Transgender bathrooms?

[Lorizael]

Well, not less than 0.01%. The 1 in 4,500 was for a particular class of disorders. Probably somewhere between 0.1% and 1%, which is millions to tens of millions of people worldwide. And that's only counting the types of sexual development disorders we've identified so far. Physical sex in humans definitely follows a bimodal distribution pretty tightly, but that ultimately means it does run into continuum issues. Most people will unambiguously fall into one of two bins, but there will be a somewhat sizable population for whom such a determination is not possible.

What that gets at to me is that physical sex is not in any way essential or sacred. It's just the way humans (and most other animals and plants on the planet) happen to be classified most of the time. But there are other ways of being, both in humans (see above) and in weird cases (see bees and ants, for example). Ways of being are important to me, because they correspond to ways of expressing ourselves. But this isn't just my crazy transhumanism popping up. Sex is a massive thing psychologically speaking, which means it plays into identity.

That's where we get into whether or not transgendered folk are mentally ill. While a person's physical sex can be ambiguous, it is rare to encounter someone in the real world for whom we do not automatically make a determination. We decidedly don't sex most people we meet, so there has to be some other way we're reaching our conclusion. Of course, we're basing our decision on that person's expressed gender identity--the degree to which they conform to the current set of gender roles. That includes having masculine or feminine physical features, to be sure, but also includes fashion, manner, voice, personality, etc.

A trans person is just someone who feels that their gender identity does not match their apparent physical sex. That is, a trans person is just someone who feels the need to express themselves in a way that is not in accord with our current norms regarding gender. That doesn't strike me as mentally ill. Trans men don't believe they have a penis when they clearly don't; they're not delusional. They're just further along a spectrum of behavior that we deem increasingly unacceptable.

That is, there are a lot of stereotypically masculine behaviors that men don't need to exhibit. It's okay to be a guy and not like sports. It's okay to be a guy and be somewhat timid. You might get ribbed for both, and might even get called names because of it, but no one will contend that you are insane for it. But the more essential masculine characteristics you drop, the less acceptable it becomes for you to be that way, until you reach a point where we've decided you're crazy.

I don't understand why we do this, and it honestly seems a bit hypocritical to me. After all, as I said above, we feel comfortable automatically assigning a person's identity all the time based on their expressed gender identity (if you see a person in the distance wearing a dress, you will decide they are a woman), yet we don't allow people to make that determination for themselves based on the same characteristics.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's just a teeny bit confusing when you refer to gender as sex...

[Buster's Uncle]

Also - page three, and no one's made a Bruce Jenner joke.  Interesting...

[Lorizael]

I contend that most of us unconsciously do this all the time. When you meet a person, you almost automatically classify them as either male or female. Yet you have sequenced their DNA, so your classification is based on their gender identity. I think we should dispense with the illusion that we categorize people by sex and acknowledge that gender identity is the thing. Yes, obviously, most of the time gender identity falls in line with physical sex pretty well, but there will be cases of ambiguity where no clear determination is possible, so why not let individuals choose for themselves how they identify?

[Elok]

Brief note, since I have to get ready for work: why would you need to sequence their DNA?  Sex is a phenotype, not a genotype; you can tell a girl in boy's clothes pretty easily most of the time, or vice versa, the plots of fifteen thousand stage plays notwithstanding.  The point of all these displays (clothes, makeup, jewelry, whatever) is to signal something about oneself, something objectively true, except in obscure cases of deformity.  Being TG is like wearing a red, white and blue elephant t-shirt while espousing progressive views.  People don't tolerate your self-definition, no--because your self-definition is a lie.

[Buster's Uncle]

Trans people contend that the lie is God's, not theirs.  -Not being trans, I lack expertise to assess who's lying...

[Buster's Uncle]

I just saw on the news that this issue has come up in Charlotte, NC, too...

[vonbach]

Yes its the latest trend in destroying western society and children's childhood. Another shot fired in the war on the family.
This is why we need moral standards and why tolerance doesn't work.

[Buster's Uncle]

I never made a facepalm smilie, did I?

[Unorthodox]

[vonbach]

"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." Aristotle

[Lorizael]

(a) There's no evidence Aristotle ever said that and (b) Aristotle also said things like "men have more teeth than women" and "heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects" so maybe he shouldn't be your go to guy for wisdom.

[Buster's Uncle]

-He also thought sex causes baldness, IIRC.

[Lorizael]

Brief note, since I have to get ready for work: why would you need to sequence their DNA?  Sex is a phenotype, not a genotype; you can tell a girl in boy's clothes pretty easily most of the time, or vice versa, the plots of fifteen thousand stage plays notwithstanding.  The point of all these displays (clothes, makeup, jewelry, whatever) is to signal something about oneself, something objectively true, except in obscure cases of deformity.  Being TG is like wearing a red, white and blue elephant t-shirt while espousing progressive views.  People don't tolerate your self-definition, no--because your self-definition is a lie.

I don't think lies come into it at all. As I said, I believe we already determine identity based on gender and are fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise. People can have multifaceted identities without being contradictory or false. For example, a businesswoman can have short hair, put on little to no makeup, and only wear pants and dress shirts. In doing so, she's taking on traditionally masculine behaviors. But no one would claim that she is lying about her identity by doing so. We wouldn't even claim that she is lying only a little bit. Yet it is demonstrably, objectively true that she is behaving in a masculine way while having a female physical sex.

You might argue that she does not claim to be a man, and thus she is not lying. But again, it is my argument that when trans people make such a claim, they are doing so about their gender identity, rather than their physical sex. And all research to date shows that gender identity is a real, probably genetically determined psychological characteristic, rather than some choice someone makes to fool others. This means you can't really go down the road of, "But can't anyone claim to be a woman, or black, or paraplegic, and we have to accept that?"

That said, the opinion I'm offering here is essentially a way station to what I think is a better place. I believe we need to allow nearly complete freedom of expression, the ability to choose how one expresses one's identity, before we can get to the real good stuff. Which is... identities based on accidents of nature (sex, race, paraplegia) are stupid and we should do away with them. Yes, people should be able to identify as female if they want to, but how limiting is such a perspective? We should forge our own identities unhinged from our biological roots and... okay, I'll stop talking now.

[Elok]

To that I would say: gender identity is meaningless except in reference to biological sex.  I have no separate "gender identity."  In general, I think gendered activities can be divided into conscious external actions (or socially acceptable pastimes for one's sex, most of which I ignore), and overall gender-linked behavior tendencies.

I think of myself as a man because I was brought up as a boy, and was taught about that sticky-outy bit down there and what it means.  I dress as a man because I was dressed as a boy, and taught to do so for myself, as a child.  I employ other forms of external signaling to whatever extent for much the same reason.  If I could be bothered to show an interest in sports, it would be out of social pressure, I guess.  All these conscious behaviors are purely a response to external influence or empirically verifiable reality.

I also display some stereotypically male behaviors--I'm slovenly, aggressive (in conversation), and don't do that weird thing women do where they talk purely as a bonding activity--presumptively because of hormones or brain structure or something.  Testosterone?  Maybe.  These traits, or personal tendencies, are purely unconscious.  I don't do them deliberately at all; they're just how I am on average.

In either case, there's no innate sense of maleness at work in me that I can determine.  The whole notion of gender identity honestly strikes me as gibberish, and to the extent it exists at all it sounds like a perverse modeling behavior found only in the TG.  Like bird chicks raised by people, only the TG are not birds and hopefully can understand the nonsensical nature of their behavior.  I can accept that they're not doing it to be annoying, or for attention; this is a real compulsion.  But that doesn't make it any less bizarre or pointless.