Do you think agencies like the FDA should be disbanded and people should be able to decide whether they want to swallow pills that don’t work and can kill or harm them?
Do you think that people should have the freedom to decide that they want the adrenaline rush of trying to outrun trains on the tracks?
There are many, many things that are controlled or prohibited. None of us has the absolute freedom to decide to do things known to be likely to kill or harm us.
Another point on this topic. Sexual or romantic relationships involve TWO people. You might manage to have yourself tortured into “doing it” with a woman, but what about HER? Doesn’t she deserve to have somebody who is really into her as her partner? This whole “get yourself fixed, get yourself married” has women as chattels.
Sex can be “letting somebody” or it can be enthusiastic. Everyone deserves for it to be enthusiastic.
Nah. There are valid criticisms to be made on all sides of the brain/body primacy debate, but this isn’t one of them.
Having a (brain) gender identity that doesn’t correspond to one’s (body) anatomical sex characteristics is not analogous to believing oneself to be a giant dragon. Because male and female human beings are in fact very similar to each other, and it only requires comparatively tiny hormonal and other changes during fetal development to give a genetically male (XY) fetus characteristics of a genetically female (XX) fetus, or vice versa.
AFAIK the current state of the science strongly suggests that transgender identity generally does in fact accurately reflect scientific reality: namely, the reality of developmental differences in the brain structures that influence gender identity and in the determination of gonadal and phenotypic sex characteristics.
In contrast, there is absolutely no scientific mechanism by which humans can naturally develop the biological characteristics of different species, even real ones like dogs or cats or monkeys, much less mythical ones like giant dragons. So it’s completely legit to treat transgender identity as a normal though rare variant of actual human development while treating “giant dragon identity” as an irrational delusion.
Sex is set at the moment of conception. It’s dependent on whether the the spermicide carries a Y or an X chromosome. So no, it’s not really that malleable. While prepubescent development is similar, there are serious differences. Immediately after birth female babies respond more to faces than male newborns. Males respond to movement than females.
But what you are saying about the differences between a human and a dragon clearly is true, and I concede that it is not as reasonable a change to propose. So let me try another: suppose I am born with two arms, but I feel that is not me, and I am in the wrong body. I strongly assert that I should have only one arm.
Should a doctor help me amputate?
I’ve read that a couple of times and I’m not sure what you are trying to say. It seems like you are trying to say that if female brain is put in a male body, it will grow breasts. I know that’s not true, and I don’t think believe that’s what you are trying to say. I guess I don’t understand what you are saying. Could you explain further?
“Ontegeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
Our genes carry the DNA from all the way back when we were fishes, and sort of replays it in the womb as we develop. We even have gills.
If I selected from the reptilian days I could likely produce a good version of a dragon naturally from human DNA (assuming of course such a sophisticated tool exists, which it doesn’t)
So, actually I could have an all natural dragon created solely from genetic traits expressed in human DNA.
That’s a fun exercise, but it does not refute your larger point which I take to mean that it is easy to see how a relatively minor birth defect could create gender dysphoria that could be corrected, by societal accommodations and/or surgery.
It would not be credible to claim that a similar birth defect put me, a dragon in the body of a human, because here there be no dragons, and there never were.
But my point is only that “XX==woman, XY==man,” while *broadly *true, is an overly simplistic perspective. We’re barely scratching the surface of how genetic sex determination works, let alone how sex and gender are influenced by gestational development. We have considerable evidence that there is not a rigid association between brain and genitalia.
For many humans, arguably the vast majority, we are able to say that “XY==male sex==male gender.”
But not all. Those outliers exist, and they are real people with real brains that do not match their real anatomy.
In cases of gender dysphoria, attempting to treat it by reinforcing the sex of the individual tends to fail miserably and cause harmful results. Whereas Gender reassignment therapy typically causes a fairly drastic psychological improvement.
Meanwhile, with homosexuality, the exact opposite is true. Reaffirming one’s sexuality typically works to remove the stigma and make people mentally healthy, while gay conversion “therapy” is ovsrwhemingly harmful.
