I’m not Miller, but I’m going to guess because that’s roughly when Middle English strode onto the scene and gave us the specific words man and woman.
A penis isn’t an objective fact?
ISTM that the evidence that males have penises is a lot stronger than the evidence that transgenders have male brains, which is a lot more preliminary and equivocal.
Regards,
Shodan
Not for the vast majority of people that you meet, unless you have powers and abilities beyond that of normal folks.
You could be like Crocodile Dundee and just start grabbing the crotches of people you meet.
That’s how he reacted to meeting transgendered people for the first time in NYC.
I would not recommend that course of action though.
Nah, you just gotta grope everyone’s crotch when you first meet them, to be sure. If you’re still unsure, take a cheek swab for further testing. Wouldn’t want to use the wrong word, after all, and of course asking them is no help there.
You appear to be asserting a claim not uncommon among conservatives, namely: All elements of human gender and sexual identity are matters solely of will power.
There is a vast body of research supporting the very opposite: Gender identity, sexual orientation, and related issues are not matters of will power. They are not choices. They are not due to subjective states of mind, but instead are due to objectively observable physical states (of brain structure as it interacts with hormones).
(A gateway to a lot of the research: http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/sexual-orientation.aspx
More: Is There Something Unique about the Transgender Brain? | Scientific American
Is gender identity biologically hard-wired? | PBS News
Google Scholar
The right has its own “research” proving that it’s all a matter of will power, of course. But if we limit the discussion to actually respectable research, you are left high and dry.
Obviously, I’m not arguing that nobody had the concept of "men"and “women” before those specific English words for them evolved into their current form. I’m just using that coinage as a handy reference point to demonstrate that these concepts about gender are really, really old, and - like most things people thought about human biology a thousand years ago - are not very accurate.
Do you mean that he wouldn’t be able to tell if someone had a penis through normal interaction with the vast majority of people that he meets?
Yep. He might suspect, and usually guess correctly, but he won’t have “objective fact” for most people he meets.
I refer you to the other post I made:
My point with the wiki links is that you can’t just state a general case that the crucial thing is genetics or whether someone has a penis. Bailey Jay has a penis and is absurdly attractive. Women with Androgyn Insensitivity Syndrome have XY chromosomes and yet display as women and have female genitalia.
As various people have pointed out to you throughout the course of the thread, including my own post that you quoted, this simply isn’t true.
Hell, even if we didn’t have strong evidence indicating that gender identity is grounded in physiology, we would still have good reason to point to it as the most important factor, for all the same reasons I named above. Because when a psychological state like this is persistant, consistent, and unchanging, it needs to be addressed. We don’t have a direct physiological link to sexual orientation; this does not mean that being gay is just a “subjective state of mind”. It certainly doesn’t mean that one’s sexual orientation is not a fact.
Fair enough. But in that case, how would “brain structure” be an objective fact?
I’m not expert in physiology, but I do not believe a penis by itself is responsible for a subjective state of mind, though certain actions with said penis certain can be. Brain structure is, however, which was the point.
It wouldn’t be, for most folks, short of some unusual technology.
So all the posts in all the threads that list scientific studies of the brains of transgender people are moot, since brain structure is not an objective fact?
No, since I’m talking of “objective fact” as Shodan used it – fact as could reasonably be determined from mundane interaction with people day to day. It might be fact in other senses, such as how, scientifically, the brains of transgender people work.
I’m not sure that is how **Shodan ** was using it. I thought it was “something tangible that could be observed or measured to determine something”
Of course I could be wrong.
You can measure the brain differences.
With an MRI.
Which I assume you do not have in your pocket.
The differences in brain structure being discussed here aren’t observable in an MRI. They can only be done by autopsy.
I agree. You can also look to see if there is a penis. So what?
Okay. I had thought on a different thread that there were in fact claims that the differences were visible by MRI. If that is not the case, then I retract that, but still maintain that there are objective differences that apparently require even more intrusive measures than I thought.
By the same token that you should not ask to see a man’s penis before allowing him to call himself a man, you shouldn’t have to ask for an MRI or autopsy of their brain before referring to them by the gender to which they identify.