“I’m not sexist, but I think men and women are different and so should be treated differently.”
“I’m not a racist, but I believe each race has its own unique characteristics and place in society.”
“I’m not a chiropodist but I cut corns off people’s feet for a living.”
I’m just absolutely flabbergasted that you just don’t care that you don’t even know what a term means, but you’re certain what it describes doesn’t actually exist.
Do you appreciate why that’s defective thinking, 'luci?
'Luc, my friend, I must join the throng of those who would urge you to quit while you’re behind. Just because you or I don’t experience it, doesn’t mean it’s not real, be it same-sex attraction, or the persistent belief that one’s body has come with the wrong set of sexual characteristics.
A few comments on the definitions provided by Polycarp:
I think it would improve the precision of this definition to say it’s the condition of men deriving enjoyment from wearing women’s clothing.
When women wear men’s shirts and slacks, there’s nothing remarkable about it. Nobody refers to such a woman as a transvestite or cross-dresser.
I believe you’re confusing a transsexual with a hermaphrodite. Per Wikipedia:
It goes on to say that some with that condition prefer that term, and others prefer ‘intersexual.’ Whichever.
Had no idea matt_mcl had forsaken Canada to move to Washington, D.C. 
Got 'em? Bring 'em? No got? Tough.
As mentioned elsewhere, there was a time that trans-orbital lobotomy was peer-reviewed, and prescribed, and perfectly dandy! Then it wasn’t. How many hospitals perform transexual surgery these days? Dunno. Do you? Since you’re the one claiming the high ground of scientific proof, oughtn’t you?
I do think so. I think a woman should have the right, and the responsibility, to determine her reproductive future, that the choice of child-bearing is entirely hers, and the prospective father has no right to intrude or overrule.
So blow it out yer ass.
Why does it have to be well defined for you to consider it valid? Do you identify yourself only in terms that have definitions which are fully defined through wide consensus? If some of them are not so ubiquitously understood, should you drop their use? Even if they’re descriptive of salient points about your identity?
I’d like to reiterate a point that a lot of other people have made. The same arguments that 'luci keeps making (though that gives them a bit too much dignity) are routinely advanced as reasons why homosexuality is imaginary. Doesn’t that trouble you, 'luci? You’re cribbing your arguments from homophobes. Doesn’t that suggest that they’re probably not very solid arguments, since they are so frequently used to “prove” things that are so obviously untrue?
Is this a gigantic whoosh? Of all the people to start making bigotted, ignorant remarks about transgenderism, elucidator is the last one I’d expect.
Just a slice of lemon, and no sugar thank-you. 
I agree: words should have useful definitions.
I don’t agree that this word counts. It has a very useful definition:
It is as useful, perhaps, as the word “bread” or the word “human” or the word “Republican.” There are many types of bread, humans, and Republicans, but nobody would lament that “bread,” “human,” or “Republican” are useless words.
It’s true that diagnosis of transsexualism isn’t an exact science. There have been some interesting studies done of biological differences in the hypothalamus between transsexuals and non-, both men and women, comparing them to supposedly baseline samples of gay and straight men and women — not exactly useful studies for diagnosis on a living patient, because you have to cut open someone’s brain and take pictures of the hypothalamus to confirm it. Even then it doesn’t provide solid evidence of the patient’s sexual orientation, because transsexualism doesn’t mandate “straight” orientation.
There are also a number of sex-chromosome anomalies that can occur, such as XX males, XYY and XYYY males, and so forth, but those are easier to diagnose.
But your position is that it is all an act, or a lie from, or a delusion of the other person. If you don’t directly experience the condition yourself, you declare can’t exist. By that logic, elucidator, people with autism or arthritis are just “faking it” and beer doesn’t really get you drunk.
Good luck on that position, man. Oh — wait, can I call you “man?” Or do I have to cut open your brain first to be sure?
Don’t really know what to say.
Guess I’ll start by posting what I’ve understood the words to mean up until now – and how I feel about each one:
Transvestite: Straight men who like to dress-up in women’s clothing. A fetish not unlike many others. Being into D/s myself, it bothers me not a bit.