I know you retracted the dragon argument. But as the Straight Dope is dedicated to fighting ignorance, I cannot let this stand. Recapitulation has been disproven. OTTOMH Stephen J Gould’s book Ever Since Darwin, the essay “Racism And Recapitulation.” I give quotes and cites but my copy is several hundred miles away at the moment.
Oops, I was unclear. I am not accusing Scylla of making any racist arguments. Gould’s essay is about recapitulation being wrong, and about racists using pseudo science and discredited hypotheses. I genuinely apologize if I implied that you were making a racist argument. Again, that was not my intent.
Remember when one identical twin is gay, there is a 50% probability the other is. This is much higher than the general population, so is a strong indicator of a biological factor. With identical brains, we would expect it to be 100% if biology was the only determinant. It appears that there is also an environmental determinant.
Extrapolating what this tells us about biology and sexuality to the issue of transgenderism, May suggest that the brain not matching the body hypothesis is likely flawed.
My current shorthand model for the mechanism of sexual determination goes like this:
The brain is a computer. You can install an o/s on it when you partition the drive for either Windows (male) or Mac (female). Once that’s been done, you are pretty much committed and can’t switch without losing everything.
Stretching the analogy, there are also partial formats and formatting problems and errors, and some stuff that might let you run both but may contain malware, etc. etc. you get the picture.
So, it seems unlikely that it is the brain itself that is the issue. There is no lab test that will show someone is transgender.
There is no lab test that will show that I have bipolar affective disorder (manic depression). But according to numerous shrinks and the DSM, I have it. There are definite problems in my brain (who’s surprised by this? Show of hands!) but no lab test currently known to science will show them.
Yes, and that is no knock on you or on transgender people. It’s just a fact.
It’s a shitty fact because if there were such a test, than there might be a treatment that addresses the causes.
You are arguing as if by my suggesting there is no lab test, that somehow means that it’s not real. I’m not. If anything, the opposite That’s why I made the whole operating system analogy. If your computer is busted because a cable is loose, or a board got fried, well shit. That sucks. The problem though is clear and you can probably address it directly and have a fix, and get back to work. However, if the operating system is screewed up somehow and you’re staring at the blue screen of death, that’s a big problem without a simple fix.
This is not true, actually. The problem is that the test requires dissecting the patients brain. So not much use as a diagnostic tool, but it does point to transgenderism having a physical root cause.
As with just about everything, it is more spectrum than binary.
And I think this is also true of sexual preference. Most likely, the people on the hard ends of the Kinsey Scale are uncommon. There are some genuine heterosexuals who could not ever engage in same-sex activity, and there are some genuine strict homosexuals, but most people fall somewhere in between.
There may even be some natural migration across the scale of sexuality. I seem to be different than I was decades ago. Trying to move me to a solid position on one end of the spectrum would be like trying to make me not gag on green bell peppers.
“Therapy” is never about modifying you, it is about helping adapt to how you are. Modification is “surgery”, “training” or “indoctrination”. You might want to “err on the side of freedom”, but should that erring support deceptive labeling? I think we ought not be tolerating these kind of lies.
This only refers to genetic sex, i.e., whether an individual has XX versus XY chromosomes (and I’m assuming you meant “sperm” there rather than “spermicide”, which would be very confusing).
As others have noted, there is plenty of variation among humans even at the most basic genetic-sex level. There are women with an extra X chromosome (about 0.1% of the female population), men with one or more extra X chromosomes (about 0.1-0.5% of the male population), men with an extra Y chromosome, etc. If you consider any group of a thousand random people, the odds are quite high that at least one of them will not fall into either of the simple binary genetic-sex categories XX and XY.
More importantly, though, the sex chromosomes are not the only factor determining things like reproductive anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and gender identity. Other genetic or developmental factors can produce people with XY chromosomes but female anatomy, or XX chromosomes and a penis, or any of a wide variety of other “intersex” characteristics. These are people whose sex chromosomes are absolutely ordinary XX or XY, mind you: it’s just that their sex chromosomes didn’t ultimately produce the ordinary combination of uniformly “male” or “female” bodily characteristics.
