JamiMacki

Regrettably I think this may be my last post here, at least for a time. My life is getting a bit crammed and it's hard to find the time and mental energy to return to these arguments for the moment. I'll give some quick housekeeping replies so as not to leave you all with lingering questions and also try and read any replies you've got to this one, but after that no promises. My replies are bound to be brief and unsatisfying but so it goes. Anyways, I found this thread useful and I'll thank you all for your contributions, especially to Donnadogsoth who's stuck around for quite a long time. My views are not precisely the same as when I first started the thread, about the use of the word defect, about how to conceptualize sex and gender as categories, and a few other things. No, that's not what I'm telling you. The context of that post was regarding transphobia, the sense of disgust toward trans people, and the behaviors acted out as a response. Completely separate issue from heterosexuality. You still haven't really solved the issue of subjectivity of your viewing point here. And even if you do, I don't think you can use that difference to justify or rationalize a phobic person's disgust toward a trans person taking hormones. I think you've grossly misjudged Zinnia here. She isn't bullying straight men. She's simply pointing out something that's obviously true to any trans woman involved in dating. Plenty of straight men are perfectly capable of finding a trans woman attractive, penis or no penis. Plenty of those straight men have stigma against trans people at the same time. Some of those men will seek us out anyway but are riddled with shame and want secrecy, and a lot of those men are the exact same people that loudly proclaim that straight men can't be attracted to a women with a penis, but their claims like "it's just sexual preference" is just a lie made to validate the stigma they hold, and repress their desires. I've personally encountered men like this, and so has every other trans woman I've known. Zinnia isn't saying that people like you don't exist (straight men that genuinely can't find trans women attractive due to strong fertility and anatomy preferences), she's just saying the numbers of those men are much smaller than you might think. The question on its own is not relevant enough to impact my decision making, so no. Knowing specifically what caused the feminization of my brain and the resulting female gender identity does nothing for me in terms of expanding my options for what can be done about it. As I said there are a number of possible causes, most of which are unproven and just conjecture at this point, but no possibility seems to suggest that my gender identity can be changed at this point, at least not by any method we currently know of. It also raises the question of, if I could instead change my gender identity to match my natural primary sexual characteristics, instead of visa versa, should I? There's the philosophical issue of whether or not that's ethical. My gender seems as though it's a core piece of my consciousness, and an important part of what makes me, me. The idea of manipulating the development of mere flesh seems insignificant in comparison to reshaping my consciousness itself into someone else. Gender identity and sexual preferences are clearly not social constructs. That's just a fact at this point. Gender roles are certainly socially constructed, but there is doubt as to what extent it can be detached from our biology. Even if it is purely socially constructed, that doesn't mean it isn't real or significant. Money is also a social construct, for example, and is so important that most everyone alive shapes their behavior around its existence. I watched the small clip of that interview from your timestamp and enjoyed it. I would argue just as they were describing how you can't put a homosexual person in a straight camp to reconstruct them, you can't simply put me in a boy camp to make me not a girl, and attempting to reconstruct me in such a way is psychologically damaging and certainly unethical.

I've been insanely busy lately and I'm not sure when or if I can find the time to watch two full documentaries and hunt down the sources for each. I can say in the moment that I've heard people claim that transgenderism is caused by modern hormone treatments given to mothers during pregnancy, that it's caused by diet or chemicals in the water supply. But I've never seen any real evidence for this, only conjecture. If you wanna talk science I think you could save time by linking to peer reviewed research directly. Additionally, even if we could demonstrate one environmental cause, we haven't proven that it's the only cause. We already have a good idea of what biological conditions must be present to create a transgender person, but it seems likely there are a vast number of causes for these conditions. And though I haven't watched your videos, I'm wondering about the titles. Why are they "male" focused? There are just as many female-to-male trans people as the other way around. Your theory would need to account for both kinds to have much value. This seems plausible but I would need to see some data on this to accept it as fact. I don't personally have much of a problem with sexual tension despite some degree of bisexual attraction. My tendency is to fixate on one man, a boyfriend or potential boyfriend, and once that happens my desires for people who aren't that man are very diminished, my desire to appear attractive isn't as strong when he isn't involved, and flirtations from other sources just make me think of him. I never really thought of this as a gendered experience but more of a personality type that both men and women are capable of having. There should obviously be at least some cis homosexual men that share this mindset, just as there should be homosexual women who are ravenous and promiscuous. The trends you mention may exist but I do wonder to what extent. Are we talking about a case of 90% or 60%? The difference is meaningful. Absolutely, it's demoralizing. But if it is reality that lives lived in misery will never see justice, then it's something we have to accept. Once you adopt a logical framework of thinking and start using empiricism and skepticism, the only choice we have is to either accept these things or abandon reason. For example: try your absolute hardest to truly believe that the spirit of your great grandfather is standing invisibly next to you right now. So long as you remain logical and skeptical, it should be impossible. It's the same with the concept of afterlife and divine justice. The link appears to be broken. I don't see trans women as being significantly different enough from cis women that this comparison does not also apply to us to some extent. A cis woman trying to cure hirsuteness, stunted breasts, and imbalanced hormones is defying the biology built into her body ; these conditions are an enemy to be wrestled into submission with medicine and drugs. It is only a world away from a trans woman undergoing affirming care according to subjective perspective. It isn't the entire body either. If you took me pre-transition and lined me up next to a cis women with very slightly masculine features, then censored the breast and crotch areas, I believe you would find it quite the challenge to tell which is which. I accept your point. The equation is naturally rooted to a system that arose as a reflection of our natural tendencies. My issue is that it's irrational and undesirable, and should therefore be overcome, not embraced. Just as we attempt to do with rape, slavery, and all the other naturally coercive evils that cause harm and suffering in our society. The issue is that all three positions tend to land at extreme points and all three are just as wrong as the other two. You might balk at this and say that your conservative position is the most reasonable, and it is, but I would argue that while this may be what you and many conservatives say, it is not the position that those that call themselves conservative act out in reality. I do wonder if and to what extent equality of opportunity can truly exist alongside a mindset of gendered superiority. That said, I don't believe our situation is quite as dire as most feminists claim. Evidence: here's a quote from an interesting meta-review study. "recent meta-analysis suggests that claims of gender bias in peer review “are no longer valid” (Ceci & Williams, 2011, p. 3,157). For example, if there is gender bias in review, we would expect double-blind conditions to increase acceptance rates for female authors. However, this is not the case (Blank, 1991). Nor are manuscripts by female authors disproportionately rejected at single-blind review journals such as Journal of Biogeography (Whittaker, 2008), Journal of the American Medical Association (Gilbert, Williams, & Lundberg, 1994), Nature Neuroscience (Nature Neuroscience, 2006), and Cortex (Valkonen & Brooks, 2011). Even when the quality of submissions is controlled for, manuscripts authored by women do not appear to be rejected at a higher rate than those authored by men (Borsuk et al., 2009)." I'd be happy if this was one day the case. On the topic of transhumanism, I do think the study of gender dysphoria and gender identity is very pertinent and somewhat concerning to those ideas. If a female mind experiences significant discomfort in a male-developed body and visa versa, might we also expect significant discomfort with a human mind in a non-human body? Seeing that gender identity is not something we even notice that we have until it becomes mismatched, it seems very possible that there exists a similar need for a humans to have a perceptively human body, and that we wont feel the full effects of it until the mismatch exists. But this is just a worry. It doesn't logically follow that both circumstances must be the same necessarily, and I think if the technology does one day exist, it's inevitable that people will try it.

