Gender Ideology And Its Contradictions
This is quite a controversial subject to most people, if you get offended easily then I politely ask of you to ignore this thread. Thank you.
Hello, I am a new member of this forum. I've had a bad experience with a trans-gender woman in another forum.
The discussion wasn't civil and so I couldn't be convinced of anything. I was neutral about the subject, however the latest discussion gave me a quite negative impression on those people.
I did my research even further on the Internet and I am even more convinced that these people are delusional. Not only trans-gender people but those that thinks there is more than two genders. A non-binary gender? Really?
First let's start by this what is 'Trans-genderism'?
According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries:
"A state or condition in which a person's identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional ideas of male or female gender."
According to the Cambridge Dictionary:
"The condition of someone feeling that they are not the same gender (= sex) as the one they had or were said to have at birth."
This gender ideology contradicts basic biology.
Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: 'XY' and 'XX' are genetic markers of health, not genetic markers of a disorder.
The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species.
This principle is self-evident.... Individuals with DSDs [Disorders of Sex Development] do not constitute a third sex.
It is physiologically impossible to change a person’s sex, since the sex of each individual is encoded in the genes, XX if female, XY if male. Surgery can only create the appearance of the other sex, if poorly.
Transgender ideology claims that biological reality does not determine one's sex and that feelings do. Therefore, the differences between male and female, much like the clothing we wear, are separate from our identity and are constantly in flux.
Manhood and womanhood are mere labels used to describe what we see but lack any substantial basis.
A fundamental part of logic and reason is the idea that things have a purpose. The purpose of our eyes, for example, is to provide us with sight. Our lungs exist in order for us to breath and absorb oxygen, and our ears exist in order to hear.
Likewise, the primary purpose of human sexuality is procreation.
However, transgenderism, deny this principle. This is irrational thinking. A denial of reality. If anything I think they are extremely insecure about their bodies.
I am a woman, with XX chromosomes, I am capable of being pregnant and birth. I would never consider myself a man because I don't have a penis and I can't produce seeds to impregnate another woman.
I am aspiring to be a Doctor. I can't let the feelings of others affect my view on reality or science facts. The world and society won't bend to accomodate them. They cannot impose on me to use the pronun 'he', 'she' or 'they' when it doesn't just fit.
Hello, I am a new member of this forum. I've had a bad experience with a trans-gender woman in another forum.
The discussion wasn't civil and so I couldn't be convinced of anything. I was neutral about the subject, however the latest discussion gave me a quite negative impression on those people.
I did my research even further on the Internet and I am even more convinced that these people are delusional. Not only trans-gender people but those that thinks there is more than two genders. A non-binary gender? Really?
First let's start by this what is 'Trans-genderism'?
According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries:
"A state or condition in which a person's identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional ideas of male or female gender."
According to the Cambridge Dictionary:
"The condition of someone feeling that they are not the same gender (= sex) as the one they had or were said to have at birth."
This gender ideology contradicts basic biology.
Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: 'XY' and 'XX' are genetic markers of health, not genetic markers of a disorder.
The norm for human design is to be conceived either male or female. Human sexuality is binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species.
This principle is self-evident.... Individuals with DSDs [Disorders of Sex Development] do not constitute a third sex.
It is physiologically impossible to change a person’s sex, since the sex of each individual is encoded in the genes, XX if female, XY if male. Surgery can only create the appearance of the other sex, if poorly.
Transgender ideology claims that biological reality does not determine one's sex and that feelings do. Therefore, the differences between male and female, much like the clothing we wear, are separate from our identity and are constantly in flux.
Manhood and womanhood are mere labels used to describe what we see but lack any substantial basis.
A fundamental part of logic and reason is the idea that things have a purpose. The purpose of our eyes, for example, is to provide us with sight. Our lungs exist in order for us to breath and absorb oxygen, and our ears exist in order to hear.
Likewise, the primary purpose of human sexuality is procreation.
However, transgenderism, deny this principle. This is irrational thinking. A denial of reality. If anything I think they are extremely insecure about their bodies.
I am a woman, with XX chromosomes, I am capable of being pregnant and birth. I would never consider myself a man because I don't have a penis and I can't produce seeds to impregnate another woman.
I am aspiring to be a Doctor. I can't let the feelings of others affect my view on reality or science facts. The world and society won't bend to accomodate them. They cannot impose on me to use the pronun 'he', 'she' or 'they' when it doesn't just fit.
Comments (167)
No, it claims that biology does not determine one's gender. Sex and gender are not the same thing. Whereas sex is concerned with one's chromosomes and sexual organs (where, for the most part, there are two sets), gender is concerned with something else.
Take for example having long hair and wearing make-up, a dress, and high heels. We tend to think of this as being the traits of a woman despite the fact having long hair and wearing make-up, a dress, and high heels has nothing to do with having XX chromosomes or a vagina. We have this idea of what it means to be a woman that transcends biology.
So let's say someone with XY chromosomes and a penis decides to have long hair and to wear make-up, a dress, and high heels. You might look at their biology and say that they are of the male sex (and they will agree), but they look at the social aspects of their lifestyle and say that they are of the female gender.
As soon as you start to talk about women's and men's clothing or the like you've lost any ground you have in trying to reduce it all to biology (for the most part; something like bras being used to support breasts can be an exception, although given that flat-chested women often still wear bras and large men with "breasts" don't, even that's debatable).
Quoting Terran Imperium
What's the connection between pronouns and biology? Although someone's biology has historically been the measure we used to determine which pronoun to use, language is always changing, and it is becoming more and more common for these pronouns to defer to someone's cultural gender rather than their biological sex. What compelling reasons are there for resisting this change?
My first wife couldn't be pregnant because of complications breaking her hip in a car accident. She never felt like a 'real woman' and eventually killed herself. My current wife cannot get pregnant either, because she is post-menopausal. I think if you want to be a doctor, you need to get used to the varieties of real humans that you will have to try and help, and not try and force them into your own categories of what they ought to be. You will do much harm otherwise. Chromosomes, hormones, brain-type, orientation of desire, and fertility are not always aligned as you seem to imagine.
Since at least the mid-1970s I accepted the idea that "transsexualism" was real, that some persons were born in the wrong body. "Transgenderism" is the view that regardless of whether one has XX or XY chromosomes, one can "perform" whatever gender role one wishes, and that other people (can, should, must, will, had better) jolly well accept it. For a time I was willing to tolerate this view.
I've come to the conclusion that transsexuals are delusional, and transgenderists are at least slightly crazy.
Now, I am well aware that men and women (but mostly men) have been bending gender for quite a long time, and it isn't just a recent phenomena never seen before. In the early 20th century, "drag acts" were a very popular (but always outré and risqué) entertainment for heterosexuals, and a somewhat common practice among gay men. Drag was a way of asserting one's gayness, rather than asserting that one was actually a female, though the cross-gender performance could be extremely convincing (up to the point of copping a feel or undressing).
Some gay men have always presented themselves as effeminate, and some gay women have always presented themselves as masculine. There were aesthetic and emotional pleasures in the performance but it was also a way of signalling that one was interested in same-sex activity with one's own sex.
The multiplication of "genders" is part of the "at least slightly crazy" aspect of transgenderism. How many are there these days? 19? 33? 62? Who the hell knows. Mostly it's just staking out imagined differences that one can then impose upon other people.
My opposition to the "trans" business stems from a firm belief that "people are more alike than they are different". We are not all unique snowflakes, one of a kind never seen before. Most people have some willingness and ability to experiment with sexual roles, and some do--without basing their entire self-definition on what they tried.
IOW, last year it's women, this year it's transgenders and now women are being thrown under the bus; last year it's Blacks, this year it's Mexicans and now Blacks are being thrown under the bus. It's all complete twaddle, and the movers and shakers don't believe a word of it. Only the useful idiot footsoldiers take it seriously - and they'll be first up against the wall come the revolution.
The most you can say is that there are two sexes and two genders, but since gender relates to manifest behaviour (behaviour that's like the typical or average or normal behaviour of either sex) it's possible to have any mixture of the two behaviour types that falls on a continuum anywhere between the two genders; but a given random position on the continuum is not its own gender, that would undermine the very concept of polar genders on which the idea of a continuum is based.
And of course there can be biological anomalies producing brains that don't sit happily with the sex they're born with. That's a difficult situation for which one obviously has sympathy, but it's just being used as the "Motte" pretext for the standard "Mottte & Bailey" tactic of the hard Left.
My condoleances.
I said that exceptions don't really count, they are true women. There is a reason, they are called exceptions and that they aren't used as standards.
That is true, I agree and I can't say much against that.
About the pronouns, I was referring to the 'non-binary' people which I mentioned earlier in my post. Whereby forcing people to call them 'they' or 'she' or 'he' when it doesn't fit them is like forcing me to agree with their view on how the world works. Yes, language evolves and change through the centuries but it still had a basis on reality. The pronouns 'he' and 'she' rely on your biological sex, on a fact everyone can rely on. If a person who thinks she is 'non-binary' and I called her 'she' or 'he' does that make me bad? As I said those people are more subjective than objective and don't really look at reality.
Please bear in mind that before somewhere in the 80's, Sex and Gender were perfectly interchangeable. They meant the same thing. It was not until the mid-1990s that use of the term gender began to exceed use of the term sex in American Physiological Society titles. That's where the difference really started to show and Transgenderism used it.
Although I have nothing against Gay people, someone can be Gay and keep the gender identity he or she was born with. Homosexuality is proven to be natural anyway, there is observed homosexual behavior between chimpanzees and lions or birds.
Yes, it is an unfortunate trend this time. Feminists and now Transgenderisms.
As an interesting fact, scientists are making progress on how homosexuality work biologically. I can't find the article on it, unfortunately. If I recall correctly it was a hormone that spikes at a specific time when the baby is in the womb which determines their sexuality through their whole life.
Thank you all for your answers, it was enlightening and offered me much insight on how to interact with those people.
Although there is still something I am confused about when I was talking with that trans-gender woman, I did my research about Transgenderism so I can ask my questions here but I was caught off guard by his words when I said that Gender and Sex are different things. I think he said I was a feminist of some genre?
To quote:
"Which is basically biological essentialism, a wonderful set of beliefs possessed off by many groups, of which one of note is the Trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
You don't want to be confused for a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist."
From what I can tell, radfems believe gender is a patriarchal institution that oppresses women (and also men, to a degree) by forcing them into artificial categories that suit the needs of those in power. When a transgender person "switches" genders, then, they are implicitly affirming the gender institution. They feel the need to call themselves a different gender, thus reinforcing the notion that gender is a legitimate category. Instead of a man wearing "feminine" clothing, he may call himself transgender and/or a woman. But the whole point of radical feminism is to liberate women from this oppressive schemata. Transwomen, to a radical feminist, are "invading" (so to speak) the biological class of women, and are bringing along the baggage of patriarchy. From a radfem perspective, this can obviously be seen as threatening: men can now be women (and vice-versa), there is no distinction between the two now, and so the oppression of women becomes evanescent. Now anyone can be a woman!
To a degree I think these radfems are correct. But it's also clear they do tend to harbor a deep suspicion of men, which is not entirely undeserved.
No one is "forcing" you to refer to people by the pronouns that they ask to be referred to as. Language, like gender, is socially constructed, and regardless of the etymology of words they are, as you yourself admit, are malleable over time. A fitting analogy, let's say someone I meet someone who kindly asks me to refer to him as Jake, despite his birth certificate explicitly stating that his official name is Jacob. Or perhaps he'd prefer to go by his middle name, Max, because he dislikes the name Jacob or Jake. Or perhaps he decided, at some point, to change his name entirely because he loathed his given name for whatever personal reasons. His nickname, or new name lacks a "basis in reality", but that's not a justifiable reason to stay with the name Jacob. In fact, it makes very little sense to say that words have a "basis in reality" external to their socially constructed use.
Would I ignore his request and refer to him as Jacob regardless? Of course not. It's unnecessarily rude, doesn't inconvenience me in anyway, and is disrespectful of his innocuous request. Same is true when a transgender person asks to me refer to them as something other than their biological sex. Does it make you a "bad person" when you ignore their request? I would say yes, insofar as it's a clear demonstration that you doesn't view them as a person who should be respected or treated in a dignified manner. It is vital to note that studies have shown that there is a high suicide attempt rate of transgendered persons relative to the general population, the major factors being, "gender-based victimization, discrimination, bullying, violence, being rejected by the family, friends, and community; harassment by intimate partner, family members, police and public; discrimination and ill treatment at health-care system are the major risk factors that influence the suicidal behavior among transgender persons," and so I think that it should be understood that while maybe you had a negative experience with a transgendered person via the internet, you should A) not extrapolate her presumed "incivility" onto her entire group, while B) understand (and sympathize) that her frustration may stem from the fact that her group faces overwhelming social and personal hardships on a day-to-day basis that I personally can't even begin to wrap my head around.
Thank you for your answer.
Again, thank you for answering my questions.
I can argue the fact that none of those names don't refer or are in anyway related to any ideological view unlike someone especially asking me to call 'they' when they are obviously a 'she' or a 'he'. That's being needlessly stubborn and rude however and I concur.
I can use the pronoun 'they' without agreeing to any of their ideological ideas. It's not the first time for not only this subject and its called being polite to other people.
That's better than being rude like I was before.
Transgender isn't an "ideology" anymore than Cis-gender is, or being heterosexual, or homosexual. No one would claim that being heterosexual is "ideological".
I am quite prideful of my eccentricity, and I seek to analyze whatever traditions are offered carefully. When applicable, I seek and create my own modality of conduct. I am cautious never to bow to shame or to widespread stigma; I am secured my own goals and expressions.
My identity as an author is concentric about rituals of writing; in this way, I express my ego and self-actualization. Receiving bodily alterations to align with the ego is equally critical, and is another form of sovereignity. I refuse to be enthralled to another’s image of myself; those whom I befriend must acknowledge my identity in its various components.
Perhaps it turns on what is meant by 'switch genders' - specifically, whether the person in question declares that they are now of the gender that is the opposite to their sex, and requests others to change how they refer to that person, via gendered pronouns etc.
