I’ve been having this discussion with a friend of mine which was prompted by the recent passing of a local transgender-rights law. Below is the text of his LTE:
Leaving aside my own problems with his argument for the moment, I promised him I would post it here in GD for discussion with people who might know a thing or two more than me. Your thoughts?
There’s no flaw in the logic.
You can’t change a person whose mental facilities tell him he’s really female, just as you can’t change a person whose mental facilities tell him he likes men.
Gender dysphoria actually means (to oversimplify things) that a person’s genes are in conflict with each other; the mental and physical sides of the person don’t agree. Genetically they’re male, sure, but they’re also female. And I can tell you that really screws a person up.
There is a choice to change one’s physical appearance and physiology, and there is a choice to seek out mates of the same sex. These are the same types of choices as choosing between a salad and a pile of feces for lunch.
Why are two being linked and why doesn’t a generic “human rights” argument cover both?
It’s your basic slippery slope. If we accept gays, we have to accept transgender. If we accept transgender we might as well make it legal to have sex with children and sheep.
You can easily use the same argument to question equal rights for blacks, women and other minorities.
Only if the same arguments apply for making it legal to have sex with children, and you know they don’t.
It’s like we’re being pressured to tolerate people who like country and people who like rock’n’roll! The contradiction is obvious! Big Brother is watching you!
Is the friend using “genetic predisposition” differently in the two cases? With homosexuals, it refers to basic drives and behaviors. With transgendered people, he/she seems to be talking about something else, like having a certain reproductive organ. Isn’t it the same genre or magnitude of “genetic predisposition” that drives sexual attraction as gender identity? I don’t see the difference being highlighted.
NAMBLA likes to try and tie itself to the gay, lesbian trans leather S&M bear communities under the guise of “alternative lifestyle.” There’s no reason the rest of us should accept them or advocate on their behalf because what they are is not a logical progression from “alternative lifestyle.”
I don’t think that even the most ardent white supremacist who ever lived believed that being black (or otherwise non white) was a choice, and yet neither they nor far more moderate and mainstream contemporaries had any problem with institutional racism. I think homophobia is intrinsically irrational and whether or not it’s a choice just doesn’t make that huge of a difference to most people who disapprove; they’re going to ban gay marriage regardless.
I’m really not just picking on John McCain but I’m using him as a ready example. He has stated that he does not believe homosexuality is a choice, yet he is also against same sex marriage because he thinks it endangers the institution. Never mind that McCain himself is an admitted adulterer (reference to his first marriage, not the BS NYT article) and, in violations of the teachings of his religion, remarried after a divorce, and thus, in other words, not internally consistent in his views or opinions and seemingly unbothered by the inconsistency. I think he’s indicative of a depressingly huge sample of the public who can work pretty much any illogic into their worldview.
If tomorrow a big rainbow colored genetic sequence was found that proved conclusively and 100% without any possible room for doubt that homosexuality is a purely genetic and unalienable part of a person’s identity with no room for choice whatever, I seriously doubt that it would greatly diminish homophobia (a term I don’t like for reasons gone into a thousand times before so I’ll just say that by homophobia I’m not talking Phelps and gaybashing guys with baseball bats but the less virile and more systemic variety as well).
Now “down the road a stretch” it may change attitudes, but immediately- nope.
It needs to be noted that not all potential biological causes of homosexuality are genetic in nature, and current research suggests that, more likely than not, we will never find any such marker. The current hypothesis with what I believe to be the must convincing *preliminary *evidence for homosexuality in males would be maternal immune reactions to male sex hormones during gestation causing differential development. It does not attempt to account for homosexuality in females, or for other phenomena which are categorized with homosexuality but are in fact likely to be completely distinct, biologically. This hypothesis, if shown true, would mean that we have nothing to look for in anyone’s genes; even if it does not prove to be a cause, we still have to consider the possibility that nothing will definitively show a person’s sexuality but his or her statements and actions.
Eh. Personally I think based on my years of complete inexperience with genetic research that there is no single cause of homosexuality but that it is polygenetic. While nobody with eight functioning neurons, unless they’ve lived a life where any kind of questioning is taboo, thinks “teh gay” is chosen, I don’t think that anybody is born tabula rasa either in the sense that “in the ideal home they’d have been hetero”, but rather that some kids are probably Calvinist Pink (i.e. you are queer from birth) and others had some sort of a heavy predisposition but having rice pudding instead of apricots when you were six months old (or something equally random) is what pushed you over the edge. I doubt that hormones have that much to do with it in most cases as even the “nelliest” men I’ve known are all male in equipment and, often, temperament/upper body strength/all other factors.
I don’t mean to be offensive on the race issue, but the old notion that “dominant mothers + abdicating fathers = Orlando Bloom put’s the ‘I’d tap that!’ in Duh-reamy!” would imply that black mothers should have percentage-wise far more gay sons than white mothers since there are far more “mother only” households than among whites, while Asian-Americans should have the fewest gay sons since they’re lower-per capita single mother households than whites, yet in all of these cultures and in fact in most countries where it’s not punishable by death to be open it seems that it’s always about the same single-digit percentage of exclusively gay men with slightly more for bicurious men and women. (Of course the real numbers are damned near impossible to obtain since, to quote Heinlein, “everybody lies about sex”.)
