Yea... I edited it. If a person can feel aggression, compassion, sensitiveness, coldness, etc., I imagine it's just a matter of putting those notes into a song one calls masculinity. Feel that song.

In some places a woman might think it's dangerous to feel that. Joan of Arc was actually sentenced to death for the crime of wearing mens' clothing.

But now women have a lot more freedom than men do. Men are still boxed in... to some extent.

Well, on a zoological, gender-choice theme, you might find Zoos are Polluting our Children's Minds with Dangerous Gender Stereotypes of interest.

The study says that adults seem to want to characterize zoo animals according to “binary” gender terminology, forcing the camels and penguins and elephants of this world to conform to either “male” or “female,” even though those particular zoo animals haven’t truly examined whether they would like to identify as their birth gender. ...

Another problem: Parents tend to use zoo exhibits to model traditional family roles. The study says “adults mobilize zoo exhibits as props for modeling their own normative gender displays.”

Talking about “mother” and “father” animals, then, forces children to believe in traditional, gender constructs, which could harm their psyches as they grow older.

Just as well the Social Psychology Quarterly is on the case!

I know that you think that it's ridiculous... I probably shouldn't have commented.

Not that the quote is serious, but there are a number of species with more than two genders, some up to five (one of the reason that prenatal hormones is usually the favored, especially since they can consistently produce gender confusion in rats if they mess with their balances early in development), and there are also gay animals to.

So, keep them out of zones? Say they're the poor crazy ones? Or maybe the truth? There are different types of families.

Just as well the Social Psychology Quarterly is on the case! — Wayfarer

What drugs bring on the states-of-mind that enable people to write such crap as this?

more than two genders, some up to five — Wosret

Would you care to explain what the 5 genders are?

How could a bishop be trapped in a knight's body? He's not trapped. He just wants to move diagonally and he knows knights who do that are scorned.

Sensible people avoid offering solutions to psychic problems they've never faced. — Mongrel

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How could a bishop be trapped in a knight's body? He's not trapped. He just wants to move diagonally and he knows knights who do that are scorned. — Mongrel

The question though, is whether it is the horse-face that makes the knight or the moves he makes. Players don't like pieces that don't make the moves assigned to their form; it confuses their strategies. More confusion to the players, I say, I don't want to be played by their game anyway.

Should we sacrifice the way things are to accommodate the needs of men who believe they're women and vice versa? Where do we draw the line? What if I wanted to undergo plastic surgery so that I would resemble a dolphin? Had my limbs removed and fins added? Then I decided I wanted to join the Olympic swimming team. Should I be accommodated? — MonfortS26

I'm not sure I understand the idea you have in mind with "sacrifice the way things are."

At any rate, I think that people should be allowed to consensually do anything they'd like to do with their bodies, including being made into dolphins or whatever. It seems ridiculous to me that other people should be allowed to tell people that they can't do whatever they'd like with their bodies.

And if a swimming organization, team, whatever wants to have that person in their organization, on their team, what's the problem with that?

Your appearance and the outward appearances have changed. Are you the same real you, or are you a different real you? — Bitter Crank

If one doesn't buy type realism or logical identity through time this really isn't much of an issue no matter what you do.

Would you care to explain what the 5 genders are? — Bitter Crank

Facebook has 58 gender options now. Other than male and female, they have:

Agender
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cisgender
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-Binary
Other
Pangender
Trans
Trans*
Trans Female
Trans* Female
Trans Male
Trans* Male
Trans Man
Trans* Man
Trans Person
Trans* Person
Trans Woman
Trans* Woman
Transfeminine
Transgender
Transgender Female
Transgender Male
Transgender Man
Transgender Person
Transgender Woman
Transmasculine
Transsexual
Transsexual Female
Transsexual Male
Transsexual Man
Transsexual Person
Transsexual Woman
Two-Spirit


I saw a site with an explanation of each, but I'd have to search for that again .

I see... the list gives an air of verisimilitude to the otherwise airy notion that there are more than two genders--male and female.

including being made into dolphins or whatever — Terrapin Station

I am unanimous in the opinion that nobody should be allowed to be made into a dolphin. I mean, do we really want to insult dolphins that much?

What drugs bring on the states-of-mind that enable people to write such crap as this? — Bitter Crank

The page I linked to was a sarcastic comment on a serious article published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Gee I'm glad I'm not a database programmer at the dept of births deaths and marriages. Although if I were, I would be awfully inclined to collapse the list to M/F/Other.

Kids are born with ambiguous genitalia from time to time. Nobody says "Nature made it that way. We must respect that."

Surgery is available.

