What is wrong with having standards?

Great Debates
201

Religion, which I already mentioned and you completely hid from. “Hispanic” is also purely a matter of self-identification on all government forms right now (and is typically a separate category than race), and it’s doubtful they’ll come up with some kind of hispanic-test for it.

If he just fills out ‘f’ on a form but doesn’t actually ask people in his day to day life to refer to him as female, he’s scamming, and it’s so abundantly obvious that there’s no real need for discussion. If she actually spends her day to day life consistently insisting that people refer to her as ‘she’ and otherwise interacting with people as a woman outside of the single form for the program, then I don’t see what remedy is needed. She’s going to not be accepted by her conservative friends since they’ll consider her a freaky ‘man in a dress’, but if she’s doing it as a scam is also not going to be accepted by liberals because she’s hurting actual trans people. Whatever one-time bonus she gets from the program is going to pale in comparison to the costs of actually trying to live life that way.

BTW, you (and other people arguing your side) would look a LOT less bigoted if you got some basic education on what life for a trans person is like. It’s not walking down the street and having people hand you affirmative action cash and jobs, it’s constantly being vigilant for threats of physical violence, losing jobs or being turned down for jobs because of your identity, taking your life into your hands if you’re on a road trip and have to pull over to a gas station to pee, and a lot of other unfun stuff.

202

I have a friend who once told me, despite being a woman who was intelligent enough to attend Oxford University, that she would have preferred to live in 1807 rather than 2007. When I asked her if she understood why people of non-white, non-Christian or non-wealthy backgrounds might find such an attitude bizarre and shocking, she admitted that she would probably feel differently if she was any of those things.

203

This is a discussion that brings me back to why I do not identify as transgender myself. On the one hand, the official definition embraced and promoted by trans activists and trans support groups, etc, is that transgender means merely that “your gender does not match the one that was assigned to you at birth”. No further paragraphs delineating “due to the following cause”. And they do actively promote an understanding that says one need not be transitioned, planning on transitioning, desiring to transition, in order to qualify.

But for me, if not necessarily for all transgender people (or some, — or even any of them, who knows?) gender is “who you are” and has damn little to do with the body. I have no dysphoria, no problem with my body being male, and I do not regard “male” as a gender. “Male” is a sex, it is “of the body”. Who I am is one of the girls/women, those being the people I recognized as “us” whereas boys/men were “them”.

I don’t identify as transgender not only because people tend to assume all transgender people are transitioners but also because the narrative within the trans community is indeed strongly towards the idea that “gender” is a mental diagram of one’s body parts, like some kind of hardwired thingie in the brain that says “you were supposed to have female parts, the ones you have are all wrong”.

I’m skeptical that any human being can have knowledge of what a sexual morphology other than their own could conceivably be like without involving social processes of some sort, in particular how anyone could internalize a sense of what having that alternative equipment would feel like, … but then I trend towards sociology, not biology, in my attitudes about meaning and self overall. And I am not qualified to say they’re wrong, just that this way of looking at things doesn’t mesh well with my experiences and understandings.

When I do presentations myself, I describe
[QUOTE=AHunter3]

One more person.

The person I’m thinking of is male-bodied and a lot like Dan. Totally masculine in all the traditional ways, and attracted to feminine women, an extremely conventional kind of guy. Except that Joan isn’t a guy. Joan says this male body is just wrong. It has the wrong parts. So she is transitioning to female, at which point she will be a very masculine person with conventionally male interests, but female, and she will live her life as a lesbian.

WHY? Well many transgender activists speak of a biological cause, a built-in difference in the brain. That it is NOT social, is not about personality and roles and what society does or does not consider “masculine” and “feminine”. Phantom limb sensation sort of thing. The body in and of itself as wrong…

Joan would probably not feel included by an explanation that stresses social messages and social notions and perceptions. So although I have not met her, I am mentioning her now for you to add to your map of possibilities. Because although I do not know if any such biological difference exists, I most certainly don’t know that it doesn’t exist either.

[/QUOTE]

204

As noted several times, religion. Also, there’s any number of disabilities that don’t present any sort of objectively testable symptoms, but are still recognized as legitimate medical conditions. They’re diagnosed (not unlike gender dysphoria) purely based self-reporting of internal states.

Well, you’re mixing contexts now. The discussion in this thread is, essentially, about how to treat trans people in social situations. In a social situation, if someone says, “I’m a woman,” there’s almost never a good reason to argue the point with them. In situations where fraud is a legitimate concern - which would, given human nature, be any situation involving money - it’s entirely fair to have some standard of proof that someone is the gender they’re claiming. Which is what brings us back to this bit from one of your earlier posts:

See, your problem here is that transgender issues aren’t the result of liberal philosophizing, they’re the result of examining the medical and scientific consensus on the issue and following the advice of the experts in the field. Hell, the single most prominent transperson in America right now, Kaitlyn Jenner, is a Ted Cruz supporter. Gender dysphoria is a recognized and diagnosable condition. So, in those few situations where someone could dishonestly represent their gender to gain a financial advantage, there’s a reasonable and workable way to “prove” your claim: have a note from your doctor.

205

You sound seriously wound tight. You need to relax, because you sound miserable if that’s what you’re doing.