One fundamental point which is the tipping point towards acceptance of me and my people is “is there a legitimate medical basis transgender people to be transgender?” The evidence is very strongly “yes.”
Then the next point is “what is the motivation for transgender people to live as a gender different from that assigned at birth?” The motivation is that we are simply trying to live our lives and be comfortable in a gender role which aligns with our brain gender.
If you believe the first two points, then the question comes down to “so what harm is there in accommodating these folks who face a terrible challenge which not one of them ever asked for?”
Really, the rest is almost just “fine details” after that.
This is why the Dope is so valuable! I learned this fact here, and it is eminently fascinating.
I’m of the opinion that civil rights are civil rights (and I actually really like Damuri Ajashi’s “reasonable accommodation / undue burden” analysis for how ever a person wants to live their life), and it doesn’t matter if being gay or transgender is a choice. So what? People should be free to choose.
But the science that shows that these sorts of things are not choices just adds a whole 'nother layer of justification to protecting these sorts of civil rights.
So, there was no particular emphasis on the T part of LGBT in the Charlotte legislation. So the theory is that the conservatives realized that it was no longer politically viable to strike down anti-discrimination laws against homosexuals generally so they focused on the group that they thought could still stir up some support? Makes sense. Doesn’t resolve all the issues but the motives make sense.
I think it matters that there is a biological (or other scientific) basis for transgenderism. It has to be something that is beyond their control. I think my opinion would be different if the accommodation was for something that was a mere preference or voluntary choice.
I don’t believe for a second that a man will decide to live as a woman for shits and giggles, so I am confident that there is at least a significant psychological basis for it, I haven’t seen evidence that there is some biological basis for it. Maybe I missed the cite. This is the best I found and while it points towards the notion that it is biological, it is not conclusive and more studies are needed.
I mean aren’t we still blazing trails in the wilderness on transgender issues?
:Shrug: Fair enough. I have a broader view of human behavior; if it can be reasonably accommodated without creating an undue burden on someone else, then go for it.
While there is not conclusive proof beyond any doubt or any metaphysical certainty, there is a huge weight of evidence which is why the vast majority of medical bodies do accept that there is a physical basis for what we go through, and that transition is currently the best treatment.
As I’ve said before, many of us, if we could have taken a magic pill and suddenly not been transgender, we would have. We don’t put our families, careers, friends, and even lives on the line to play dress-up. We transition because we are driven to identify as a brain gender which does not align with the rest of our physical bodies.
When Christine Jorgensen’s story broke in December, 1952, her doctor Christian Hamberger was flooded with letters begging for treatment. In the first year I believe he received more than 3,000, and in the next few years more than 10,000. I’ve read the archives of many of the letters, and they are very telling even from that early age - people who feel they must live as a certain gender role, but don’t want to. The letter writers were terrified about what could happen to them. They did not want to “invade [cisgender] women’s spaces”. They did not want to lose their livelihoods and lives, they did not want to become pariahs. Many wrote to Hamberger begging for a “cure” other than transition.
I lectured at a church this weekend and among my other topics I told them about the “transgender prayer” as I call it, because I’ve heard so many transgender men and women say it was a part of their lives for years or even decades. It goes simply, “please God, when I wake up, make me a [woman/man]. Or kill me.” One lady I know started saying it when she was 5. She’s 64 now and still says it, and is still suffering.
Medical science searched for a cure. The search peaked in the 1960’s, with transgender people voluntarily and involuntarily undergoing drug trials, shock treatment, lobotomies, insulin shock therapy, pain-based negative reinforcement, and years and years of counseling. Some of us died as a result of this. And for the vast majority (greater than 95%), it simply did not work. A "cure"was still sought as far into the mid-1990’s, when the first autopsy and MRI studies began to show the concrete brain differences between us and cisgender persons.
Transgender individuals who are untreated and who are denied transition have a negative impact on their quality of life which we should as a society be ashamed of. I’ve researched this, but also importantly I work with this in the counseling and mentoring I do every week, as well as having lived through it (barely) myself.