The most basic definition of heterosexuality is the attraction to people of the opposite sex, and you can extend that to encompass behaviors and traditions that manifest as an expression of that union, but to then call it a principle you are stretching the definition even further. You don't decide to be heterosexual, it's simply something you are. We've run into another issue of having two separate definitions, so I'll need you to define what you mean by heterosexuality. It seems as if you are equating heterosexuality to monogamous traditions and homosexuality to promiscuity and polyamory, but I'm fairly sure this is a mistake. The expression of heterosexual desires in their most natural form doesn't lead to the kind of monogamous relationships that you value, but rather it favors a kind of hierarchical polygamy with the most dominant male gathering many females as we see in the wild. By instituting marriage pacts and family values we aren't applying a heterosexual principle to our lives, but rather suppressing chaotic, instinctual desires through establishing a social order. I don't know what "cruise culture" is or what you mean by VD rates, but I can only assume it's related to promiscuity and lack of formal structure to relationships. As with most things, understanding the causes is important. Does homosexual attraction lead to this sort of behavior all on its own? Or is what we're seeing in the rainbow community simply a reflection of what human sexuality is like in chaos, without tradition and structure? I don't know for sure and I suspect it may be a mixture of both, yet vastly more weighted toward the latter. And if it is the latter, let's not discount how they ended up in that chaos. Inflexible and ornery traditionalists refuse to allow them to participate in tradition because a homosexual mimicry of the marriage covenant isn't "pure" enough for them, and so they are in chaos, and this is what you end up with. Anyways, back to the issue of principle. I don't think you should be using heterosexuality as the word for the principle you are espousing, because that word already has another meaning that's incompatible with what you want. The actual principle we're talking about is a kind of order, or sexual structure. There are two ways to examine the idea of bearing a burden for gory in the next life. One is what I believe an ego-related belief that your consciousness will somehow persist after death in any meaningful way, which is insane and destructive, and another where we are living and suffering in order to build a better world for the next lives, the next generations of humans. I'm not a biblical scholar but I'm hoping the original intent of the bible was to impress upon us this latter desire. I can't let you weasel away out of the sourcing issues so easily. If you want to critique her words directly you should do so directly, because when you view them in a framework like this you lose their proper context and replace them with an opposing, hostile one, and then you're prone to making mistakes in reasoning where you otherwise wouldn't. If you want to hold Zinnia up as an example of an ideological proponent of polymorphous perversity then provide a proper citation of her doing so. I don't see an example of this in the article you linked, because all she's done there is exactly what I just did in my previous post; encourage introspection. Your example of noticing a toggle effect may not be so simple as it first appears to you. There may be much left unexplored, and I suspect this because sexuality itself is very complex. For example, your summary hinges on the word natural. Do you believe the concept of naturalist sexual development has an innate, instinctual sway over your sexual preference? Or is this response informed by some kind of value or belief? The androgynous face is a good starting point for consideration but what about a situation where you have two identical female bodies that you consider attractive, and the mind is the same. One body developed naturally and the other required intervention such as hormones processed from soy. This isn't a situation where you are comparing a trans women to a more attractive cis woman, but one thing to a different version of itself, nearly identical in qualities aside from the process in which those qualities emerged. This is plausible for some but it does run into the issue of inconsistency with what is and isn't considered mutilation. If a teenage cis girl has a hormone imbalance that's causing a stalled breast development, and HRT is used to kickstart her puberty, this draws many parallels to the situation of a trans girl but I've never seen it described as mutilation in the same way. This idea of trans people and homosexuals mutilating dress codes and sexuality seems far too abstract to be uninfluenced by belief structure. The question to be asked is why are these considered mutilations? This may be explained by the feminist idea of transmisogyny, which is the concept that there is an idea rooted in our belief systems that femaleness and femininity are of a lower hierarchical order to maleness and masculinity, and the former exists for the benefit of the latter. If you'd like to see an example of this rooted in tradition, simply go read Corinthians 14:34-35 If we accept that this is something that influences our thinking as culture, then the equation of transition to mutilation would be naturally rooted in this system. It would also explain why the outrage is so centered on trans women, while trans men are mostly ignored by the public at large. If you view gender through this lens and you view me as a man, then it follows that my transition toward femininity and femaleness is repulsive to you because I am lowering myself on a hierarchy instead of raising myself up. Conversely, the transition of a trans man is less upsetting, because it stands to reason that a female would want to be more male-like. I'm not discounting the subtle instinctual comparisons from surgery to wounds, from HRT to poison or disease. These are the things that make transphobia such a visceral experience, but I think these comparisons stem from belief structure, and the evidence of this is that once you change the belief structure, the visceral experience tends to vanish. That's a good a point and I certainly agree we shouldn't be nitpicking quips and one-liners from Jesus and Moses. My Corinthians citation that I gave earlier is an example of exactly why we shouldn't engage in this. Though I think embracing the main idea, and embracing the bible as a whole are two separate things. We can view the big idea of it as one point, and the many specific pieces which our traditions are based on as other bits. I also think the big idea encompasses much more than the bible, but goes all the way back to the Akkadians/Sumerians/Assyrians and probably even further into pre-history. Lastly I want to address your portrayal of a war on nature as a bad thing. The context you used it in was in relation to your prediction of acceptance of deviant sexual practices, which makes me think of this is another example of an improper use of wording, as this is more accurately a war on order. Conversely, a war on nature is the essence of human progression, and this becomes clear if you recognize evolution via natural selection as the defining process in which our reality is based, and start applying that to thought processing. This leads us to the understanding that the natural world is one of endless death and horror, where creatures live in a near constant state of chaos and fear. The construction of our civilization is our race's greatest achievement, and the state of comfort it allows us where we can sit and have a discussion like this together is extremely unnatural. Certain branches of Judaism and Christianity take the concept of hell to simply mean a state of living without God, and I think this is a mind blowingly profound insight.

