And the objective reality is that there are people who prefer to present as Napoleon Bonaparte.
<…> than the one they were assigned at birth.
Assigned by reality you mean? Or do you actually think that gender is entirely a social construct?
ISTM that gender is both physical and psychological. A person may have male parts but their brain identifies as female (as one example). That is the reality for many people.
And yet more:
Absolutely true, and I didn’t mean to imply that gender dysphoria isn’t a real condition or that transgender surgery isn’t the best option in many cases.
Moderating:
Thank you for your later clarification, but this is a very sensitive subject, and I’d like to remind you:
Comparing a transgender person to someone who thinks they are Napoleon is suggesting they are mentally ill.
Yeah, and if a black guy was elected president that would seal it. /s
Pretty much. The reality is lots of people are born with genitals that defy your standard male/female definitions – it’s perfectly possible to have a penis & ovaries, for example. In addition, most of the characteristics used to assign gender (e.g. a beard) are a result of hormonal/chemical balances, which occur on a spectrum, it’s not just on/off. Intersex is the term scientists use. As a result many people quite literally have to choose a gender (or have it chosen by their parents). Gender is no more black/white (male/female) than hair color and I can’t believe thinking adults don’t know this. People need to leave the house more often.
I dunno about “lots” of people. I would have thought that, except for people affecting to be genderqueer, that the “grey area” is very narrow compared to the number of people for whom gender is unambiguous.
I don’t see that it matters how common it is. Once you acknowledge that there is a gray area of people who don’t fit neatly into one of the two boxes you want people to fit into, then ISTM that you acknowledge that assigning gender at birth sometimes requires a judgement call. And once those folks are grown and sentient, they should be free to change their gender from what they were assigned based on that judgement call.
And once all that is acknowledged, everything after is just an invasion of privacy.
You can show fringe cases for virtually any kind of categorization at all; that doesn’t mean that categories don’t exist or are completely arbitrary. And I think that your own statement that “Gender is no more black/white (male/female) than hair color” itself appeals to claiming that how common it is matters.
A statement I didn’t make.
A statement I also didn’t make, because it was Ziberian who said that.
Care to address anything I actually said?
Although I see the connection in subject matter, may I suggest, without being a junior mod about it, that arguing whether people have the right to be the gender they feel they are is a tangent to the OP?
I don’t see that it matters how common it is, like steronz said.
But to put it into perspective, I think it’s about as common as red hair.
If you denied red haired people the use of public rest rooms, or the right to marry, it’d be a pretty big problem.
“At a time when transgender and nonbinary Americans are gaining visibility in the media and among the public, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that 1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary – that is, their gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.”
" Red hair (also known as orange hair and ginger hair ) is a hair colour found in one to two percent of the human population, appearing with greater frequency (two to six percent) among people of Northern or Northwestern European ancestry and lesser frequency in other populations."
P.S. Yes, perhaps this is getting too far from the OP. Sorry if so.
I imagine their collective brains would explode if Kamala Harris was elected president (or worse, Stacey Abrams).
Harris/Abrams 2024
I’d prefer that the other way round.
I understand. That’s what I have been thinking, as well.