I find both amusing and terrifying that a civil government would go to such extremes. However, I do recognise that any legislator can propose any legislation, I still think it’s funny ( not in a ha, ha way) when someone doesn’t understand the limits in a democracy.
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This actually makes me think of the approved hairstyles of North korea. There is a lot to this thread. I myself don’t quite understand the difference between ‘gender’ and biological sex. That is a very difficult thing for me to wrap my head around. But I absolutely see no reason to try and regulate someone else’s hairstyle, clothes, or anything else.
I took a rad program, and one of the other students cross dressed. He was very vocal at some point that he was no trans, nor wanted to me. He loves women. but he loves wearing women’s clothes. He refrained from doing so for the program, and also for his daughters sake, until she was older. He didn’t want her to get caught in the cross fire from someone verbally attacking him. He has been threatend several times. But I could tell he felt uncomfortable in men’s clothing. He showed photos of himself before he had a child. He looked way more at home in women’s clothes.
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An easy exercise to EMPATHIZE the difference is to wear clothes of the gender OPPOSITE to what you currently feel comfortable in.
It’s so easy to google and get a decent explanation…
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I am still not sure I am getting it. Well, maybe a little bit. I remember as a teenager I went shopping by myself, and I got this white mesh shirt, and black sweat pants. I remember liking how I looked. I remember coming home and my mother looked very angry. I just didn’t get it. I asked why was she looking scornful and angry, and she touched the collar. She said the shirt was feminine because of the white mesh(think something like lace I suppose) and the boat neck.
I just didn’t get it, it was actually in the men’s rack. and it didn’t look femine at all to me. I was in great shape at the time. I am not finding any photos online of the exact shirt, but I think it looked a bit like this
I suppose it is sort of ‘fem’ but with that build he has he looks pretty masculine. In fact it seems to accentuate masculine features. But one has to be very confident, and have the right build to get away with it.
I think that was a certain style at the time. I remember these football players were wearing clogs. I thought that was sort of ‘fem’ especially with bare smooth hairless ankles, but somehow it worked.
Maybe I am way off. Maybe there is a continuum of styles. also cultural perceptions that vary with time, and particular cultures. Is that what you are getting at?
I remember when I was young, I really disliked most boys toys because most of them were so violent and scary looking. I didn’t like most girls toys either, they were boring, brightly colored, and focused around cooking, babies, and cleaning. It was a pretty rare toy that wasn’t too bright, not violent or scary. I am trying to think what I actually had. Mostly non descript plush toys.
I have my own beliefs about trans people.
There are any number of instances–in both the plant and animal kingdoms–when biological sex is a grey area.
I have repeatedly mentioned Klinefelter syndrome (males with XXY chromosomes), and there are other examples.
As a way of illustrating my point, I want to digress for a moment and discuss twin studies.
There have been interesting findings which show uncanny similarities between twins seperated at birth. Men have married women with the same names, given their dogs the same names, entered similar professions, and even carried their wallets in the same way.
Most interesting, one set of separated twins divorced wives named “Betty,” and remarried to women named “Linda.” They also both gave their sons the names “James Allen” and “James Alan.” This is all after being separated as infants and with no contact.
When I read these findings, I was tempted to ascribe these similarities to data mining (like the famous “uncanny” similarities between Kennedy’s assassination and Lincoln’s assassination), but this point was anticipated, and these similarities don’t seem to exist between fraternal twins separated at birth.
How is this relevant to trans people?
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It seems that much of our behavior is encoded in our genes in ways that we don’t completely understand.
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Certain elements of hermaphrodism are very common in the animal and plant kingdoms. When female marijuana plants are stressed by substandard conditions while maturing (temperature, water, nutritional deficiencies, and so forth), these plants will develop hermaphroditic flowers. Frogs–when subjected to environmental stress in the form of pollution–will sometimes develop hermaphroditic features, regardless of their chromosomes.
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While no “gay gene” has been found (a point made with nauseating regularity by the religious right), no specific “autism gene” has been found either . . . yet we know that autism often has a strong genetic component, and we shouldn’t require autistic people to stop being autistic because autism is a supposed choice (my parents believed that I choose to be autistic, and I was punished and made miserable because of this, as they had to “straighten me out”). So, we can reasonably assume that most trans people are born this way.
So . . . I choose (based on these points) to believe that trans people were born with a certain degree of hermaphrodism, and they should be accommodated just like we accommodate people with autism, cerebral palsy, color blindness, or hemophilia.
The religious right has a problem with this because of the Biblical principle that there are only two genders, so gender-affirming care should be banned . . . so why don’t we also ban surgery to correct gynecomastia in cis men? Alcoholism, male menopause, hormone-secreting tumors (among many other causes) can cause breast development in men . . . especially later in life.
These men have no problem accessing surgical care to reduce the gynecomastia, yet it’s a problem when trans people get surgery for similar reasons, and this is a double standard that no one wishes to acknowledge.
