I think it’s time to have another go-around on the topic: Is a man who feels female and therefore has an operation to achieve the physical likeness of a female body actually female or still an unhappy male attempting to deceive himself and others?
Is such a person a risk to the emotional health and/or morality of children with which she (or he) comes in contact?
Obviously, Kaitlyn, Eve, and Clothahump have something to say on the issue…and I doubt anyone could stop Kythereia from adding her 2 cents.
Clothahump, rebound from the (perhaps over-passionate) pitting and give us a reasoned, reasonable statement of your position, please.
I’ll post my own position and experience in the subject this evening when I get home from work…from which I’ve already stolen too much time this afternoon.
You’ve left out the possibility which appeals to most of the scientists doing work in this area. Specifically, that she was always a female who happens to suffer from a genetic disorder which gave her male physical characteristics and who chose surgery to minimize those characteristics.
Exactly. To expand on this, imagine we could do brain transplants. If your brain was put into a body of the opposite sex, would you instantly lose all of your previous gender identity? I don’t think so.
Well, first of all there are male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals. But my understanding is that male-to-female transsexuals consider themselves to be female and wish to be treated as female, and that’s good enough for me. Whether they “really are female” depends on your definition of female, I suppose, but given that reasonable people clearly can (and do) disagree on precisely what it means to be female, why not just treat people the way they want to be treated?
As far as transsexuals being “a risk to the emotional health and/or morality of children,” I see no evidence of this whatsoever (and think the burden of proof is clearly on the people making that claim). I suppose spending time with and getting to know transsexuals could make kids more tolerant of them, so if one considers “tolerance of transsexuals” to be immoral, then I suppose you could call that a “risk to the morality of children.” But otherwise, no.
As manhattan has basically already said, you’ve missed what I believe (with at least some scientific backing) is the correct option: such a person is not and never was a man.
I can’t even begin to understand how anyone could ask this question. It’s as if you think a transsexual has a communicable disease that can emotionally or morally infect other people.
My reasoning may be utterly simplistic, and I hope it’s not offensive.
But here it is:
We know that occasionally babies may be born with both male and female genitals. I’m told that at one time, the practice was to decide at birth what sex to raise the baby, operate accordingly, and go from there.
To me, this proves it’s possible to be physically one sex, but mentally another. After all, how did the doctor or parent making the decision know if their choice at birth was the “right” one?
Now, if it’s possible to be born that way, then logic suggests its possible to be born with all the genitals of one sex but still FEEL the other way. And you have things like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome – how do you classify a person with this diagnosis?
In short, I buy the concept that a male can be born with a female body, and a female born with a male body.
Bricker, that’s the exact same reasoning I used to arrive at my belief with regards to gender disorders. Even when I thought people with gender disorders were suffering from a brain chemistry disorder (I was young!), I never thought they should be denied any rights, though.
Please help me understand this question, especially the morality part.
UrbanChic, the logic of the “morality” question is something like:
“If transsexuals and other deviants go around expecting to be accorded the same consideration and respect “normal” people receive, then children, with their vulnerable little minds, might come to think that there is more than one way to live a decent life. And we can’t have that.”
I’m not assuming the OP holds this opinion, but that’s why the question is even posed.
The problem as I see it is not differing perceptions of what “male” and “female” mean, but differing perceptions of what “really” means.
If Eve won’t mind me using her as my example, since I know her story a bit better than I do the others, she has the same chromosomes now as she did when she was born – and which equipped her with male genitalia. And she is the same person now, albeit older, as she was when she was a young boy who knew inside that he (using the external-referent pronoun) was really a girl, inside.
Where one’s identity resides is the bottom-line question here – the person she knew herself to be did not conform to the external bodily form that she observed in the mirror.
What is “real” in all that? I submit that one’s self-perceptions are quite as “real” as the physiology that appears to contradict them.
(BTW, my impression is that Satyagrahi was trying to do as “objective” an OP on the question as he could achieve, based on his comments in the MPSIMS and Pit threads – but my first reaction was, “What the heck kind of trolling is he doing?” simply because he was asking the questions as if in a void, when we have been over them before.)
In a vacuum, Clothahump’s opinion that one’s gender is determined by one’s genes would not have been offensive – it was the way that he presented, and in the context that he did, that gave rise to the offense people took to it. Though it is instrinsically offensive: It’s saying, “My perception of what you are based on your genetic makeup is more valid than your perception of what you yourself are.”
But there are plenty of situations in which we happily impose our perceptions on others. I don’t care if someone has the perception that all property is theft; if he’s on trial for trespassing and the evidence merits conviction, I vote to convict. I don’t care if someone has the perception that children should be able to consent to sex; if he’s on trial for statutory rape and the evidence merits conviction, I vote to convict.
Now, those examples are not exactly on point, because they involve the rights of others.
But here’s one that may come into play. A convicted arsonist objects to being placed in the men’s prison, because, says the arsonist, I am really a woman inside. The women’s prison officials don’t want to take the arsonist, because the arsonist is biologically male and their existing prisoners object to being forced to house with what they perceive to be a male.
At that point, we cannot rely entirely on the arsonist’s declaration; it may be self-serving malingering or it may be true. We must impose, at least to some extent, our own perception as more valid than the arsonist’s own.
As a teenager I started to get my head arround the ideas of Homosexuality and Sex Changes and Trans Sexuality by considering my reaction as a heterosexual male to this sci-fi hypothetical.
If a mad doctor one day transplanted my brain into a female body, what and how would I feel?