Question: Are there female transvestites?
Transexual: Not really sure. Is this another term for a hermaphrodite? If so, there’s no question that its a medical fact that there are people born with “undefined” sexual organs. Crassly speaking, somewhere between having a very large clitoris and/or a minute penis. Beyond that, they may look manly but have breasts and/or femenine but have fairly noticeble facial hair/prominent Adam’s Apple.
I can only feel pity for them. Hopefully, modern surgery can correct these birth defects.
<gossipy aside>years back I used to have a crush on Jamie Lee Curtis, heard through the grapevine that she was/is a hermaphrodite. any thruth to that?</gossipy aside>
Transgendered: People who have or want to change their sexual identity. Don’t understand it, but OTOH, I haven’t really read up on it much. Perhaps someone could provide a brief summary of the condition? For instance, is it totaly different from hermaphroditism (sp?)? IOW, are their bodies perfectly in order with their sex and is the desire strictly mental? If so, what does the American Psychiatric Association say about the condition? Is it preferable to treat as a mental disorder or better to guide them towards a full sex-change surgery?
I’d appreciate some replies so that I may straighten out my own thinking towards what 'luc wrote.
Thanks, Arty, but I’m a stubborn sumbitch. (No offense to anyone who’s mother is disagreeable and/or aggressive…)
No prob, Bob. But on the gripping hand, why should we assume that this belief is well founded? What differentiates this from an ordinary delusion? Shouldn’t there be *some * distinction? Well, what might that be?
And what does that say about effeminate homosexuals who are entirely content with themselves (as they every right to be, and might well be, if we didn’t insist otherwise.) Should we be urging surgery upon them?
Yes, repeat, no. Some het men like to dress girly, and are (I am assured, having zero experience) no less het than myself. Some men are totally gay and cross dress for reasons I don’t begin to understand. I don’t have to understand, I have to shrug and accept. And I do.
When Will of Will and Grace ranks on Jack for being “nelly” and a “fem-bot”, is he worthy of censure? Does his sexual orientation confer some sort of “pass”?
Love is a many-gendered thing, it would seem, and none of it is very clearly defined.
Aww, c’mon, John, lemme give you some sugar, you big ol’ hunk of well-aged beef, you…
Hermaphrodites are not transsexuals. I think the term some like to use instead of hermaphrodite is “intersex”.
Transsexuals are generally classified as having GID-- Gender Identity Disorder. From what I’ve read, there is no known psychological “cure” for the disorder, and many people don’t like to call it a disorder at all since so many people experience the condition from their eariest childhood memories. We do know that there are significant differences in the way the brain develops in boy and girl fetuses, so it’s not at all unreasonable that sometimes the developement patterns might get switched. But, like being gay, there is no known genetic of biological cause.
Not until you’ve completed “the change”.
No, he’s a self-proclaimed Peckerwood. There’s a big difference.
I like this subject. Personally I’ve thought Ann Coulter’s publicity shots have been altered – more to the Lithgow than the Paltrow – for quite some time. And I say “good for her” if it helps her sell more books. Just don’t be surprised if every time she sits for an interview she wears a set of solid-gold conkers under her skirt for motivation.
Red, that’s pretty much the problem in a nutshell. I think if I were a gay man I would have no patience with the notion that a cross-dresser has civil rights issues on a par with my own. For instance, I think equal employment opportunity for gay persons is a worthy point of struggle, but I can’t see myself personing the barricades so that some guy can wear pantyhose to work.
Keerist, John, menopause? Setting the bar pretty high, ain’t you?
Hopefully kimera will stop by; she seems to know a considerable amount about the subject. I don’t know as much so I’m mostly relating things I’ve read elsewhere but don’t remember the details of.
Transgenderism is basically usually defined as someone having a physical gender out of sync with their gender identity.
As you’ve noted, there are lots of cases where there is some degree of ambiguity regarding an infant’s genitalia (a surprisingly large number, depending on the exact criteria used, which isn’t surprising because most medical conditions occur in degrees.) The current word for people with that condition is usually “intersexed”.