My understanding of the de Beauvoirian (dB) position (I prefer to use that rather than 'radfem', which sounds pejorative) is that they are supportive of somebody changing their dress and other behaviour to that which society deems as being 'gendered' in a way that mismatches their sex, precisely because the dBs want to subvert and remove the notion of gender altogether, and a great way to do that is to undermine people's expectations (or worse, requirements) of the relationship between behaviour and sex. I imagine the dB would congratulate the person on having liberated themself from oppressive societal expectations of how their behaviour should be constrained by their sex. Further, I think dBs would be supportive of requests to use neutral pronouns, but not of using gendered pronouns that mismatch the person's sex.
But if the person makes claims to a specific gender (as distinct from a denial of having a gender, or just not mentioning it at all), and requests agreement with that from others, the dBs may see that as regrettable because it supports rather than deconstructs the notion of gender.
So my understanding is that a dB would be supportive of a 'gender switch' that involves change of behaviour, but would regard it as unfortunate if the person self-labels that change of behaviour as a gender switch.
This refers to those cases where there is no ambiguity as to the person's sex, whether from how they were born (eg unusual chromosomal variation) or from medical interventions. As far as I know, there is no representative dB position on such cases.
And mtf persons are seen as men who
a) try to tell biological women how it feels to be a woman, and that this feeling is somehow accompanied by or worse even just the desire to wear lipstick and skirts (last I checked women were still female without those props)
b) insist on pushing their way into female conversations (abortion is simply not their issue) and spaces.(bathrooms and locker rooms) with all the self-rightousness patriarchy has imbued them with
And c) want cis women to recognize privilege but adamantly refuse to admit that their male birth gave them any privilege whatsoever.
I personally think all trans people do these things, but I see why feminists are annoyed.
Picture a small child pretending to be a bird. They do not have bird DNA, but still they like to play bird. They wear a cape and flap their arms running around the house pretending to fly. This imaginative play is natural for a child, with the parents often playing along, since it does no real harm, and the child is happy and content. It is assumed to be stage of child development.
If this bird behavior continued into their teen years and then as an adult, it is no longer treated the same way by culture. The neighbors and the doctors will not say this is natural for that age. The mom may still go along, since it still appears to make her little boy happy. Say the bird man doubles down and decides they want to add permanent wings and feathers through surgical procedures, so their fantasy is more real, and not just limited to dress up.
Personally, I would not care, since to each their own. But say this bird man wants me; insurance, to pay for his bird surgery. And say I am publicly pressured to say this is normal. If I don't I am called a hater. I am being sucked into their fantasy, even if I do not wish to go there. I am not his mom so I have a right to choose, like him.
As far as men and women dressing up in certain ways, this is based on biology. Men are more visually oriented than women. Women will cater to this difference, by creating pretty visual displays that cater to this male orientation. Animals do the same thing, with usually the male animals more decorated. The human biology of dress is connected to the male side of the women, and the female side of the men. This firmware reversal is what causes confusion and the bird man affect.
Women are more verbal orientated. This is why men tend to lie to women. The sweet little lies is type of verbal makeup; you look wonderful today. This is the male bird singing his song to the female birds. In the bird world the male has the sweet song and colorful dress. I human world, the female has the dress and the male the song. A male with a good line of bull, does not have to be handsome to attract females.
Exactly. Now I did a little more research to satisfy my curiosity and set my final personal judgement on these people if they are crazy or not.
So let's go back to the start so that there is no confusion. An argument about transgender identities will be much more convincing if it concerns who someone is, not merely how someone identifies. And so the rhetoric of the transgender moment drips with ontological assertions: People are the gender they prefer to be. That’s the ideology. That's what Transgenderism is all about and what it preach.
So as I said earlier. Transgender activists don’t admit that this is a metaphysical claim. They don’t want to have the debate on the level of philosophy, so they dress it up as a scientific and medical claim. And they’ve co-opted many professional associations for their cause. Which I mentioned one of them earlier, I believe.
The phrase “sex assigned at birth” is now favored because it makes room for “gender identity” as the real basis of a person’s sex. So here comes the next part, more like its the main part.
In a federal district court in North Carolina concerning H.B. Dr. Deanna Adkins who works in Duke University School of Medicine said this: “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.” she claims: “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.”
Its funny because the argument recently was that gender is only a social construct, while sex is a biological reality. Now, activists claim that gender identity is destiny, while biological sex is the social construct.
Adkins doesn’t say if she would apply this rule to all mammalian species. But why should sex be determined differently in humans than in other mammals? This is really confusing.
This is really ridiculous at this point. I feel like my head is spinning. The more I look up information about Transgenderism the more my opinion about them only get lower and lower. These people have no basis on reality and contradict themselves a lot.
So far, I was convinced that I might have been unecessarly rude to them by using the 'wrong' pronun but that's not much. Althought it was still an interesting discussion with you and the different opinions were insightful.
If the spiritual component makes a difference then our biological disposition may only be secondary. The mind can chemically change the body and have all kinds of physical effects on it.
The real question here is whether sex is a biological or spiritual reality, or both. If it is both, as I believe it is, it is enormously difficult to analyse. With some people it may be just a mistaken way of thinking and with others there may be a real longing to escape our biological identity. You cannot put all of them under the same label because the may have very different reasons for feeling the way they do.
The question is whether it is more ethical to modify the psychological essence of someone to fit the body, or to modify the body to fit the psychological essence of someone if bringing congruency to the self-image is a goal. Another question is whether a person's ability to modify their circumstances is to be respected, or if their circumstances should instead modify them. If a transman were technologically able to alter his genetic code, would you accept him as male once he did? Knowing that the only thing that bars that transman from altering his genetic code is an inability to do so, is his identity less valid because circumstances do not allow for it to be actualized, despite having the clearest image of what that identity would be if it could be? It's a case of "I have no mouth and I must scream". The mouthless entity screams internally, but nobody believes it because on the outside, there is no indication of it. Graft a mouth on and suddenly it becomes clear that it's not that it was never screaming, only that it couldn't manifest its screams. To the integrated person this doesn't even occur as a possibility because their bodies have been beneficial to them rather than constrictive.
It comes down to how you see people, I think. It can be extremely hard to understand the psychological essence of someone when their external presentation so greatly defies it. All that being said, I don't think that a person has the explicit right to force others to see them the way that they see themselves- transgendered militancy is an unfortunate side effect of miscommunication and a desperate need to self-actualize. But I also don't think that someone has the right to force others to see themselves the way that they are seen by that someone. I see our ability to define ourselves as one of the hallmarks of what separates us from animals, and I think that attempts at actualizing our identities, however imperfect those attempts may be, are progress in respect to normalizing a freer mode of existence. Obviously transitioning is on the whole a work in progress technologically, but the attempt is to be respected, rather than giving into the will-less existence that is choosing not to define oneself.
In this matter, I wonder if your view on reality might be blinkered by your reliance on "scientific facts" in an area where there is (I think) more than just science going on. Here, we are very firmly in the realm of human culture, where the thoughts and feelings of individuals are the primary determining factors. Science places humans into the role of impartial observers, and that just won't do in a matter like this. Here, humans are active participants, and must be treated as such.
The first thing I remember when I call trans-gender issues to mind, is that a man would not consider doing to themselves what gender correction surgery does unless they felt they had a really good and strong reason. You might consider them delusional, but they just feel they are bringing their emotional and physical sides into alignment with one another. I see no way to disprove one side of the argument or the other, and I see no profit in even pursuing that argument. No harm is done to the individual or society. There is no case to answer, IMO.
Perhaps the most important point is this: is anyone harmed by someone asking to be addressed as "she", even though you feel that form of address to be inappropriate? No. Is anyone mislead? No. Does it matter at all what form of address I prefer? [Let's assume I remain consistent, and don't alternate between "he" and "she".] No. Is there any negative consequence at all? No, there isn't. So let's allow anyone and everyone to nominate their preferred form of address. And when they have done that, let's show them the simple respect of using it. The world and society will bend to accommodate them. Why wouldn't it? :chin:
No harm; no problem. :smile:
Pattern-chaser
"Who cares, wins"
You raised interesting questions, some answers and examples. And yes I do view the mind and body to be one single entity. They are one part of another.
If they could alter their genetic code then my argument has no value. They are completely female or male regardless of what was their previous gender. I am not against that. I am not against change. But currently, we can't do that. And biologically, they are still female or male.
I think I determined my view on them. I don't specifically despise them but I was more than confused about their way of thinking. It was enlightening. Thank you.
I understand your argument but I think you might have missed the part where I acknowledged that and I was obviously the mistaken one. I won't call them by what they think is the wrong pronoun because that would be rude, I only considered the biological reality and that may have been my mistake.
As for whenever or not it harms society, it does not. Transgenderism itself cannot harm society. However, a few months ago, I had a neutral opinion about them but the few that I talked about, they were infuriating and irrational and more than a few time they took an aggressive stance when I tried to return back to the original subject. The original subject had no relation what so ever about genders, I barely mentioned it in a 500 words long post. Yet, they only picked up that part and started arguing with me, I couldn't understand.
I spoke with a few more transgender people in real life and they were just as aggressive. I can't say I can project the few that I talked with into their whole community. That would be stupid and narrow-minded but it didn't really paint a good image on them nor the ones in social media do. Is it harmful? No, but it just fills my everyday life with a subject I don't care about, that I don't want to hear about and I kept dragged in it because they feel that I was offending them in some way or another or that I should agree with them.
More than a few people said I was cold because I was considering science and rationality to be above all else. But its just who I am, I can't really change who I grew up to be as a woman. I came here to discuss the subject and to get a few more opinions. I came to an interesting conclusion. And I was wrong about more than a few things. I hope this will help me understand them more and avoid aggressive talk next time, I encounter one.
Again thank you.
Well I can't argue with that, as I'm putting the human-centric view, and "cold" is a very human reaction to what you say. :smile: But I do not criticise you for your view; I just think it is incomplete and unbalanced. Science and rationality are powerful tools, whose utility and usefulness is proven. But that doesn't make them universally applicable. In the current discussion, for example, science and rationality have nothing useful to offer. It is a human issue, a socio-cultural issue. Different tools are appropriate. :up:
If it causes no harm to others, it shouldn't matter that X is biologically male or female but identifies otherwise. We may think it odd or strange or even wrong, but we must resign ourselves to the fact that we can't make others do or think as we please, and shouldn't try to, unless harm will result, and not merely harm to our sense of what's proper. If there are circumstances where it may cause harm, deal with those situations as they may arise to prevent harm. There are ways to address such things intelligently. We shouldn't make decisions, however, based on such concerns as--"what will happen if some bird-man wants us to pay his medical bills?"
I agree with the comment generally. We definitely should focus on what is in our control. However, what I personally see as an issue is the ideological part, or, to put it more gently, the fact that certain communities want to be loud about their activities and shove it into other people's faces. If we just mind our own business, why should an LGBT flag hand next to a national flag on a university campus? Who actually needs that? Sure, I could mind my own business and not be concerned about it, but then again, why? I would question the necessity of such behaviour. The said communities and groups demand to be accepted. They want to dictate the rules of behaviour and discourse in academia and news. That surely is ideological.
To say it's the "primary purpose" is just to say that's what the sexual organs, sexual dimorphism, etc. are for.
They're not suitable for playing golf, reading the daily newspaper or calculating the distance to the moon, for example. But reproduction? Yeah, the sexual organs, the bodies built around them, the social structures built around those - these things do that very well.
Now that being said, as with other functions established by nature, once they exist, they can be gerrymandered to other uses, that's true. (e.g. once we have a capacity for suffering that evolved so we would avoid injury, we can be tortured to extract information; once we have big brains that can automatically compute the ballistic trajectories of rocks and spears, we can design aeroplanes, etc., etc.)
The situation with sexual pleasure is a bit analogous to sugar craving: we have the inbulit preference for sweet things, inculcated into us by nature because sweet things were relatively rare but high value; because of that, we get into trouble when sweets and cakes are cheap and abundant. Similarly, nature has made sex one of the most pleasurable experiences possible to us, but we get into a psychological tizzy when, instead of having to like or lump the array of average-looking potential partners on offer in our local tribe, we have visually displayed before us constantly the pick of the planet's sexual magnets, men and women who most of us will never have a hope in hell of cajoling into bed.
Or again, sex is an intense craving partly because of the attrition rate in the state of nature - of babies, of infants, children and adults. So even if people fucked like rabbits, only a very few of the products of that activity would have survived through to functional adulthood to contribute to the security and prosperity of the tribe (and therefore, with the tiresome circularity characteristic of natural patterns, to the tribe's reproduction). But as civilization progresses, even if it progresses to, say, the stage of early agriculture, that "natural" degree of constant casual fucking is no longer needed, in fact it's a liability (it would return us to the Malthusian constraints that the intensity of sexual desire was born in - too many mouths, not enough food, not enough provision or space for the mouths, no place for them).
As I'm fond of saying: sex is not a toy, it's a nuclear bomb. The "accidental" product of a sexual liaison isn't just something you can throw away, there has to be some place prepared for it (otherwise you're being cruel to something for the sake of your own pleasure). Formerly this was understood, that's why sex was hedged about with taboos - and even that didn't work all that well. But it worked somewhat. The great mistake was the 1960s and the "sexual revolution." Now everyone thinks that sex is a toy, and that sexual pleasure is a value in itself.
Anyway, you can't say a thing is "for" a thing that's just ancillary to the thing it's for. If it's for anything, it's for the original thing, and the other thing is also for the original thing, even if it can take on a life of its own.
If you read my previous posts more carefully, you'll notice that I didn't particularly care nor put much attention to the transgender people or the feminists until the later comes knocking on my door spouting stupidities and the former insulting me on the internet. No one would dedicate time to talk about a subject they aren't concerned about or doesn't affect them in any way. I'll be pretty stupid and hateful if I despised those people for no reason what so ever.
Most of your speech is confusing, to be honest. I understand this is a philosophical forum but speaking like that doesn't help much on selling your point and argument. For the few parts that I suppose I understood, I'll answer.
When you reach an orgasm, it produces dopamine. Dopamine is in a way the motivator of the body, its what makes you wake up to go to work, to go eat something or to accomplish a particular goal. Dopamine. When you reach an orgasm, it produces over 200% over the average dopamine your body contains on a daily basis. Drugs do the same by stimulating your brain and producing over 300%, although the difference between those two is that the body's dopamine level get gradually lower over time so that 200% stay there for a few hours at least while with drugs the 300% levels of dopamine stay there for only a few minutes at best. That's why it's so addictive.
