In what sense is this a “cure?” If you goal is to make the person happy, I suppose you could say you succeeded. If your goal is to correct the deviant behavior, you have in fact given up.
This is an idiotic analogy. I have never denied that reality that transgendered people WANT to be another gender. The problem is that they are NOT their preferred gender, no matter how much they might wish otherwise.
This is also stupid. The question is not whether you wear the wrong clothes, but whether you represent yourself as the wrong gender. (And yes, by “wrong” I mean inconsistent with your biology). Your landlord wearing women’s pants out of temporary necessity is clearly not the same as trying to convince people that he is biologically a woman or live a woman’s lifestyle on a permanent basis.
FWIW, I started a new thread to deal with some of the broader issues I’m having trouble with here.
This is exactly and specifically wrong. Could you entertain for a minute the possibility that you should educate yourself on this issue before posting further about it? It’s as if I decided to post all about what terrible pets chihuahuas are, since reptiles lack any sort of social instinct, and anyway keeping wild animals as pets is against the law in most jurisdictions.
You don’t know enough about transgender issues to post about them right now. Please spend some time educating yourself. Please. If you need resources, I guarantee people will provide you with more of them–or you could read the links previously offered in this thread.
Transgender people who are not allowed to transition have a tremendously high suicide rate. Do you consider suicide more or less deviant than gender transition?
Personally, I prefer my “deviants” alive rather than dead.
Here’s the problem: you have a disagreement between what the body says and what the brain says. Past efforts to change the brain to agree with the body were largely unsuccessful, occasionally in spectacularly disastrous ways. Now medicine is trying treatment that changes the body to more closely resemble the brain. The goal here is a person that is less likely to kill him or herself and who functions better in society, meaning, less self-destructive behavior.
Yes, really, that IS the problem. Again, there is a disagreement between body and brain. We don’t have any way to change the brain half of that equation. We can’t change chromosomes or truly convert sexually differentiated organs from one to the other but we can alter the body to more closely resemble the brain’s viewpoint. Nobody knows it’s imperfect more than the people who undergo such a transformation.
It’s a bit like arguing dentures aren’t real teeth. Well, no, they’re not naturally grown teeth of dentine and bone, and we don’t advocate ripping out perfectly healthy teeth and substituting dentures, but we don’t argue that people with severe dental problems should live toothless and eat at a separate table. Yeah, we know dentures aren’t “real teeth” but they’re better than the alternative and people with proper dentures tend to be healthier and happier than people with bare gums or messed up broken rotting teeth. You don’t go up to people eating with their dentures and point at them and say “you don’t have REAL teeth!” That’s just rude even if the dentures don’t fit too well or aren’t perfect and if they happen to fall out at an inopportune moment the polite response is to look away and pretend it didn’t happen.
Except, of course, the analogy only goes so far so no, I don’t think transgender issues are as “trivial” as needing an entirely new set of teeth.
If you “abuse” a young boy because he’s not athletic enough or interested enough in sports… aren’t you trying to get him to be something he’s not? Should he pretend an interest he doesn’t have in order to stop that abuse? Or should people stop abusing him because he doesn’t fit their standard of “manly”?
NO. You are very much mistaken. Try setting aside your bigotry for a moment and re - examine the issue. For instance, Individuals who are transgender are high risk for suicide. Is that for the sake of "pretense? "
Right-Wing Authoritarianism. In an ironic way, Chihuahua may be as unable to consider relaxed standards as no big deal as transgender folk are unable to consider themselves their birth gender.
Doesn’t make his adherence to strict standards (OUTMODED strict standards at that!) right. But it may explain why he’s so rigid about them.
FWIW, some of the materials posted here make fascinating reading. I did read the article on biological differences and thought it was quite good even if I don’t agree with the implications. Also, the article on right wing authoritarianism was very instructive. I knew I always had certain racist tendencies, but I did not realize it had been studied as a psychiatric phenomenon.
I am genuinely confused as to people’s objections to the idea that transgenders are impersonating or pretending.For example: Everyone acknowledges that Bruce Jenner was born a man and lived as a man for many years. Therefore, Caitlyn Jenner is an alias he adopted when he transitioned to a female persona. I understand these to be factual statements, and to say otherwise would be a falsehood.
I learned very early what I wanted to do with my life, but I wasn’t stupid enough to respond sincerely when asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Even at age three, I realized that a sincere response of “I want to go places without my parents!” would have been unacceptable.