We (generally speaking) don’t want to cause trouble. Sure, Google and you can find some firebrands talking big and making noise. Same with any group. Is that representative of the population? Not from my work with well more than a thousand transgender persons. I’m the mentor who has to talk transgender women into coming into the women’s bathrooms with me for the first time, some of them in tears because they are so afraid of violating societal norms, of causing a ruckus, of making other [cisgender] women feel threatened. Sometimes they text me from the stall that they’re afraid to leave until all other women are gone, so I wait by the sink for 5 minutes or more until they come out. The same thing happens with changing rooms - I’ve been the one to rush to the mall to extract a terrified transgender woman who entered a women’s changing room, but then lost her nerve and couldn’t get out of it - because she was so afraid of causing trouble.
But for all that, we’re more terrified of going into the men’s room dressed female. I’ve posted before about the harassment and violence I’ve personally witnessed.
And conservatives in general should be appalled at what they’ve let the anti-science Christian right turn their party into, a party which is worldwide known as the party of hatemongering, ignorance, prejudice, and fear. What went wrong with conservatism such that they can look at LGBT persons trying to live and work and play and raise their families and have the American dream, and say “we’d better put a stop to that! Our group’s interpretation of a book largely written by Bronze Age goatherds and poorly translated at that, which many others do not agree with or have other interpretations of, tells us so! And let’s ignore all that acceptance and tolerance in that pesky New Testament.”
[ul]
[li]Is the fact that brains of transgender people are physically different than those of parallel cisgender people really a valid indicator that there is a “physical basis” for it? I would think that anything which impacts a person’s mental state will have some sort of impact on the physical structure of the brain in some manner or other, but you can’t just measure this and prove that the physical structure caused the mental state versus the reverse. (FTR, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is a physical basis for the self-identity, and am just questioning this particular type of proof.)[/li][li]Even based on the studies you mention in your linked article, it’s not like it’s a clear-cut case of transpeople’s brains being like those of the gender that matches their identity. Only that in some but not all manners, they have a greater tendency to do so. So while you may be able to use it to prove that there is a physical basis for the self-identity, ISTM that to state - as have many posters in these threads - that “medical science has proved” that “transmen are men and transwomen are women” is a vast overstatement. At best, medical science has shown that the brains of transpeople are, on average, in some intermediate state with some characteristics of both those of their physical gender and those of their identity gender.[/li][/ul]
I think there are homosexuals that might have felt this way in past decades.
Heck, to a much lesser degree, there are members of racial minorities that have felt this way.
People don’t seem to give a shit until it affects them or someone they know.
For example, when crack was about black people, we just passed higher mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. We are reacting very differently to the opiate abuse we are seeing these days and I think that some of that difference is because of who is being affected.
A couple of questions/comments:
[li]Is the fact that brains of transgender people are physically different than those of parallel cisgender people really a valid indicator that there is a “physical basis” for it? I would think that anything which impacts a person’s mental state will have some sort of impact on the physical structure of the brain in some manner or other, but you can’t just measure this and prove that the physical structure caused the mental state versus the reverse. (FTR, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is a physical basis for the self-identity, and am just questioning this particular type of proof.)[/li][/QUOTE]
I’m not being argumentative but I’m not certain I understand the question. If it’s the argument (allow me to rephrase it here) that “since all mental illness likely has a physical basis, why is this ‘mental illness’ accorded special accommodation?”, that’s a good argument. The answer to that strawman argument would be that the Societal cost of compassionate accommodation is relatively low, and the relative success of the accommodation for making lives better relatively high.
If that is in fact what you are asking; forgive me if I’ve read too much into the question.
[QUOTE]
[li]Even based on the studies you mention in your linked article, it’s not like it’s a clear-cut case of transpeople’s brains being like those of the gender that matches their identity. Only that in some but not all manners, they have a greater tendency to do so. So while you may be able to use it to prove that there is a physical basis for the self-identity, ISTM that to state - as have many posters in these threads - that “medical science has proved” that “transmen are men and transwomen are women” is a vast overstatement. At best, medical science has shown that the brains of transpeople are, on average, in some intermediate state with some characteristics of both those of their physical gender and those of their identity gender.[/LIST][/li][/QUOTE]
That’s another fair argument. It can also be (and has been) posited that all human beings have a gender identity, or brain development, which lies on a spectrum. That spectrum has two “fat tails” at either end (I have a really cool graphic I wish I could post later) but also a significant middle ground.