I can't really agree that heterosexuality should ever be called a principle. I find the idea that homosexuality and transgender identity have the ability to dissolve the basic heterosexual reproductive unit completely absurd. In total, the entire LGBT spectrum makes up less than 2% of the population. A large portion of that is bisexual people who are still potentially suited for a heterosexual coupling, which leaves the rest of us even less than that. And it's very well documented at this point that sexual preference and trans identity are both innate properties of the individual based on biological makeup. The actual numbers are likely a bit higher than that, since there are still a decent amount of homosexual or trans people that are in denial and would lie on a survey, but I can't anticipate that being too high a number. Sheer numbers means heterosexuality will always be the dominant trend. Further, I don't believe that heterosexuality is "a good" since that would imply that all those who engage in it would be doing good, and that's simply untrue. A gay man and a trans woman would both make poor fathers if forced to take on the typical heterosexual male gender role in a family, and that is a real situation that occurs due to an excess in rigidity within the very tradition you're advocating I should defend. I'm an advocate for the western heteronormative tradition for heterosexual cisgender people. Which is LGBT lingo meaning a straight person who isn't trans ought to recognize the value in the nuclear family, and the traditions which make this possible such as the marriage pact, etc. What I feel the need to warn against is the tendency for members of a dominant tradition to ram said tradition down any and all nonconforming throats. As I said, the heterosexual western/Christian lifestyle does not suit a minority of people for reasons beyond their control, and attempting to exert pressure or force the issue is counter-intuitive and detrimental to the very tradition you're trying to promote. Effectively, wailing transphobic or homophobic vitriol makes you look like a fool, and don't think people don't notice which traditions the fools are citing to justify their bigotry. I'm not saying the left is in any better state. The most horrifying part about this LGBT debate between the Left and Right, is that the winner will be decided by whichever side manages to destroy itself first, not by which side has the best arguments. Here is the crucial thing that I wish the moderates and the right wing would understand. The only reason an LGBT "movement" exists is due to anti-lgbt hatefulness. In a vacuum, trans people and homosexuals have nowhere near enough in common to form a political group at all, even with just trans people by ourselves. The only reason we're together is that the hateful in our society are so ignorant that most of them can't even tell us apart, and therefore hate us equally and for the same reasons. The political right is constantly trying to pass laws and promote a culture that makes our lives a living hell, knowingly and deliberately. The day this stops is the day the LGBT movement collapses and splits in half, because fundamentally both homosexuality and transgender identity are apolitical qualities. Nothing more than biology, not ideology. If the right wants trans people on their side, the way to do that should be obvious. People like Siegfried Von Walheim and Worlok in this thread are evidence showing how difficult that will be though. From a viewing point without prejudice and even the slightest appreciation for the biological sciences of the past 20 years, they appear just as delusional if not more so than Zinnia Jones at her worst. And because I'm vaguely familiar with Zinnia I feel like I should defend her here even though I find myself disagreeing with her more often than not, because I can't really abide blatant transphobic hit pieces like that article you linked. I could go on about all the unscientific armchair psychology the author is doing but that would take a while and isn't the main point so I'll skip over that. If you agree with the author here, then it's likely you haven't considered the origins of this viewpoint. This claim that straight men who don't want to have sex with a trans woman with a dick are bigoted and transphobic is nothing but a strawman. A strawman unfortunately created originally by trans women themselves, who took a legitimate point and exploited it for vindictive purposes as a form of revenge against people who turned them down. And now people like your article author have spun it up and overblown it, happy to leave the original point undressed. I think it's somewhat important so I'll break it down. A man is free to reject a trans woman because she's transgender, and there are good reasons to do so. If the trans woman has a penis and the man has a sexual preference for vaginas, or if a man is simply looking for a wife to start a family with and desires biological children, that's completely understandable and it's not those kinds of men we're talking about. If you find yourself attracted to a woman and then are suddenly no longer attracted after learning that she's transgender, it is worth taking a look in the mirror and honestly attempting to examine why that is. If you look inside yourself and truly find that it's one of the above reasons I mentioned or something similar, then you're golden. But more often than not the most dominant reason is that you simply find us disgusting. Not the individual obviously, since in this situation you found them quite attractive before, but knowing they are trans invokes an earlier prejudice that triggers a disgust response. This is the very definition of transphobia. It's a useful and very revealing thought experiment, especially considering the most common response is for the transphobic person to simply recite exactly their prejudices and try to pass them off as reality (which is always how prejudice is justified). As a side note, I'm extremely appreciative of your continued conversation and civility. Your perspective is an interesting one and very different from mine. I'm an atheist who's long been disillusioned with Christianity but who's been recently turned back onto it by Jordan Peterson. Not in the sense of believing literally in a supernatural divine entity or virgin births and resurrection (Nietzsche described how the nail ended up in that particular coffin), but in valuing at least most of its teachings and traditions as wisdom. Though I think to embrace it as a whole unquestioningly is simply madness, and there's simply no other rational way to take it than by looking at each piece of tradition and moral value critically on a case by case basis, which is quite a monumental task. I still have a few hangups about it, namely that the traditions seem to lead directly to the mistreatment of homosexuals and to misogyny/sexism, and by the combination of these things we get transphobia. I don't hate you. I don't hate myself either. I think that you are prejudiced, uninformed about this topic, and have a tendency to go on incoherent rants only tangentially related to any arguments I've made, which makes you somewhat of a chore to have a conversation with, but I'm not angry about any of that or saying so out of some kind of spite. It's just an observation. I'm not actually sure if you're trying to speak to me directly or if you're simply speaking to the ether, because almost nothing about what you're saying makes any sense in the context of my initial reply or anything else I've said in this thread. Really the only point of disagreement that you've presented that can be intelligently discussed is your insistence that my brain doesn't matter. But you haven't presented any evidence to demonstrate this or any sort of coherent argument. I'm here to be challenged and have productive conversation and this is neither challenging nor productive. I'd be glad to discuss this further if you can provide some grain of evidence suggesting that gender identity doesn't exist or doesn't matter, but otherwise I'm out.

Straight away calling me a moron is pretty bad form. As is using the phrase "nobody cares" in an argument for anything that people obviously care about. You're also writing this in the form of a response, but you haven't made it clear what arguments specifically that you're responding to, and it seems like you're tackling a strawman that you've built based on listening to the way people ridicule trans people. Is it too much to ask to allow yourself to be open to the possibility that you're wrong, rather than beginning by thinking you already have all the answers? If we both accept that mentality, then we can have a meaningful engagement of ideas where in the end everyone wins, because then we're both simply trying to figure out what's true, not who is right. I'm far from perfect but I'm honestly attempting to maintain this mentality, but I don't see the same effort from you, or many others in this thread. I do appreciate that you seem to respect science at least generally, but I think if you truly had a respect for it you'd be open to looking at what modern science is saying, instead of only the 30+ year old science that fits your world view. Your use of the word hermaphrodite betrays a terribly outdated concept of what sex is. A more up to date view recognizes that sex itself is somewhat nebulous and without any clear boundaries. Instead of two sexes and a hermaphrodite, we have two general trends and a huge amount of variance and overlap which make perfectly consistent categorization impossible. But I'll leave the exploration of that at your discretion. I'm not claiming to be sexually female. Although I would argue that changing some of the components of what defines a sex category (sex characteristics in my case), is actually changing your sex by logical necessity. I'm not changing my sex to female as such, rather more female-like, but it is changing nonetheless. Identity is what I'm more concerned about though. Again lets look at science, and this time I'll actually put in some leg-work for you. There's actually very strong evidence of a biological origin of gender identity. "Gender identity, sexual orientation ... are programmed into our brain during early development. There is no evidence that postnatal social environments have any crucial effect on gender identity or sexual orientation." (Swaab, Bao, 2013) "Gender-dependent differentiation of the brain has been detected at every level of organization -- morphological, neurochemical, and functional -- and has been shown to be primarily controlled by sex differences in gonadal steroid hormone levels during perinatal development." (Chung, Auger, 2013) "There is strong evidence that high concentrations of androgens lead to more male-typical behavior and that this also influences gender identity." ( Jürgensen, et al ) In summary, gender identity is an emergent property of the brain, and it's predictable based on how certain structures are formed. We know these structures are formed in the womb, and are controlled by androgen concentrations. We have no evidence to suggest this is something that can be changed later in life. Once developed it is set. In the case of a transgender person, there seems to be a genuine mismatch between primary sex characteristics and neurological phenotype. Those are the facts. If you still want to talk about identifying as an attack helicopter, please show me your rotary blades and missiles and then we can talk about that as a valid comparison to gender. We are left with the question of what this means and why is it important. Surely you're thinking, even if I have this female neurology the rest of me (the majority) is anatomically and genetically male, so I'm a man right? Only if you define man as a person having majority male sex characteristics. But this doesn't accurately represent reality. The brain has a much greater impact on what you are, and by you I mean you: that which has the experience of consciousness and is aware. Whatever that truly is. So if I'm sexually male and neurologically female, the purpose of transition comes from acknowledging that the metaphysical manifestation of gender established by neurology is meaningful and can't be changed by any means we know of, that having a gender and sex that matches is a preferable state of existence, and so we change the things that can be changed to bring us closer to that point of harmony. Free speech and the pronoun situation is on a lower order of concern for me, because I think it resolves itself if we as a society come to a consensus on what is actually true about sex and gender, so that's what I prefer to focus on. Basically, by preferring to be called she, I'm not trying to deny any biological realities, manipulate, or fool you into anything, because I don't take it to mean that I'm sexually female. So don't be so damn pedantic about it.

I can tell by the language you're using that this is something you're passionate about, but I think a bit more clarity and less aphorism would serve us better here. So if you'll allow me to paraphrase: The critical thinking methods that Socrates laid the foundations for, coupled with the belief that all life has value are the primary basic principles we should each submit to before having a conversation. Is this fair? How would you edit this into your own words? As is, this is something I can embrace. And having done so, what impact does this have on our conversation? Have I said anything that is now inconsistent with these basic principles?