I think we need to recognize hormones and pheromones for what they are: chemicals; and make room for varying desired levels and expressions of these chemicals. I also think that what Kinsey did for the gay straight continuum should be done for gender identity.Even the work of Kinsey is not yet widely known, so it will take time for society to catch up to any paradigm changing worldviews pertaining to gender identity, as it has for sexual orientation.

"Should we accommodate a trans-dolphin?".

Not until they can stir enough public awareness of their plight to incite the public to pressure politicians and lawmakers to mandate both fresh and salt water swimming access to all public buildings...

A bit of the issue causing controversy with this question seems to me really just a classic dichotomy with some new packaging; the sacrifice of freedom or adoption of burdens in exchange for things like safety and equality that we make in our never ending political endeavors. How much individual freedom ought to be preserved or sacrificed, and what kinds, is in some cases too complex a question to give good answers. So let's partially side step that issue by answering this question as if we ourselves have a child determined to transition, so that then we're more likely to give answers concerned with what is best for them rather than what is best for a society closer to our own ideals.

Of course then we should allow people to transition. If they are already transitioning, and stopping them from doing so causes them more unhappiness and harm than whatever kind of harm we think they are doing to themselves by transitioning in the first place, then how could we morally interfere? If I could afford it, I guess I would probably try and help my hypothetical trans son/daughter to transition if I was convinced this was actually a healthy decision for them. In society and politics we already do monetarily support various kinds of needs that not everyone has because we more or less want everyone to have a shot at happiness; wheelchair access for the wheelchair users is one sturdy example of this.

But when it comes to "accommodating" transsexuals, there aren't very many ways in which we actually have the opportunity to do so. In a way transsexuals accommodate the world around them in every way possible by putting in ineffable degrees of effort to achieve a state of "pass" (which means people either cannot tell they are trans or are perceived as the gender they present as). Once they achieve a state of pass, we lose the ability to police them because they blend in too well, and so the discussion becomes moot in that regard (transsexuals have been getting away with public bathroom-use ever since public bathroom-use became formal). The further a given transsexual is away from a state of "pass", the more uncomfortable we seem to be with "accommodating" them by not disallowing them use of a preexisting bathroom (not coincidentally, the less likely they they are therefore to attempt to do so). Whether or not a person is genuinely transgendered and not just a sexual predator in a wig is the source of this discomfort, but it is simply not reasonable to suggest gendered bathrooms are any real deterrent to serious threats of sexual assault in the first place. Wig or no wig, "women only" sign or none, predators can still waltz right in, and same-sex sexual assault (I think that's a new one) can still occur. If you are afraid that you or your child will be sexually assaulted in public bathrooms by sexual predators disguised as transsexuals, you might also want to consider one of the many other irrationally persistent and overly specific fears we commonly refer to as "phobias". There is still no name for the irrational fear that classmate(s) of one's children will commit social suicide by playing a long con of pretending to be transsexual in order to get into their pants. What should we call it?

A soon to be even more controversial issue than the fairly vanilla topic of bathrooms is the topic of "pronouns". For transsexuals who pass, obviously it's not a problem, but what if a transsexual who very distinctly does not "pass" demands to be referred to exclusively as their chosen pronoun? Society already handles this almost entirely on it's own. "Confusion" from whatever source leads to perceived misuses of pronouns, and then formal/informal requests are made by one party to alter the use of specific pronouns when dealing with that party. Whether or not that request is accepted or rejected in all situations comes with the possibility of social sanctions, both good and bad, being applied based on whether or not that request is accepted or rejected in that specific circumstance. Individuals who will not make small gestures of courtesy when asked look like douches, and businesses (and government) who likewise refuse common courtesy by always referring to someone as the opposite of the gender they identify with see plummeting popularity levels just as well. Consider this: I am a cisgendered male (meaning not-transsexual). If you were to call me a girl, that would be kind of like calling me a boy if I was actually an MTF transsexual. To make it illegal to refer to a transsexual as the opposite of the gender they desire would also be to make it illegal to refer to me as a girl in a pejorative or name-calling sense. Do we honestly want to outlaw name-calling? I really hope not; only a pussy would want that.

"But Vagabond, they want us to pay for their operashuns!!!!!!". — internet

It's a valid question, and there's some startling answers out there. Being denied access to the medical requirements for an overall healthy transition (hormone therapy and counseling mostly?) can actually be seriously debilitating (depression leading to suicide is common), and so any approving parent of a transsexual teenager is going to for certain want such things included in their medical coverage. Full blown sexual reassignment surgery, if indeed is a healthy part or major step in the process of transitioning for some transsexuals, then yes, should be covered at a premium in the plan of any would be parents not willing to risk the health of their children or future financial insecurity. Whether or not you want private or state funded medical coverage that includes it is a much larger conversation. Individuals and households who can afford to do so on their own already do, whether or not we can afford to include it in a state medical program is a question of relative wealth. If the state is wealthy, then yes.