When people say “transwomen are women” and “transmen are men” it’s a shorthand for “they are enough that they should be treated as such.” I’m a transgender woman. I’m also intersex. However, I cannot bear children (not could I ever have “fathered” children, for that matter). But I live and work and love and exist, and to the best of my ability and with complete honesty feel and identify, as a woman.
However, gender non-binary, genderfluid, agender, etc. persons then lead to an entirely different situation.
I know a couple right now, and the desire to not “be gay” is entirely driven by the way they have been treated. A lesbian friend of mine was kicked out of her house at 16 and ended up dropping out of high school due to her sexuality, and she’s only just now in her 30’s finishing her GED. Her parents meanwhile have ostracized her for nearly 20 years from the entire family. She has told me that she wishes she would never have been a lesbian, despite having made a good life for herself even with those challenges.
I’m saying: suppose you had two identical twins, who began with identical brains. And then you subjected them to vastly different life experiences, possibly trauma and the like, such that they end up in very different places psychologically and emotionally. Now you did scans of their brains. Would those brains be alike? I don’t think so, because the psychological and emotional differences would manifest as differences in their brains, even if these differences are the results of their p. & e. differences rather than the causes of them.
Based on that line of thought, I’m questioning the extent that you can prove that the differences in the case of transsexuals result from physical differences in brain structure and the like, even when those are observed upon study.
[Though again, I don’t have any particular reason to doubt that the transgender phenomenon might be partially or totally due to a physical basis.]
I don’t disagree with anything here other than the first sentence of the second paragraph. Because I think people are making a much more absolutist statement than you suggest.
And the reason they’re doing it is because it removes the option for others to look at things differently. To say “what’s the big deal about letting people live as the gender they’re most comfortable with?” is a reasonable argument. But it’s not as strong as “medical science has proved that transwomen are women so, anyone who doesn’t think of them as women is just an ignorant bigot who should be ignored”, and a lot of people prefer the latter.
No, it’s not difficult, which makes one wonder at the source of your confusion.
The assertion being made is that people on the left asserted that fears by people on the right (or middle) that gay rights would lead to trans rights was paranoia. Even if it were true that people on the left felt that the entire concern was based on transphobia, it doesn’t follow that they did not make the argument that “there’s nothing to worry about because it won’t follow”. People frequently argue against slippery slope arguments that they feel will lose them support with the public at large even if they themselves personally wouldn’t mind if the slippery slope came to pass.
I don’t recall this either, but again, it’s not my assertion. Others have made that assertion here, and my point is only that you’re muddling things a lot by purporting to counter what they’re saying by denying that the left “dismissed transphobia as paranoia”.
I don’t know the answer to that, but I suspect the mere experience difference is not something which is detectable as easily as brain/neuron volume and activity differences? I honestly don’t have a concrete factual answer to that question at this time.
It could be that absolutist statements are what (sadly) are needed to combat wars of social issues in a society which increasingly does not and could not participate in well-crafted sentences, as we are doing here, and instead communicates with 140-character tweets, Vine videos, and Facebook.
ETA: “Biometric modeling revealed that, in men, genetic effects explained .34–.39 of the variance [of sexual orientation], the shared environment .00, and the individual-specific environment .61–.66 of the variance. Corresponding estimates among women were .18–.19 for genetic factors, .16–.17 for shared environmental, and .64–.66 for unique environmental factors. Although wide confidence intervals suggest cautious interpretation, the results are consistent with moderate, primarily genetic, familial effects, and moderate to large effects of the nonshared environment (social and biological) on same-sex sexual behavior.”
I don’t think so. Personally I don’t see any need to explain how your cite did not address my question. But if you insist, then paraphrase what you think my question was and describe how you think you’ve addressed it, and I’ll respond.
Got it. Identical twins. And I linked to identical twin studies. Seems on point so far.
Got it, different life experiences. Which my studies call “individual-specific environments”. Still on point, I think.
We’ll have to use a proxy for brain scans. The proxy we’ll use is sexual orientation.
Right, so we start with identical twins. Since identical twins have pretty similar genetics (haha), we can decouple differences in outcome due to genetics (i.e., differences caused by brain structure) from differences in outcome from life experiences. In fact, I would say this is pretty much the entire point of twin studies.
