Is it okay to encourage a child who chooses to be transexual?

Great Debates
221

I’ve met my share of men and women who behave as though they think they’re smart and witty but are neither - they may be smug, self-important, and conceited, but they’re neither witty nor smart. On the other hand, I’ve met people who are well-groomed and well-dressed, very sharp-looking, and it’s only later that I’ve realized that they aren’t particularly attractive in a conventional sense.

But I take your point - if someone wants to be treated as smart, witty and handsome, he can, in fact, do things to become smart, witty, and handsome. And none of those, despite Jimmy Joe Meager’s assertions, is as simple as demanding that everyone simply behave that he is any of the above.

Likewise, transgendered people - at least in the real world, where I live - don’t simply demand that everyone else “pretend” that they’re men, women, fire chiefs, whatever.* TG people, when you meet them, are men and women. Unless you routinely do panty (or jock) checks of the people you meet, you’re not going to know.

And if you can tell, or think you can tell, what are you going to do (Jimmy, I’m talking to you now)? Are you really going to say to someone, “Excuse me, but would you mind telling me your natal gender so I know for sure how to address you?” No, you’re going to suck it up, make your best guess, or avoid using gender-sensitive pronouns for the couple of minutes you have to deal with someone you’ll probably never have to see again. Sheesh.

*Now someone is going to come along and tell me about the time they met some 6-foot biological male with a 5 o’clock shadow, shoulders like a Mack truck, and an adam’s apple with its own ZIP code who wanted to be called June Belle. No doubt you did. And I once met a woman who told me that her cat possessed a species memory of being accused of witchcraft, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.

222

Hmm, to each their own, one supposes; to me it’s all brain function. I would get skeeved at doing it to someone against their will (actually, “skeeved” isn’t a strong enough term), but if the person chooses it themselves I’d have no problem with it.

223

Donde esta, Lucanae, religious extraordinaire? It seems we’ve definitely proven that people don’t choose transexuality, as stated in the OP.

224

As people are (at least in this country) required to under therapy before moving to living as a transsexual, much less getting surgery, I am wondering what percentage of people undergoing such therapy decide/figure out that they aren’t really transgender and don’t get such a transition - perhaps they figure out they’re actually homosexual, or perhaps a heterosexual with some personality features and/or interests of what is considered traditionally the opposite gender and shift therapy to becoming comfortable with that rather than moving on to surgery. I would see that as working on “the mind thing” and using therapy to maximize a person’s functioning and happiness. Until you know what percentage of people entering therapy for “gender identity issues” actually go through transition vs. those that choose not to do that in the end I’m not sure you really have the full set of information to consider.

225

I shall flatly disagree that I need to agree that a person who has changed or concealed their physical gender is the opposite physical gender. If I choose I may (and as it happens, personally do) include natal gender in my definition of gender. As such when some dude has the gross misfortune of losing his wang in an accident, I don’t suddenly decide he’s not a man.*

Similarly I need not accept that a man wearing a tiger costume is actually a tiger now - no matter how good the costume is, or what morphological accomodations he’s made to himself to accomodate it.

Which is not to say that you can’t define “man” as “looks like a man, walks like a man, quacks like a man - it’s a man” - just that I need not do so and arguing from that definition is unlikely to get you much traction.

  • I realize that if you identify gender based solely on presentation and proclamation, you would also identify Mr. McWangless as a man - but I’m not including natal gender in my definition for the purpose of identifying him this way, I’m pointing out that my definition as it is structured has this effect.
226

Could everyone please stop comparing transsexuals to people wanting to be animals?

227

OK, so a male who wears a dress and gets breast implants and takes female hormones is still a man. So what?

The question is, what should the rest of us do if a man wants to wear a dress and act as if he were a woman? Lock him up in a jail or mental hospital? Or let him live his life however he likes? I’m sure if you sat down and told him that he’s making a mistake and shouldn’t do such things and should just accept that because he’s a man he’s going to have to only do manly things and act masculine, he’ll give your advice the consideration it deserves.

And if they consider your advice and reject it and decide that, no, they’d really be happier living as if they were a woman, what then?