The specific comparison is unimportant. Replace cancer with anything that reduces well-being. The point that you are evading here is that you are like the charlatan in this story, providing recommendations that impact peoples well-being from a place of ignorance. You know no more about this topic than a homeopathic shaman knows about pharmacology, and the real world results of your suggestion has similar efficacy, so it's utter madness to believe you have all the answers for what a trans person ought to do. Would it surprise you to learn that I consider my physical transition more or less complete without a single surgery? The last stats I saw, only about 1/3 of trans people have any intention of ever getting genital surgery. So, while it's helpful for some, it's not a crucial aspect of transition in any regard. But I digress. I think with this said, It's best if I check out of this conversation, because it isn't one. If you're just going to ignore any data I present and sidestep any points I make because you don't care then we aren't conversing, you're just preaching. I'll leave you with a final point about LGBT individuals dying out from the gene pool because we don't breed as much. Fat chance. It exists in many species today, and may well have existed throughout the history of mammalian evolution and even far beyond. If natural selection hasn't eliminated it from the gene pool by now, how many more generations do you think it'll take? Even if it's much more recent than I'm proposing, the amount of time it would take would still be enormous, to the point where humanity would have advanced so far into the future that it would barely be comprehensible to us. That's assuming there is a gay gene or trans gene at all, and the causes aren't something more complex. If that's the case, then it's possible natural selection may never have any impact on it. No matter what, we're going to be around for your entire life at minimum, and it's preferable that we learn to live with each other. Which unfortunately seems like you staying away from me and visa versa. I can only hope your future children aren't gay or gender dysphoric.

His main point was that if you ignore the vast time span that the Roman empire existed within, and the complexity that entails, you can cherry pick just about anything as the cause of Rome's fall and they're all equally valid. The fall of Rome is not reducible to any one factor. About moral decline specifically, Shaun describes how there is no point in Roman history that you can point to and say, "Ah yes, at this time period Rome was moral". Rather, Rome at many points of its history had people exactly like you, who complain of moral decline and point backward to some time when things were better, but this time never truly existed. It's just the power of nostalgia. What is mutilation? Piercing your ears? Getting a tattoo? Removing a tumor? The way you're using it is just pointless hyperbole. I've already discussed the nature of sex and gender at length with Donnadogsoth in this thread. A more full explanation is in that conversation, but here is something to consider: In having the brain structure that I do, I'm a transgender woman. Whether or not I transition or live as a man changes nothing about what I am in that regard. In the formation of a metaphysical identity, what do you suppose has a greater impact? A penis or the brain? Isaac Newton, George Washington, Beethoven, Vivaldi? Wastes of space all of them, apparently. You are simply proving my point about a breeding obsessed mindset. You apparently cannot imagine a world with purpose outside of parenthood, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't. And what does it mean when you say you don't factor in a childless man (or gay man as you put it, though I'm not sure why the specificity) in moral decisions? You are starting to sound like a dangerously immoral individual. This is no excuse to factor someone out of morality. I'm assuming by Rubicon you mean transition? Your solution is like recommending sugar pills in place of antibiotics when someone is dying of an infection. I'm assuming you aren't trans and don't really have a stake in this issue, so I wouldn't expect you to be aware of the data/research on this topic. But I would expect you to be aware of your own ignorance and avoid telling people what to do without having a clue what outcome your advice would lead to. Here is some evidence in favor of transition. Where is yours? You are not a fence sitter if you're advocating your position to be the truth. You've hurled yourself a hundred feet opposite the fence to me. Unless you're talking about fence sitting on the issue of whether or not I should be forced to conform/exterminated or allowed to live as I choose. If that's the fence you're sitting on then let me know and I'll end this conversation. The rest of what you've said here is really nothing more than reiterating your belief that proliferating your individual genes is the only worthwhile purpose in this world, and I don't want to spend any more time on this. This is a completely subjective assertion. You do you. Did you mean right-wing extremist? Or do you think it's the left-wing radicals most likely to roll out the gas chambers for trans people? That's fairly amusing. Whether you realize it or not, you are being antagonistic by recommending something that would be blatantly harmful to me. I'm better off now as a result of transition, so my own experience invalidates your claims, and the data invalidates your solutions as well. If your wife had cancer and a man came to her trying to convince her that she should buy into homeopathic quackery instead of modern medicine, you should rightly accuse this person of being a morally reprehensible and dangerous charlatan. It doesn't matter if he has good intentions and believes 100% that his cures work. They don't, and if your wife believes him and ends up suffering for it, then he does take a lion's share of the blame. How do you think you would respond to the charlatan if that happened? I'm skeptical of any attempts to reduce an entire culture to any two specific beliefs, but I don't know. I looked up Bill Warner and tried to find where he discussed the things you're talking about so I can get a better understanding where you're coming from, but I couldn't find it. Just a lot of anti-islamic arguments and books. The belief that all life has value in western thought does seem to have its origins with Hebrew and Christian thinkers, but these groups are far from the only one's to have come up with this idea. Is the difference in the west in combining this with Greek critical thought? I don't know, maybe? It would be a very difficult thing to prove or falsify. Why is this different from selecting any other combination of things that only the west seems to have?

I see in just about every line of what you've said something that's factually false, uninformed, misguided, or potentially harmful. It makes it very difficult to unpack since explaining the folly of something often takes much greater effort than it does to state the folly. I'll do my best to focus on the most important bits. About the fall of Rome and bad mothering: Your view seems to mirror Stefan's pretty precisely so a response to his seems like a sufficient response to yours. I'll present the lovely Shaun and Jen on youtube to counter that more thoroughly than I could in this format. Since this is apparently your main argument I'll focus on this. You seem to be making a false assumption that being transgender is something you do, when it's something you are. The "false man/woman" description is nothing more than your opinion, and idea that it's impossible to sustain a family as a transgender person is simply nonsensical, and will inevitably lead you to the no true Scotsman fallacy in trying to defend it, because you're simply redefining family to suit your purposes. To your last point, how can someone be always a man while at the same time be able to become less or more of one? Is there some kind of point system to manhood that you've created? Your entire argument here is invalid because all of your premises are either false, or simply your preferences for how these words should be defined. I'd just like to point out it's very likely you are imagining the causality backwards. "For some reason" LGBT people are abuse victims more often than the general population. Are you considering the possibility that it simply means people are more likely to abuse someone who's LGBT? I have seen studies that deal with this topic but I'm too short on time at the moment to go searching for it. If I find one I'll edit this post and put it here. I consider your views here and the rest of your comments the result of a breeding obsessed headspace. Just because you consider the passing on of one's genes the highest purpose, doesn't mean it must be for everyone else. Some people are infertile, and some fertile people simply choose not to reproduce. Calling this suicide is just dishonest wordplay. If human beings are individuals, then the idea of living on through your offspring is fanciful and comforting, yet false. Have as many children as you like, but at the end of our lives you and I will be just as dead as the other. As for having anything against me, I don't believe you. I think you're probably a kind hearted person and may have some amount of compassion for me or empathy, but that amounts to very little when the ideas you hold are harmful and destructive. Intent does matter and I appreciate your compassion, but consequences matter more. You recognize that there is an issue, and are critiquing my solution without offering a viable alternative. And not only that, you're talking favorably about people like me being eliminated from the gene pool. The main reason you can come up with in support of my transition is that it means I'll likely die without proliferating my genes? Really? If down the road, circumstances changed for the worse and eugenics was once again on the table, why should I trust that someone who thinks like you wouldn't be fully permissive of my being tossed in a gas chamber?