That's where the thirst for pleasure comes from. And the brain always wants some more of it.
Pleasure doesn't keep parents together as you say, if they so wished to, they can have sexual pleasure with another person. What's really keeping them together, that's some other chemicals entering into play that I'm not going to go into details on but basically those chemicals aren't produced as much after they birthed a child or more, its because the body deemed its initial purpose of perpetuating the human species as done. That means divorce rates go up after having children, yes.
Then it would seem what you found offensive was the fact they knocked on your door saying things you thought stupid, and insulted you on the internet, not the fact they were transgender or feminist. Why bring up gender ideology, or feminism in that case?
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001180.htm
(fwiw, surgery is the final stage of transition the hrt is more important).
The obvious argument behind transsexualism is that the brain is intersex. see causes of intersexuality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality#Biological_factors Gender dysphoria is a diagnosable condition and there are bio markers involved.
Quoting Terran Imperium
Seems this is also disputed: https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943
You have way to many false premises for me even to begin.
You fatalistic, abject muppet!
Faith is all you have!
You are in bad faith
What a truth you have ascertained!
...
That is the whole issue, encapsulated. :up: :smile: Whatever gender I identify as, it does you no harm, so please respect my preference and address me as I ask. I'll do the same for you. There. Sorted. :up:
Ah. So if we merely treat them as we would anyone else, we encourage them. Yes, that makes sense.
Here is the thing since you seem incapable of understanding the context of my words. I spoke in my first post why I was insulted on the internet in the first place. It revolves around the transgender and the feminist movement. I started this discussion to understand them better and lay out my way of thinking and my view on them if you read my first posts, you will see what I am talking about.
Running around the pot doesn't help your case, here.
Quoting Blue Lux
Quoting Blue Lux
Quoting Blue Lux
Quoting Blue Lux
I will not answer someone who doesn't seem capable of formulating a proper argument. I think if you reword it more politely and in a way everyone can understand, people then might consider you words. Otherwise, you are just making a fool out of yourself.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Yes, it is harmful when you are treating someone with mental disillusions, normally, or in a more extreme example, treating a murderer, normally. Its a denial of the reality in front of them. Certainly when they demand of people to use previously unknown pronouns for their unique person. What a level of pretentiousness and ego. I will not change my language to fit someone's delusional world nor agree with their political view.
Its as if people are questioning the fact they are born in X year instead of Y year. If people are really seriously questioning something like that, something is wrong with them. That is the same thing for people questioning why were they born as a male/female and explicitly wanting to change it. You can't, you can only pretend to. You were born in X year but you can pretend you were born in Y year, you were born as a male but you can pretend you are now female, cool but don't go and demand of people to agree with your delusions.
So what if they are offended if I call someone a 'he' instead of a 'she' or from some alien pronoun like 'zer'. Is that person going to implode or something? Getting offended by something or someone say is a fact of life that will always happen somehow. If you are happy in your own little world don't go bothering other people with it.
Here is my final say on the matter. Changing your gender is your business. Trying to implement a new way of speech is unacceptable. My problem lies with the fact that people want me to be punished for not using the lingo they demand I use. That is fascism, that is control over another's speech.?
A quote that fits this subject.
"We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone." - From George Orwell's 1984?.
This is your post I was responding to. I can understand being annoyed by people who, uninvited, knock on your door to declaim something or another, or who insult you on the Internet. So, I suggested that's what you found objectionable, not the fact they're transgender or feminist. But, your last response to me was to the effect that my suggestion was inaccurate. If that's the case, though, it would seem we may infer that you do, indeed, find it objectionable that people are transgender or feminist.
That's unfortunate, but it's not their problem, nor should you make it a problem for them.
What I meant is, the initial subject is as to why they come knocking at my door and as to why I was insulted in the first place. It all comes down back to feminism and transgenderism and their ideologies which I don't particularly agree with and their intrusive nature when I didn't ask for it in those cases.
I understand if its just a misunderstanding, it happens sometimes but I think I layed out pretty much what I meant in my opening post and the ones following after it.
It is a problem from my point of view but I won't go whining about it nor crying out in the roof of my house like they do. There is a common rule among doctors is that you can't force a treatment down a patient's throat. The patient has the right to refuse to be treated and so are the transgender people and the feminists. There is a reason they are around on the news everywhere. Because they can't stop making a problem out of everything and it's annoying the hell out of me and everyone generally.
If we followed common sense, those people should already be in mental hospitals to be treated for their mental illness. You can't pretend to be something when you aren't, that's just lying to yourself, wait a few hundred years until we can somehow change our biological sex at will then you can start whining that people are certainly using the wrong pronoun when talking to you.
That is obviously not possible. You are either female or male. You can't be something in between or a third weird gender, especially as we humans are a mammalian species. There are only two genders. Its a fact that cannot change.
If you look around I talked in one of my posts about how gender and sex were perfectly interchangeable until transgender people came along and separated the definitions. Sex now refer to your biological sexual organs and gender is a social construct since it determine whenever you are being feminine or masculine. I don't really mind this change, its just doesn't really affect me nor my everyday life in anyway.
I am more concerned about the points I layed out in the posts above.
Speak for yourself. The vast majority of people I know get a lot more annoyed by ignorant bigots like you who like to pretend to have a psychology degree, just so they can display your dislike.
Sure. Not everyone's gender identity falls strictly within masculine and feminine domains. Arguments against this are supposed to be what?Quoting Terran Imperium
Dictionaries are not good sources for evolving definitions nor technical definitions, of which our current understanding of gender and related issues falls into both camps. And you are proving this point perfectly. Being male or female does not have much to do with the issue at hand (hence the inadequacy of citing Cambridge and Oxford). Rather, the issue is on gender and gender identity.
Gender refers to secondary sexual characteristics, not primary ones like your biological sex. But since gender isn't a simple matter of chromosomes and sex organs, but a covers social roles, dress, physical attribute characterizations (e.g. looking masculine), it comes in degrees. It's not a binary because there's no clear cutoff point, it ranges from highly masculine attributes, to sort of masculine ones, to a more ambiguous territory (non-binary) and over into the feminine side. I mean, we often say young males ought to play with "boy toys" and girls with "girl toys", but those toys don't have sexual parts at all. They're just objects which model secondary sexual characteristics and represent common dress for the represented gender. Gender is not sex, this distinction is clearly made (if unconsciously) even in everyday speech.
Gender identity involves ones internal view of their gender. Like, I think of myself as a man. I intentionally adopt usual masculine dress, act "manly" (also like a dork), etc. But this is not true of everyone. Many people have a mismatch here, where their internal sense does not map onto what society says they're supposed to look and be like. Many transgender people have this dysphoria, though some non-trans people have it temporarily (some kids, I think; it goes away for many people).
To treat this as a simple issue, well, your initial post makes it clear you don't understand the basics of the topic at hand. You may have been insulted by whoever (I don't care honestly), but you are probably partly to blame if you acted as you did in your OP. Calling transgender people delusional, calling people you disagree with delusional, using dictionary definitions over the definitions used in academia. These do not endear you to anyone, it would piss me off if this was how you started your other discussion because it doesn't even meet the minimum of niceties one expects in discussions.
That reveals a rather striking lack of imagination. You could have 17 genders if all of them had a different historical basic function toward reproduction and gestation. There is absolutely nothing which demands that it gender be binary, other then the convenience and usefulness of it being so.
Of course you can. The patient may not like it, it may not be legal, it's very bad manners, but it is definitely possible.
Quoting Terran Imperium
Of course you can. Anyone can "pretend" anything. The audience may not believe the fakery, the fakery may not be performed very well, and one may not be rewarded for one's efforts, but it is possible.
(Old joke: Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics live in them; psychiatrists collect the rent. In the case of sexual identity, gender clinics are collecting the rent.)
One of the phenomena we are confronted with a lot these days is excessive sensitivity to real or imagined slights, an epidemic of narcissism, and extremely inflexible ideology. So you have people whose ideology (feminism, just one of several) is very reactive. They are always set to go off when stepped on (like land mines), and their bellyaching is amplified in an echo chamber.
Of course it's possible for a man to imagine he is a woman, and visa versa. If they are good actors, he can fake it convincingly. Ditto for women who imagine they are men. I say, "Go right ahead. Imagine what you want, and if you can pull it off, you can act as if your fantasies are real. If you can't, people will just laugh at you. If you are an interesting person (whatever else you are) I'll be polite--I might even want to be your friend. What I won't do is join the show. I'm not going to pretend that you are actually a woman. If you have a penis, testicles, beard, xy chromosomes, and so on--all in working order, you can go to a chop shop and get remodeled, take estrogen, get your breasts enlarged, change your hair, wardrobe, etc. and you may look just like a woman. But to me you are still a man, (and visa versa if you are a woman imagining herself to be a man).
Where have I heard this song and dance from before?
Why not? It is a cliche, stereotype. Gender is socially produced and constructed. A construction of new gendered orientation(s) has become a powerful vector of individualization and self-fulfillment. It would be interesting to explore what forces are actually involved in this process.
It wasn't how I started the discussion, it wasn't even the main subject of our discussion and I barely mentioned it in a few words in 300 words long post, they only nitpicked that and started a heated debate that I didn't want anything in.
A woman can behave with a manly attitude, that's what people call a tomboy. Do you know the difference between a tomboy and a transgender man? I think you understand what I mean here. I won't go into detail but you are blurring the line between a woman with a bit of a manly personality with someone who is pretending and trying to make other people agree in the fact she is a man. That is unacceptable and it is what I was talking about
Quoting Akanthinos
Look, you can't. It's a biological reality. There aren't 17 genders, It's a fact that you can't change, it's how humanity is built and more than a few species actually.
Quoting Bitter Crank
That's just jumping around the context of my words.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Same here. Of course, my choice of word might have been poor. Although as I said the context of my words were pretty clear about that.
Quoting Bitter Crank
This is something I agree with completely and it's an opinion I support.
As I said earlier, I'm not one of the best persons around to talk to people, I prefer to be objective and logical generally which make an 'inhuman cold bitch' to most people, apparently. Its unfortunate but I can't please everyone and act nicely as in lying to them. Saying the truth might be harsh or rude sometimes but its just the truth, a fact. It doesn't care about your feelings and I certainly don't care either if you are trying to dispute it by your feelings.
Bloody christ you are arguing from ignorance. Intersex and androginy are real things.
Those are what you call an exception. People with DSD or hermaphrodite persons does not constitute a third sex. You do not use exceptions as a generalization. It's a genetical deficiency, you do not use an illness as a general truth.
Calling me an ignorant without providing a sufficient argument doesn't sell your point and only undermine it actually. I talked about this earlier if you had bothered to read a three pages long thread. Which is not that long by the way, if you want to participate in a discussion, you should read all the arguments and debate that was provided and discussed earlier. Otherwise, you are making a fool out of yourself.
I didn't talk about attitudes or personality. I brought up more tangible things: how people dress according to how their society deems appropriate for their gender (colors and style, for example), bodily features that are usually associated with a particular biological sex but aren't exclusive to it, the kind of norms (especially social) we apply to particular genders.
The tomboy comparison isn't sufficient here. I've a transwoman whose a friend of mine who's a music professor. She used to tell me how she knew she was different since she was a kid for various reasons: she preferred to play with "girl toys", she would take every opportunity to dress and act like a woman, and had visceral reactions to depictions of herself in typically male dress and such. She wasn't delusional, she had (and still has, if less so) gender dysphoria. She wasn't delusional, it's just her gender identity does not match what is expected from her sex.
Short of presupposing that she is inherently wrong for being the way she is, I don't see what the argument is here. Perhaps some people go too far in their views about sex and gender. I don't know, I don't personally have a great deal of interest in it. But the core of it seems extremely plausible unless we make arbitrary moral assumptions and completely disregard people's experience despite hat experience playing a crucial role in how they view and act with respect to the gender they have.
Thank you since you provided me an actual argument here. The thing is my point still apply here if I'm wearing Jordans, it doesn't mean I'm telling people I am male! It's just a fashion preference.
Quoting MindForged
I apologize in advance if I am offending you or your friend in the following words.
I don't think I can change your opinion on whenever transgenderism is delusional or not. I have nothing against your friend as long as he does not go force people to agree with his thinking or his way pronouns should work. I hear often the argument that it is the 'evolution' of language. It is not. That is the imposition of language.
I am aspiring to be a doctor and my view is set upon reality, upon science. To me, transgender people are delusional, not everyone will agree with me, of course, but objectively with the behavior that I saw with my eyes, the numerous ones in social media. They are delusional. I did not meet your friend nor did I talk to him, and I can't make an objective statement on him if I didn't see him. All of the behaviors that feminists and transgender people exhibited pointed to such a decision on my view on them. If he exhibits the same behavior, then he may be delusional, otherwise its just a harmless fantasy.
Shoes are less contentious. If you were a man and wore dresses the situation would be much different.
It is indeed. Its a common double standard in favor of women, unfortunately. Another example is, old women, oiling up a handsome young muscled man is good but old men oiling up a hot and fit young woman is creepy. I noticed that even in my mind it sounded creepy while I thought the former one is not but when you compare them... It's different and it change your perspective, it makes you take a step back and think about it for a second. It actually gives me chills by how societal biases affect my way of thinking on a day to day basis even when I'm considering myself to be an objective and logical person.
But that's another issue on its own that is not related to the main subject here. Not related in any relevant way to transgenderism at least. Maybe to feminism but I noticed that the subject was more focused on transgenderism than feminism, actually.
and
Quoting Terran Imperium
I was just being flippant there. Sorry.
Quoting MindForged
Please note: I wasn't suggesting at all that trans people should be treated badly. What I said was that I didn't want to become part of their performance of what they imagined themselves to be. Other people can do that if they want.
I've known quite a few transsexuals over the last 45 years. Most of them were likable people, some were charming, some were a pain in the neck. They all had an array of talents and abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Some of them I count as friends.
FaceFuck lists(ed) 58 gender options (below) from which to choose. Most of these look kind of redundant to me, but I am sure there are partisans ready to defend to their death the critical difference between being a cis male and a cis man, between gender fluid and gender juice. My growing antipathy to transsexualism as a movement is derived much more from these latter day gender jockeys, who probably don't know their asses from their elbows, than the previous generation of transsexuals who just wanted to be a woman instead of a man.