Coming out as transgender isn’t any easier than any other way in which you reveal a big part of yourself that you’d kept hidden as self-protection. I was risking nothing greater than parental disapproval; until very recently in our societies and right now still in many places, a transgender person risks life and limb.
My wife changed her name when we got married–changed her last name to match mine, her middle name to her maiden name, her first name to her previous middle name (which she’d always gone by anyway), and dropped her first name entirely. For example, if she’d previously been Mary Alice Smith but had always gone by Alice, she changed her name to Alice Smith Dorkness.
Is her current name an alias? Is she impersonating someone with that name? If I say that’s now her real name, is that a falsehood?
This is not necessarily correct. She was, in the parlance of gender studies, “assigned male at birth.” That is, when she was born she had male genitalia, so she was called a boy. Which would certainly mean you’d be correct, she was “born a man,” if you assume that genitals are the sole and perfect determinant of gender.
It sounds weird to you, I get that, but they aren’t. What’s between your legs corresponds pretty well to what’s in your brain–most of the time. But not always.
Yes. But then, so did Jeanne d’Arc and Hua Mulan.
Well, ok. Does that fact that she chose to change her name bother you? It’s as much an “alias” as, well anyone else who has changed his or her name.
Yes, but I wonder if you use “persona” to mean something false or put on, as an actor would “adopt a persona.” But if we use the term in its Jungian sense, a persona is simply the mask(s) that we present to the world. We all have them, all the time; they are how we interface with the rest of the world. Your masks are, perhaps, influenced by your internalized childhood messages about what it means to be “masculine.” Bruce Jenner’s certainly were as well. All of our masks are deeply influenced by social, cultural, and familial forces.
But are those masks accurate or truthful reflections of the mind and soul beneath them? Often they are not, and the conflict between our sense of self and the personae we feel compelled to adopt are arguably at the core of much of our individual emotional and mental conflict. In Jenner’s case, the masks of maleness and masculinity she wore or decades were less authentic, less truthful a persona than the ones she wears now.
So yeah, it’s a persona. And for her, “Caitlyn” is a more accurate and honest persona than “Bruce.”
And Muhammed Ali was known as Cassius Clay for many years before he became a Muslim. Is Muhammed Ali an “alias” he adopted when he “transitioned to a Muslim persona”? Or is it just his name, that he identifies himself by and prefers to be called by?
Do you notice that none of our female members are expressing any fears of a transperson who needs to take a leak? While they are quite aware of the risks of sexual assault it appears they do not see transwomen (or cismen masquerading as tramswomen) as a likely threat.
Bless their pretty little heads. Good thing they have some real manly men to watch out for them.
I just want to say that I find your willingness to investigate alternative viewpoints, especially given your authoritarian tendencies, a pleasant surprise.
In one of the two threads we’re discussing the topic in someone mentioned the long-standing practice of forcing left-handers to write with their right hands. You can, indeed, train a lefty to perform many tasks as a right-hander but they are still left handed. They still have a tendency to reach for things with their left hand, to start new tasks with the left, and so on even if society forces them to ape righthandedness. You don’t change the underlying brain by forcing it to act in a certain way, you just tap into the human capacity to adapt.
Likewise, transgender people can certainly be forced to act in accordance with (PC terminology coming up) assigned birth gender. That doesn’t make them normal. It just means they’ve learned to perform as an actor.
So, yes, the person now often referred to as “Jenner” was indeed named “Bruce” and lived as a man in society for decades. Absolutely no one is denying that, least of all Jenner. It can lead to a confusion of pronouns but given this person’s public transition I don’t think the word “fraud” or “lie” can be applied in any way in this case. There is nothing hidden here. In fact, I sometimes fear I will hear more about Jenner’s transition in the media than I would ever want to.
Jenner did something hundreds of millions of people have done without being accused of fraud: change a name. Actually, if you’re a woman who just got married you can get crap for NOT changing your name! Perfectly OK in our society, perfectly legal, no fraud involved. It’s also rude to insist on referring to someone who has changed his or her name by his or her prior name regardless of why that name change occured - marriage, divorce, personal whim, religious conversion, Major Life Change, whatever. So, if nothing else, you should have the courtesy to refer to Caitlyn Jenner as “Caitlyn”, even if you personally disagree with the name change. If Bruce Jenner became David Jenner would you object to calling Jenner by the name “David”?
