:eek:
Um, no. That’s not the question. The OP had nothing to say about homosexuality, and that’s not what transgenderism is about.
Very effeminate gay people believe themselves to be the gender that their plumbing indicates and are not part of this discussion.
It’s because on the inside, they are not a woman. They are a man.
As has been said before, the difference between “effeminate men” or “masculine women” and transgender people is found not in the first word of each quote, but rather the second.
A man who is effeminate is still a man regardless of his actions. He has no conflict with having a penis or not having breasts. He would, in fact, probably find the lack of the former and growth of the latter quite disturbing. On the flipside, a Male-to-Female transgender could be a very masculine male and yet still feel that they should’ve been born a very masculine female.
Imagine a person who is physically female, but otherwise male. He may be attracted to women, or he may be attracted to men. Sexual orientation is completely independent of gender (is that the right word here?).
National Transgender Advocacy Coalition
It might help your claim that you’re not out to piss people off if you tried a little harder to resist making observations like this. It brings nothing of value to the discussion and serves little purpose but to inflame people.
In other words, knock this shit off.
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Transgendering operations seem risky, therefore, because what if having boobs and a vagina ain’t what I thought it was?
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Candidates for sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) have to live as their destination sex for years before surgery will be performed. That isn’t a complete substitute for having the parts of that sex but it’s perhaps the best possible preparation and test.
Gender dysphoria
Schizophrenia
Take a look at the symptomology of each and you’ll see that they are completely different.
Showtime has some documentaries running right now that explore this.
They also had a very interesting panel discussion after one of the showings. Female-to-males are so much luckier than the reverse…it’s so much easier to ADD things than to subtract them. FTMs are completely indistinguishable in my opinion. MTFs are almost always unmistakable.
There was one FTM that was so complicated I couldn’t even try to understand it: He was born a woman and lived his life as a woman, and identifed as a lesbian. Then she decided to go for the change, but ONLY hormonally and lifestyle-wise, retaining female genitalia. So now he is a man with a vagina who identifies as gay and dates gay men.
Good grief!
Are you serious??? It’s a joke! And it’s not even a mean joke!
I can’t believe the hypersensitivity around here sometimes. People gotta learn to * relax. *
And inigo, if no one’s adequately addressed this yet: there is a huge difference between schizophrenics and transgenders…schizophrenics are mentally ill. Transgenders have what amounts to a birth defect, their chromosomes, hormones, and physical body are not in harmony. They seek to bring things into harmony. An understandable desire.
No, I’m not asking that question. I’m asking why someone feels the need to undergo surgery to change their sex (and in the process am confusing myself with the he/shes and the gender vs. sex things straight).* Perhaps the question needs to be qualified more, which your post and other responses are helping me to do, so I appreciate them.
Hamish’s first response and other posts bring up the concept of “bringing the outer in line with the inner”/“body in line with the mind”/etc. Maybe my problem, like Inigo’s is that I can’t properly empathize. Previous posts have stated that there are certain roles that society imposes on individuals (here we’re discussing the ones based on gender) and certain people feel that they can’t (for whatever reason) live up to those roles. I agree. In some people, this causes grief. Happens to all of us. To alleviate the grief, one effects change. Whether this is as simple as wearing dresses (in a mtf situation) or as complex as having your plumbing reworked (as it were) is simply a coping mechanism.
OK, I can buy that. Actually, rereading the posts, I think Nametag’s correct (or at least I agree with his/her analogy), as my above reasoning shows. Between you and me though, I still think the whole operation thing’s a bit much. To each their own though.
Oh man, this is a lot more confusing than I expected. I think I figured it out though.
Yeah, actually, I’m quite serious. He’s in here wanting information about transgender issues and leads off a post with a “joke” about a man with breasts. It’s not funny and it’s disrespectful.
[QUOTE=Chairman Pow]
Maybe I’m inferring this from your post, but I get the same sense from other posts, that trangender = homosexual.QUOTE]
Not really true at all. Part of the problem is that there are actually three components involved as I understand it (and I’m sure someone will be along shortly to correct me if I’m wrong):
Physical Gender: Male or Female
Mental (or True) Gender: Male or Female
Primary Attraction Gender: Male or Female
So, a female body with a male mind attracted to males = homosexual.
A male body with a female mind attracted to males = heterosexual.
Again, nope. TG people believe themselves to be a particular gender, just not properly-equipped to perform that way. It’s not about who they want to go to bed with, it about what they believe themselves to be.
Also, the general rule of thumb is to refer to them according to the gender they believe themselves to be, so an FTM is a “he”, and an MTF is a “she”, even before anything is done about it, cosmetic or otherwise.