FuckFace's list
Agender
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis boom bah humbug
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
That something is a statistical anomaly (or seems to be) has not bearing on wether or not its relevant to the subject at hand. If there is a third, fourth and fifth gender, and that each totals only 0.0001% of the living population, you don't get to erase them from existence simply because you dislike SJWs on the internet.
That you describe intersex people as "ill" or "deficient" is pretty telling. Your lack of empathy and sophistication should in itself be considered a deficiency and an illness.
How could you even conceivably be part of the "performance"? You, as an individual with little to no power to affect large social change, would at most be asked to use a preferred pronoun and slightly reword the occasional sentence to reflect that. In 99% of cases this will be to use him/her/them. People often bitch and moan about "But I saw xer, xem, or some other ridiculous thing on Tumblr (the horror!)." And to them I say oh good for you, you found someone using a stupid term that will be here and gone in a month before they opt to using something gender neutral like "them". Time tends to quickly weed these out because they are not useful and are cumbersome. There's an exponentially larger cottage industry around complaining about isolated, temporary silliness than there are people doing the silly things.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, many of them are redundant. You clearly recognize this, and they are not available any longer from what you said so it's much ado about nothing (the option for the native American "two spirit back is completely useless tbf). And that they have sex and gender options available makes it even sillier. "Cis male" and "cisgender male" are the same thing so this almost looks fake, but I'm assuming you copy/pasted what was actually done.
Quoting Terran Imperium
A few questions: Are you calling them delusional in their transgender-ism or in their support of the concept of gender through their transgender-ism? Sex and gender are not the same thing. When they reference their preferred pronouns they are asking (not enforcing) that you pay attention to their gender not their sex. That is why they are transgender, not transsexual.
I will ignore you from now on as you seem incapable of formulating a proper argument and is trying to find an opportunity to politely call me in more sophisticated words, ignorant and cold. Good try, better than the last one at least.
Quoting yatagarasu
That is running around the question in the first place, most transgender people run through a few surgeries to grow breasts and other such female traits in the case of a transgender woman. In fact most transgender people that I met tell me that there is no difference between gender and sex and that thinking otherwise is me adhering to this:
[i][b]"Which is basically biological essentialism, a wonderful set of beliefs possessed off by many groups, of which one of note is the Trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
You don't want to be confused for a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist."[/b][/i]
Apparently. Now I didn't even know there was that many types of feminists and its just giving me a headache while thinking about it. And I don't want to be called a feminist, oh hell no.
My opinion on them is that they are delusional but I won't go in the streets to drag them to mental hospitals. My problem comes from those that demand of people to accept their ideologies and name them by their incorrect pronoun or a new martian pronoun or something. Nowadays, a transgender woman can call abuse for using the 'wrong' pronoun.
I don't agree with the way they are thinking they can mold the current definition of gender which is how you behave, your clothes and your physical appearance. It doesn't change their facial structure which is masculine and I obviously have the impulse to use 'he' instead of 'she'. Growing longer hair, shaving your leg hair doesn't make you a woman in my book. While now gender and sex are two different things, they still depend mainly on each other. The fact that you may have male genitalia or female ones affect your physical appearance more than you can imagine. In fact most of them, they are so fake and underwent so many surgeries, it hurts on the eyes to look at them sometimes.
I am so glad that transgenderism is mostly limited to the English countries, I really had a bad experience going there because of the few transgender people and feminists that I met there and their talk about pronouns.
A bit of linguistic talk. In my country, France, we obviously speak French and there isn't in our language a gender-neutral pronoun. 'il' means 'he', 'elle' means 'she'. When we use the plural as its 'ils' or 'elles'. And if that group of people we are talking about is made out of men and women, we just revert back to the standard 'ils'. And our adjectives are so gender-based on a binary system that if you wanted to change that, you'll have to take down the whole French language and start it from anew.
In fact, we have 'L'Académie Française' which is an institution founded in 1634, their goal is to normalize and perfect the French language. They are the guys who decide what gets in a french dictionary or not, and they are the ones who can decide whenever or not a word or verb or anything really can be considered 'French' officially.
* A fine exemple of a slippery-slope fallacy.
Et bordel de merde, si tes capable de comprendre qu'une table est au feminin en langue de Voltaire, tu devrais pas avoir trop de misere avec l'idee d'appeler un mec 'elle'.
For those cursed with a lack of frogspeak, this translate to 'and bordello of crap, if you can learn to use the feminine for a table, in french, you should be able to wrap your head around the idea of calling a man 'she' '.
Il me semble que vous etes incapable de comprendre la langue française. Ce que vous etes en train de me demander, en comparaison est d'utiliser le pronon masculin pour une table. 'le table' 'un table'. Cela n'a absolument aucun sense! Un homme est un homme, et une femme est une femme. C'est aussi simple que ça! Je ne vais pas utiliser le pronon féminin 'elle' pour un homme.
Et par rapport aux autres? Ceux qui se considère non-binaire? On utilise quel pronon? Faut comprendre a quel point vous etes entrain d'écrire des stupidités qui franchement me remplit de stupéfaction.
---------------------
It seems to me that you are unable to understand the French language. What you are asking me in comparison is to use the male pronoun for a table, 'une table' is the correct one, not 'un table'. It has absolutely no sense! A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. It's that simple! I will not use the pronoun 'elle' for a man.
And compared to others? Those who consider themselves non-binary? Which pronoun should be used? You have to understand that the stupidities that you are writing are amazing me to a point I can't describe.
What you are doing is engaging the the unequal treatment of others by implying that a certain group has special privileges where their claims can't be questioned yet others' claims can. I can imagine what you would say if a Christian said thet their claims can't be questioned and you have to treat them as if their claims are true. Hypocrisy. At least I'm being consistent.
Per Google Translate: "And shit hell, if you can understand that a table is female in Voltaire, you should not have too much misery with the idea of ??calling a guy 'her'."
L'Académie Française needs to have a tête à tête with Monsieurs Sergey Brin and Larry Page (they own about half of Google).
I'll volunteer to head up the Anglo Saxon Vocabulary Recovery Program.
Although the title of the video is untasteful, the man talking there Ben Shapiro lay out my view perfectly. I was looking on the internet for more information and I stumbled upon it. I don't know if it will convince you and I don't particularly care, but Mister Shapiro there made interesting points and actually explained things better than I ever could. I didn't know this man until now but he seems like a rational logical man from this video that I just saw. Its someone I would like to meet and expect an interesting eye-opening discussion in the end.
Quoting Bitter Crank
That would be interesting to see actually. If I could, its something that I'll support, the study and recovery of the English language in an official institute would be beneficial to it as a whole. And it will be less likely for random people running around in the streets to add previously unknown pronouns to the language or change the foundations its based on entirely.
Please review feminist literature and then form your opinion on the idea of gender. Gender is not being "redefined", it is/was already defined but you don't want to accept the common definition. How is that being open minded? Physicality is not necessarily male any more than being prim and proper is intrinsically female. That is the core of many of the movements that define the norms we see as gender(s). Throughout most of history sex and gender have fit like a glove, but by definition they do not have to, and we have hit that moment in history. It is no longer as necessary to be physically fit and able to lift 100 kg as a man to survive, and it is no longer necessary to hold onto certain stereotypical ways women acted, as the end all be all. That is why the idea of gender exists, to delineate between what is physical (sex), and what is not (gender).
Your point about language is very interesting but that doesn't disprove the validity of their claims. It will be interesting to see a possible work around for this. In many other languages, my native tongue, Serbo-Croatian, we would have similar issues. But many others, English, the Sino group of languages, (among others) , don't have this issue.
I agree that it would be ludicrous to punish people for not referring to you in a specific way and would fight that. BUT, I would not fight someone kindly asking for me to refer to them a specific way. Then it is up to me to validate their request or not. Just like how I could refuse to call you the male pronouns (I'm assuming your male XD).
Transgender individuals making claims about what the differences between gender and sex are doesn't make their opinion any more or less valid/correct. They are not the same. If they were they would not have different names to describe the exact same thing.
I've said nothing of special privileges. If for some reason you feel the need to engage in diatribes regarding transgenderism (if that's the word), as it seems you do, I don't think transgenders have any special claim of any kind related to your compulsion. I think pontificating on the subject is peculiar and needless, true, and that absent harm to others they should be treated the same as anyone else, but I don't think I've said any more than that.
You think the body has a mind of its own, a nonconscious one that dictates our desires and our motivations, interests and relations, and that there is a set, absolute purpose of existence, to reproduce? And so gay people are thus inauthentic and illegitimate? Oh wait? Perhaps they have a disorder?
People can define themselves to be whatever the hell they want. If it is not measurably, negatively affecting them then it cannot be said to be a disorder. There is no absolute purpose of human life. Meaning is given to life by living it, not by being some passive object to chemicals.
This form of thinking is an utter disgrace to human intelligence.
Rofl
Have you ever personally been involved with someone who is transgendered? Have you ever been friends with a trans person?
"You learn more about someone in an hour of play than in years of conversation."
Plato
You think your little puny knowledge can determine the facts. Oh I'd love to uncover the metaphysics of your epistemology. Oh wouldn't that be the only legitimate fact regarding your complete dismissal of humanity for what... Let me guess...
Who are you to say what someone else is. It is not as much someone saying that they are something as much as they are saying that they are not something. So, according to your abject epistemology, my homosexuality is an illusion and I am actually hererosexual, which has become obfuscated by my mental illness, which is a mental illness because it does not conform to the average everydayness of the they, you disgusting idle talker. 'Write with your blood!' (Nietzsche). You write with nothing!
Words themselves are gendered. In German tree is masculine but plant is feminine.
Gender itself is an arbitrary demarcation of knowledge, which is at base the equating of the different. METAPHOR.
The only truth is in our own identifications and personalities. Being trans is not that chaotic, like say dissociative personality disorder or PTSD (which I have) or catatonic schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder or bipolar disorder or BPD or the list goes on. You are hoping it is a disorder because it does not conform with the manner in which you think that you know... But it seems you have already rejected human authenticity for the authenticity of the objective of... Hmmm... God! That absolute truth that tells us what is right and wrong! And what our purpose is!
That is the delusion.
You say you want to be a doctor? Then why don't you actually help people. No psychiatrist today will tell you, if you say you are trans, that you are not transgendered!
My father is a surgeon. I know what it takes to be a doctor, and it is not this form of conceptual nihilism. With this you will never have the strength to get through medical school, much less residency and internships.
Idle talk at its finest
Honestly, that Google translation is really good. It cut out 'tongue' from Voltaire's tongue, which makes it silly, but still, its not like you wouldnt understand 'speaking in Voltaire' as meaning french, just like youd understand 'speaking in Shakespear' as meaning english...
As for not understanding my mother tongue, which is kinda fucking funny when you think that I'm a francophone living in a english country only because the French decided to hightail it after a single battle lost, really, what the hell is so precious about the current gender assignation of nouns, that you cant even wrap your head around switching them around? The noun of a dolphin is masculine, that of a table is feminine, whoops suddenly its reversed. Okay it'll sound bad to the ear for a while, but otherwise nothing is lost. Gender is already such an abstract, the Immortals had no problems turning it into a simple linguistic exercise. Its about nouns, not reality. If someone asks you to name them something outrageous, then you get to tell them that. But if 'outrageous' to you is simply accomodating someone because he felt his/her sexual identity wasnt conform to binary norms, then that makes you even worse then a bully. At least the bully knows he's going out of his way to be a pain in the ass of his victims. Bigots do it as easily by simply formulating an opinion.
I will readily grant that a determined person can pull this off, and in many settings can pass. Several times I've witnessed the transformation over time as a sows ear was transitioned into a silk purse. How about a secular Jewish woman transitioning into an ultra-orthodox Jewish male? That change involved moving a lot of mental furniture. My contention is that the individual is INVENTING a new persona. I don't have anything against people inventing new personas for themselves, either. (There are people I wish to hell would find a new persona.) What I object to is the claim that their new persona reflects a biological reality, that they were really the opposite gender all along, and now they are the right one.
No. Biologically, they are pretty much the same body and mind they were before the transition. (How could it be otherwise?) They may have experienced a metanoia -- new life -- (butterfly analogy) and good for them. Excuse me for seeing in them the same worm they were before they sewed on wings.
I might not believe a 45 year old guy is entirely on the level who announces that he is transgender and is going to become a woman. But, you know, he is 45 years old. Old enough to take care of himself, herself, whatever. I find it quite unsatisfactory when young people, children in elementary school, early adolescents just starting puberty, 18 year olds... make the same announcement. This strikes me, frankly, as a social infection.
I suspect that these claims are made under parental influence (in the case of very young children) or because it seems like a solution to "the difficult matter of one's persona -- who the hell am I?" I was gay and confused about my identity for years. I'm glad that I was not pushed into an early and active gay identity, or that "transsexual" or "Transgender" had even been heard of. i've never once thought I was trans in any way, but these days it might be suggested. Peers might encourage it. In the 1950s, of course, such a thing was out of the question.
Human beings operate many delusional systems. Look at religion. I understand that people really and truly believe that God looks after them. I used to subscribe to that delusion too. Once one understands religions as a delusional system, one can't then grant it reality. The same applies to trans-issues. Once one sees it as invention and delusion, one can't credit it with being reality.
You are simply wrong. I have a best friend who knew he was trans since a very young age, and was afraid his parents would reject him, which is the reason he held it in for so long. I met him as 'Rachel' and he had long black hair that covered his eyes and he kept to himself at school and was extremely shy.
He is Ryan now. Everyone knows him as Ryan. All of our old friends know him as Ryan. He is Ryan. He has short hair and is so much happier and outgoing being who he is.
You are wrong.
He didn't know being trans was a thing.
Adults should listen to the concerns children have about themselves, including depression, gender identity, etc.
It is because you are not considering what I am saying at all nor the others as well.
Quoting Blue Lux
Then I will not consider your words as well. If you are incapable of being respectful while discussing then I don't see why I should even bother answering you right now and not just outright ignoring you. It is a simple courtesy, if you can't do so, I will not as well. You can't seems to understand what a debate is, really.
And please, avoid double posting or in your case successive multiple posts. Why can't you put them all in one post?
