In this case, I’m on the side of the people who aren’t simply making shit up.
Words have changed to a particular political persuasion. Not to the average person. Only the enlightened politically correct socially engineering elite has it changed. That’s the reality. 
You can assert it all you want, doesn’t make it so.
The reality is, we need a greater flexibility of language, maybe more words, not debasing the words that already exist.
The person IS NOT a pregnant Man.
Men don’t get pregnant and plenty of women have beards.
Out of politeness I’ll call the person by whatever pronoun they prefer when I see them, but this isn’t a venue for politeness this is a venue to discuss the issue. I’ll call Drag Queens who are most definitely male, when in drag, ‘She’, but that doesn’t make it an actual thing. I’m just willing to roleplay.
I’m sorry that some people don’t conform to the norm, but there is a norm, and the words are there to define that norm.
She was born a woman and her body will react to drugs based on her DNA, not how she thinks. I’m not going to debate the semantics of biology. I refer to her as a woman because her body is female. She can alter her appearance as she desires but there is an ethical element involved prescribing hormones when there is no medical reason to take them.
We ban the use of hormones by athletes because they are harmful. The same standard should apply in this case.
The whole “pregnancy is feminine” argument is silly- how many men would love to get pregnant if they could? These are REAL PEOPLE. With real hopes and dreams and fears. They want to have a kid, just like millions of other people. This isn’t some kind of dress up game for them- this is their one and only chance at life, and the life they envision involves having a baby. It doesn’t matter if they fit into anyone else’s set of norms. They deserve basic human respect.
We give plenty of people hormones so they can comply to social norms (grow to a certain height, hit puberty at a certain time, etc.) or perform optional feats (have a baby, don’t have a baby, donate eggs, etc.) But in this case, you’ll find that it is medically necessary.
Transgendered people are found in nearly every culture since the beginning of human history. It’s progression in individuals is remarkably similar and usually begins in early childhood. This isn’t something that sprung up from nowhere in modern America. This is a disorder that is probably one of the more widely and universally documented ones around.
Transgendered people have a suicide rate of 20%-50% .
There is no perfect solution. But we at least know what doesn’t work- telling people it’s “all in their heads”, refusing to respect their wishes, ostracizing them and killing them. We also know that in most cases all the therapy in the world is not going to make them “normal.” We’ve tried that for centuries. It doesn’t work.
We also know that in some cases changing social roles and sometimes the body does help people. And we know that in all cases respecting people’s wishes and allowing them to live normal lives as the gender of their choice helps.
So yeah, you can have the sanctity of your word. But it may come at the price of people losing their children, spouses, friends and family. It comes at the price of all of us losing people who could be bright and active parts of our world, but instead get misery and death. We aren’t playing crossword puzzles here. We are looking at the real lives of real people. Fuck definitions. Fuck words. Bring on the respect, tolerance, and trust. We each get one life to live, and if a little stretching of intellectual boundaries on my part helps someone live a long and happy life, I’m all for it.
Then those men want to take part in a feminine thing.
Look, I am kind of tired of the ‘human respect’ argument. This isn’t about respect, it’s about language. They deserve people being nice to them, yes, but that doesn’t mean that the terms, man, woman, male, female, masculine and feminine are devoid of a stable meaning. We call men feminine all the time, and women masculine, but that doesn’t make a feminine man a woman. There are words to describe these things without debasing the language into a sort of guttural nonsense language where the word, ‘man’, cannot be relied upon to mean the same thing to every person.
The whole, “They deserve respect.”, argument is just cheap pandering, a facile appeal to emotion designed to illicit engineered guilt at hurting someone’s ‘feewings’ for being different. I’m sorry, THEY ARE DIFFERENT. That’s just the fact of the matter. Is it ok to be different? Sure.
No, the whole “men can make babies” argument is silly. She could just as easily have had the surgery that Catman had and make the claim that a cat is having a baby.
We give hormones to people who are lacking them. Otherwise it would be like giving blood pressure medicine to people with normal blood pressure because they “thought” they had high blood pressure.
