I’m not really sure where to draw the line either. However, to blithely dismiss the experience of TG individuals in the manner you have is, quite frankly, unfair. Often times they suffer from real problems, body dysphoria for one, and all the problems connected to that including depression, anxiety, drug/alcohol abuse, and suicide.
I’m not an expert on TG issues and I admit that I don’t really know all the reasons why someone born a man is convinced she should be a woman. I do know that TG individuals deserve our compassion, respect, and understanding. They’ve got a tough row to hoe and we don’t need to make it any tougher.
I thought it was a fascinating article. Like WhyNot and Freudian Slit, I’d be much more sympathetic to a MtF student who wanted to go to a women’s college. Rey’s story strikes me as a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. If you were born a biological woman but want to live as a man, no skin off my nose. But in that case, you don’t get to go to a* women’s * college. Yes, I get that it may be a “safe space” to explore your personal issues. But that’s not the mission of women’s colleges any more than the mission of your State U is to provide 4 years of keggers.
I wondered about that as well. How is Jim Smith going to explain a degree from Bryn Mawr on his resume? Transgendered people have no legal protection from employment discrimination.
No, I think it’s just that, as medicine is advancing, we’re learning that gender isn’t determined by the things we thought it was - namely, external sexual organs and the Y chromosome. There’s a strong, strong correlation between the three, of course. But, as we all know by now, correlation =/= causation and all that. MOST people with a penis and a Y chromosome have the gender called “male”, but not all of them.
To insist otherwise is just not keeping up with the medical theory of the day. A person from a couple of hundred years ago would have said just the same thing had you suggested that half a child’s body came from a tiny egg inside the woman. Everyone knew that the woman was merely the incubator for the homonculous - if they babe looked like her, it was because it grew in her, but the child already existed in the father’s seed, and any other suggestion was clearly ridiculous. You might as well suggest that a woman was capable of rational thought, when everyone knows her moist humors, required for incubating a child and maintaining her monthly courses, cause the fantastik cells in the liver to overwhelm those capable of learning and thought.
I am completely in agreement with WhyNot on this issue, but I just wanted to bring up another point about a transgendered male attending an all female college. There was a story on This American Life a few weeks ago similar to this where they talked to a transgendered male who had realized that he was male after graduating from an all female college. One of the problems he had to deal with was that he ended up having to lie on all of his resumes about where he went to college lest he be persecuted for his past. Why would someone want to burden themselves with that in a society that on a large part still does not accept who they are?
I don’t accept the entire concept of “gender,” though. You are what you are. You may feel like you want to be or are or whatever something else. But you aren’t. You can want to be anything, but you aren’t, and no amount of physical or chemical surgery will change that. It can turn you into a simulacra, no more or less. You will never bear or father children, because you ain’t that form of life.
Theoretically, in the future there might be ways to completely turn someboyd into another thing, but at that point I don’t even think we can even say it’s the same person.
Is bearing or fathering children the mark of a woman or man, though? For the most part, it does seem like one is either a man or a woman. But then you look at all the myriad of exceptions out there…people who have AIS, meaning XY chromosomes but look for all intents and purposes just like women, but have no female reproductive organs. And repeatedly there’s the trope of women who weren’t born as women who have managed to simulate femininity better than some naturally born women, that you start to wonder, does it matter? I mean, when you meet someone and identify them as a man or a woman, their genitals or ability to have kids just isn’t a factor, is it?
Of course those are genetic abnormalities and those people will have a difficult time in life regardless. Whether those people are males or females or neither is a matter for debate because of the defects.
But my comments were directed at people who have perfectly normal genetic makeups regarding sex identify, yet “think” they are the other sex.
Hmm. The discussion of genetics and such has made me think of the soul thread and the point of view of atheists. Since many (if not most) don’t believe in a soul, how do they look at the whole “supposed to be/not supposed to be” and “X trapped in a Y’s body” thing?
there are cases (and I’ll look for cites, if you would like) were the brain structure of a transgendered person has been shown to be fundamentally different from the gender they are “supposed” to be.
Are there any theists that argue that the basis of transgender is that the person’s soul is of the wrong gender? I find that hard to believe.
As a strong agnostic I have no problem accepting the existence of transgenderism as a consequence of variant neurochemistry/neuroanatomy until proven otherwise. With experience in the biological sciences one becomes aware that defining what is ‘normal’ in a population can be a very difficult task.
Why do you see the situation as so clear cut in the case of the ‘genetic abnormalities’ but not in the case of the ‘normal genetic makeups’? Or put it this way - what single test or group of tests would you administer to an infant to determine what gender it should be raised as?
Because I haven’t worked out a way to either completely eliminate my binary view of gender, or to find a way for trans-gendered people to operate with any degree of comfort within a binary gendered world, I too would be fine with a FtM (or MtF) attending a women’s college . . .
. . . except for the fact that the entire point of a women’s college rests upon the expectation that a person is male or female, and only one sort is allowed to enroll.
I think that a female student would be fully justified in being upset that she was rooming with a trans gendered roommate. A person might enroll in an all women’s school for any number of justifiable reasons, many of which could involve not being around people with male biology, or involve not being around people who consider themselves guys.
In a non-binary world, even the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ come into question. I don’t know that a women’s college could exist in such an environment. So, I think in order for a school to stay a women’s college we need to be accepting of the fact that to do so it might need to define ‘women’ as XX chromosomed people who identify as female.
How do you determine which transgendered people are transgendered because of a genetic abnormality, and which ones are transgendered because they “think” they are transgendered? How do you know if some of the people in the second group are transgendered because of a genetic abnormality that we haven’t yet identified? And even if we could identify the specific reasons that cause some people to want to be a different gender, what purpose, ultimatly, is served by parsing the trans community up into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” segments? If we’re going to make accomodations for “genetic” transexuals, why not just include the “psychological” transexuals in the accomodations?
Clearly, he attended my proud alma mater, Haverford College (Bryn Mawr’s brother school, formerly all-male, now co-ed), and majored at Bryn Mawr. Male students can take all their classes, eat, and even live at Bryn Mawr. Although perhaps that’s not really the answer you were looking for
“Quaint?” How patronizing. I’ll phone Wabash and Hampden-Sydney and let them know you’re charmed. I’d call Deep Springs, but they don’t throw tea parties like the other two do.
I would think that someone making a change this important would want to do so without the stress of going to college. I mean, ye gods, attending college is stress on steroids! Add what has to be a cross between menopause and puberty – gee-zuss, people, let’s take one life-altering, mind-bending change at a time, shall we? I’m not joking or making fun – seriously, somebody is letting these people down something fierce out there by not counseling them to pace themselves a little bit. I’m thinking Zsofia’s classmate was a victim of somebody’s wilful negligence.
Well the question is to what level society should accomodate. Certainly the transgendered individual deserves compassion, but identity is an important part of culture, and there is a mental divergence for every aspect of identity. They all risk the chance of suicide, depression etc… So by what criteria should we be accomodating?
It’s moot in this instance as the person was transferred to Colombia, which is more appropriate. Now with his newfound male identity, he can make fun of ‘Barnyard’ Girls like everyone else.