Quoting Akanthinos
Of course, something is lost. The integrity of a language. You do not get to change the rules of a language because it hurts your feelings, the world won't bend itself over because it hurts your feelings. So what? It's something that everyone experience and I don't see people making manifestations in the streets or asking people to change two thousand years of the history of a language just because. At some point, as I said, it is not the evolution of language that you or others are doing, its the imposition of language. It's completely two different things.
Now, tell me. Why would I accommodate them to fit their own little world? A world filled with self-delusion and lies. You are removing my freedom of speech by compelling me to call someone by what they aren't. Don't go pulling that old argument if someone wants to be called Jake but they aren't named Jake and its bullying if you do otherwise. That's completely two different things, the name Jake doesn't refer to a biological reality/physical appearance nor does it make me adhere to a particular political view because somehow I should. Really.
So what if I don't call them a 'he' or a 'she' or a 'zer'? Do I care if you feel offended because I assumed your gender? No, I don't. Nor will I change my view on the world because it doesn't adhere to your own. At least my view is based on facts, a reality that everyone can understand in time. Are you going to remove my right to have an opinion too then? Where would it stop if transgenderism starts forcing other people to call them 'zer'?
Quoting yatagarasu
I am sorry but I don't understand the point you are laying out here. Gender is based as much on your behavior and clothes as it is on your physical appearance. In fact, the brain process first the physical appearance to determine whenever or not you can call the person in front of you she or he. Then the rest comes after.
The sex refers to your genitalia, I don't think anyone goes around the streets checking everyone's nether area to tell whenever or not they are male or female, that's where the physical appearance enters in play, as I said.
Perhaps; perhaps not.
I am glad your friend is happier as Ryan than he was as Rachel. I've read stories about young people like Rachel/Ryan (various ages) and as I mentioned, I've known a number of transsexuals; maybe a dozen since the 1970s--three quite well. I take their perceived and expressed problems seriously, and I respect them as persons. But this isn't about any particular person. It's about a phenomena which has gradually become increasingly visible over the last 60 to 70 years in various countries around the world.
I started out taking the explanations of trans persons at face value, and did so for oh...40 years, at least. It has only been recently that I have started questioning the stated rationale, or etiology of transsexual/transgenderism. Is it organic? Is it caused by the same sort of at-present-unknown-prenatal-or-genetic-conditions that causes sexual orientation?
Or is it caused more by the prompting of social cues? You know, POMO theory says that sexuality and gender are constructed. There's nothing biological about it the POMO camp says. Is the trans movement socially constructed? Does it come out of social views about gendered behavior? Is transsexual/transgenderism a consequence of profound cultural change?
I don't have a dog in this fight (I'm not trans) but I am perplexed, and I don't believe the phenomena has been adequately explained.
Quoting Maw
Of course. But that doesn't mean that everything children say about how they feel amounts to good diagnosis.
Sure. But it's a better starting point than assuming the claim is made under parental influence.
How does a man even know "what is like" to be a woman to make the claim that they are really a woman in a man's body and vice versa?
Again (I need to repeat myself because you seem a bit thick-headed) I am not questioning their rights. I am questioning their claims.
Quoting Terran Imperium
Gender: the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).
Sex: either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
Again, look over literature regarding gender. They are different things, shown by the bolded text. The brain processing physical appearances first doesn't mean they are the same thing. It is how I can be a male (sexually) and dress/act like a women (gender). So I am taking on the physical role of a man, while taking on the social/cultural role of a women. This cannot be that confusing.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I have a good friend that considers himself transgender. I was always wondering how to ask him about those feelings without it coming off as derogatory. It feels like it would be taboo to question this, as it seems any questioning about their "feelings" (for lack of better word) is a step towards non-acceptance (bigotry).
It seems to me that making a distinction between gender and sex the way you did is part of the problem and creates the confusion.
It definitely does drastically effect the roles we play/played but those roles are much more fungible at this point. They may not have been before, but they are definitely more fluid now.
It makes it more confusing but at the same time more precise. It lets us explain discrepancies in individuals roles or behavior. What other way would you differentiate sexuality (physical), from everything else (cultural/social)? Without that extra dimension you don't have a way to describe discrepancies in different cultures that also share the same biological sexes.
True enough... That reflects my feelings towards asking him. I'm concerned he'll think I'm invalidating him. What if they don't know the answers? That would be troublesome for their psyche and could cause the volatile reaction I'm so worried about.
They do have a drastic effect(all human events, actually, given that any human reposes involves their body reacting), just not the sort of of essentialist, reduction to singular meaning of gender behaviour or social value effect some people like to imagine. Gender and sex constructionists are well aware of the presence and effects of bodies. They are not interested in denying our bodies are our bodies.
Instead, they are drawing out the distinction between bodies and meanings/categories of sex and gender. A body is not a category of sex. A body is not a category of gender. Bodies are what they are no matter the category they are sorted. They are defined independently of any sex or gender categorisation.
In the respect, the sex/gender split is rather unhelpful. Not because there isn't a difference between sex categories and gender categories, but in the distinction asserts that gender is "constructed" while sex is supposedly immutable aspect of the body itself.
The sex/gender split is still caught in confusion of the body with categories into which bodies area placed. It doesn't recognise sex isn't the body at all.
I think the act of "questioning" us dubious itself because it has no aim knowledge. The challenge of "How do you know you are right?" only has cutting down the idea a person you are talking about in mind. It ignores responsibility to understand and respect what is true. Everyone is assumed to not be saying anything of value (except of course oneself) by default. Profoundly disrespectful of anyone challenged, for it begins in an assumption no-one understands what they are talking about.
That's before we even get to the obviously discriminatory usage of such "challenges" only being put forward to devalue and reject the experiences of minority groups. You don't see people going about "challenging" the cisgender man over whether his claim to be a man can be trusted.
I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. Even if I think sex is immutable I'm obviously not denying "bodies are what they are", nor am I saying that "sex is the body".
Rather, I'm taking the view that there is an type of object called "body". This type of object, when instantiated in the world (e.g. myself), has among its properties "sex" which I will assume does not change since it's based on concrete properties that do not vary with time nor interpretation (e.g. the genetic capacity to bear children, so infertility isn't relevant). This has no similarity to your objections to those saying sex is immutable and non-constructed. Sex is, let's suppose, a property that human bodies have. No one is saying bodies are identical to the sex they bear as a property.
Am I misunderstanding you?
I wasn't thinking you were denying bodies are what they are (though you might do so if I was to talk about some intersex bodies).
My point the idea of sex you are using claims bodies are more than bodies. If I take a body, let's say one with XX chromosomes, a womb, breasts, a vagina, etc., your position proclaims it must belong to the sex category/sex identity of "female." It is subsuming our linguistical/conceptual/social practice of "female sex" into the body itself. You say such a body must be "female" when such a categorisation is not actually given in the existence of body.
A body with XX chromosomes, a womb, breasts, a vagina, etc. might be categorised any number of ways. We might have such a body and not refer to it be a sex at all. We might categorise such a body as "male ". The body itself doesn't pose a meaning of sex itself. It will be a Y chromosomes, a womb, breasts, a vagina, etc., not matter which category we place it in.
A body being present doesn't suppose anything "male" or "female."
This is why people using your categories have to say: Well, that body is definitely female because XZY...". If the present of a body did suppose sex, we wouldn't have to suppose an extra understanding over the body we already know. I would be able to think: "There's a body with XX chromosomes, a womb, breasts, a vagina, etc." and understand them "female" without engaging with sex as a distinction.
Yet, sex is a distinction. It means something distinct to "there is a body with...". Sex is not contained within the body. It always remains a seperate concept/meaning. The step of placing the body in the extra meaning of "sex" has to be taken.
I am sorry but you are merely playing with words there. Let's say we are talking from our perception of a door. Does that mean a door is not really a door but its a concept we impose on the object? If you understand what I mean. Sex refers to your genitalia. I don't think its that hard to understand. The split between the two definitions gender/sex is definitely not helpful as you said. It doesn't solve anything as it was supposed to in first place. It only made it worse in the end.
Quoting yatagarasu
It is because they depend on each other, still. The distinction between sex and gender differentiates a person's biological sex (the anatomy of an individual's reproductive system) from that person's gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own and secondary sex characteristics. Which is your overall physical appearance. That is the definition of gender and that is the definition of sex as we know it. Do you understand what I mean, now? Gender depends on sex but sex doesn't depend on gender. Sex is a biological reality.
Feminist literature as it apparently exists doesn't get to change the meaning of words when they feel like it.
You are playing with words in a way that is unhelpful. I am not claiming bodies are more than bodies. Referring to a body with such characteristics as "female" is a matter of definition, not of needless addition. This would be akin to complaining about calling an SUV and SUV when it's simply a vehicle. Well obviously some vehicles meet the criterion that make them SUVs, just as certain bodies have the properties which instantiate "female".
That is just another name for "fear of the unknown". Religious people experience this and is part of the reason they just accept their beliefs based on faith because NOT knowing is scary.
I feel that the truth is more important than one's feelings. Who is to say that they won't feel better when they realize the reality of their condition and can then take action to address it instead of lying to themselves (humans are capable of lying to themselves and being misinformed of their bodily and mental states) and allowing others to propagate that lie?
Why don't we think of a schizophrenic's feelings when we diagnose their condition correctly and tell them that their hallucinations aren't real?
It doesn't make it more confusing. There are males and females. Then there are the ways that they behave in some social structure based on their physiology. For instance, in the animal world females tend to be more picky when it comes to choosing mates as they have to spend the more resources and time in raising the young. Seahorse males are the ones that carry the young so the roles get flipped in a seahorse society. Human males do not have the capacity to get pregnant and give birth. Men are physically stronger, etc.
So there are just males and females and then there are males and females with mental problems that enable them to think that they are anything from the opposite sex, aliens, tigers, Elvis, etc.
This isn't complex or contradictory and explains the current conditions perfectly.
So then why do we point out to schizophrenics that they have a mental condition and that their hallucinations aren't real? Why aren't we concerned about their feelings when their hallucinations aren't threatening to anyone?
Why do we point out that anorexics aren't really fat and that they have a mental disorder without concern for their feelings about who and what they are?
Is lying to someone about their condition just so that you can avoid being labeled as a bigot, harmless?
This is total nonsense. We categorize bodies all the time. How do you think we make distinctions between species and between sexes of the various species? Some species don't even have males and females, and that will dictate their behavior in their social structure.
Human males do not have the capacity to be pregnant and give birth, nor do they face the possibility of the father leaving, or cheating with another female. These are all behaviors based on our physiology and are different for other species with different sexual physiology.
You still have not explained the cultural aspect of sex (aka gender). You just described different types of physiology that influence behavior. But humans have the same physiology (roughly) but their behavior changes. A man does not have act like a prototypical man, nor does a women. A seahorse does, therefore their sex greatly influences their behaviors. Humans have a wide variety of ways they act, that has changed between cultures. Sex does not cover that at all, which is why gender was/is used to separate it.
Quoting Terran Imperium
What do you mean do I understand now? I gave the definitions. haha Sex is the biological and gender is everything else outside of that realm. Secondary sex characteristics are biological, they are not part of gender. No, gender doesn't depend on sex. If I was born a male (biologically), but wore women's clothing and acted like a women I would be the male sex, but female in gender. The second part I can agree with, sex doesn't depend on gender, as no matter how you act you cannot change your sex.
They are the ones that created the differences in the two words, so I have no clue what you are implying.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, that is true, but them not understanding their condition doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong in what they experience.
Fair enough. Since I believe gender to be a social construct I could see that. Humans are incredible at self-deception. I am open to that possibility.
Probably because culture and the things they want to be are more tangible than the obvious delusions no one else can account for in schizophrenia. As an interesting side note... The friend I mentioned was diagnosed as being very likely to develop schizophrenia going through their adulthood. He has mentioned hearing auditory hallucinations and is being treated for it alongside other issues. I see what you are saying. More research is necessary, and it might not happen if we just assume this a social issue rather than a psychological one.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/gender_confusion_a_tool_of_the_left.html
Categorisation isn’t an issue. People categorise things all the time. Many categorisations are true. My position isn’t against categories. I’m talking about how it is one category is true or not. When I say sex identity is independent of a body, my int is not to say bodies do not belong to categories.
I’m saying a body does not belong to a category by virtue of existence as a body. We can see this in how imagined bodies (which do not exist!) belong to categories. Belonging to a category is a particular and independent logical meaning, separate to just the presence of a body.
A body does not take on belonging to a category of “male” or “female” because it is “a body. One does not get belonging to a category from the fact of a body, from a hormone, from a penis, from a vagina, form a womb, form a certain set of chromosomes, etc. It’s always a fact of belonging to a category itself— i.e a body which is of this category because it is of this category rather than a body which is of this category because it’s a body.
The equivocation of the body with its category leads to erroneous locating of bodily difference in the meaning of a category. A man can get pregnant, provided he has a functioning womb and other associated body functions . When such a body is in the “male” category, there is a man who can get pregnant. The difference maker is the bodily state in question, not what category of identity they have. It's about having body, not a meaning of sex.
I'm not merely playing with words. Error is your concepts are my target. I'm pointing out logical different/facts about the meanings of sex and the body you are missing.
The property of being a vehicle (a body) does not define the property of being a SUV (female). Only the property of being an SUV (female) can define the presence of being an SUV (female).
Sex does not simply refer to genitalia. If it did, we wouldn't even have the logical distinction of sex. We would just be saying: "There is this genitalia" not "This person has some genitalia and has the sex meaning of "female." Your own usages include this distinction.
It means a door is a door by virtue of them meaning of door, not because it is an existing body.
Our language is also something we impose upon our object here. Neither our concept of the door nor our language acts of speaking about the door are the thing of the meaning of door.
The existence of a door is nor defined by the meaning of the language we use. Our language is not magic in that way.
The existence of the door defined by the presence of a thing, in its body being present. In terms of how it maybe be talked about or categorised, there are many different ways. Some language, for example, might even give the door a gender, despise it having no human body and no genitalia!
The introduction is the ubiquitous claim that you started out neutral but after bad experiences with your respondents you now think "these people" are delusional. There is something quite objectionable about the phrase "these people", in that it serves to sever them from "us"; as if "we" do not owe them any respect.
