Shodan, I feel chagrin that you, whom I respect highly, took that “invincible ignorance” jab as directly aimed at you. Surely you can see that for some of those present, this was a case of “this evil gay kid deceiving some good boys into having sex with him by pretending to be a girl, and they did nothing more than what any self-respecting man would do if he found himself so deceived.” And they will bend the facts of the case, and the entire complexity of what constitutes transgenderism and gender dysphoria, into something that constitutes support for their side.
Okay, first, IMHO Eddie/Gwen should have taken the supposed moral standards of the young men into account, and been upfront about who and what she was, prior to entering into sex with them. However, also IMHO three men in their early 20s who jointly want to have gang-sex together with a girl below the age of consent whom they’ve just met at a party are on rather slippery footing in the “moral standards” department. While you might be able to get that dog to hunt, he looks rather moribund to me.
Second, unless you are seriously interested in having sex with another person, the question of his or her genitalia, genetic complement, fertility, and so on, takes second fiddle to that of treating him or her with respect and courtesy, as whatever he or she presents as.
I am a man with an annoyingly fine-grained beard (annoying because that fineness makes shaving a much more difficult operation than is normal for men), an occipital ridge, normal male hip-angle, less than normal body fat, a penis and testicles, and insofar as I know a normal XY complement. I have been fortunate to inherit the McNeil retention of a full head of hair into late middle age; pattern baldness being sex-linked, I should have fallen prey to my mother’s father’s baldness gene or Mom’s mother’s father’s baldness gene, but instead seem to have linked back to my maternal grandmother’s mother’s father’s gene and kept my hair. And I conceive of myself internally as a man, find some women to be sexually attractive, and present myself to the world as a (relatively geeky) male in middle age.
My parents expected a girl. I’m not sure what preindications were available during pregnancy in 1948, but I faked them out. Fortunately, they rose to the occasion, named me “David” instead of the “Mary” they’d decided on, and brought me up as a good little boy. (Their inevitable fallings short in doing so are stuff I intend to share only with my wife, foster son, and daughter-in-law, and then only when relevant to discussing how it impacted my personality or in what to avoid in the raising of their kids and why they need to avoid it.)
I do recall being highly offended at age 10 to find out that only girls could have babies – I thought it was a neat thing to have one, and felt shortchanged that us boys couldn’t. (It was another year or so before Dad got around to explaining our part in the baby-making process to me.)
Now, here’s the key point to me in attempting to grasp what’s going on here. I can dimly conceive of how I might have wanted to be a girl, given all that information. And because I’m acutely aware of how parental values and tastes are readily assimilated by small children (I’ve watched Chris’s three define themselves in terms of what their parents, aunt, and older relatives are over the past few years.) – because of that, I can easily see where different choices in my infancy and childhood could easily have made me feel that I was “really” a girl. Too, I’m not so quickly convinced that there is not a genetic or congenital element to what the transgendered feel.
Bottom line for me is, if somebody represents herself to be a girl or woman, my only proper task is to accept her as such; and if a man or boy, the same. I don’t anticipate anyone lusting for my body to the extent that we will need to discuss what biological equipment may be under his or her clothing, and whether it’s what he or she was born with or the product of surgery.
I also recognize that “reality” can be a very slippery concept. You and I, Shodan, have been faced with a parade of college freshmen and sophomores who are convinced that there’s no “real” evidence for God, and the faith we hold dear is an unreasoned superstition. And I fall back on Lib’s definitions – for me, “real” is what you know in your heart is true. The fact that the stars don’t spell out the Shema in square Hebrew letters every night is irrelevant.
And by that standard, a peniphore who believes herself to be a woman, and is prepared to undergo psychological and hormonal therapy and surgery to equip her body with the right structure to do so, deserves to be treated as a woman. And a vulviphore who thinks he is a man, and is prepared to do the convere set of treatments, deserves to be treated as one.
And any person who would assault and kill anyone else because he or she is anything – black, white, gay, straight, bi, old, young, transgendered, Catholic, Jewish, pagan, atheist, or left-handed – deserves to be locked away indefinitely.