Transsexuals who pay for their transition out of pocket, and do it successfully, currently require no accommodation from society whatsoever, and have likely made contributions to society it in the form of hours worked to earn the money required to pay for their transition, the taxes paid on those earnings, and the business given to one of many sectors of the medical industry. These are the sneaky bitches and bastards that will be violating our sacred bathroom laws for centuries to come, and getting away with it with us none the wiser, at least until we install DNA scanning tranny-alarms in the distant dystopian future of The Great Inter-Stellar Mormon Empire.

In summation, what people do to their own bodies, and what is in their own best interest, is pretty much not for unconcerned laymen to dictate. Some things people get away with, like watching a drive in movie screen from a nearby hill or using the bathroom of the gender that everyone thinks or considers you to be when they are wrong from a chromosomal standpoint, should not be either worried about or legislated against. Transsexuals who fail to "pass" are no more likely to commit sexual assault in a bathroom than anyone else, so why bar them? Use private bathrooms instead of public ones? But hey if you see Bill Cosby in a wig walk into a women's bathroom, maybe play it safe and hold it in... If a really manly looking woman demands you refer to her as such, first and foremost consider whether or not they are manly enough to beat you up, but after that ask yourself how far out of your intuitive way you need to go in order to placate/appease/respect them in the given situation. If you don't like them and want to be offensive or have a point to make, go ahead and speak what you wish, but also consider the social ramifications resulting from how other people will interpret and judge what you say and how you say it. If someone demands that you refer to them as some pronoun they just invented like "ze/zim/zir/zey/zem", then you can in most situations get away with explaining to them that they can be satisfied with "he/she/they" like every other person and thing in existence or fuck off back to their preferred orifice of origin to continue gestating for a few months while they come to realize that the world cannot cognitively and syntactically revolve around their own eccentric obscurantism. Tell them that when people begin to use those terms regularly enough that you will just naturally and subconsciously adopt them into your patterns of speech.

When there are enough fully transitioned dolphin-kin out there swimming the the deep blue of the pacific, I'm sure that out of respect and admiration we will all use trans-dolphin culture specific pronouns where possible. So you see, while this issue is very deep, dark, and complicated, through echo-location like observational skills we can scan our environments for the porpoise and goal of successfully navigating what seem like unchartable waters.

mtf literally stands for male to female. So no, its just arguing in a circle. — Forgottenticket

“Mtf” wasn’t used above.

But you can’t go from male to female, or vice versa, unless we radically redefine “male” and “female”. I think there’s a lot of resistance to that, and for good reason. Strikes me as insane.

Intersex and those without gametes are exceedingly rare. People can be born with six fingers too — but I don’t think it’s bigoted or discriminatory to say human beings have five fingers on their hands.

In any case, I’m moving this response to this thread so as not to derail the “motte-bailey” thread.

In physical sports no. I general yes. It is common sense.

By the end pf the century I expect there will be a complete change of our species and we will extend beyond anything we can currently imagine. CRISPR and cybernetics will ‘evolve’ us down several roads. Things inevitably change. Sadly I think there will be far more significant prejudices and social problems to come that will make the whole politicising of transgender people a mere speck in the distance.

But you can’t go from male to female, or vice versa, unless we radically redefine “male” and “female”. I think there’s a lot of resistance to that, and for good reason. — Mikie

We generally understand what MTF and FTM mean in the context of transgenderism so this seems like a pointless argument.

Have you ever considered contacting something like the youtube phone-in show below and asking them about the issue of gender and physically changing sex, since these folks actually live it?

We generally understand what MTF and FTM mean in the context of transgenderism so this seems like a pointless argument. — Michael

“We” do? So male and female have also been redefined in some way? That’s fine— but wasn’t at all mentioned in the above conversation. What was mentioned was “trans women aren’t women.”

Seems to me like terms are being re-defined to the point of absurdity, quite frankly. I think it’s an enormous mistake.



I’d love to have a conversation, sure. If there’s something I’m missing, I’m happy to be corrected. But I have yet to see that.

If it’s about gender identity, and loosely using “woman” to include this, I understand. If we’re expecting people to believe you can change your biological sex, I think that’s a mistake. Biological males cannot get pregnant, for example. That’s pretty basic. To ask the public to go along with believing they can is absurd, and gives bigots even more material to use to justify themselves.

The main two 'stances' I have heard from on-line trans folks and their supporters on the issue of gender and the biological reality of a persons sex are:
1. Gender is a social construct and therefore is not a biological condition.
2. The scientific facts related to biological sex are irrelevant to trans issues.

