I think, when talking about trans people, it often truly is more of a phobia than a prejudice. It makes a lot of people feel “weird” or uncomfortable to think about someone being transgender. For one thing, it has associations with surgery on the genitals, which is really not something that anyone gets pleasant feelings thinking about. And we also live in a culture that is generally phobic of body modifications of any kind, beyond minor tattooing and piercing. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault that people feel this way, it’s just a result of the conditioning we’ve all grown up with.
Wow, I’m in an OP.
I just adore the way you poison the well here. “mutilated…impossible fantasy.” What I require of you is to present a few actual scholarly citations that gender is not generally considered by sociologists to be a social construct in the 21st century. I mean, even the United Nations World Health Organization says you’re wrong, as does the Council of Europe,the USAID Office, and even the state of Vermont, as well as about 10,000 or so articles and journal publications on Google Scholar.
But you would obviously know much better than all that rabble, so present your thesis.
[QUOTE=Grumman]
You want to know how I’d make things safer for transsexuals? Find every therapist who tells their clients to hide something they know is a divisive issue until the exact moment at which it will cause the greatest offense, take them out the back, and shoot them.
[/QUOTE]
Wow. That’s the sort of quote that pretty much sums up a poster entirely.
As to the OP I think it really depends on what is meant by “100% sex change surgery.” What we can safely say is given the large amount of homophobia and the absolutely outrageous amount of transphobia in American culture, that it would make absolutely no difference. Haters will keep hating, especially the ones who believe their “God” orders them out on a daily jihad to hurt and abuse others who are different in any way from their white, Wonder bread-eating suburban Jesus. And this isn’t even totally a case of conservative versus liberal; although the vast majority of liberals are much more tolerant and accepting, I’ve met and encountered plenty of hippie-dippy liberals on this message board who aren’t above making a crude “dude looks like a lady” or “man hands” joke in trans-related threads.
Edited: oh for fuck’s sake, don’t get sucked into the sidetrack of what “phobia” means; that’s frequently used to hijack these threads. “Phobia’s” use has been well-established in perhaps hundreds of threads on here.
If this was addressed towards me, I do think it is relevant in this case, though it’s not the main issue but a secondary one. The idea of changing gender gives a lot of people the willies, what can I say.
It is not presently possible to change one’s physical sex. It might be possible some day in the future to do so. It is presently possible to make physical changes to one’s body which in some way approximate the opposite sex.
Are any of these three statements in dispute?
Are there a lot of therapists who tell their transgendered patients to do that?
By definition, 100% effective sex-change surgery would give female-to-male transgenders willies.
Pun intended.
People. Let’s not turn this into a debate on whether transgendered people exist, or whether it’s good to embrace it, whether Chaz is a man or a women, etc. Let’s address the OP directly.
Would our attitudes change if a 100% conversion was possible?
I too agree that it would be a great thing if this were possible, and over a long enough period of time, most people would accept it and be fine with it. There may always be a contingency of men who would never have a relationship with a transgendered female, even if they were 100% female. But I think the vast majority of people would embrace it and be fine with it. Attitudes are already shifting a lot and eventually people’s hatred and outrage will be pushed off center stage.
My attitude would not change, I think that people who opt to do this are brave, and I would be happy to see a time when attitudes change to 100% acceptance of this choice.
Most “Transphobia” is caused by the disgust people have when thinking about people who have paid to have their johnsons cut off. Also the results of the process seem to find people residing in the uncanny valley which weirds alot of people out. These are visceral reactions and not easily subject to change.
The idea that religion is associated with this just seems odd. I have been around church all of my life and I have never heard anyone say anything about transgenders, good, bad or indifferent.
I would imagine that the only “100% effective sex-change surgery” would be a brain transplant. (As in, transporting one’s brain into the body of your true sex/gender)
Will that ever be a possibility? Who knows?
For my own part, I try to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude, and I wouldn’t care who was sharing a public bathroom with me so long as they observed ordinary public bathroom etiquette (leave a free urinal between other people when possible, no gratuitous junk-staring).
But if I was involved with a woman who later revealed herself to have been born a man, I would walk away instantly. To me, that’d be the worst sort of niggly mental reservation, like if she had said instead, ‘you know, you never asked me point-blank if I had AIDS, so…’ I would want to know that at the very earliest stages.
Wait till somebod here calls you a transphobic, then.
Any reservation whatsoever means you secretly want to kill the all.
Even being a person who doesn’t believe in the whole “you decide you gender” thing, I agree with you.
Ehh, the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
I think it would at first harden attitudes against transsexuals. The main arguments put forward against gender reassignment seem to be anger over having been deceived and the whole against God thing. I’m pretty sure a more effective surgery will do little to address either of those concerns. Over time though, I think society at large would become more accustomed to the idea than with no easy surgery.
For me, the one thing it would change is whether I would have sex with that person.
I have no problem with transgendered people (my brother was my sister for the first 20 years of his life), but the “uncanny valley” genetalia does kind of squick me out. What can I say? I’m attracted to what I’m attracted to.
On the other hand, if your body looks and feels the same as every other woman I’ve been with or seen naked, I find it hard to believe it even matters.
Also, I think if surgery were 100% effective, that would get rid of any duty to be up front about it. Sure, in a long term relationship you should be entirely open, but the main reason (for me) that I would want to know you were transgendered in advance is that I don’t want any surprises when it comes time to do it. If nothing down there is surprising, go ahead take your time telling me.
Oh, say they develop nanotech that can modify the body right down to the cellular level, so that a transgen woman or man is physically identical to a genetically male or female person. Can bear children and everything. (Can Y chromosomes combine with Y chromosomes?) How would you even tell they were transgen? Why should you care?
Indeed, I’ll sometimes even see a man in traditional Jewish attire, and uncomfortably realize that I automatically know more than I needed or wanted to know about a random stranger’s genital modifications. I assume this is not the whole psychology behind full-fledged anti-Semitism.
On topic, I think that if perfect and truly cheap science fiction sex changes were available, they’d eventually be somewhat mainstreamed by people who aren’t traditionally transgendered, but rather just trying out a temporary reversible sex change as a form of “gender tourism.” It could be a fad that a lot of people end up doing for a couple weeks or whatever.
This. Like the internet demotiviational posters say, “Haters gonna hate”. It’s what they do. So take a way the reason (the excuse) or remove the target, and they will just look for another.
You can always flip the question
If it’s no big deal that a woman who used to be a man does NOT tell the man she is with. Then it’s equally no big deal that she DOES tell him.
But it doesn’t seem to work that way.
As for gay and lesbian hositlity. Well a transgendered person may or may not be gay so it’s not fair to lump them all together in one category.