Then there is your use of teleology. You speak of the "purpose" of sex as procreation, grossly oversimplifying the human experience - so, for example, sex is also recreational. You speak of "design", but of course there is no design. Unless you are defending some sort of creationism, in which case your view on sexuality is post hoc and the real issue is your imaginary friends.
Sex is biological. Male and female look clearly distinguishable; but of course the truth is that there are exceptions to any definition you might wish to set out.
Gender is societal; we decide what gender is. As such there are again exceptions, but further we can make changes and exceptions as we see fit.
Gender is a set of expectations foisted on us by others, depending on the contents of our underpants rather than our relevant abilities.
It is easier to change expectations than to change genitals.
It might be worth asking how comfortable you are with folk who are different from yourself. Why should it matter to you that the person in the next toilet cubical has a penis? Why the interest, again, in the contents of other people;s underwear? Is it this that makes people worthy of respect, or not?
I agree with you that there are problems with the way transgender issues are articulated. But your lack of capacity to accept and respect difference might speak more about you and your approach to others than about problems with trans folk.
Well, this is not a question easily answered. It involves an epistemological theory. What you are speaking from is known as realism. Furthermore, this is an empirical realism you are speaking from. The epistemology of trans philosophy is different fundamentally.
This is the root of the differences.Quoting Terran Imperium
According to your epistemology, which is not very accurately based.
What about linguistic gender? Why is tree masculine and plant feminine in German? What are these demarcations of knowledge?
They are arbitrary.
Since gender regards identity, and human identity is of consciousness, of personality and furthermore of thought; and since thought is the determinant of gender, with regard to the gender variations of language that structure reality, the gender of a personality, in terms of its psychological constitution in the strict sense of the word (logos + Psyche), regards not the material world (which your realism regards) and facticity but consciousness carte blanche.
@yatagarasu@Banno@TheWillowOfDarkness
But language is a character performance, really. We show who we want to show, in the end. If I'm at a stripper bar in Montreal I stop using my French accent and switch to my French-Canadian backwater town lexicon. Its just safer. We all perform the language. If its too hard for you to change your performance slightly to help someone who has or has had issues that you are lucky to never have, then I dont recognize in you the same great culture that has fostered tolerance and defended human rights.
:halo:
Human beings are known for their wide range of adaptable behaviors. But they are still limited by one's body and shape. A man can never bring an infant to term. A woman cannot fertilize herself. You're confusing the range of things we can do with what we can't based on our size and shape.
Sure, cultures can vary in what women and men wear, or the jobs that they can do, but they can never change the way we procreate and the specific jobs each sex has in procreation. That is what sex is about. Any other behavior isn't related to sex and therefore would not fall under your definition of "gender".
Actually, medical 'science' is able to bring about both of these things.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But gender is not sex so it would not relate to the biological side of things. Gender is about the "performance", the gender roles we take on, not about the things that we cannot change (easily). The range of freedom we have to perform is what shows that our gender is not fixed. Our sex is (relatively), but not gender.
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. I use that definition of gender, so it seems like it does cover it, it is not about sex, it is everything else.
I don't even understand the whole host of what the problem of gender is. What is that people are complaining about? If a man wants to wear a dress so what? It's only when he actually believes he is a woman that a problem arises.
There is absolutely no connection between gender and sex. This is a metaphorical correlation and is absolutely non-sequitur. So because someone cannot have children they are thus genderless?!
You are sick.
The woman of liberty must free herself from two forms of imprisonment: one, the assumption that in order to be independent she must be like men, and two, that socialization through which she becomes feminized. The first alienates her from her sexuality. The second makes her adverse to risking herself for her ideas/ideals. Attentive to this current state of affairs, and to the phenomenology of the body, Simone De Beauvoir sets two prerequisites for liberation. First, women must be socialized to engage the world. Second, they must be allowed to discover the unique ways that their embodiment engages the world. In short, the myth of woman must be dismantled. So long as it prevails, economic and political advances will fall short of the goal of liberation. Speaking in reference to sexual difference, Beauvoir notes that disabling the myth of woman is not a recipe for an androgynous future. Given the realities of embodiment, there will be sexual differences. Unlike today, however, these differences will not be used to justify the difference between a Subject and his inessential Other.
The goal of liberation, according to Beauvoir, is our mutual recognition of each other as free and as other. She finds one situation in which this mutual recognition (sometimes) exists today, the intimate heterosexual erotic encounter. Speaking of this intimacy she writes, “The dimension of the relation of the other still exists; but the fact is that alterity has no longer a hostile implication” (The Second Sex, 448). Why? Because lovers experience themselves and each other ambiguously, that is as both subjects and objects of erotic desire rather than as delineated according to institutionalized positions of man and woman.
From plato.Stanford.edu
I agree with what you are saying with regard to sex and am actually someone that thinks the idea of gender should be done away with. We are not at that place however, so until then differentiating the two is what we have to do. Sex does not change, gender does. People that are transgender want to take on the roles of the opposite sex and the easiest way to do that is to actually try and be that gender. This is impossible on the sexual front (may change with technology), so they go for the gender roles/norms we have and follow those.
The problem is that people do not want to accept them for following those norms. IF they did, then this wouldn't be an issue (as much). People are extremely uncomfortable with others doing that, hence the issue. Let alone that transgender people also try and undergo sexual changes to complete the process.
Your feelings to not determine the truth. If that were the case then the feeling Christians get means their God exists. Truth is not beholden to your feelings. The truth is not necessarily consoling to one's feelings. Any logical and objective person understands this simple fact of life.
Quoting Blue LuxNo, they would still be a man or woman that has a physical problem, just as a transgender is still a man or woman that has a mental problem.
Quoting Blue Lux ad hominem attacks don't win arguments.
I won't be responding to any more of your or Pattern-chaser's post. You are both unreasonable and have a problem with constantly committing ad hominem attacks. You aren't worth my time.
This is an unaswerable question - just like every ethical question. This is why we should just rely on the simple truths of what a man and woman really are as a product of their physiology.
No one's feelings. These matters a lre a question of a logical turth/meaning. People aren't their gender or sex by a feeling or body. They are so by the meaning of their sex or gender itself.
Feelings, sensations, thoughts are just how people are aware of the s meaning.
It doesn't relate to the subject at hand at all. The comparison is shallow, you cannot compare a tree to a human in linguistic, they each have a different weight, a male would be masculine and a female, feminine. Is it hard? I'll answer for you. No.
Realism is easy to understand, it's in the name, its based on reality. On facts and logic. It doesn't always apply to everything, I truly wish it did but in this case, it applies.
And I am glad you dropped the passive-aggressiveness of your earlier posts. This one is much better.
EDIT: Although you literally just restarted that behavior a few posts after, this time with Harry. Seriously?
Quoting Akanthinos
Again, it's a shallow comparison, the accent doesn't relate to this at all. It has no basis in reality, unlike pronouns.
I do not particularly care about the recognition of some random joe on the Internet, I have an ID that proves I am French, I was born in France and I grew up with French people and it is my culture.
It is not, you cannot force me to change how language work nor agree to your political view. You can do all of those transgender things, it's your choice, it's your freedom to do so, but don't go imposing on people to follow along with you.
I am completely tolerant of these people as long as they don't step on my freedom of speech rights as well, human rights don't have any relation to this subject. I am not stepping on their right by calling them with the 'wrong' pronoun. What comes out of my mouth is what I want for it to come out. Regardless if you feel offended or not. People get offended every day by someone who says something that you think is inappropriate either unintentionally or intentionally. So what? A truly wise person, won't even argue and will do as a mature person will do. Ignore the person that offended you, you know that there isn't a synergy between you, so why force it? No one is forcing you to interact with that person.
So if I grow a fake pair of testicles, a phallus, I cut my hair down and say to everyone that I am male, they should accept that? Or that I can just easily enter the men's bathrooms because I am a man now?
It might not seem 'serious' because of double standards but try it the other way around with a man.
He is growing a fake pair of boobs, let his hair grow, put some make-up on and start crying out that he is female. Should he be allowed in the women's bathrooms or the women's changing rooms? I'll slap the shit out of him if he dared to do so
It's an example where transgenderism is getting way too far, we'll have so much fewer problems if they just kept it in and didn't bother people because it hurts their feelings, because they are feeling inadequate, insecure in their original sex/body. Seriously. What about non-binary people? Should their new assigned bathrooms be the dump? Or are we going to comply to their little fantasy inner-world and we're going to build entirely new bathrooms uniquely for them. And, yeah how about 32 more types of bathrooms for each gender too. If we comply now, I'm pretty sure they are going to demand that soon enough, I mean I've seen more and bolder claims everywhere right now by the feminists and the transgender people.
And here I was hoping humanity got past such things, that we were going for the betterment of our lives, of technology and science and where rational thinking rules. We are thinking of sending astronauts to Mars, to capture an asteroid, we broke through the petaflop barrier for computers, we sequenced the whole genome of a cancer patient including the tumor. And what are we doing here on Earth? Complaining about gender identities. No, seriously, no.
:rofl:
Quoting Terran Imperium
Not only does this make little sense, it is absolutely ridiculous.
Hmm what reference should I use this time?
Jung. Ahh... What a solid reference!
The 'anima' is the feminine aspect of the unconscious mind, the feminine, anthropomorphic archetype of the collective unconscious. The 'animus' is the masculine archetype. Both the anima and the animus are intertwined, constituting the totality of the psyche. The totality of the psyche cannot be masculine or feminine. This is an utter illusion. Masculinity only exists in relation to a feminity: both are included in the minds of everyone, one being manifest and one in a sense latent.
The child realizes that the anima, what Jung calls "of the will to life", is manifest in his relation to the mother, whom is the source of their life and their satisfaction. The idea of being with another emotionally is manifest originally in the mother. And so, with the male, the anima becomes unconscious, anassimilated into the personality due to the realization of his incapability to possess the mother, and that he lacks something that the 'father' has. The child does not realize this explicitly, but reacts to this implicitly and develops accordingly realizing that a very important part of the mother is directed elsewhere, and that his life is forever contingent upon that manifestation.
But through development this becomes concealed. Throughout the life of the heterosexual male, he is always looking for the possession of the anima, that feminine aspect that would lead to his totality or, biologically speaking, unconsciously, the peace, the stasis, the homeostatic balance of the conditions inside the womb. He seeks this, and becomes alienated by this feminine aspect, which is always a part of him, but outside of him to be ascertained in an apprehendable form, namely that which regards intimacy... And this is the case after puberty. The libido, a psychical energy of manifestation and expression, has as a focal point the sex organs. These organs are part of what would attach us to another person, and in sex, the acquiescence and emphatic nature of subject becoming object, in relation to Hegel's master-slave dialectic, provide an excellent example of how every person is both feminine and masculine, capable of an exchange, a yin and yang perhaps.
The animus can be explained to be the configuration of a heterosexual male's conscious mind, as it is in relation to a female, the conception of a female, not the ideal or form of a female, but that which a female is with regard to the male's specific desire for his own totality and mastery.
The female also desires the mother but realizes that she does not have something specific that whatever the mother's psyche and an understandable realm of the mother's mind is directed towards, namely the penis of the father. The girl realizes that she does not have a penis and then competes with the mother for the possession of the father. This is Freud
In terms of Jung, the female becomes differentiated. The male becomes differentiated as well. Both become differentiated because of the parents. The anima that the girl has as a configuration of her psyche is in relation to the animus that was never possessed, because the female is fundamentally in a state of sexual acquiescence, and she desires the male for her totality. She wants to take. The male wants to give. This is heterosexuality.
So we have found out that males and females are not connected physiologically but psychologically. And that both males and females have the same psychological aspects.
It is the case that this is not always the case!
Jung speaks specifically of an undifferentiation of the psyche, people withholding neither the anima nor the animus but an androgynous archetype that can set the tone for a myriad of sexual identifications and desires! All of which are authentic!
But hey, that's just Jung. And I have a lot more in my philosophical arsenal. :yum:
@Akanthinos
And you would be charged with assault. So much for being tolerant.
And that is because you are a piece of sh$t.
Again, you are upon a completely impoverished epistemology. Gender IS NOT sex organs. It is psychological.
My friend Ryan is a he.
There is no aspect of a woman in him.
You look at him and the last thing you think is woman.
He is transgendered.
You are an unphilosophical cretin who should not be on a philosophical forum but back in church.
According to your empirical realism, the only way a sexuality is authentic is if it regards the 'natural complementarity' of sex organs, which would amount to the birth of a child.
This is ludicrous.
Natural? That is your base isn't it? Let me tell you something. Natural? Tornados? Murder? Mutilation? Genocide? Domination of other species? The absolute abject reality of survival of the fittest? Natural? Nothing about being human is natural. It is precisely being in opposition to nature that being human is! Living in conformity with outlets of power and control over the world as opposed to being some passive, impotent object of objective processes, determined and fatalistic. This is a disgrace to the human intellect to base "what ought to be" or 'what is authentic and not a disease' on the 'natural.'
This sort of materialism is nauseating.
Tell me this. What is being? You don't know. Nobody knows. You think you know because you can metaphorically correlated and think you have a knowledge so to be God but you don't.
Although I disagree with @Terran Imperium and find them a lot less open then they claim to be, I don't think calling them those things will change anything. The same goes with @Harry Hindu. It just breeds more toxicity and doesn't change their minds. Some just want things to stay the "natural" way, even though I, as well as you it seems, see a lot of incredible good that can be had by tossing those conventions to the side.
:cool:
Quoting Harry Hindu
Hmmm... Well, there are a lot of benefits to giving up the standard conventions. Much of the interplay between the sexes and the advantages/disadvantages could be mitigated. It's more flexible and we are most likely heading towards an androgynous future anyways. (can't imagine AI caring much about their gender roles haha) People that want to abide by those natural ways still can, and they will find mates that also think the same and favor the norms simplicity. As a critic of gender though, I find it difficult to support the transgender movement when I see it is also indirectly holding up/feeding into the cultural norms. They seem to support the establishment of gender as much as the average person, for they have to have a gender to become. Still, I feel like the positives outweigh the negatives, not to mention I am somewhat of a social libertarian, so I could always argue that angle if I wanted.
What do you think? I've had many friends resist this movement because it takes a simple idea and makes it more confusing (at least to them). But sometimes things have to be that way in order to make social/cultural progress.
