What a childish way of approaching the idea of transgenderism.
I hope for your childrens’ sake that they aren’t transgender. Would you punish and abuse someone for their gender identity?
Someone believing they are a refrigerator is a red herring. And honestly gives away that you simply can’t empathize with someone who feels their self-image and their body don’t align.
I’m a fit human trapped in an obese body, but I’m changing the way I look through diet and exercise. How is that different from someone who feels their gender doesn’t match their body who then work on changing themselves to be more comfortable with how they look?
Why won’t you empathize with the poor man who thinks he is a refrigerator? So, clearly, you think these people are sane: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/nov/14/please-amputate-this-leg
? By treating the impossible, (Leg “not really” his/ male “really” a female) you are fostering insanity in place of realism. Yes, someone who feels their self-image and their body don’t align needs help. Encouraging their delusions, especially with surgery is ridiculous.
We have decades of experience attempting to coercively force gay and transgender people into being “normal” heterosexual cis-gender people. Such therapies fail. Often ending in the suicide of the patient.
That alone is enough to drop the whole thing as a disease. It’s better to help a person be happy than to drive them to self-destruction.
Not acknowledging the history of transgender people and how they’ve been treated only leads to inhuman cruelty on the part of those who would force a transgender person into being “normal”.
I suggest you speak with some transgender people about their experiences and motivations before you label them as insane for wanting to make their body match who they view themselves as. Otherwise you’re essentially no better than an MRA mansplaining to a woman how feminism is harmful to women.
You keep equating people who are transgender to those who have mental illnesses.
The sticking point is, psychotherapy and treatment to try and force transgender people into being happy with the sex they were born with doesn’t work, and in fact is harmful.
Being transgender isn’t harmful to the transgender person at all. In fact taking action to align their body with their perception in many cases makes them much happier. It’s not a delusion if they make themselves into who they want to be. In fact you’re the obstinately delusional one in the equation by forcing your binary value judgment onto someone who won’t fit into your conception of gender. Gender is a fluid spectrum, and you are delusional to deny that.
The reason why harm befalls transgender people is that society has a problem with them. People like you, essentially.
If you took a transgender person’s name and gender identity at face value, and treated them like a cis-gender person, then they will function as a healthy and happy individual who is of the gender they say they are. You imposing your ignorance onto them and treating them in a way that runs counter to who they are is what causes the problems.
Transgender people do often receive psychological treatment. Because they end up abused and murdered and hated for their own choices about their bodies. A responsible psychologist does not try to force a transgender person into appearing and acting as a gender they don’t identify with because transgenderism isn’t a disorder any more than being gay is.
If people like you were less judgmental and more willing to let people be who they want to be, transgender people wouldn’t be killed in such numbers, they wouldn’t commit suicide nearly so much, and they’d be allowed to thrive as members of society. But you’re so concerned with someone’s personal image of themselves that you can’t help but be a part of the problem.
Your transparent attempts to conflate transgenderism with mental illness sickens me. What’s next? Are you going to start insinuating that gay people are child molesters? Because that’s the level of argument you’re presenting, and I won’t have it.
The, exceedingly few, btw, boys that don’t have a penis are NOT, therefore
girls, are they? The exceedingly few women without ovaries aren’t men any
more than they are space aliens or goats. Indulging the delusions of the
insane isn’t a kindness.
It seems to me that people less often feel that they are in the wrong body, but are rather in the wrong category. Much of the social dissonance tends to be caused by the individual being confronted by other people’s categories. Just like any other “class” of person, not everybody agrees to the same categories or relevance. And not unlike racism or sexism, strife occurs when groups aggressively force their categories upon others - often violently, and about criteria which do not even directly concern them. There is no practical, legitimate reason why it should matter to anybody else if I am a certain gender, race, height, eye and hair color, etc. Why it becomes important to many people, pro or con, is because these categories are wrapped up in lots of (IMO useless) cultural baggage. It’s hard to believe in an un-conflicted gender identity/image if practically everybody is trying to figure out “what you are” and having tantrums over you “getting it wrong”. Culturally, it has been more important to assume the dichotomy, and force everybody into it, for the sake of perceived convenience.
A pro-active person knows who and what they are - but there is no reason why they would be obliged to reconcile it to other peoples categories. It’s like two grown people fighting over whether someone has green eyes or hazel eyes. What difference does it make?
How about people whose primary sexual identity has been changed? Is a woman whose ovaries have been removed still a woman? A man whose testicles have been removed still a man? After all, you can’t reproduce with them. How about for people who fundamentally de-couple sexual behavior from reproduction? If you aren’t reproducing, does it matter if you are XX or XY?
A funny contradiction I encounter is that anti-trans “biological essentialists” tend to focus upon primary sexual characteristics, and waffle away the difficulty of secondary sexual characteristics. Culturally, the secondary characteristics are actually more significant in people’s daily interactions. And this is precisely why variance here inspires such violently reactionary behavior. It’s a trap! XD What self-respecting alpha male want to impress his droogs by chasing a fine set of breasts and pair of legs only to find out they have a penis! Or are otherwise not breeding material! For the sexist crowd who feel they are entitled to conquest the opposite gender for pleasure and bay-beez it is a rude awakening to need to get to know people first, and not take for granted what they might be “good for” in the sack.
It is not only for ones self, but also for others that one might try to change the categories of gender in order to avoid confusion. It might be easy for a trans person to say that they are the same gender, and profess to normality. But then what do they do if/when others are confused about their secondary sexual characteristics, choices of partners,. social roles, etc? If somebody walks and talks like a goose, but you insist that they are a duck anyway, maybe you are the one who is confused! If the masses didn’t passionately beat their chests about what being a man or woman was supposed to mean, it would largely be a non-issue.
FWIW I am genderqueer. I have never claimed to be trans, or indeed anything else. Yet I often encounter people telling me that whatever gender I am, I am doing it wrong. So who has the problem? Me, never claiming to be in any particular category? Or others, who don’t know me, yet assume that they should be able to subject be to their categories. Not only of what their binary is, but what it means socially for me to perform it.
@popobawa4u did a much better job cutting through the shit than I did. I have a bad habit of leaning on gender-sex issues when in reality it’s first and foremost a personal liberty and bodily autonomy argument, and additionally a categorization error to engage in the argument relying on binary gender.
After all, gender is just presentation and behavior, and a social construct. It can be as broad or narrow as you want. Whereas sex is more limited, and is pretty fundamentally tied to whatever genitals you have. I end up conflating too much for the simple reason I’m a mostly straight cis-gender male, and it’s very hard for me to feel like I understand a genderqueer perspective, no matter how hard I try to empathize.
Sort of the same situation where I get off with people saying they totally know how something feels when they have no possible way to have felt that. Eg some white person saying they know how it feels when a black person endures racial bigotry. I’m not a bigot, I support equality for black people, but it’s really damn presumptuous for me to assume I have any idea what it’s like to be black, because I never have been black. It’s not an experience I get to have. So I try to just stay on the commonalities. We’re human. That’s the most important consideration. Being human means seeing injustices that you can’t possibly empathize with in any accurate way, yet still fight for the rights of those downtrodden people who need and ask for an ally.