You shrug your shoulders and move on with your life. You don’t have to understand or agree with the way this person lives their life, you just have to not make their life harder than it has to be. Transsexuality isn’t exactly a basket of roses you know. People don’t do it for the kicks, or to get back at their parents, or to annoy the neighbors.

228

But moods are supposed to be changeable. While identity should not necessarily be immutable, the idea of doing it chemically/surgically seems like a serious personal violation. And in this case, because there are physical, structural differences in the brain, it seems likely that the “mental” path would still require surgery of some type. Maybe it’s just me, but “We’re going to cut bits off of your body until you’re happy,” isn’t half as creepy as, “We’re going to cut bits off of your brain until you’re happy.”

I dunno. I suppose ideally, we should have both solutions available, and allow people to pick whichever works best for them. But I got the implication from Hilarity that changing the person’s mental identity should replace treatments that change their physical identity. Could be I’m reading to much into her post.

229

I think she’s just talking about trying to get people to be happy with the way they are.

And as I said earlier, I don’t quite understand why transgendered people HAVE to be transgendered. What’s wrong with being a femme man or a butch woman? Counseling intended to help people be happy as a femme man instead of a transgendered woman doesn’t seem like such a horrible idea.

230

I would be happy to substitute it with any other case where a person tries to change themself into something where the status of being it or not is an entirely unsubjective status and not influencable by behavior. (Which means that being smart, witty, and handsome all don’t work as examples.)

Being a skyscraper does, though. So I’ll happily use that instead. I think there are no pejorative associations with skyscrapers. “Similarly I need not accept that a man wearing a skyscraper costume is actually a skyscraper now - no matter how good the costume is, or what morphological accommodations he’s made to himself to accommodate it.”

You do what you like with them; I need not choose to associate with them. If required to be in their company I can avoid calling them “him” or “her” by calling them “them” instead; and if I am required to refer to them by name (which is easier to avoid than you might think; I always forget names so I would know), I can just refer to them by their last name, and thus somewhat avoid making my internal classification system feel badly done by.

And if that’s not good enough, too bad for them.

Moving on with my life is the plan, really, without even harassing them with orders to change themselves first. I perhaps differ with many who are on my “side” of the “call them what they want to be called” issue, in that I don’t actually wish to make things harder on them (or me).

“He”.

But yes, the goal here is to give these people a(nother) way to be happy, and to mention that I’m not skeeved out by the “brain drugs” method in this case. The fact that this method wouldn’t push them outside my personal set of gender definitions (like reassignment surgery would) is something I consider a perk to the idea, but I wouldn’t mandate that they go the brain drug route regardless.

231

It’s the interior identity, not the sex life or the mannerisms, so far as I grasp it – and I confess to having a little difficulty identifying with someone transgendered. I am a man – a small, highly intelligent, weak, unathletic, witty, sarcastic, compassionate man. As it happens, my self-identity matches up with what I find in my pants and presumably with what a microscope would show by way of chromosomal complement.

For whatever reason, Ray (Raymond T. Hypothetical, Esq.) is not happy with what his body says about his identity – although he has the proper complement of penis and testicles, he feels like he is, or should be, a girl, not a boy – Rae, not Ray. It has nothing to do with who, if anyone, he wants to take to bed, whether he feels more comfortable in whatever clothing, playing whatever lifestyle role, etc. – it’s an interior sense that “I’m in the wrong sort of body.”

*Anyone able to clarify this better, please do so – I am floundering like a flatfish here. *

232

Because feminine/butch isn’t the same thing as female/male. There are, odd as it seems, MTF transexuals out there who identify as butch lesbians.

233

That just means they would end up masculine males and feminine females, if they took the “magic brain-gender switching pill”. That’s not really a problem, once you get over the shock of someone taking such a pill at all.

234

Well, MtFs are going to average butcher than a typical genetic female.

I guess my point is that there’s nothing wrong with wearing the clothes you want and doing the activities you want and getting involved with the type of person you want. But gender roles don’t have to be so strict. I’m just saying that typical clothes for me are jeans, t-shirt and flannel shirt. And my sisters’ typical clothing are jeans, t-shirt and flannel shirt. It’s not an androgenous costume, it’s more gender-irrelevant.