I don't understand this part of your post. People aren't their gender based on feeling or body, but by the meaning of sex or gender itself? People are their sex or gender based on their physical and behavioral features. People are also delusional based on the criteria set forth by the medical community itself. People can be deluded about many things, and they don't necessarily have to have a mental condition to delude themselves. Just look at the religious folk.
People who we label as transgender don't just want to act like the opposite sex, they want to BE the opposite sex, which is why they go through sexual reassignment surgery. If it was only about gender, then they would be happy as just dressing like the opposite sex. Shouldn't we be making a distinction then, between transGENDERS and tranSEXUALS? - and is there really such thing as a transsexual when they never fully become the opposite sex - just an fake version of the opposite sex?
Do people that just dress like the opposite sex still claim that they are the opposite sex internally, or do they do it just to feel more comfortable with themselves (as a result of how they were raised and the norms that were established for them at an early age - like their parents treating them as the opposite sex)
Wanting to act like the opposite sex just reinforces the gender dichotomy - as you aren't really trying to break down the barriers between sexes - you want to BE the opposite sex.
Transgenders exhibit most, if not all, of these symptoms - especially being oversensitive about their belief and accepting it unquestioningly - similar to the religious.
Any attempt to contradict the belief is met with hostility. Society has even adopted this symptom - just look at the responses to my posts on this forum. Again - no different than the religious.
In diagnosing their condition correctly, we aren't being disrespectful to anyone, just like we aren't being disrespectful when we diagnose an anorexic correctly. We are attempting to help the patient instead of hurting them more by reinforcing their delusion to the point where the pay a doctor handsomely to cut them up. People that don't get this are inconsistent are actually the haters they label others to be.
• 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
To understand this phenomenon it is possible to apply an approach developed by Foucault in "The history of sexuality": "It is the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more, a determination on the part of agencies of power to have it spoken about, and to cause it through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail. An imperative was established ... you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire into the discourse."
The ironic thing is that most people that talk about the feelings of a transgender not being hurt on have no quarrels about trampling on the a religious person's feelings about their beliefs and the stress it causes them for someone to say that their beliefs are false. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking ice cream from a child when I engage in debates with religious people and argue for the non-existence of their god, but I don't let that deter me as I only seek the truth without worrying how people feel about it, and try to ensure that what I believe is not only consistent with my experiences, but also with the other knowledge in my head. The truth was never guaranteed to be consoling to our feelings. The truth is the truth and how we feel about it is another matter entirely.
If a man can wear a dress and make-up then obviously these acts are not what it means to be a woman that transcends biology. There is no transcendental aspect to being a man or woman. It is determined by sex. Gender is simply an arbitrary set of rules for the expected behavior of the different sexes in some culture. You either follow them or you don't. The fact that we can break these rules should be evidence of this. We cannot break the rules of sex though. Once you are born a man, your body tries to revert back to a man after "sexual reassignment surgery" and is why the man has to have stents in his wound in order to prevent it from closing.
I admit your point about our ignorance. Yet, it is impossible to ignore the problems discussed in this thread. I think it would be useful to apply analytical tools and concepts developed by Foucault, even though they look too complicated.
Quoting Blue Lux
You are not worth my time if you continue being so hostile. There is a complete disregard of my arguments, you are openly insulting me. I don't see why I should even read your posts anymore. I will ignore you from now on.
So much for being civilized.
Quoting Akanthinos
Are you going to take it literally? I wouldn't slap anyone in reality unless they really went overboard, in this case, I"ll just call the police since there is a pervert lurking around in the women's private areas.
So much for someone entering an area that is not meant for him, that's just plain perverse, I will not tolerate something like that, should he be allowed in women's public baths too? Because he feels like a woman? No.
Look, if you are just going to comment without actual arguments, I will not take into account what you say as well.
I said it in the first line of my first post. You obviously ignored it for some reason or another. Both you and Blue Lux.
Quoting Terran Imperium
Quoting yatagarasu
I apologize if I appeared like a close-minded bitch but when two people in a debate have a constant passive-aggressive or sometimes outright aggressive behavior, it makes one angrier than they should be and they answer in kind which I kind of did.
The best thing I can do is ignore them, I guess.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Exactly, you are so much more eloquent than me really, I don't think I could have explained it better than you just did now.
As Harry demonstrated in one of his earlier posts, they have a severe case of delusional disorder. The transgender movement is based on ideology rather than sciences. Transgenderism amounts to just playing pretend since sex change is biologically impossible. Sex can’t be reassigned because it wasn’t assigned at birth in the first place. It is a physical reality observable prenatally, the denial of which is indicative of psychological problems and often leads to further psychological distress. Modern science shows that our sexual organization begins with our DNA and development in the womb, and that sex differences manifest themselves in many bodily systems and organs, all the way down to the molecular level.
Cosmetic surgery and cross-sex hormones can’t change us into the opposite sex, They can affect appearances. They can stunt or damage some outward expressions of our reproductive organization. But they can’t transform it. They can’t turn us from one sex into the other. They merely amount to the donning of counterfeit sexual garb.
The scientific community even got a name for this illness: Gender dysphoria (GD), or gender identity disorder (GID), is the distress a person experiences as a result of the sex and gender they were assigned at birth. In this case, the assigned sex and gender do not match the person's gender identity, and the person is transgender.
You can try to argue with science, its the goal for the overall betterment, somethings may not be absolute, its a common rule but to refute something, you need to have a proof, something tangible that everyone can understand otherwise, you are just speaking with your feelings. You cannot argue with your feelings.
Science does not produce "Truth." It produces predictive value through repeatable experiments. That's the point. Anyone can test your claims and if you did the experiment wrong, they will demonstrate it under carefully controlled conditions which minimize people's personal biases.
The scientific method can be used to disprove/discard false notions. Several hundred years ago, people believed that Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics explained the whole universe. Then it was discovered that really massive objects or really fast objects or really small objects obeyed their own laws. We didn't throw out all of Newtonian Physics. But we did make those rules more accurate. One more step forward.
Right now, we are taking steps backward rather than forward because we are accepting an illness as 'normal'.
Quoting Terran Imperium
The only definition of an illness you could be referring to is a psychiatric illness, and I recently gave you an analysis of gender based on the thought of the most important psychiatrists of all time. You reject this.
Trans people function just fine. There is absolutely no correlation between their being transgender and frequent stress or inability to function. There is absolutely no aetiological correlation. If you say there is... You are lying.
Gender is assimilated and understood as a result of psychical activities. It is related to sex in a very peripheral way. Furthermore, gender relates very much to sexuality, namely how one relates to themselves and to another in terms of the libido, which is the energy of expression, commitment in relationships and, in a sense, empathy.
There is a reason MDMA was given to couples for couples therapy. There is a chemical aspect, namely serotonin and oxytocin, of an emotional relationship between two people, but these chemicals, namely the ones released by a female in sex and by a male in sex, do not determine a healthy sexuality nor a sexual relationship. These chemicals cannot define us, they are rather a correlated mediation, an objectivation of what perhaps could amount to a conception of what we are. Resorting to a representation replacing the real is a seriously fallacious way to understand human life and human relationships, and furthermore an understanding of the self and the personality.
The personality is fluid. It contains all sorts of potentialities. Consciousness is potentiality. Consciousness consists of it's relation to its potentialities. A consciousness and furthermore a personality is not defined by the expressed. The authenticity of an individual is between the expressing and the expressed. A person expressing themselves to be a certain way is in a sense based upon an appeal to the willing of an inapprehendable object; however, it is this relationality in terms of the object that defines the mode of consciousness associated. Therefore gender, of the transgender, which means literally 'to go beyond gender,' implies that willing of an inapprehendable object, which would be the being of the will, the exhausting of the will to be something. Nobody is something. The meaning of reaching a goal will inevitably not be the apprehension of that which is desired but the reaching of the goal itself. In this case the meaning of life in relation to the most inevitable possibility of consciousness, death, will be the time in which one approaches death. One is reminded of Leo Tolstoy's The Death Of Ivan Ilych. In the end he is dying, and finally says to himself 'DEATH IS FINISHED!'
Death is thus not in dying, when the lights go out, but the time in which dying is defined, that is, the experience of dying, which is not atemporal.
In relation to gender, this is the same. When you close your eyes you realize that everything you claim to be is contingent on what you think defines you, in relation to others. But the single fact is that, aside from all of this, you are something greater and that you yourself contain every identifyable condition or potentiality, and with this one can identify with their personality and understand who they are themselves, aside from the seemingly contingent nature of understanding oneself. In realizing ones absolute freedom from concepts one can be whatever the feel to be, and they can act and behave and conduct themselves in whatever manner comes about, and if this manner becomes defined by others, so be it, it is authentic.
I am gay. In being gay I have been told that 'my condition,' as if who I am is some sort of definable, psychiatric quality that needs to be tested in a lab for the purpose of intrusive pontification, makes me more susceptible to mental illness. This relates to gender very well, as it is completely non-sequitur. It is a metaphor.
The reason homosexuals and transgendered people have a higher risk of mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, etc is not because of some deterministic, fatalism of their genetic coding... This has not been proven and nor will it ever be proved.
The conditions of a trans or homosexual life, in relation to a populace and interaction with others whom are different in this extremely meaningful aspect become a source of serious alienation. Depression and anxiety is most often the result of the environment, namely the environment disagreeing with the conditions of the personality; the ideal mode which would allow what Jung calls individuation, or a full apprehension of the self and its integration into the world.
I myself have depression and have been diagnosed. The aetiology of my conditions, PTSD and major depression, are not related to being a homosexual.
In terms of gender, there is no absolute causal relationship capable of being logically adamantine between sex and gender. It is a metaphor.
Does it mean that you deny the existence of the permanent "subject" of consciousness?
May I reformulate your point in the following way: consciousness is a resulting vector of an assemblage of different, even non-human factors?
That is okay as long as you offer arguments and you are not hostile, I will openly answer you.
Science can adequately explain how emotions work and which area of the brain, which chemical cause sadness, depression or happiness. We are taking steps forward in understanding how the human body works. You are assuming that science has no relation what so ever to the subject at hand, that is not the case.
Let's discard biology for a second and talk about psychological sciences. Under a completely objective view, any professor will tell you that transgenderism is a mental illness.
Quoting Blue Lux
I didn't, you were insulting at the time and I completely skipped over your post. I don't even know what did you wrote there, I can't answer you if I don't understand what you are talking about in the first place.
One of the psychiatrists doesn't make him or her represent all of the psychiatrists, being someone important doesn't automatically mean that his or her work is a 'truth' that we should adhere to, especially if you don't have any proof that this psychiatrist's words that you mentioned are widely accepted or not. In fact, I can't seem to find that post, unfortunately. It would be appreciated if you could quote it in your next answer.
Quoting Blue Lux
Don't assume directly that I am lying without further information, it doesn't really help your case.
Although it seems we don't really have the same definition of what delusion is, delusion is very much a mental illness. I'll quote Harry's post. You can look it up.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Blue Lux
We can agree on this at least, personality is molded through life experiences, it only showcases that these people went through something that caused them to develop such a delusion as to think, they are 'beyond' reality. Either through mob mentality or just some life experiences, its very much a delusion.
I'll quote Harry again since he briefly mentioned it in of his posts.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Blue Lux
What I think defines me?
It's like trying to argue that an apple is a pineapple when everyone think otherwise and they have proof that it is not in fact a pineapple. Being rebel is good sometimes but it doesn't paint a good image of you when you are denying reality, we aren't transcending reality with some psychic powers yet I believe,
The fact is, your personality doesn't rely on basic biological truths unlike gender and sex. You yourself admitted that gender relies on sex.
You are getting a bit far, there. Humans all have the potential to do great things, of course, so? Your point? 'Accepting' oneself and becoming a transgender person is not an achievement. It's just a delusion. It's twisting the words, you are not accepting yourself, you are insecure about your gender, you are insecure in your body and you try to find something that makes you feel better, of course, then everyone needs to follow along with your twisted thinking.
Quoting Blue Lux
So... You are admitting they are delusional, that what they do is not authentic because it is not acknowledged by others, those others who rely on facts, reality and not feelings.
I am not saying, they shouldn't, they can do whatever they want with their bodies. What they can't do, is impose on others to follow along with their delusions.
Quoting Blue Lux
You being gay is not a mental illness, throw that notion away, that's people being misinformed, it's in fact perfectly natural. Homosexuality is observed in other animals like birds, lions, and even foxes. It's not exactly a common thing in species, it leads to a dead-end in a lineage but it doesn't really matter all that much when we have seven billion people on Earth.
Homosexuality is explained scientifically as to why it happens, there is several studies about it on the internet, its really interesting look it up. Homosexuality is not bad. If lesbians or gays somewhere can find happiness, sure. Who am I to deny them that? They aren't forcing anyone to do anything, they are just a normal couple and they are completely accepting of their original gender, I can call a gay couple 'he' and I wouldn't expect any lash out or hostility unlike transgenders. I have a gay friend and he is really nice, he got a pretty handsome boyfriend and tell you what, he has the same opinions as me on transgenderism.
And though it will take me some time to completely destroy your argument. I will do it to you and Harry for the sake of humanism.
As well, you have absolutely mutated my words into an abject interpretation, devoid of all the original epistemic foundations.
This is the worst fallacy in a debate.
The first objection to a Humanism is that it is blindly supportive of absolute freedom and autonomy and it disregards the unintegrated or conditioned aspects of human existence.
Ergo we have where I stand. I stand in support of Humanism as opposed to fatalism, which is what these two @Terran Imperium@Harry Hindu espouse ever so eloquently... with subtle subterfuge...
Quoting Terran Imperium
This is the first absolutely baseless claim we have. As I have a piece of paper in the other room from a mental health facility that has the option of 'transgender' marked under gender... This assertion of yours is absolutely false.
Contrary to what you believe, according to whatever conscious or unconscious ideology you yourself have been conditioned or, more likely, coerced into adopting; being transgender is a legitimate gender identity.
This is furthermore supported by hundreds of colleges and just about every mental health hospital or out-patient clinic you can visit in the whole United States. The reason I know this is because I have personally seen this in about 15 different states.
Quoting Terran Imperium
Another completely baseless claim...
