In all seriousness, changing language to fit some weird political philosophy and then berating others for not going along is as dangerous as it is outrageous.
Constructs in your head are not real. When you die, they are gone forever. Yet, when they dig up your body 1,000 years from now as some sort of archeological dig, they will study your skeleton and determine your biological sex with certainty.
You (or anyone) is free to think whatever you want about yourself or others - but you are not free to force others to think like you, particularly when your thoughts are irrational and not grounded in reality or scientific fact.
And people make fun of the flat-earthers for denying reality and objective facts...
Woof, I'm not going to engage fully with this post. It is too loaded. I am not sure I can fully parse this post, but I am going to state some assertions that I believe respond to the statements made.
I am going to agree (?) that gender is a construct. I assert that it is a social construct. It does not exist inside our cells, only in our minds (individually and collectively).
I am going to disagree that sex is determined by our skeletons. I assert that skeletal structure and other phenotypical features are symptoms of sex, which is determined by genes. This is a scientific consensus as far as I can tell.
I believe I am disagreeing with you when I say that there are more than two possible outcomes of genetic sex determination. This is obvious, because there are multiple sex-determination systems in animals, not just XY. There is X0, there is ZW, and there are others.
Even within XY, there are variations. An individual can be born with XXY chromosomes. Or they can be born male with XX chromosomes, or female with XY chromosomes.
Or, a human can be born female with XX chromosomes, no outward differences from typical female phenotype, and feel they are a man. This is because, as stated above, gender is a social construct. Not actually sure if we agree or disagree on that.
There is no berating happening here or anything else that should make a person feel victimized. Just science. A little more advanced than grade school science, but still science.
> A little more advanced than grade school science, but still science.
"He who controls the language controls the masses." - Saul Alinsky
> Even within XY, there are variations. An individual can be born with XXY chromosomes. Or they can be born male with XX chromosomes, or female with XY chromosomes
We are not discussing extremely rare genetic defects. We're discussing people who slander biological genders by dressing as offensive caricatures and then demand everyone else participate in their mental illness.
You brought out emotionally charged language in response to my post about biological sex determination, which was in response to a post filled with emotionally charged language. It has nothing to do with whether or not we disagree. It's that you haven't expressed your ideas in a way that doesn't denigrate trans people and make you sound like the victim of their existence.
I don't call it hate speech because you aren't on my side. I call it hate speech because it treats transgender people as uniformly ill and invalidates their identity. (You'll find that if we stop doing that, their mental health tends to be pretty good.) And because the rigidness of the gender binary in modern western society is not universal across time and space within human cultures and it exists in opposition to scientific understanding.
You are saying right now that you want a genuine engagement. I'm a sucker for debate obviously. This is your chance to genuinely engage, lay out your scientific reasoning why a biologically female person with XX chromosomes should be forced by their peers into accepting the gender roles that other people say they must have regardless of what makes them feel good or happy.
> If she pretends to be a man instead, she isn't challenging gender roles, but is implicitly agreeing with the harmful idea that women must adhere to some roles, men must adhere to other roles, and anyone who doesn't do this is defective and must change themselves to fit this mould.
I appreciate your rational input. And to be honest, I don't completely disagree with this part. Trans people are not unaware of it either. However, [I must explain that] I was using "gender roles" in a very broad way, including pronouns like "she". This person doesn't need anyone to use specific words to describe their sexual phenotype if they don't want it. We don't have different a different form of "he" for children vs adults, nor for black people vs white people. It is a societal construct and they're allowed to opt out.
> Even worse is how such non-conformance to gender roles has been medicalized, so she may end up taking opposite-sex hormones, having her breasts removed and other cosmetic surgeries to appear as some odd facsimile of a man. Rather than rejecting this malignant, cultish ideology that advocates physical destruction of the self in lieu of bodily acceptance.
This is an extremely disgusting and transphobic thing to say though. I hope you didn't realize how hateful it sounded. Gender-affirming care is widely supported in the medical community as a life-saving intervention. As for whether or not you think it's appropriate for another person to have their body surgically altered, what do you think about tattoos? About facial reconstruction for burn victims? About a mastectomy for cancer? And why do you even care what other people do with their bodies?
I believe in treating people the way they ask to be treated so I always respect pronouns, bathroom choices, etc. What I've never been particularly clear on is why we've collectively agreed to cooperate with the social construct version of sex, i.e., gender but not anything else. If someone identifies as being tall, or older/younger than they are, or a different ethnicity, why doesn't anybody respect that identity as well? Is it just because there are a lot more people who don't feel like their assigned gender than there are people who don't feel like their assigned, say, eye color?