Society recognizes the right of people to change their names when undergoing a major change in life (actually, in the US we’re even more liberal than that, but let’s not get bogged down with that). I’d say going from living as a man in society to living as a woman is a MAJOR life change. If you refer to Muhammad Ali as Muhammad Ali rather than Cassius Clay* then I think you have to respect Jenner’s wishes here.
There are circumstances such as a court appearance or applying for certain sensitive job positions where you are referred to or are required to report any other names you have been known by or used, even if not legal name changes. This is in part to establish identity and distinguish the individual from anyone else with a similar name or names, and also as a show that there is no fraud or concealment of pertinent information. In such circumstances it would be appropriate to refer to “Caitlyn Jenner formerly known as Bruce Jenner”.
I think it might be time to link to this thread where we had a discussion about transwomen in toilets and what ciswomen think about it.
For those not interested in reading 5 pages, the overwhelming majority of women just don’t give a damn. A mere 4% of woman respondents objected to the notion, meaning 96% either didn’t care or had only minor concerns. Granted, it’s not a scientific poll but that’s still an overwhelming response.
Probably the most common response first appears in post #2:
Back in the 60s I was in a pub in the Earl’s Court district of London and went to unload the first two pints. I took no notice of the person who followed me in, but was a little taken aback when he lifted up his skirt to use the urinal.
My friends and I thought it hilarious as we hadn’t realised that most of the ladies in the pub were not really ladies (so to speak). This was long before the word ‘transgender’ was coined and before homosexual sex was legalised.
Every time the issue of “female dress” vs “male dress” comes up, I remember those old ads by a Basque phone company featuring burly Scottish dudes and overweight Basque ones doing manly things like chop down trees and throw them around… But hey, at least the Scots aren’t wearing this particular plaid (uniforms from my school).
I live in NC, and I can tell you without hesitation that this is absolutely correct, as far as it goes. It really has very little to do with bathrooms as such, but it has a great deal to do with attempting to use the law as a cudgel to force people to conform ANYWHERE IN PUBLIC to a “societal norm,” defined by a certain interest group.
I can’t tell you what our white, straight, male, conservative, “Christian” Republican legislators are thinking, because what is going on is not thought. It seems to me to involve atavistic fears of castration and anal rape that are way beyond where reason can reach. As I said before, the primary “intent” of the law is to attempt to enforce public behavior (something along the lines of “Well, you feel like you want to rob somebody? The law says you can’t. You feel like you want to kill somebody? The law says you can’t. You feel like pretending to be the opposite sex? Well, the law says you can’t, so if the doctor looked at you when you were born and saw that you were a boy, put pants on, and if you were a girl, then put a dress on, and go to the right restroom.”)
I am firmly convinced that they, even if they have a tiny inkling of transgender, really cannot understand the difference between “identifying as” and “pretending to be.”
What I think they were afraid of (and so immediately passed a law against - and for anyone who doesn’t yet know this, I need to stress that the bill was introduced in a special session, voted on and signed by the governor ALL ON THE SAME DAY) when they looked at the original Charlotte ordinance extending LGBT rights, was something like this:
“Why, this’ll let any man or boy who wants to to just say he’s a female, and he can waltz on in there and ogle all the naked women he wants to. That ain’t right.”
(This is not symmetrical, I realize, but I’m as near as can be positive that this is what they were thinking) "Why, this’ll allow any ole swishy, cross-dressing pervert to come into OUR MEN’S ROOM, WHILE OUR BACKS ARE TURNED, AND…I’ll let you finish the rest. Because, obviously (and I assure you this is the “creepy” thing that’s creeping them out), ever - a - one uh them gays is just waitin’ for the chance to rape any - an - ev’ry man he can get holt of…every day…all the time…for the Bible tells me so (check out the New Testament, book of Romans, chapter 1, verses 26-32 for the tidy little to-do list that LGBT people have to get through every day. And in verse 32, they’re pointing the finger at YOU, too. The don’t want to simply wipe all LGBT folks off the face of the earth; they also don’t want YOU to support it, or even THINK about it - or you’re goin’ ta burn in hell.
Of course, having said all that, I am also in agreement with a letter to the editor that appeared in my local paper yesterday that this is red meat for the base in an election year.