But then I look at my six year old daughter. And she LOVES wearing dresses and skirts and tights and tiaras and all that girly crap. If you ask her to wear pants she’ll often pout and insist on finding a skirt. She didn’t get that from my side of the family, I can’t remember the last time I saw either of my sisters wear a dress.

235

But such a person isn’t going to end up as a butch man or a femme woman. Even if they decide not to do any surgery or take any hormones, you’re going to have femme men and butch women. Any man who would have been a potential candidate for SRS except with our hypothetical counseling is going to be a femme man–otherwise it wouldn’t be an issue. And after the hypothetical counseling they’re still going to be a femme man, they’ll just accept it rather than wanting to be a femme woman.

Of course, such treatment does not actually exist, while SRS does.

236

Well, i’m a man. I’m not a woman. If I woke up one morning with the wrong parts, then i’d be pretty upset about it, whether I was particularly femme or butch. So what’s wrong with it is it’s still not them. As Miller points out, femme/butchness isn’t necessarily on the same mental track as being female/male, just as sexuality isn’t.

In all honesty, with your point being an option, I can’t see anyone selecting surgery (for example) instead if they truly only want to be a particularly male-looking woman or female-looking male. It is, as I understand it, not a walk in the park - and that’s not even taking into account the social stigma. It’s about as good a weeding-out process of the unsure as I can think of, really. You’d have to be pretty damn sure.

237

Given that I don’t accept your assertion that Miller is incorrect, I shall continue to believe that there are MTF transexuals out there who identify as butch lesbians, who if given the “magic pill” (which doesn’t exist) would turn into manly heterosexual men.

This is a bit academic, mind you. Given that the pill doesn’t exist.

238

You mean like being transsexual ?

As pointed out upthread, transsexuals have identifiable differences in the brain. Portions of their brain are identifiable as being like those of the opposite sex of their body. For the “man who thinks he’s a horse” analogy to be accurate, he’d need to have the brain of a horse. Something that would quite clearly make him a horse in a human body. NOT just a “man who thinks he’s a horse”, but an actual horse stuck in a human body.

239

Am I reading you right, in that if a friend or family member came out to you as transgendered, you would cut off contact with them?

240

I used to have trouble with the concept of being transsexual. I figured transsexual people had the right to dress and behave as they liked as long as they weren’t hurting anyone else, but couldn’t really understand what the deal was. It became more clear for me when a MtF transsexual Doper posted that having genital reassignment surgery wasn’t really the major thing for her, it was the hormone treatments. She said she’d never really felt “right” until she went on estrogen. I later heard a different transwoman say she’d rather die than go off her hormones.

I don’t know what it’s like to be transsexual, but I do know what it’s like to have hormone problems – I have some fairly serious health issues relating to my pituitary gland. I know from experience that it’s possible to have blood test results showing that your levels of a particular hormone (e.g. thyroid hormones) are within the normal range but still have symptoms of associated with having too little of that hormone. So “Jane” might for instance feel cold, tired, and depressed all the time because her thyroid levels are too low for her, but “Sue” might feel just fine with the same low-end-of-normal thyroid levels. There’s no easy way to tell exactly what Jane’s ideal thyroid levels would be, and her doctor might need to experiment with a couple of different doses of thyroid medication to see what works best.

It seems possible to me that transsexual people are somehow born with their individual ideal levels of estrogen or testosterone being much higher than their bodies can produce naturally. Male bodies produce some estrogen (plus lots of testosterone) on their own, and female bodies some testosterone (plus lots of estrogen), and most of us are fine and happy that way. But maybe some people aren’t. I don’t know that this is the case, but if Jane can suffer from hypothyroidism then maybe “Ray/Rae” can suffer from hypoestrogenism.

That’s my current concept of transsexual people, that they suffer from a kind of hormone deficiency. This is largely speculation on my part, but it makes sense to me as an explanation of how someone could feel like a “woman in a man’s body” or vice versa. Perhaps Ray/Rae the XY fetus was exposed to an unusual spike in estrogen levels while in the womb, causing “him” to develop some brain structures more like those of the average “her”…and leaving Ray/Rae’s body always expecting more estrogen than it can produce on its own.