Science cannot adequately explain how emotions work. You honestly think an anti-depressant fixes the emotions associated with depression? Do you honestly think that science has the upper hand over emotions and consciousness? Are you kidding me? We have absolutely no idea how consciousness works. All we have are correlations about different neurological mechanisms. What is DMT? Explain to me what DMT does to a person's experience in terms of the chemical itself? It is merely a pseudoneurotransmitter altering perception? It is endogenous! Are you going to tell me that neurotransmitters can explain conscious experience? This is a fantasy! Throw someone in a dark room and give them opium and record their thoughts. Dopamine may be associated with pleasure but it is not itself pleasure. Have you ever heard of what it takes to have an orgasm? That is, the psychological investigation of it, neuropsychology states that a very important piece of having a fulfilling orgasm relates to the CONSCIOUS FIXATION and interest in that sexual state of affairs. There is a reason one cannot just take heroin and feel good. There is a reason one cannot just rub their penis and ejaculate. There is a reason a mother loves her children. And it is not because of some chemical! This is, again, fatalism at its finest; the conception that humans are fundamentally unfree and abject machines incapable of making any decisions outside of that which amounts to some sort of pleasure. Consciousness is not some hedonistic object that becomes affected and then is oriented toward these chemicals that cause pleasure. Ever heard of human sacrifice? Ever heard of someone dying for another? And what of art? What of these experiences and expressions of existence that are incoherently complex and absolutely incapable of being understood in terms of brain chemistry?
The conclusion is that neurology is not the edifice of truth and human existence and personality is not this survival of the fittest. Darwin himself said humans should never live according to survival of the fittest, and that it is essentially abject and nihilistic.
Both of these people have arguments that support, inevitably, nihilism.
Quoting Terran Imperium
Ummm. And you want to be a doctor? Freud was a NEUROLOGIST. Jung was a psychiatrist and founded analytical psychology! He was one of the most important psychiatrists to ever live and if it was not for his and Freud's research then psychiatry would be impoverished today, if not non-existent!
This is simply wrong. The foundation of gender relates to the identification of what it means to have a penis and what it means to have a vagina... THE IDENTIFICATION of it NOT the fact of it as if the body has a mind of its own and enslaves you to its own mechanism giving you the absolute illusion that you are controlling anything. Please tell me how you would explain the body controlling the situation of a person randomly committing suicide? Please tell me how the body, chemically could determine whether or not a person will commit suicide. This is absolutely impossible. Emotions are not neurons. If you think so, then you clearly have no emotions.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Wrong.
People who ARE transgender do not want to be the opposite sex. They are not what they have been led to by their facticity to believe that they are, and they have realized by whatever means that their personality, and their identification of what it means to have a penis or a vagina does not conform with what they want for themselves, namely in the manifestation of the libido in the sexual organs. They realize that what they want in life and what they want to be a part of, in terms of a sexual relationship, does not involve the sexual organs they did not choose to have in the first place.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Another absolute mutation based on absolutely no a posteriori methodology or epistemological basis. And question this so I can tell you, please.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Really? You think someone would just randomly choose to be transgender, and to have to live in a world with people like you?
Quoting Harry Hindu
There is no gender dichotomy. Have you even ever had passionate sex? Or did you just use the woman as a passive object for your own pleasure?
It isn't about wanting to be another sex. You are misguided. It is that one is absolutely against being what they are imprisoned within, and thus they are the Other... Simone De Beauvoir's other.
Quoting Harry Hindu
1. There is no evidence that their personality is not what they say they are. "A fantasy is a fact: it is so much a fact that because of one man's fantasy another man may lose his life. It is again not a tangible object, but it is a fact." Carl Jung
Because some sort of correlation can be made between biology, reproduction and the function of the sex organs does not mean that how people identify within themselves regarding who they are by understanding who they are not and what they are not is in any way degraded. Just as the function of the sex organs does not define sexuality, the biological disposition of sex organs does not determine gender. Gender is something that a person becomes. "One is not born but becomes woman." Simone De Beauvoir.
2. With regard to this. I can say anything is a delusion. The fact that I am happy. If I say "I am happy." And then someone comes along and says, no you are not, you look sad. And let's say that I am crying tears of joy, another person may ask, "What is wrong?"
One cannot say what is a delusion for another person unless it meets certain psychiatric criteria, namely believing that people are out to kill you, that everyone is lying to you, that the world is fake, that the cameras are watching you, that the medicine you are given is controlling your mind, that you have some type of electronic device in your head. Comparing a trans person to a paranoid schizophrenic... You are the one who needs to be labotomized. I know trans people and they are not delusional people. They are simply different, atop different psychological premises, in a different paradigm of identification.
3. All of these displays of delusion absolutely do not apply to trans people. You are an idiot if you think they do, and this clearly represents your lack of insight into the subject altogether, which honestly makes me question your state of mind... You are the delusional one.
Now how do you feel? How would you feel if someone constantly called you delusional and then brought up all these reasons as to why you are delusional? They did the same thing to gay people. I have had the same thing done to me. And what? All of it was complete dogsh+t.
There are people with particular physiologies.
There are people who are comfortable with their physiologies, and people who are not, who authentically believe that they would be more comfortable with a different physiology (and this is often borne out).
There are cultural associations to certain physiologies - types of dress, behavioural expectations, manners of speech, jobs, etc.
There are people who are comfortable with these associations and conform to them, people are identify with against the common associations, and people who believe the associations are arbitrary.
What's the normative claim here? How do we get to 'right' and 'wrong' and 'delusion'?
sufficient expertise in different fields to support and fabricate a desirable "truth".
That's why you get a good doctor and follow the healthy, designated path of transition.
Quoting Terran Imperium
ROFL, you really think you are onto something don't you?
You are absolutely wrong. Why don't you go out and ask a trans person?
TRANSPHOBIA!
You are assuming these people are idiots who were coerced into believing that they were not a man or not a woman? You honestly think something could make someone believe that other than that person themselves introspecting and identifying their own psychical disposition, in terms of their possibilities and what they want to become and be a part of, and what forms of intimacy they feel would be most fulfilling? You honestly think a transgender EXPRESSING themselves is really them hypnotized by some prior experience or upbringing? WAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. All you have are assumptions and abject idle talk. This is getting to be VERY revealing of your own personality. God knows what your sex life consists of!
@Harry Hindu
I wanted to offer a better answer than my last one and I finally found the words.
This is an argument concerning language and since language is a human invention declaring that a particular term means this or that doesn't bear the same weight as declaring that gravity is stronger on Jupiter than it is on Earth. This is a matter of physics. We didn't invent gravity, we merely observe and study it. I hope you see my point here as this applies to both gender and sex.
Quoting Blue Lux
Show us that piece of paper as apparently it contains the absolute truth and we plebians should bow down to it...
Quoting Blue Lux
You can look it up, or is it too hard for you? I thought everyone was taught this at school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system
And yes, pleasure is a component of reward, but not all rewards are pleasurable. Stimuli that are naturally pleasurable, and therefore attractive, are known as intrinsic rewards, whereas stimuli that are attractive and motivate approach behavior but are not inherently pleasurable, are termed extrinsic rewards. Dopamine is very much a major part of the pleasure, if not a dominant one. Please, if you skipped over your biology classes don't go arguing with people about it.
Quoting Blue Lux
Did I say that? Don't try to put words into my mouth please and you are getting overly emotional here. You completely went off-topic there, its just giving me a headache and so I skipped over it.
Quoting Blue Lux
Several hundred years ago, people believed that Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics explained the whole universe. Then it was discovered that really massive objects or really fast objects or really small objects obeyed their own laws. We didn't throw out all of Newtonian Physics. But we did make those rules more accurate. Just because someone is popular doesn't make them right about absolutely everything.
Quoting Blue Lux
Okay... I think you should take your leave off this discussion. You aren't capable of being civil in a debate, I'm really regretting my decision of answering you in the first place. Whenever or not, you are being polite, I will ignore you from now on. It was a mistake as it seems the 'civilness' you showcased earlier was only enmity and scorn hidden under the veil.
My sexual life is perfectly fine, thank you. I am a virgin and I won't be anymore after marriage. Don't go making assumptions on my personal life.
Yes, what you think, you become (Buddha)
Consciousness is not a thing like a pineapple is. This is a false comparison and anything derived from it is fundamentally baseless and at best an impoverished metaphor.
The psyche is the origin of gender! In terms of Jung, if the anima and animus archetypes of the unconscious remain undifferentiated, or if they become differentiated in a way that is unconventional or unique, then a person may be a homosexual or, perhaps, transgendered. It all has to do with identifications made at a very young age in relation to not only the parents, which are extraordinarily significant with regard to the emotional, psychological development of the child; but also in relation to oneself and what one sees of themself in the mirror, to reference Jacques Lacan's Mirror Phase, the point in which the child will recognize themself in the mirror and realize that they are an objective totality, limited and are not completely defined by what they themselves operate and feel within--and the mirror is the mother in a sense, for the child realizes that they themselves are something separate, yet still very attached to the mother not in a physiological way but in a psychological way, which is just as significant. The child did not always realize he was something to be defined. The child was not always this. And although people conclude that the child's perspective is flawed and absent of rationality, it substantiates the idea that one is not born to be and experience that of being a certain gender and thus immediately comply with a gender a priori. This is absolutely ridiculous. One becomes a gender based on their identifications, true or false a posteriori.
Oh... Because you are a religious dogmatist yourself.
Oh... Well at least that elephant in the room is no longer a hallucination, although the noematic content of a hallucination is indistinguishable from that of a 'real' perception...
Anyway.
Hmmm. It is not that I the existence of a 'permanent' subject of consciousness. It is that it seems only a presupposition.
Yes, consciousness is a sort of vector, but it is not linear. It is the pure apprehension of possibility.
I do because my argument is coming from exactly that sort of position. No-one "invented" the meaning of belonging to a gender or sex anymore than we did any other thing, logical truth or meaning we might peak about. Sex and gender are a matter of... the significance of sex and gender themselves.
The argument was never about how we use language. It was about concepts, meanings and truth with respect to sed and gender.
Just like gravity is a matter of gravity itself (not physics, as relationships between thing physics can change).
Sex or gender involves talking about that specific truth in reference to a person. So when we consider whether someone has a sex or a gender, we are not asking a question about their body at all. Rather, we are asking what significance do they have in terms the sex and gender categories which are expressed regardless of whether someone agrees with them or not.
Simply looking at the body won't help us because that only gives us the meaning of a body. It doesn't give any definition of how the body belongs (if it does at all) to a sex or gender category. We need to know the sex or gender category expressed by the person question, if we are to now their sex or gender.
Science does produce truth - when done correctly and without external influences like we had from religion in the 15th and 16th centuries, and like we have today when it comes to this particular issue. It really is a shame to see the best method at getting at truth being used for political purposes, or influenced by these inconsistent ideologies to come to inconsistent conclusions.
Again, (and I'll keep pointing out these facts as they are continually being ignored by the "other" side (and I put "other" in quotes because they still haven't made their position clear about what "gender" even is :gasp: )) men have been sporting long hair and wearing make-up for thousands of years. In some cultures, women shave their legs and armpits while in others they don't. The behaviors expected from each sex are arbitrary. There is no such thing as an objective, transcendental sexual disposition. It is purely biological - natural (as is everything, but that is a topic for another discussion). Any feeling of being the opposite sex is the result of either some genetic and/or developmental cause.
They want to keep calling people, "bigots", "hateful", etc. while ignoring the fact that these acts are the very definition of being hateful and unreasonable. They are ad hominem attacks and the result of intellectual laziness and/or dishonesty. I have pointed out their hypocrisy in their claims that we should be sensitive to feelings. When it comes to the feelings the religious people have about their (mass) delusional beliefs, and the offense the believers take when their belief is questioned, their feelings don't count somehow - as if believers are less human and don't deserve equal treatment when it comes to hurting people's feelings by telling them the truth they don't want to hear. This hypocrisy just proves that it isn't about hurting feelings.
And it shouldn't ever be when trying to get at truth. The truth isn't dictated by our feelings - which is just another contradiction on their part. If truth were dictated by feelings, then all the various gods from each religion must exist.
This is how mass delusion works at propagating itself and rooting itself into a culture - by labeling non-believers essentially as heretics and outcasts. This is how religion spread and entrenched itself in various ways in different cultures.
They want to ignore the double-standard in how we treat anorexic and schizophrenics, and those that believe that they are Jesus or King Elizabeth, and how it isn't disrespectful to correctly diagnose those conditions, but somehow it is when it comes to believing your the opposite sex. It is compassionate to correctly diagnose a medical condition so that you can actually use a treatment that works for the benefit of all, and it is callous to use someone's medical condition to further your own extreme
"progressive" <- NOT (another topic for another thread) agenda and even worse to hijack science (which has improved our lives more than any other method of seeking knowledge when done correctly) for your own ends.
From this discussion
The problem with defining attitudes as bigotry in a debate where the propositions are related to what is real, is that it begs the question. Bigotry, according to my dictionary, is when "a person has strong, unreasonable beliefs and does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life". To accuse others of bigotry you would have to have already established what qualifies as reasonable (for a belief), and which beliefs are 'strong' (which I take to mean outside of the normal mileau). Yet both these measures are exactly what the debate is trying to establish.
It's this kind of approach which promotes the alt-right's sense of 'righteous indignation' which then fuels proper, well-established bigotry. The sense that any discussion about these issues is a foregone conclusion, that you're not even allowed in unless you tow the party line.
You say "Discrimination against and rejection of trans people at the deepest conceptual level" basically you're saying that the concept cannot be disputed without bigotry.
This is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.
So basically, you met one transgender you didn't like, and decided to make a thread about all transsexuals are delusional.
Why don't you A. Tell us what you didn't like about that particular transgender person, and B tell us this supposed research you did and why your research made you come to the conclusion they were delusional.
A good way, to start.
Quoting trixie
Correction, I met several transgenders that didn't like me, I wasn't hostile in any case. You will know my stance if you read the thread.
Quoting trixie
The thing is, I'm not going to repeat myself each time someone joins the conversation, you can read this 6-pages long thread which is not that long and then contributes to the discussion, if you aren't bothering to even do that then please skip this thread altogether.
If you post hate-speech, expect appropriate responses. I have treated you with respect and courtesy, although I have agreed with little that you have posted. You, on the other hand, have posted stuff that is hateful and intolerant.