I understand. If we’re expecting people to believe — Mikie

Again, only from my own very limited experience of listening to on-line commentary from trans folks, it seems to me that they are more concerned with being allowed to exist, without fear of violence against them or being marginalised to the point of having almost 0 life opportunity, much more, than they are concerned with what individuals 'believe' about them. BUT, call-in shows like the one I posted are amongst their attempts to open reasoned dialogue with the masses of dissenters they face.

"We” do? — Mikie

I do. I assume you do to.

So male and female have also been redefined in some way?

This is an ambiguous question. In the context of the phrase "male-to-female", it means a transgender woman born with male genitalia/genetics/etc. In other contexts, e.g. when discussing biology, "female" typically means a human both with XX chromosomes, ovaries, a womb, etc.

The English language isn't some formal system where each symbol has just one meaning that applies in all contexts.

The English language isn't some formal system where each symbol has just one meaning that applies in all contexts. — Michael

No one has claimed that.

In other contexts, e.g. when discussing biology, "female" typically means a human both with XX chromosomes, ovaries, a womb, etc. — Michael

I’m trying to figure out what else it means. Why choose male-to-female when one could simply using “man-to-woman.” Again, I think it’s a mistake to push language this far and then retreat by saying “well we don’t mean it in a biological sense.” In this semantic world, is there ANY word for biological sex?

1. Gender is a social construct and therefore is not a biological condition.
2. The scientific facts related to biological sex are irrelevant to trans issues. — universeness

I fully recognize (1). If (2) is true, as I believe is true too, then the trans community needs better PR.

Why choose male-to-female when one could simply using “man-to-woman.” — Mikie

According to the SEP article on Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues:

FTM and MTF are abbreviations of female-to-male and male-to-female. They were originally connected to transsexual (medical) discourse indicating individuals who transition to the 'opposite' sex." They are now used in ways that have broken from this medical discourse and may be used more generally to indicate folk who move away from being assigned male (or female) at birth to the “other” direction. They may also be used as primitive (undefined) terms. This means that they are not treated as abbreviations indicating transition from one sex to another. Instead, they are used to simply categorize individuals in a way analogous to the categories man and woman.

then the trans community needs better PR. — Mikie

I assume, hence the call-in shows and their increasing on-line presence, in debate/dialogue mode.

is there ANY word for biological sex? — Mikie

Yeah, SEX! Your sex is biologically male or female (unless you are a hermaphrodite.)
From Wiki:
A hermaphrodite is a sexually reproducing organism that produces both male and female gametes.
So, I think that's a human that can produce eggs AND sperm.

Identifying oneself as belonging to the trans community seems to me no different in principle than self-identifying as a Hasidic Jew, or belonging to a fundamentalist Islamic sect, etc. etc. We live in a pluralistic society, and every unique cultural group certainly has a right to whatever practices define them within the context of that group. But the problem is when special recognition and treatment is demanded outside of the group, by other groups. Which is most certainly what is going on now. Frankly, it's hard not to want to push back against that, and it's easy to see how otherwise-tolerant people could want to push back against attempts to publicize and promote the rights of a very small minority preferentially over the rights of the myriad other minorities that make up our collective community. I haven't a prejudiced bone in my body, and never questioned that trans people should be treated with respect. But given the course that the social movement has taken, I'm starting to develop a very negative attitude around the issue.

But the problem is when special recognition and treatment is demanded outside of the group, by other groups. Which is most certainly what is going on now. — Pantagruel

But given the course that the social movement has taken, I'm starting to develop a very negative attitude around the issue. — Pantagruel

Such as?

The imposition of gender-selective pronouns on a whole lot of people who don't make that part of their own self-identification process. The exposure of children to these issues in school at a very young age. The chaos of redesigning all public bathrooms to accommodate a plethora of gender-identities. Identity is a composite of numerous dimensions: religion, race, gender, culture, etc., etc. I'm sure being trans is fraught with numerous challenges, but the same can be said of many minority cultures. Why does this one sub-culture merit such promotion? This hardly qualifies as affirmative action. It's a small minority of people, a very small minority.

All I know is you can make a human mind believe anything under the right conditions, including identity.

No human study of the same would ever see the light of day but, for reference. Leanrned helplessness along with Stockholm syndrome prove a rational mind can be made to believe irrational things (or anything) under the right conditions.

Otherwise "parental issues" or childhood trauma simply would not exist. 90% of a child's brain develops by age 5 and has been proven to have lifelong effects. If you're told you're worthless from birth or abused your entire childhood, you will harbor that identity - at least to some degree - until you die.

None of this means anything automatically as far as the gender identity theory model goes. But, the science to back the counterargument is certainly there.

Which is why I hate jackasses and wholeheartedly believe, in the best interest of civilized society, Constitutional rights can and should be suspended in certain scenarios under the right pretext and conditions.