We used to teach people to accept others, and ourselves for who we are - flaws and all. We used to guide people into being comfortable and accepting of themselves - we are always our own harshest critic.
Most people undergo some period of time where they are unsure of their self, their future, their purpose, and perhaps even question their existence and the meaning of it all.
Now we teach people being uncomfortable and uncertain is unacceptable and that it obviously means you are the problem and must change. In doing so, we doom these people to a lifetime of hardship and uncertainty.
Imagine a world where having blue eyes was viewed as bad and had to be surgically and permanently altered to look more brown. Would these people feel any more confident after the operation? Why do celebrities continuously get plastic surgery over and over? They are never comfortable with themselves, and the further they go down the path of altering who they are, the more uncomfortable they become - ignoring whatever actual problems they may be experiencing in favor of cosmetic and superficial changes.
Indeed. I find it highly disturbing that the (very high) suicide rate for trans people has not precariously fallen as the number of people identifying as trans has risen. That doesn't make statistical sense if suppressing your trans nature is worse than embracing it. Something is wrong here. I wonder if perhaps we're classifying multiple conditions as "being transgender" and only some of them psychologically benefit from transitioning. Considering the charged political climate I doubt we're going to see any rigorous research on the topic for decades.
You may want to cite some source when asserting things that are contrary to well understood facts.
For instance, here's a NIH article studying extremely high suicide rates among transgendered people[1]. It cites many, many possible reasons for this, but the facts remain. Your assertion appears to have no supporting evidence.
> In doing so, we doom these people to a lifetime of hardship and uncertainty.
Let's allow them to "doom" themselves to increased happiness and just stop filling their lives with hardship.
> Imagine a world where having blue eyes was viewed as bad and had to be surgically and permanently altered to look more brown. Would these people feel any more confident after the operation?
Probably.
> Why do celebrities continuously get plastic surgery over and over? They are never comfortable with themselves, and the further they go down the path of altering who they are, the more uncomfortable they become
Is this what all your celebrity friends say? My celebrity friend circle mostly disagrees. Let's take a poll of all the celebrities we personally know and try to get some more data on what's going on inside the minds of "celebrities". Even though we already both know so much about the internal experiences of all celebrities.
"You (or anyone) is free to think whatever you want about yourself or others - but you are not free to force others to think like you"
No one cares what anyone else thinks. The only thing that matters is behavior. If your behavior is harmful to others, then we certainly are free to try and change that behavior.
If gender is not real, then why do you care what gender people are assigned.
> Yet, when they dig up your body 1,000 years from now as some sort of archeological dig, they will study your skeleton and determine your biological sex with certainty.
I mean, its thousands of years in the future, so maybe, but if we do it today, that’s not how it works; there’s a scale for skeletons of “Female, Probable Female, Intermediate, Probable Male, Male” and even the extremes are subject to caveats. But who cares? Why would what archeologists will think about your sex from your bones in some distant future constrain your gender expression in life?
No one said gender is not real, you are asserting an argument I did not make.
The notion you can be whatever you want - that is not real, that exists solely in your head.
As an adult, you are free to do whatever you want - so long as it does not impact me and my life. Which is the problem isn't it... people forcefully impacting my life to please themselves.
Forcing me to guess whatever pronouns you happen to what to use today is not a game I am going to play. If I demanded you refer to me as "King Alupis" in every one of your responses, you would probably not play that game either, despite the obvious happiness it would bring me.
"if someone says 2+2=5, the correct response is, ‘What are your definitions and axioms?’ not a rant about the decline of Western civilization".
From Wikipedia because math is hard, let's go right wing.
Use a wiki or something. Because when even I know that 2 + 2 = 5 can be true in some cases then you might want to reconsider your arguments.
BTW.
A + B != B + A also can be true.
> Constructs in your head are not real. When you die, they are gone forever.
Almost all of you is a construct, there are few things directly wired into the brain(but they aren't irrelevant) but most of it is learned. And when you die everything you had in your brain is gone forever. And then by your definition things that make us us are fiction. And they are as fictional as gender(btw. gender is not sex, and sex is more complex).
In all seriousness, changing language to fit some weird political philosophy and then berating others for not going along is as dangerous as it is outrageous.
Constructs in your head are not real. When you die, they are gone forever. Yet, when they dig up your body 1,000 years from now as some sort of archeological dig, they will study your skeleton and determine your biological sex with certainty.
You (or anyone) is free to think whatever you want about yourself or others - but you are not free to force others to think like you, particularly when your thoughts are irrational and not grounded in reality or scientific fact.
And people make fun of the flat-earthers for denying reality and objective facts...