There’s increasing evidence that a lot of people who would formerly be classified as simply transgendered - i.e. gender identity and physical body don’t match - are actually intersexed in some degree. They have more or less subtle physical and genetic conditions that make their physical sex less clear. For an anecdotal example, a pre-op transgendered MTF friend of mine was identified as male at birth but grew small breasts at puberty (lasting longer than the occasional cases in which pubescent boys exhibit minor breast development.) That sort of thing is, according to some researchers, not terribly uncommon. (kimera actually mentioned once in a thread that some doctors have proposed that height above 5’8’’ be treated as evidence against transgenderism for MTFs, because typically they tend to have smaller, more feminine builds. My limited personal experience knowing some transgendered people aligns with that.)
Differences in brain structure have been alluded to above as well - just as subtle differences in brain structure may exist between gay and straight people.
Of course, none of these things are really diagnostic. But one thing I’ve always been struck by in talking to the few transgendered people I know is that they’ve all known from a very early age, and most of them were scolded as children for behaving more like their mental gender rather than their physical gender. The stories of transgendered people I’ve known (as well as ones I’ve read) always struck me as pretty similar to what it was like to realize I was gay. At first, it seemed perfectly natural - certainly well before puberty, I realized that men were attractive to me and women weren’t (even if there were no sexual urges related to that fealing.) It seemed natural right up until I started realizing that it wasn’t normal. Transgendered people seem to report the same sorts of things - for instance, wanting to dress as their preferred gender rather than the one their parents thought they were, and only later starting to understand that their behavior was not considered normal.
Fundamentally, homosexuality and transgenderism are really both facets of the same thing, and I think that’s where the political identification of gay rights and trans rights movements came from. After all, we’re all a crowd of people who aren’t acting the way our gender is supposed to, and we tend to suffer the same sort of shit for it.
That’s why I have a good deal of sympathy for transgendered people; no, it really cannot (yet, at least) be conclusively proven that transgenderism exists in the same way we can prove that gravity exists (though I think the same could be said for lots of things in the human experience.) At the same time, people still argue that homosexuality isn’t real, that it doesn’t actually exist and arises out of rebelliousness or confusion and that it can be cured rather than permitting us to live our sinful, deviant lifestyles.
I can understand exactly why that’s not true: I’m gay, it’s how I am, it’s very clear, and it’s not something that can be changed. When it comes down to it, that’s the only real evidence there is that homosexuality exists - some people claim to be homosexual; we claim not to be able to change even if we wanted to; we claim that it feels right and natural for us. There’s no other way to determine that homosexuality exists except by trusting that people are probably the best experts into their own experience until you can prove otherwise. By the same token, then, wouldn’t it be extremely arrogant of me to claim that transgendered people are all wrong when they describe how they feel? Since I demand that people take my word for it that I really am gay (or at least would, if anyone doubted it), how in the world can I justify not trusting someone else’s word that their physical and mental gender don’t match? The fact that bits and pieces of medical evidence keep accumulating to confirm both of those things should come as no surprise, but it’s certainly even stronger reason to believe.
And I do take it personally when people claim that transgenderism isn’t real. From a broader, more abstract perspective, transgenderism is a lot like homosexuality. We’re both groups of people that have suffered a lot because we don’t fit in with what is common and expected of our genders. So when someone questions someone else’s gender identity, it’s not a big leap from there to questioning my sexual orientation. As has been said in this thread more than once, both questions can be raised with exactly the same reasoning to support them. You might as well be telling me I’m not really gay if you think only what’s most common and what’s traditionally accepted is really genuine. And, of course, a lot of the same people think the same thing about transgendered people and gay people.
Swell. Another term. That helps.
Whats the difference, then, between an effeminate homosexual and someone who has GID? If the terms can’t be satsifactorily defined, what damn good are they?
The homosexual does not think of himself as a woman stuck in a man’s body. I’m bewildered by your stubbornness here, elucidator, and surprised. I guess it just shows that all of us have blind spots somewhere.