What “caused” me to be gay may not be what caused Jay-Jay or Matt McL or [del]Bricke[/del] others to be. I would not be at all surprised to learn that extremely effeminate gay men probably have a different cause from “straight acting” gay men (no Cite, it’s opinion) and that both have a different cause from lesbians who have a different cause from true-blue bisexuals who have a different cause from intersexed transsexuals who have a different cause from non-intersexed transsexuals who have a different cause from Log Cabin Republicans (the cure for which must be found [or fling them into the Nile or something]). Either that, or it’s a plot by the Freemasons and Dutch who want to insure their wives will always have fabulous hair.
???
Would you care to explain this before I get a thousand e-mails reporting your post (with no two agreeing what you said)?
I can’t understand the point the OP’s friend is trying to make. Either way, it’s genetics that makes the person different from other people, isn’t it? Is he trying to say there’s choice in transgenderism, unlike being gay? I don’t buy that. People don’t chose to be that different. I’m left-handed, and I can assure you that there’s no way that being different from 90% of people was something I ever consciously decided upon. In fact, if I were given the choice, I’d be right-handed because it would be easier. I’m positive that being transgendered is much more of a pain in the ass than having the vast majority of objects not designed for you. Only a masochist would decide to embrace something that would encumber their daily life to such a huge degree.
I thought it was a sly allusion to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
His argument is that if genetics determines your sexuality, and that that fact makes homosexuality above society’s criticism from a behavioral standpoint, then the fact that genetics also determines your sex should make a transgendered person’s lifestyle open to discussion as a “choice.”
His argument falls apart when you include a fact he’s overlooked: The evidence that gender identity has a genetic cause is at least as strong as the evidence for the gay gene. FWIW. Anyway, I agree with Bryan Ekers that a simple commitment to human rights ought to be sufficient.
elfkin477–right on. I tried really hard to “choose” not being trans, but wasn’t able to. As the gender dysphoria grew worse and worse as the years went on, my “choice” became either transition or go crazy and kill myself. I love life so it was a no-brainer.
Why is he so tied to genes? Last time I checked, we could reliably make XY female-behaving rats by manipulating the mother’s hormones during pregnancy. These rats act contrary to their genes. But, their transgenderism has a clear cause and is no choice.
Certainly a transgendered person’s lifestyle is a choice. Do they listen to country music? Do they wear stripes with polkadots? Do they vote for candidates I oppose? All of these are lifestyle choices that are clearly wrong. Being transgender is not a lifestyle.
In addition to what others have said, you might point out that there’s nothing Orwellian about this. A “Orwellian” usage is when something is named or described as the opposite of what it actually is. So, to make up a hypothetical example, if a group of swift boat veterans gathered to tell lies and called themselves “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”, that would be Orwellian. Or, to make up another hypothetical example, if the USA started a lengthy military occupation of Iraq and called it “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, that would be Orwellian. A garden-variety contradiction is not Orwellian.
It’s not even clear that the contradiction exists. Individuals should be able to go where their individual sexual desires take them, assuming it’s not infringing on another. Whether they want to have sex with members of their own gender, or undergo radical medical treatment… what society’s interest in interfering?
The OP’s friend reminds me of the “Paradox” glurge falsely attributed to George Carlin in the “I throw up my hands in confusion over just how carrrrrrrrrazy the world is! I finally get what Andy Rooney is talking about!”
I’ve only heard genetics proposed as determining heterosexual versus homosexual preference, and physical gender, and internal gender identity. If this is correct then I understand homosexuals would only be able to enjoy a satisfactory love life with partners of the same physical and internal gender. And, transgendered people, whose physical and internal genders don’t match, would need surgery (or some as-yet undiscovered treatment to alter the internal gender identity) to align the two kinds of genders within them.
In other words, the second paragraph quoted in the OP misses the point that the people in question already have two genders, and need one of them changed to match the other, for genetic reasons.
I think what I’m saying characterizes a progressive view.
I am heterosexual, but I don’t remember ever deciding to be. It just happened to me. If there are two options, and you can choose one of them, you can choose the other. That is, logically, I don’t think I’d have to ask somebody who was homosexual to figure out that it isn’t a choice. Except, of course, I’m working from a sample size of one, so I don’t know whether it’s a choice for some of us and not for others. But clearly it’s not a choice for homosexuals and a non-choice for heterosexuals.
Also, I think there is a kind of slippery slope - or better to say a continuum of argument - making the case that society should have some kind of sympathy or acceptance for other sexual preferences. This is a dilemma. If somebody is born to become sexually stimulated exclusively by something that most of us agree is wrong, for example intercourse with prepubescent children, then I think they have a kind of entitlement to enjoy sex as the rest of us do, but certainly also think they can’t have sex with children, so I’m left with a paradox. For want of any better position, I wind up thinking those people are to be denied the only sex act they would find stimulating. But, this is life - some people are denied sight or mobility or even life itself, for reasons we’re often powerless to change.