The splitting of sex and gender seems like a more elegant way of describing it with less problems, but ultimately those kind of semantics aren't worth arguing about further because I think ultimately you and I mean the same thing. What worries me is the consequences of the language you're using, and the emotional attachment that you seem to hold to these definitions. Namely, fueling the fire of trans hatred and validating the rejection of our identity. Danica Roem, a transwoman, just won an office seat in VA, and I encourage you to open your ears to what people are commenting on most frequently about it. There's very little political discussion and almost no objection to her actual politics, but a whole lot of rage and vitriol with people outraged over news articles referring to her as "she". If you were to say your quote to these people, they're going to understand it as they are just their biological sex, and perceive "adopted sex" as some bs you just made up. It's ripe for the confusion of replacing the word biological with actual or real. The safety and freedom I'm referring to is a very specific kind, which you are for some reason ignoring to pose this question, but I'll try and give you an answer regardless. Safety and freedom as vague concepts don't need to be promoted directly, but rather they are manifestations of a basic collective moral value. In my specific case, the west has had the groundbreaking moral epiphany that maybe it might be wrong to murder someone for being trans, and is even waking up to the idea that it might be morally questionable to try and force a trans person to conform, or to make their lives so miserable via ostracization and stigmatization that they'd rather just kill themselves than continue living. This makes the west the best place on earth to live in, such as it is, but even here there are many who would want to take the latter away from us, and some even want to take away the former.

It doesn't suffice because in this case it's tautology. What is the purpose in saying my biological sex is biologically my sex? What a useless statement. My point is that everybody doesn't know what you mean by this, and it's not unreasonable to assume you are using the word biologically to instead mean what is real or actual. We want to be in the west because of safety and freedom. The reasons we have safety and freedom are due to a mix of ideas from the left and the right. You have a strange use of the word generous here. Is allowing me to exist without targeted oppression based on my gender expression really "extraordinarily generous"? I'd simply call it moral progress. Are you trying to say that some aspect of right wing tradition must be vitally upheld above moral progress? What exactly is this cornerstone of Western Society that needs to be defended above all else? There's hardly any real consensus on the right. Ask people and you'll get different answers, such as the two parent family, the white race, the working class, Christian values, secularism, the constitution, capitalist prosperity, and on and on.

Let's dial back a bit and let me ask you this: For something to be biological, must is also be natural? Are these things synonymous? If I create a duck in a lab from scratch, is it not biologically a duck because it wasn't birthed naturally? Have I made a mistake in assuming tyranny was off the table in this discussion? I suppose I should rephrase. What I meant to say was that you can't turn back the clock on culture in a free society. I've assumed our common cause was defending freedom from tyranny and oppression. In other words, your commitment to a free society should be of greater importance than your commitment to tradition, and if so, you must accept that what yesterday was deviant may become acceptable today. Talking about returning to a time when things were better and restoring tradition might seem quaint and appealing to some, namely white men, but for people like me and other minorities it's a threat. For lgbt, racial minorities, and women who value their personal liberty and equality, there is no time in western history we can look back on that's better than now.

If you're getting irritated, it's probably time to change course or end the conversation. You're starting to assume my intentions and set me up as an ideological enemy, but I'm not taking words away from you or changing obvious truths. I think I understand why you're getting upset. You see something about the nature of biology that seems obvious to you, and are expecting that it should be equally obvious to me, so it's frustrating to be asked to explain this thing that you feel shouldn't need explaining. But I'd remind you that obviousness is subjective, and knowing this should mean there's really no cause to be upset. The reason I'm skeptical of the things you hold to be true is that to me, they seem to be stuck in the version of biology outlined in 1911. Is Richard Dawkins also changing obvious truths and taking away words by proposing the extended phenotype theory? Your cerberus example doesn't really hold water. The differences between stitching on an extra head and using hormones to activate body structure development already encoded in our genes is significant, especially if you consider the purpose of this being to match an already present aspect of biology in the brain of a trans person. Systems of politics and religion can be dug up and reused, but culture at large doesn't stay the same, and Chinese culture has never been frozen in time. The culture and traditions of the Song Dynasty for example are radically different from any period in B.C. China. Christian traditions might see a revival in the U.S. though do you really expect it will be the same as it was in the past? How far in the past? Will tolerance of slavery return with it as in biblical times? Will it come back with the medieval idea of divine right? Of course not. If it happens, it will be something new, made from the pieces of something old, influenced by modern thinking. And if part of that package comes with intolerance and oppression of deviants, then I reject it on moral grounds. A people can be judged by how they treat their freaks. I don't want to be put on a pedestal, which is where some on the left would place me, but it's far worse to be pushed to the fringes of society and outcasted, which is where the right is driving me based on ideas similar to your own. You have the causation backwards. The bigotry is not caused by trans people's association with the left. Rather, trans people are pushed to the left by the existence of right wing bigotry in the first place. It's self preservation.

For me, this has nothing to do with political punch and everything to do with what makes rational sense. You haven't actually made an argument here or explained a position. Morphology is a branch of biology that you seem to be dismissing on the basis that it's partially artificially sustained. But why exactly? It is still biology that we're talking about. Taking this into account, it seems there's no other reason to use the phrase 'biologically male' to describe a transwoman than propaganda, because so many people associate biology with what is real. I'm not accusing you of having that intent, but regardless of intent that is the effect of using that phrase. You're misunderstanding me. I'm talking about where I'm drawing the moral line, not where Canada is drawing it. I don't agree with the concept of assisted suicide being implemented in any system, for reasons I've already discussed. As to your following point, traditions change and evolve over time. They don't always change for the better, but giving into the nostalgic desire to return to better times is a dangerous temptation. There is no turning back the clock on culture or freezing it in place. History shows us this. Transition as a concept and the reevaluation of gender are deviations away from tradition, but please understand that these deviations are a response to old traditions becoming stifling and causing harm. When this happens, change is not only needful but inevitable. The change or decline of a culture if that's how you perceive it does not excuse bigotry. You are correct in that in that the 'anti-traditionalist' camp is associated with transsexuals, but who is really to blame for that if not the traditionalists themselves and the bigotry they cling to? Inability to compromise is a weakness. 1) It hasn't come up for me personally yet. I have encountered guys that are attracted to me, but are afraid of the looming transphobic opinions of their parents, and I do consider that an issue. Family can be important. I'm fortunate enough to be decently 'passing', so the parents probably wouldn't know I'm trans unless they were told directly, but that is nonetheless something I would want to lay on the table, come what may. Ultimately I would have to leave it up to my partner to decide how much they value their parents approval or disapproval. 2) People use gender to treat each other like garbage and it's hard to say which gets the worst of it. Before transition I had people telling me "man up" in situations where it ended up being nothing but psychological abuse pressuring me to suppress any negative feelings. Now I have people assuming I'm stupid before I even open my mouth simply because they see me as a woman, and end up being unabashedly condescending toward me. I don't see any simple solution, but I have noticed that most sexism comes from people that have no idea they are even being sexist. I do think we need to have a serious cultural discussion about sexism as an egalitarian issue for us to move forward. Modern feminists are trying hard to do this but perhaps not in the most effective way, and I think the anti-feminist/conservatives are doing an equally poor job at listening and critiquing constructively. 3) Even at my most miserable points I've never actually attempted suicide or made plans or anything, and my general emotional state has only improved since transition so I'm not too worried about that. The fear of violence against me is something very real though. Perhaps not where I live currently, but for example there are many places both within the US and outside that I'd like to visit, but being trans means there's extra impetus to do thorough research to avoid putting myself in a dangerous situation. I've never personally been threatened but I do have a friend that was stabbed for being gay in rural Utah (actually bisexual but bigots don't tend to care for details), and hearing stories like these are deeply unsettling. I don't really know how to deal with this to be frank. I just sincerely hope to go through life unstabbed, and try to limit myself to situations where I'm least likely to be stabbed. 4) The holes in our society's common conception of sex and gender are becoming increasingly obvious, and people at that age range are always finding those holes and digging at them. I think the non-binary/queer trends are an attempt at resolving the inconsistencies and solve problems present in the old ideas of gender, and while I'm not sure whether or not they're hitting their intended mark, I'm supportive of their experimentation. And yes I would say it's fairly trendy in some places, though in the same way that goth or punk has been trendy in terms of numbers. I don't really see it ever taking over the mainstream, but I may be wrong. That said, there's a huge difference between being transgender and being gender noncomforming. The trendiness is heavily weighted toward the noncomforming part. 5) The general consensus among trans people is that in order to be safe, if you want to have children you should assume HRT will make you infertile, and if you don't want kids you should assume that it wont. Because there's no guarontee either way and it's a hard thing to test since it can change spontaneously. So yes, it's a safe assumption that I'm sterile and it was an extremely important thing to consider, but consider it I did and here I am anyway. I've entertained fantasy-land notions of finding a single dad and falling in love with both him and his child, and having that full family experience despite my situation, but I'm not actively seeking it and avoid factoring it into my relationship considerations. More likely I think I'll try and end up modeling my relationship after my Aunt, who is not trans but is nonetheless unable to have children, yet has enjoyed a long and healthy marriage despite this. I'm very confident in being able to live a wholesome and productive life with a strong relationship without having kids. Now, there is the question of whether an infertile couple in a stable relationship is morally obligated to adopt, since there's never any shortage of orphans and they would suffer far less in a loving family home than in an orphanage, which is something I'm wrestling with and don't have an answer for yet. But fortunately deciding on that can wait, since I'm not in any kind of stable long term relationship just yet. Thanks for these questions! They were fun to answer and a nice break from arguing about definitions like in the rest of this thread