So is hormone abuse. She is not a man and no amount of surgery or hormones will make her a man. Maybe someday they can alter her genes so it’s possible but that day is not today. She’s free to engage in whatever plastic surgery makes her happy but there are ethical issues to giving her drugs that do little in the way of altering her appearance but add health risks down the road. As I pointed out before, it is illegal to prescribe hormones for athletes simply because they want to alter their bodies. Not only was she prescribed drugs that her body didn’t need but there is a child in this scenario. Hopefully the child will be OK but it may be years before that is known.
Nobody is arguing against her wishes. She can make herself look like a man, a cat, or a goldfish. Whatever makes her happy. But there are medical limits that should be observed.
My god, but I wish this post had been moved to the Pit by now.
It’s 9:00 and I just took my hormones- and trust me, I have plenty naturally. I take mine so that I can screw as much as I like without getting pregnant, which is not something my body particularly needs. If I wait until I’m 40 and then realize I can’t get preggers so easy, I can get another set of hormones to circumvent nature. Hell, if I don’t like hot flashes during menopause there are hormones for that, too. We take hormones outside the realm of strict medical necessity all the time.
And of course, the high suicide rate (note: the figures I gave earlier are suicide attempt rates- the only number I can find for actual suicide rates is 21%…no idea if that is accurate) is an argument that helping transgendered people find peace between their body and mind is medically necessary. Unless you have a better idea…
HE will react like a man, because he has a brain that reacts to hormones like a man. That’s one of the major reasons such people take hormones; it gives them the hormonal balance their brains are designed for.
Except that the hormones are much more likely to keep him alive.
And he’s lacking in the male hormones his brain is configured for.
Genes don’t make you male, or female. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, there are people with XY genes that looks female, think female, and regard themselves as female.
Actually, because gender is behavior and because you are completely taking on the behavior of the other gender, I think it’s questionable whether you have a valid claim to being a “man” . . .
Gestalt
Why is gender behavior though?
Say a person with XX chromosomes, and female sex organs likes to work on cars, watch sports, cut her hair short, and pee standing up (there’s device so female can easily do that).
Is she any less of woman? If not why the double standard for men?
Well, we always talk about how gender is a societal construct, oftentimes correlated with but not necessarily determined by, biological sex. As a construct, gender’s primary expression is in behavior.
Certain behaviors are societally associated with xx chromosomes and female primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Certain other behaviors are associated with xy chromosomes and male primary and secondary sexual characteristics. These respective sets of behavior are what we call gender.
Some small group of people have one set of chromosomes but yet wish to display the behaviors of the other gender. This gender bending can be anywhere on a long continuum that begins with, say, a girl with short hair or a boy who loves fashion and whose ultimate manifestation is the changing of genitalia and secondary sex characteristics in order to appear more like the gender the person associates with.
So, gender is determined by social groupings of some behaviors. Certain behaviors we consider more “identifying” of one gender than another. A tomboy is taking on many behaviors of the male gender, but they are not huge societal markers of gender, such as hair length or interest in sports.
But the ability to give birth is one of the big markers of gender. And so a biological woman who wants to be considered a man cannot make a valid claim to the societal categorization of “man” while still engaging in one of, if not the, biggest societal markers of woman.
I should add that we generally only allow people to belong to one gender at a time.
Basically, what I’m saying is, gender as a social construct is only defined by behaviors. If one exhibits behavior that is defining of one social gender, how then can one claim to be part of the other, mutually exclusive, gender?
Gestalt
Again, nobody saying not to do the surgery. You want to discuss suicide then start with giving someone something their body doesn’t need such as steroids and now you have a suicide problem.
- That hormones are not necessary.
- That taking hormones is particularly dangerous.
- That surgery is a safer alternative to hormones.
- That gender is genetically determined.
- That all hormones are exactly the same, and carry the same side effects.
So, really, that would be five facts that you’re totally ignorant of. But who’s counting?
Where to start… Hormones are dangerous when given in a situation that doesn’t warrant them biologically just as any other medical compound is. Surgery is elective, as are the hormone treatments. Gender IS determined genetically just as every other aspect of the human body is. All hormones are NOT all exactly the same and if you’ve read any studies regarding transgender techniques you would know this (not that this was my point).