Well I know there would be all sorts of different hormones now drugging me, but I don’t believe they would be strong enough to change my mind’s gender. Instead I would still find women sexually attractive, and men sexually unattractive. So I would act and seem like a lesbian. But I would also miss the physical strength and penis of being a male, and would probably tire of the novalty of having a female physiology (who wants periods?) so I would also take any oportunity to regain my male physiology through medical methods available to me.
Now luckily, such mad doctors don’t yet exist (I hope), but I do know things go wrong/get muddled up in fetuses all the time as they are developing, and it really doesn’t seem to strange for someone to be born with a feminine brain inside a masculin body, or a masculin brain inside a feminine body. Such a person wouldn’t be in quite the same hypothetical position as the one I mentioned above, having never had the oportunity earlier in life to have existed within their correct body, such a person would have ttake a lot of time and suffering before they could learn the truth and then search out corrective surgery.
Later I learn’t that many homosexuals have brains completely at one with their bodies gender, and it seems to me that the scientific evidence is starting to show that an extra-masculin brain in a masculin body can lead to wanting sex with males perhapse more so than is the case with a feminine brain in a masculin body.
The OP’s question is meaningless, as it assumes that everyone can be precisely and totally said to be one and only one gender, and that doing so is somehow important.
There are two separate discussions to be had:
(a) let’s discuss the totality of gender: biological, cultural, behavioral, etc.
(b) let’s discuss how we should treat people who don’t fit neatly into categories
(a) is obvoiusly an interesting discussion to have, but it seems to me that (b) has a pretty clear answer, which is “we should treat them with the same level of respect we treat other people, and, in all normal contexts, refer to them as their self-identified gender, if they have one (which most people do)”
So the statement “Eve and Kaitlyn are real women” is neither true nor false as “real women” doesn’t have any precisely defined unique meaning, but should be treated as true in the vast majority of contexts, particularly day-to-day interactions.
I don’t understand the point of these questions. Someone is unhappy with the way they are. Modern science can change them. They avail themselves of modern science and change. They are now happier than they were before. That’s it.
Now, there is certainly a natural philosophical fascination with the nature of gender and where it “really” resides. I understand that fascination and share it, to a degree. But it seems that most of the discussions–at least on this board–aren’t “What is gender, exactly,” but rather “What’s the deal with these transexuals?” I don’t see what is gained form the latter discussion, especially given the hurt feelings, insensitivity, pompous moralizing, and inevitable pit threads that arise.
Bricker, you raise a good point. It’s difficult to tell when our perceptions of others are important, or when we should act on them. A good principle, it seems to me, is to refrain from acting unless they affect us in a real, tangible way. This is obviously easier said than done. We could spend weeks arguing about what “real” and “tangible” mean in this context. But it seems to me a good place to start.
Do you know about this case? The site I linked has an opinion, not on the inmate’s gender, but on whether taxpayers should pay for SRS. It takes the basic stance that Kosilek’s request is “elective surgery.”
I should note that in THIS case specifically, I have “insider information” on the inmate, so I’m going to leave my personal insight about whether or not the person is transgendered OUT of the discussion. However, I do not think SRS for a transgendered person should be considered elective surgery.
I think there’s “gender” in a genotypic sense, and then “gender” in a phenotypic sense. The two may not always correspond, nor will the “normal” male/female dichotomy always be so clear cut in either sense. The instances where it’s not clear genotypically or phenotypically what the gender is are sufficiently rare to warrant the term “abnormality”. That’s not to say “abnormal” is good or bad, it’s just to say that these deviations from the norm do not invalidate the “normal” quality of the gender dichotomy characteristic of our species.
Hence, I think there’s “male”, “female” and “other”. “Other” is, in my mind, the catch-all for gender ambiguity of whatever form (some of these things under “other” have names, like Klinefelter syndrome). Each kind of ambiguity needs to be dealt with and conceptualized in the manner most helpful to that individual, which may or may not involve interventions designed to help the individual conform to a normal male or female phenotype. If a female with a male self-identity menstruates, or goes through menopause, it might be most useful to think of that person as “really” female in certain circumstances (say you’re the person’s gynecologist). In other circumstances, it might be most useful to think of that individual as “really” male (say you’re involved with the person in an intimate relationship). Even when a person has undergone gender reassignment, the influence of the genotype cannot be ignored, because the individual must undergo chronic treatment to maintain the characteristics of their gender self-identity. In my mind, it’s not quite the same thing overall as having everything “match up”, so to speak.
Transsexualism is just a different sort of biological state, and, in my mind, really deserves its own catagory. In “real life” it gets unwieldy, which is why I think allowing the person the dignity of assuming a distinct gender role regardless of overall biology is indicated in most situations. But it’s useless, IMO, to be so stark in one’s language and thoughts so as to assert identities like “really” male or female. It’s just too complicated an issue for neat boxes like that.
I think we all have a physical identity and an emotional, mental, and spiritual identity; our body is largely governed by instinct and biochemical reactions (ie. estrogen, testosterone, pheromones, adrenaline); we feel tired when we don’t sleep, we feel hungry when we don’t eat, we feel pain when we receive an injury. So we have this physical identity, but our minds and hearts and souls–the other identity–transcends the physical, goes above and beyond it, controls it and keeps surveillance on it.
My point–in a very rambling and roundabout way–is that the physical state is secondary to the mental, spiritual, and emotional state of any given person. And if you’re a woman (or man) in your heart and head and spirit, and a man (or woman) in your body, and you feel uncomfortable with the split between those two identities, by all means seek the surgery that will offer you the change you desire.