I would like to challenge you to explain why we should use my comprehensive natural state over my observable morphology to justify your use of the world "biologically". One exists only as potential, while the other is objective and tangible. I should also point out that I would only agree to the use of the world comprehensively in its loose form, meaning "mostly" rather than "complete". 3) If I'm drawing the line somewhere in the realm of events unlikely to ever occur in reality, does it matter where specifically it's drawn? What's the point you're trying to make with this comparison? For someone with gender dysphoria, it may be possible to go through life without ending up suicidal and miserable without transitioning. I'm sure I wouldn't mind it so much if I did heroin every day, or perhaps I could become a Buddhist monk and detach from the idea of self entirely, to name a few possible examples. But not all solutions are equal, and we can look at the data and see objectively that transition is currently the best option for a trans person in terms of well-being by reducing dysphoria. The more pertinent question is why is the transsexual person being barred from transition? If the reason is something natural and beyond our means of control, then that is simply unfortunate. But that's not very common. What is very common is bigotry. Stopping someone from transitioning is like preventing someone who's bleeding from bandaging themselves, simply because you dislike the aesthetic of the cloth. 4) The words of Jesus here seem like they can be interpreted in multiple ways. I'm guessing if a widow gives her last few pennies to charity, skimps on food for the week as a consequence, gets sick from the resulting poor nutrition, and then dies, you wouldn't be so keen to bring out this passage to praise her decision.

The "we don't care what you do with your body" thing is just a cop out. A way to answer the question without actually saying anything. What you're actually saying is you don't care about me, because you don't know me. If it were a member of your close family, a best friend, or one of your own children wanting to transition, I'm sure suddenly the topic would be of great interest to you, and your opinions on whether gender transition is leading to a healthy life or ruining yourself would come into play. It's not as if libertarians and ancaps all have the same views on transgenderism, and at least the ones that are anti-trans would have the decency not to use government to forcibly sterilize me, control my gender assignment, or exterminate me if they were in charge, as the fascists would. 1. As to your point about pronouns, I don't want to see you thrown in jail for refusing to call me she, whether directly or through tertiary means (refusal to pay fine > resisting arrest > jail). If someone is being a tremendous jerk(not being able to swear on this board is difficult), lets say going around spouting racial slurs and publicly professing their love for slavery, we can generally rely on social consequences being levied on this person, and it's usually satisfactory to leave it at that. The unresolved issue that's driving the pronoun debate is that it still isn't considered socially unacceptable to use pronouns to harass and verbally abuse trans people in many places. If you're a trans person and someone is proudly misgendering you and throwing all the buzzawords in the transphobic toolkit at you (mutilated, mentally ill, the various slurs, etc), it can be extremely psychologically damaging when you also add that nobody in your community is willing to defend you, and this jerk can say this garbage with no social consequence. My preferred solution is to convince you that you are being a tremendous jerk when doing this, and you should be calling your friends out when they do this sort of thing. When you stop being an indifferent bystander, there will no longer be any need for a law. 2. Nobody except the most hardcore, free healthcare for all type of socialist is suggesting that you should have to pay for all trans medical procedures. Everyone else is only concerned with the extremely poor. If you live in a western country, the fact is that our culture has democratically decided to use tax money to pay the medical bills of people who can't afford them. Nowhere in our system is it allowed for an individual to pick and choose the specifics of how their tax money is spent. If you agree with the concept in general of your tax money going to help the poor pay for their medical procedures, then some ill-conceived notion of excluding trans HRT or surgeries you've constructed is irrelevant. The views of medical professionals is that HRT and surgeries are sometimes necessary, and if elected representatives heed this advice, then your complains about a specific use of your tax dollars don't hold water. If you want to get rid of health benefits for the poor entirely, sure you can have that discussion, but then you're not talking about trans people specifically. Otherwise you need an actual argument to counter what the medical professionals are saying. In the example of abortion, the argument is pretty clear. Anti-abortionists claim that a fetus is a human being and that terminating it is murder, which is illegal. I've heard all the anti-trans arguments in the book and none of them hold any water, and I'd say none of them come anywhere close to the level of coherence and weight that the abortion argument has.

1. (a) Myself included. (b) After taking a second look at how defects and malfunctions are defined, I agree with you. You changed my mind on this. Kudos to you. 2. It'd be a shame if this conversation got hung up on the nature of existence. In the scenario I was bringing up, you still exist, but without a mind. Rather, you would be a brain causing itself to hallucinate the experience of being a mind. Really the only reason I'm bugging you about this is because I've been listening to Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett's views on this topic and it's left me confused about the nature of the self. I'm not saying I believe this is true, more playing devil's advocate, but I think it's a possibility. As far as I'm aware, there isn't any way to counter this using reason alone. It's not illogical or paradoxical, and seems like something that will inevitably be proven or disproved by neuroscience in the future. I'm willing to assume your view is true because I don't know what's true, but the assumption bandying need not extend to you. If you're certain about the nature of the mind then great, you might have knowledge that I don't. I only bring it up to explain why I'm not 100% sold by your metaphysical argument.