And as andros’s cites explain, research on human development is strongly indicating that innate gender identity is one of those characteristics that usually—but not always—corresponds to genetic sex. Your sex chromosomes, your reproductive anatomy, your secondary sex characteristics, your gender identity, and your sexual orientation are all different aspects of your physical self, and any one of them can be atypical with respect to the others. E.g., you can be an XX feminine-appearing female-identifying male-attracted individual who has a penis, or an XY feminine-appearing female-identifying male-attracted individual who has a vagina, or an XY masculine-appearing female-attracted individual who has a penis and identifies as female.
All these variations are rare, but they’re real, and they involve real people who are just as human as anybody else. It’s insufficient and kind of dismissive to treat them as analogous to unsuccessful installations of an operating system. They’re outcomes of an infinitely variable and complicated organic process, not errors or failures.
That might be the money quote to get us back to the OP.
Straight people are usually straight–but not always. Gay people are usually gay–but not always.
If we accept, as Saint Kinsey (PBUH) argued, that sexuality is a spectrum, then it is entirely possible that someone who is a lifelong confirmed heterosexual could fall in love with someone of the same gender. It’s even possible, Scylla, that you are close enough to the middle of the scale (legit bisexual) that you could work to repress your sexual attraction to women and seek out romantic and sexual relationships exclusively–and happily!–with men.
I don’t see it happening. One man, maybe? The right man for you? Ok. But “changing” from straight to gay? Nossir. I do not buy that, regardless of how much pressure society might place on you.
If that pressure did exist, though, sufficient for you to feel you had to turn yourself gay or lose social status, or the love and respect of your family and peers, or be seen as a broken, insane, deviant failure…yeah, you might seek out recourse in the form of [del]brainwashing[/del] [del]reprogramming[/del] “conversion therapy.”
And it would not work.
You, who (for the sake of the argument) have never checked out a guy’s ass before, who have never had a crush on a man, who have never fantasized about men while masturbating…you’re pretty dang straight. That’s part of who you are–you dig women, you don’t dig men.
This hypothetical change you’d want to make–from straight to gay–requires three basic steps:
First, you have to accept the pressure from society and family and church that you are wrong. That you are broken, malformed, dirty, even hellbound. That who you are, how you feel, what arouses you, who you love…is all wrong and must be changed. That’s what we’re really saying when we talk about “societal pressure.”
Second, it requires you to suppress the desire for women that you have always possessed. “Nope, I gotta be gay now, no more women for me!” (Seriously, how realistic is that for you? To never once idly glance at a nice set of tits, a long pair of legs, a pretty face?)
Finally, it requires that you create, pretty much from whole cloth, a sexual and romantic desire for men. Their faces, their bodies, the cultural connotations of masculinity. You’d need to check out a guy’s ass as readily and as casually as a straight guy might check out a woman’s, and with the same subtext: “Damn, that’s hot.” Hell, you’d need to somehow create within yourself the desire to check men out in the first place; merely forcing yourself is hardly the goal, is it?
Going back to Kinsey, maybe you are close enough to the middle of the scale that the last step is not a deal-breaker. Maybe you’re openly bi, maybe you acknowledge your bisexuality but don’t talk about it, maybe you deny being bi and have fully suppressed your attraction to men, whatever. That still leaves the first two steps in your “straight conversion” therapy: you have to accept that you are damaged and disgusting and then you have to repress all the romantic and sexual desires you’ve always had for women.
I submit that the former is inherently harmful and the latter is doomed to failure–and therefore also harmful.
Tell me again how it’s like quitting smoking or training for a marathon?
All that is just a roundabout way of saying that I kind of agree–if someone wants to buy poison, we generally as a society do not stand much in their way. Rational adult, make your own choices, fine.
But we do and should limit who can sell poison, and how, and to whom.
And we most assuredly should keep people from selling poison while calling it heath food.
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