Reasons like this are why I hate organized religion . . . especially when it infringes upon my abilities to practice as a nurse working in healthcare . . . when I wish to provide compassionate, nonjudgmental care to anyone who needs my services.
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Evangelicalism can be seen as basically a conformity fetish. Someone who has cerebral palsy? Not their fault, but put 'em in an institution where we don’t have to see or deal with them. Autism? Brutalize them into obedience. Trans? Erase them, deny that their gender identity or feelings are real, etc.
The proposed law to control haircuts deemed gender-inappropriate just harkens back to the moral panic of the 60s in the church world about facial and/or long hair. It was associated with hippies, youth rebellion, radicalism, etc.
The triumphalist narrative must be preserved at all costs. Looking and behaving in certain ways (God’s ways) always is doable and results in by far the best outcomes. “Condoning” deviant behavior might make god punish you along with the deviant.
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I knew a pair of twins where one was gay and the other not. But later when became trans. This person told me of her bad experiences around expected gender roles, in her religion she was raised with. For a time I wondered if her desire to change was due to deep seated desires to be male, to have a better status in her religion. At least that is how she viewed it.
I have come to believe that may have been an influence, but her becoming ftm probably would have happened anyway without religion. or perhaps some other religion. She was raised LDS, and they have clear expectations and defined roles. I was also, but as a child I really didn’t believe in it much. I was just the boring thing I had to do with my parents on sunday.
I have lost contact with her/him, now him. But I looked him up and saw a photo. Well, I don’t really like the results, but I am not living in that body. Its also not about me. Its for him. I think that is what is missing from a religious point of view. I personally wouldn’t do a transition. I have enough problems with the idea of plastic surgery. I have thought about how it would be nice to change such and such about myself physically. But what if there are side effects? The surgery gets botched? what about the cost? Also, would I see myself the same? I guess I literally would not, and that is the point of such surgeries, to change. I would have to adjust to how others also perceive me.
Comparision with LGBT with diseases? Why not hair color, or eye color, body type, or perhaps other features which are not viewed as pathological?
I didn’t know that anyone thought people can choose autism. What a strange concept. I suppose people ‘choose’ hand dominance, but that is based on a natural predisposition. So many things are built for right hand use. I am right handed, but people have asked me if I was left handed, Apparently I eat like a left handed person, or like someone from Europe. The first time I heard this my reaction was…wtf!!! (I was too young to know the words, but that is how I felt) Why did it make any difference? The comment sounded so judgemental.
I don’t know that I’ve seen this straight up asserted, but I’ve seen it pooh-poohed as an imaginary problem, a discipline issue. As recently as the 1990s, it was frequently thought to be caused by overindulgent parenting, even within the mental health disciplines. Starting, IIRC, in the early 1960s, they sometimes would recommend a “parentectomy” to extract the child from the home and institutionalize them and try to normalize them there. You can imagine all the pain and suffering this caused both for children and parents. The gaslighting, etc.
After the 90’s the “blame the parents” strategy fell apart and things became, relatively speaking, more enlightened, at least outside of intellectual ghettoes like Christian fundamentalism.
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Unless I have been woefully misled, the human mind is a part of our biology.
Gibberish, and the plural of phenomenon is phenomena.
More gibberish, are you typing with your elbow, blindfolded?
More gibberish, and I see facts and evidence are still anathema to you, and your facile idiotic rhetoric.
Your perception has suggested killing healthy children with psychiatric problems, using physical violence against people with gender dysphoria, and fucking animals and corpses be made legal. So why would we give a fuck about your warped perception of reality.
This is the first thing you have asserted, that I am inclined to believe.
I asked ai a similar question and that answer isnt very clear.
If a key aspect of what gender is consists of societal norms then why is that overridden by how a person feels about themself.
I asked ai if theres any other types of identity similar to gender thats mainly defined by what people feel they are and its examples were cultural identities. So gender is no more real than going through an emo phase or being a punk?
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Well I think that’s an oversimplification. I don’t just feel that I am a man, it’s part of who I am, now I happen to have been born as man as well, but if I had not, then how society generally feels about me, could not change who I am. So why would we deny this to others, just because who they are, differs from the biological sex they were born?
Well elite psychiatric bodies in both the US and the UK disagree.
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Not quite.
As I mentioned earlier, there is a biological grey area between male and female.
I consider myself to be very cis and straight, yet some aspects of my personality may seem feminine to some people, and my parents worried (when I was a child) that I might grow up to be gay.
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I never liked “rough and tumble” sports like boxing, football, etc…
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I like to cook.
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I have a nurturing side that seems out of proportion for the “average” male, as I am a registered nurse.
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I have always gotten along better with women than men, and I have always had more female friends than male friends.
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I sometimes like to go to the opera.
So even though I am cis and straight, we can argue that I fall into the grey area (or spectrum) between a man and a woman.
Should I not be allowed to cook or be a nurse because I’m male? A lot of people automatically assume that I’m gay because of my profession, and–because I’m a nurse–I shouldn’t be allowed to be unsupervised around children because “most gay people are pedophiles.”