1) Ultimately I think I agree. Sexual dimorphism is not always related to fertility, but the study of fertility is necessary to our understanding of evolution and we do need words for the distinctive gamete producers, and those words may as well be male and female. What we must recognize about this definition is that it is an abstraction, and in reality is not limited to just two distinct states of biology. By this logic, each intersexual variant could be considered its own sex, but we don't do this for the sake of pragmatism. However, when we define it this way, it means that sex is not the individual defining characteristic that our language and often ourselves perceive it to be. A male is therefore someone who possesses an arrangement of organs necessary to produce sperm. It's little different than saying a blonde is a person with blonde hair, and we don't go around creating pronouns for blondes. Since I think we do have a working definition now leme bring up some things you mentioned earlier. Calling something a malfunction doesn't give you cause to dismiss its importance unless you assign a value judgment, which is beyond the scope of science. Also, calling transgender people confused and malfunctioning is an uncharitable misrepresentation of reality, including value judgements and bias. 2) The experience of having a mind could be illusory. You can't observe other peoples minds, only your own. When the brain is damaged, your mind is also impacted, and when the brain is destroyed, so is the mind. The brain could be giving us the hallucination of having a mind, which would mean it doesn't exist like pond scum, but rather doesn't exist at all. Or we could think of it like you say, and posit that brains create minds and that minds are metaphysical. I don't actually know the answer to this, but for the sake of this argument I'm fine with assuming your version is true so long as we acknowledge that minds are fundamentally linked to physics, and cannot exist without the physics. Taking into account our definition of sex and assuming your understanding of the mind is true, I actually agree with your summary (points 1&2) that you made in your first post, with a few small but necessary edits for accuracy. First, with our established definition of male, saying that I'm biologically male is more misleading than saying sexually male. If the word biologically is meant to simply describe the biological nature of sex, then it's redundant because that's already included in the definition of sex. And, if the word is meant to define me as a physical whole, then it's contradictory because our definitions of sex don't include the physical whole, but are limited to those specific functions involving reproduction. Saying I'm metaphysically female however, is entirely correct, as is the description of transition being about making my phenotype match that metaphysical identity. What modern science is showing us however, is that this identity is not something that arises through socialization but as manifestation of something physical and unchangeable about our brain structure. We can simplify this by calling it gender, and as trans and certain cases of intersex people demonstrate, gender can exist independent or opposite of sex. This is a much more narrow, focused definition of gender than we're used to using, and this is why researchers have proposed to make even further distinctions using the term "gender expression" to refer to the manner in which that identity is expressed through masculine/feminine behavior and preferences. In this way you can understand the differences between someone with a male sex, male gender, and feminine gender expression, from a person with male sex, female gender, and feminine gender expression. I'll quote the bits of your post that I'm editing down below so that you can easily reference the exact words. 3) This is a weak comparison. We don't even know why the child is experiencing depression. Also depression is the wrong word to use here because someone who's depressed isn't necessarily suffering so badly that death is preferable to life. Knowing nothing about the causes of the child's suffering, it's unreasonable to assume that death is the cure. Gender dysphoria is entirely different. We have enough data to make informed decisions about it, and the data shows that it's reasonable to assume gender dysphoria will not simply cease on its own without transitioning. 4) Of course there is. We are free to sacrifice our own well-being for the sake of others if we choose, and having this mindset is even beneficial to our own well-being in the long term because it creates a wonderful society to live in. What I'm saying is that we are not obligated to do so in all circumstances, especially when those circumstances are extremely detrimental to one's individual well-being while only superficially beneficial to the well-being of others. If you're destitute, don't give your money to charity. And we shouldn't be encouraging trans people to suffer a lifetime of dysphoria without transitioning merely because it might inconvenience or irritate the prejudices of others in their lives. This is what I believe your analogy is ultimately working toward in relation to the topic.

Define "so many". The reason we associate masculine behaviors with males and feminine behavior with females in the first place is because there is a strong correlation. I agree that biology doesn't provide a full explanation. My objection is to the claim that there is no relation at all, which must be true in order for your argument to make any sense. The issue with trying to separate sex from gender as biological vs behavioral, is that you run into conflict with every scientific observation we make showing a causal relationship between behavior and biology. The "wider spectrum" descriptions of sex and gender have a slightly easier time dealing with this contradiction I think, but I don't think it solves the issue completely either. 1) I see this view as perhaps being due to, and leading to a limited understanding of human evolution. Some species evolved heavily optimized for the proliferation of the individual organism's genes. This explains instances of cannibalism, killing a rival member's children, etc. Humans evolved in groups or tribes, and ended up specialized for the proliferation of cohorts of genes, rather than a single individual's genes. The complete whole of human sexual differentiation reflects this, and the limited essentials for reproduction do not. This is why I think your definition is flawed, and subject to the fallacy of composition. 2) "Materialistically there is no reason why minds should exist." This is debatable. I'm not sure how you can reasonably assume this given how much uncertainty there is. Things which can't be reasonably assumed to be true shouldn't be used in arguments if you can avoid it. We're now going down a road where it becomes necessary to define what it means to exist, and I'm uncertain we need to do so to have a productive discussion of sex and gender. a) I believe the goal of medicine is to improve health, and the goal of morality is to improve well-being. Cases where decreasing health in order to improve well being sometimes exist, but they're tricksy. Assuming omniscience, I think it's entirely possible to know that death is necessary to improve well being in some circumstances. For example, if the 13-year-old was guaranteed to be locked in a state of perpetual suffering with no escape. I think in this case it would be hard to argue that the child should continue living in this state. The issue is that we never have this complete level of knowledge. I can imagine almost no circumstance likely to occur that it becomes reasonable to assume the depressed child will always be depressed. If it is even remotely possible to improve well-being, if there is any doubt whatsoever about the inevitability of continued suffering, then death is an illogical solution. b) In the scenario you're providing, it's possible that the amputation would actually decrease the entire families well being, the farmer included. Individual circumstances and context must be considered. You can add as much complexity to the situation as you like, but it will always come down to the observable consequences of overall well being. If it increases, then it's what should be done. If it decreases, then it shouldn't. Related to the topic, even though there are cases where transition objectively improves well-being, that doesn't mean that everyone experiencing gender dysphoria should transition. For example, if the person is living in one of the hostile environments to transgender people such as many places in Africa, the attempt to improve well being will also correlate with an increased risk of being buried in the sand up to your neck while your community throws rocks at your face until you die. The end result would be a reduction in both wellness and well-being.

The level of disconnect I was talking about was in reference to you saying that gender identity has nothing to do with biology, while referring to studies which demonstrate a link between gender identity and biology. By all means disagree, but at least have an argument. As for your definition, I understand the appeal of categorizing human dimorphism based on the particular arrangement of organs necessary for procreation. It has what I would refer to as the greatest "correlative weight". I still don't think you've quite escaped the fallacy of composition with this however, and while I would say it is a consistent enough definition to be useful to us, it isn't the truest representation of dimorphism, and leads to a limited understanding of what we are. I'll get into the details of this in my discussion with Donnadogsoth, which you can read if you're interested, but wont bother you further since it seems like you prefer back and forth conversation to the slow pace of forums. I don't know what the FDR discord info is but if you provide it maybe I'll pop in. To understand where I'm coming from you should first concede that some assumptions I'm making are true for the sake of argument. One is that gender identity is an expression of fundamental, unchangeable biological brain structure. Second, this is an aspect of sexual dimorphism in humans. Meaning, it's not just me and other trans people that have it. You have it to, and so does everyone else. Just like being able to cut open your chest to examine your bones, you can cut open the brain to examine your gender identity, or more specifically, the brain structure that causes gender identity to manifest, similar to how the nerves on your bones cause pain to manifest. If you accept this premise you can start to ask questions like, objectively, when does gender identity manifest? The answer would be at a particular stage of fetal development when the infant receives androgens from the mother. The brain develops at a different stage than genitals, though they correlate with each other almost every time (unless scientists are deliberately messing with the process, like in mice experiments). Transgender people are a rare instance in which these two things do not correlate. The gender identity brain structure becomes female, the genitals become male. This leads to psychological distress that can be described as a persons biology in conflict with itself. I'm not hurt or insulted by your skepticism. So please don't feel any guilt over what you're saying. You're right that I examine the awful feeling through introspection and therapy. What we find is that specifically it's observations and perception that are causing me pain. I don't like the X in a Z's body analogy for a number of reasons. Some people really relate to it and it's fine to use as a self exploratory tool, but I don't think it's useful in the pursuit of truth. The phrase itself is a paradox. If your body belongs to you, and what you are is a man, then your body is a man's body by logical necessity. You can sort of get around this by subscribing to mind/body dualism, but that is a deeply flawed view of the mind which I don't really consider in my analysis. The feeling started as confusion in my early childhood but became 'awful' roughly when I was like, 11 or so. Observing the way my body was developing in puberty caused me psychological distress. At the time, being a kid that wasn't really skilled at introspection, I wasn't really able to process it like I can today, so as a defense mechanism I ended up dissociating, or becoming selectively unaware of my body. I can understand from your point of view that it's tempting to search for some kind of trauma in my childhood to explain these feelings, since trauma actually is the cause for this in some cases. But similar to depression, sometimes the cause is environmental, and sometimes it's just physical. The way myself and my therapist(s) narrowed things down is kind of a lengthy and very personal thing to describe. The important bit is, hormone replacement and physical transition are consistent with the idea that gender identity is related to biology and cannot be changed. Dysphoria might also be described as a psychological demand or strong desire for this piece of brain structure to match other dimorphic aspects of the body. I believe the evidence shows that is the most probable explanation for what is going on, and given that gender identity can't be changed without killing me and most everything else can be easily changed, if we want them to match it's clear what path we should tread.