Nobody here is expected to know I’m not trolling. I chose “looney” to make a point: that most folks wouldn’t go to the trouble of looking for a difference between foil hattery & transgendering surgury. That’s all. Assume, just for a minute, that I have NO idea what these individuals exoperience; that it is completely outside the scope of my daily routine. And my incapacity for empathy here is not rooted in prejudice, but rather, as I stated, complete and total ignorance of the emotional/mental state of people who face these issues.
Beligerence I don’t need. Answers are what I’m after.
I am not a transgendered person, I’ve never even met one to my knowledge, but this board has done a great deal to enlighten me about the issue. Something I think the OP is maybe missing, possibly because he’s a man and maybe a little less sensitive to it, is how huge a role gender plays in human interactions, at least in the Western societies I’m familiar with. It’s an absolutely intrinsic part of how we deal with people.
Ever meet somebody who you couldn’t immediately identify as male or female? Somewhat unsettling, wasn’t it? Because odds are, his or her actual (or perceived) gender probably has no practical bearing on your interactions with him/her, unless you’re going to have sex or hire a wet nurse or something, but it has everything to do with the way you communicate with him/her. Body language, spoken language, personal space - all of these things are gendered in our society. Gender is amazingly important to us and our culture in ways that have nothing to do with sexuality.
Maybe if that weren’t true, a person who feels they have been born the wrong gender would not be so deeply affected, but as it is it seems to be an amazingly painful thing to endure. I read somewhere that one in four of those who don’t get any help (I assume that means things like talk therapy or antidepressants as well as reassignment surgery) commit suicide. Evidently it’s an issue of desperate importance in their lives, and an indication of how important gender identification is to us is that I, like most people I’ve talked to about it, try as I might, can’t really imagine it at all. I identify so strongly as female that I can’t imagine being otherwise in body or in mind, although I can be sensitive to the plight of those who are.
And jokes are jokes. It is an unhealthy civilisation that cannot laugh at itself. Same goes for people. But that’s my angle. Unless I hear calls for encores I shall turn off my humor gland for the remainder of the thread.
But for the record, uptight & defensive are at least as repulsive as callous & clumsy.
Then why would you be surprised that we would think so?
You knew you were choosing insensitive wording, especially given:
You’d been made aware that 1 - there are transexual posters here on the board and 2 - there are friends of transexuals here in this thread.
There were at least three informative posts before yours that were attempting to explain it to you. One made a serious attempt to paint a picture that could be understood by a non transexual (ftg’s).
Actually, I toned my answer down quite a bit from what I wrote originally. Given that even you admit that what you said could come across as trolling, why wouldn’t you expect beligerence? I honestly don’t get this.
Ugh - let me see if I can draw an analogy here - it’s gonna be clumsy.
Lets say, because of a genetic blip, or a hormonal issue, or whatever, you were born with a cleft palate and a hare lip. Would you get a cleft-palate and hare lip repaired? Probably yes.
Transgenderism is essentially the same thing only instead of the problem with the face, mouth and lips, the problem is with the private parts. I am a woman. I like women things. If I happened to have been born with my brain, but also a penis, I would still be a woman - just a woman in need of a medical correction.
I wouldn’t necessarily be gay, or crazy, or have dandruff. I would still be me, only with one (or more) of my body parts not quite right.
There is such a thing as a male brain and a female brain - sometimes the bodies they wind up in don’t match up.
Zakalwe - I would suggest giving Inigo a break here. He has said that his errors were made out of ignorance and not malice, and has requested information. Continued criticism of a moot point falls into the category of beating a dead horse.
I did want to comment on the question about homosexuality vs. transgenderism. Again, let me state that I don’t know a whole lot about this, but I have anecdotal information that may be useful. Comedian Eddie Izzard self-identifies as transgendered and has opted not to have reassignment surgery - he says he’s a "lesbian trapped in a man’s body"and if he WERE to have reassignment, then he would be a woman attracted to women. (Where his transvestism fits into that, I don’t know. I presume transvestism may be somewhere on the transgender “scale”?)
Nah - totally different things. Men wanting to dress up as women are just that - men who happen to like to dress up as women.
“Men” who are transgendered don’t like to dress up as women, the ARE women.
Totally different ball of wax.
That doesn’t mean that the two are necessarily mutally exclusive.
Nah - totally different things. Men wanting to dress up as women are just that - men who happen to like to dress up as women.
“Men” who are transgendered don’t like to dress up as women, the ARE women.
Totally different ball of wax.
That doesn’t mean that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive.
Ignoring that double post for a minute, I just wanted to point out that both transvestites and transgendered persons can be gay, straight or bi-sexual - gender, or a proclivity for dressing in the opposite gender’s clothing, do not denote sexual orientation.