And yes, a lot of people actually believe this.
If you see some of my earlier posts, you will see that I bring up twin studies that show a lot of interesting and remarkable similarities between twins that have been separated at birth.
They enter similar professions, and they even marry spouses that have similar names.
In my mind, this means that people who fall into a grey area between being a man or a woman were probably born this way.
The reason why people say that trans people are “sick” has to do with religion, not reality. How does it hurt anyone if a man has surgery, and acts (and dresses) like a woman?
If an older man with an underlying hormone disorder develops breasts (called gynecomastia) and has cosmetic surgery to reduce them, then this is gender-affirming surgery. Also, if a man loses his testicles from cancer, then he can have reconstructive surgery to put in new plastic ones (to fix the appearence) and get hormone replacement therapy.
So again, this is gender-affirming care.
To be dismissive of trans people as going through a phase, or having a bad upbringing because their parents didn’t raise them correctly is like being dismissive of the distress that is felt by a man with gynecomastia or who is missing testicles from testicular cancer.
We may not know all of the whys about how these people were born this way, but this lack of knowledge shouldn’t keep the medical establishment from helping them.
Also, the fact that these people may fall on a spectrum doesn’t justify “conversion therapy” when kids are removed from the home and brought to camps where they are often beaten, told how sick they are, forced to wear clothing that is uncomfortable to them, and sometimes driven to suicide.
Gay and trans conversion therapy does not work, and is usually done for religious reasons.
How is conversion therapy different from practices in the Middle Ages when “heretics” (people who believe in the wrong religion) were tortured into converting into Catholicism, or another religion of your choice? Similar practices happen today in the Muslim world.
Conversion therapy is similar.
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How do you feel you are a man?
Theres something fundamentally illogical about this to me.
I am a man, biologically, and i can see that. I dont feel like a man. I mean i wouldnt know how to even tell if i felt like a man.
To my mind theres nothing you can feel and sense that isnt comparitive or demonstrable using tools for measurement.
I can feel sad compared to how happy i was or feel something is rough compared to being smooth. I cant feel like a woman or a man, ive only ever been a man. So what kind of sensations make you feel like a man? As a man ive only ever felt basic biological senses of being a man, for example.
Also in relation to you saying professionals from the uk and america disagree they dont.
Theyre saying gender is fluid and based on internal identification which can change and societal norms which also change.
This is where i agree with the op its basically a spiritual belief system, theres literally a 2 spirit gender.
I dont think youre in a grey area i think youre a man, liking cooking doesnt change that.
Why are you spending any time even wondering? What does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make to you (or anyone) what gender a person decides to identify as at any given moment? What effect does it have on you that you haven’t created for yourself?
Gawd! So many folks are so verklempt about what is completely the business of another!
Not sure I follow what you’re asking sorry?
About what, and which principle of logic is being violated, and why?
What do you feel like then? As I said a man is part of who I am, I can no more feel differently about that than anyone else, it just happens that I was also born with the biological sex of a man, so I suffer no gender dysphoria.
Happy, sad, love, anger, misery, euphoria, just off the top of my head. though this is missing the point, it’s not just about how one feels, I am a man, it is an integral part of who I am, not just biologically.
Maybe you’re gender neutral? You keep using the word feel, and again then this seems to be oversimplifying it. Do you identify differently to your biological sex, if not then you don’t have gender dysphoria.
Well there you go, what’s the problem? For some people this differs from their biological sex. This is called gender dysphoria.
I don’t understand the question, you just said you are a man, surely you know how that feels? Being a man is only part of who I am, but I couldn;t change that, if say I had been born as a biological woman.
Ok, this means you don’t have gender dysphoria, but some people do,.
If you are claiming gender dysphoria doesn’t exist, then yes, you are disagreeing with the prevailing opinion of psychiatry.
Who is they? it’s true that social perception would be subjective, so of course they can change, we once thought dog fighting, fox hunting, and badger baiting was ok, and slavery, now we don’t.
No it’s not, psychiatry doesn’t validate findings based on subjective beliefs like spirituality.
I feel like a man in the sense i have a penis, i have testosterone flowing through me, but this gender identity is suposed to be seperate from all these biological realities.
All of these things, in fact these things in particular are comparable. You have felt opposiing emotions, they compare and contrast with each other.
Whereas feeling like a man or a woman is impossible, other than in the sense of biological reality that is.
Youve never been a woman, how would you be able to idenify if you feel like a woman and what does it mean to feel like a specific gender?
I know how i feel, but im sure every man feels somewhat different. It seens logical i can only tell you what i feel like in terms of what i can compare and contrast. I was smaller now im taller, i went through puberty.
Ive always been biologically male and physically been able to sense that but there is no seperate sensation of gender which is why it seems to me like a spiritual thing. Even if i was disgusted with my own male sexual organs and wanted them off and replaced by female ones that really isnt me feeling female, im still a man who happens to hate his body and wants to change it.
And like the op i can see the similiarity beteeen this and anorexia.