There's a level of disconnect here that's kind of blowing my mind. The studies are direct evidence against your claim that gender identity has nothing to do with biology. It's not my intent to insult you so I hope you aren't taking it that way, but it's like I'm trying to show you something in my hand saying, "look at this thing I'm holding" and you keep replying, "there's nothing there, that's just your hand." The subjects in the study that you're referring to didn't even have a gender identity at the time they were being observed. They were all dead before the study took place. The researchers are observing something physical, biological, and objectively existing in reality. There is a piece of the brain with sexually dimorphic characteristics. In males it develops one way, in females it develops another way. The point of the study is to show that this piece of the brain is consistently female in transsexual women, and visa versa with transsexual men. It's right here. Look at it :P As for the claim that reproductive functions alone decide the sex of an individual, that was a reasonable assumption 60 years ago but new information has revealed it to be fallacious. "This person has a male trait, therefore the person is male" is an example of the fallacy of composition. What is true of a part is not necessarily true of the whole. There are a lot more examples of sexual dimorphism in humans than reproductive functions. Differences in vision, social preferences, fat distribution, skin thickness, bone structure, brain structure, emotional response, musculature, on and on.

I'm not sure how you can say the studies are focused on feeling more than biology unless you ignore all but the first sentence. The quotes you've picked are simply descriptions of the most common conceptualization of what a trans person is. The actual study involves biological characteristics these individuals possessed. Your views seem like they're coming from quite a different place than others in this thread, and I hope I'm not blending them together, but I might be because I'm confused as to what claims you're making. I don't feel you've adequately demonstrated that I have biological characteristics of one sex and the feeling of another. I'm claiming to have biological characteristics of both sexes, and the feeling of one. It might help me understand what you're talking about if you addressed this claim directly.

Here are the two I linked earlier in the thread again for your convenience. These ones discuss the BNST. And here's another that looks at a different section of the brain, the INAH3. Neuroplasticity seems to have some clear limitations. These aspects of the brain related to sexual behavior and gender identity are set for life. Nothing but physically destroying them seems to have much impact on their development path. Of the traits you chose, what do you mean by consistent and true? No single trait has total consistency. Not one. Once you've gathered all the sexually dimorphic traits in a person, and you find that the individual has a mix of male and female traits, how are you deciding which traits have the most categorical value? Obviously you've decided that the presence or absence of a Y chromosome has the greatest value, but why exactly? Can you actually do this with the level of truth you're demanding? 1) Why is maleness defined by sperm production? With the way you're presenting it I may as well presume you're claiming it's defined that way because it's defined that way, which is obviously fallacious. The rest of your points here aren't worth discussing until we've established a working definition. Once that's done then we can happily discuss function and deformation. 2) The categorization of sexually dimorphic biology is not predicated on the existence of free will, so it really doesn't matter in this discussion whether or not we have it. Even if we remove my mind from the equation entirely, say if I were dead, my corpse will still display sexual dimorphism. 4) In today's world, doctors actually are amputating their limbs, or in some cases paralyzing them. What I'm arguing is, your and my personal disgust or revulsion to the practice isn't relevant. Whether or not this is something that should be done has an objective answer. The reason it's done is to improve well being. We can objectively measure whether well being is improved. I've seen studies claiming to demonstrate that it does improve well being, and if that's true, then my opinion doesn't matter.

To point #1) For a definition to be an accurate description of reality, does it not require consistency? If you look at the details, saying that humans with XY chromosomes are male just doesn't make any sense. Sometimes SRY is absent from the Y chromosome entirely. There is androgen insensitivity. If the entire meaning of the word male is going to be defined by the Y chromosome, why do we need the word male at all? We could just call ourselves double X's and Y's. I just don't see how it's reasonable to define sex as anything other than a product of our total biological makeup. Meaning, all observable aspects of sexual dimorphism in our biology, chromosomes included. 2) I'm not sure I buy this either. It seems like a fair description of what transition is, but I don't think that's a correct assessment of how that metaphysical identity manifests. I think the evidence shows that in many (but perhaps not all) cases, it isn't a product of socialization but an expression of some fundamental structure in the brain. I linked to two studies which I consider evidence in my first reply. It's also worth noting the reason they knew where to look for this sort of thing in the Zhou study was from previous experiments with mice. Researchers essentially created transgender mice by controlling the level of androgens during fetal development, noting specifically that increased or decreased androgen exposure during certain stages of brain stem development resulted in sexually dimorphic BNST's opposite of chromosomes. This results in genetically male mice exhibiting female behaviors and visa versa. Sexually dimorphic behavior is fundamentally related to the brain. The brain is just as much a biological organ as the genitals or anything else. So it doesn't make sense not to consider brain structure as an aspect of biological sex. 3) If we were all psychologically identical, stories like David Reimer's shouldn't exist. After all, if lived experience is all that shapes us, why should a boy raised from birth and accepted as a girl not be perfectly fine with that? Instead he killed himself. I don't think you'll find me disagreeing with your conclusion, but I think we may arrive there through different paths. 4) I'm aware of what you're referring to though I know it as BIID, or body integrity identity disorder. The difficulty in dealing with this comparison is that so little is known about BIID. If there is a significant difference I would assume it is in the causes, but while we have some solid insights into the causes of gender dysphoria, we have no idea why someone develops BIID. The question of whether or not it's a mental illness isn't really my concern. The term itself is a medicinal tool, and I'm happy to leave that to the actual professionals that are going to be treating it. In other words, the people writing the DSM. The word insane serves no purpose in helping us achieve any sort of understanding. The relevant question is, "does amputating a foot or a penis improve wellness or well being?" This is a question that can be objectively answered, and it seems the answer is yes, in some contexts. As for whether or not BIID is comparable to GID, I don't know. It's frustrating, but I don't think there's enough data to draw any kind of meaningful conclusion. If it turned out that someone with BIID had some fundamental brain structure identical to someone born an amputee, or some other similarity to the female BNST in transsexual women, then I would certainly need to reevaluate my position. I don't see this as being very likely, but given lack of evidence I remain open minded. I can certainly agree biological truth matters. What I don't understand is why that is an argument against my position, since my entire argument is based on this assertion. If you were to cut open my brain you'd find physical, observable female biology inside, present from before I was even born. And certainly after hormones, you'll find even more female biology all over the place. It seems as though you are assigning value to those female traits which trans people can't or don't usually possess, and ignoring the ones we do have without providing a reason for doing so. I'm not familiar with the discord group but I'd be willing to join and discuss at some point certainly, though it might be tough to find a good time.

In using the category in the first place, you already are one of those people considering what is female. We can and should be as objective as we're able, but a certain level of abstraction is necessary for us to function at all. The truest version of what we are in terms of our sexually dimorphic nature is something so complex that it becomes unwieldy. If you'd prefer to perceive me in the purest form of objectivity possible, then you should avoid categorizing at all, or construct a new category for every possible combination of physical traits. We don't do this because our minds have limitations in memory and processing power, and there is enough correlation to reduce the categories down to two sexes anyway, despite there being some overlap and the occasional anomaly. Like it or not, you're already at a certain level of abstraction and have already made assumptions that aren't entirely objective. There's not much you can do about it and this is true of everything to an extent. So I don't accept that you can simply define male and female as the two gamete producers and wash your hands of it. When I pointed out a basic inconsistency, you brought up a list of other traits that I assume you see as not only simply existing, but also having some categorical value. Why? And what do you do when these traits also show some inconsistency? What does it even mean to say the biological differences matter more than how those differences are conceptualized, when we must conceptualize them to even understand them enough to categorize them at all?