Pushing hormone levels to the point where they alter physical appearance has long-term health consequences. This is why they’re a controlled substance and banned for use by athletes. Using hormones in place of other drugs to fight depression is a dangerous game to play. They are not magic pills that make everything OK.
And in this case, it’s “warranted biologically.”
No, it’s not. It’s biochemistry and brain structure, which can be affected by more than your genes. And by more genes than your sex chromosomes as well.
And sometimes those consequences are positive ones, like now.
Gender dysphoria isn’t depression, and “other drugs” won’t work.
And hormones are biologically necessary in treating transgenderism, because transgenderism is a physical defect. It is not a mental illness: there are distinct structural differences in the brains of men and women, and people who are transgendered have brain structures of the gender opposite of their physical body. They aren’t taking the hormones on a lark, they’re taking them because their brain needs those hormones to function properly.
Yeah, not really the point: what I was amused by in your post was the contention that taking hormones was more dangerous than slicing open the human body. If taking hormones is an unecessary medical risk for treating transgendered people (it’s not) then surgery is an even greater risk.
No, it is not. Gender is determined chromosonally, not genetically.
Funny, I could have sworn that’s exactly what I just said.
I disagree that pregnancy is one the biggest societal markers of gender. It’s certainly one of the most exclusive, but if I’m trying to determine the gender of someone I’m interacting with, “Are they pregnant?” is not an especially major factor in my determination. In terms of gender as a social marker, facial hair is a much more important factor than the ability to bear young. In fact, this case does a particularly good job of highlighting that: if you met the man in the OP on the street, when he was seven months pregnant, would you think, “That pregnant woman has a beard,” or would you think, “That bearded guy sure has a huge beer gut?”
Since you’re basing your entire argument on gender as behavior, I think it’s also worth questioning if “pregnancy” can legitimatly be considered a behavior. The urge to procreate itself is not tied to either gender: both men and women want children. The man we’re talking about here wants to have kids: the behavior he’s engaging in is procreation. Because of his physical peculiarities, the method by which he conceives children is different than that of other men, but that’s a matter of biology, not behavior.
As an extension of your behavior-based argument, it would seem that, under your definitions, the person in question was a woman up until he transitioned, at which point he was a male, up until the point where he became pregnant, at which point he became female again, a state I presume only holds true until he gives birth? Because at that point, he will no longer be pregnant, and therefore, no longer engaging in a “behavior” that automatically defines him as female. Which seems to be an inordinatly complicated approach to gender identity to me. Or is it your position that, because he decided to get pregnant post-transition, he was never “really” male, and can never be considered male here after?
I think this is another preconception that needs challenging, but that would be outside the scope of this thread.
The obvious answer is that the person in question does not consider that behavior to be defining of gender.
As an aside, by calling pregnancy the defining characteristic of womanhood, I can’t help but feel that you’re implying that women who do not have children are somehow less the entirely female. I assume that wasn’t your intent, but it’s hard for me to follow your logic and not come to that conclusion.
Your attempt to deconstruct Gestalt’s gender as behavior argument is not persuasive. In the context of this discussion where of the notion of something being properly defined as “X” or “Y” is to a large extent related to it’s behavioral “exclusivity” to a particular gender, the act of “being pregnant” can be considered by any measure of common sense a fairly “big” marker of gender. Trying to parse out “big” and “exclusive” into separate categories in the scope of this argument is just silly.
Your notion that the state of being pregnant would have less play than facial hair as a gender marker because the appearance of pregnancy might logically be mistaken for a pot belly on bearded mannish looking person has little relevance in this discussion. We’re not talking about scenarios where you could fool or confuse someone and say “see the visual perception of gender is mutable”. What we are discussing is whether a person who is behaving in a fashion entirely consistent with that of being a pregnant woman, can also be considered (logically) to be a “man”. The answer is no. A “man” within the context of a behaviorally based definition of gender cannot intersect with, or or be contained within, the the state of “being” pregnant. In humans that behavior is a state of existence “exclusive” to human females.
So if someone does manage to successfully implant a fetus in a man ( not at all implausible ), he’s now a woman ? Just because of that ? And once it comes to term and is removed, are they forever tainted with girl-cooties, or do they suddenly become male again ?