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Personally I would say that “gender reassignment surgery” is unethical, a complete violation of the Hippocratic Oath, and ought to be banned by civilized societies, but that may well be a minority opinion even among social conservatives these days.
Right, I think the exception arises b/c we recognize that parents need to accompany small children to the restroom, that sometimes the only parent available is of the opposite sex, and b/c it seems more appropriate for a mother to take her son into the women’s restroom than into the men’s restroom.
Another common exception is that custodians and building maintenance staff are sometimes permitted to enter the “wrong” restroom. I don’t think this means we view janitors as gender neutral.
Word meanings do evolve over time and “gender” definitely has.
Ok, you made me look. It appears “Matt” (who wrote your answer above) is quite a hostile prick. In scrolling through I saw several responses from him that were equally nasty. “Possum” however, seems quite pleasant and eager to help. I don’t think we should judge all trans people by Matt any more than we should judge all Christians by Fred Phelps or all gay people by Cardinal McCarrick or all black people by OJ Simpson.
I think it was directed at Zafar and I, but I chose to ignore it.
A lot of feminists aren’t onboard with all the trans stuff but they know they’ll be demonized if they speak up. However, I have heard of cases where a woman is able to claim that because of past trauma, it would be terrible–for her specifically–to be exposed to
malethe other kind of female genitalia.First, while it is true that gay was seen as—among other things—a mental illness, this was not (merely) because it challenged gender assumptions. It is also because homosexual sex was, by definition, non-reproductive, and sexuality and reproduction were tightly linked in the human mind for the obvious reason that they are also tightly linked in the body. Not just the human body, but the horse, cow, sheep, dog, cat and goat bodies that our forebears were far more intimately familiar with than we are. (I have vivid memories of my mother unlatching the gate and letting the stallion into the paddock with the mare…lots of sturm und drang, and the result was a foal). A female dog is not female because she identifies as female, but because she has the parts. I am a woman for exactly the same reason and to the same end. There are exceptions, no doubt, even in the animal kingdom, and yet I can tell the difference at a glance between a female and male cardinal, a female and male dog and even, with a bit of intrusive investigation, a male and female turtle.
Sexual dimorphism—“male and female created He them”—is one of the most basic, essential and non-negotiable biological facts. There can be no “logos” about “bios”without the acceptance of anatomical and physiological sex as a (even “the”) reality. Nothing in biology —certainly not Darwinian evolution—makes sense without it.
Homosexuality is, obviously, an exception. Like, say, color-blindness. There are very good, scientifically-sound reasons why human beings as a rule see color. But some people are color-blind. It is a variation. Is it a handicap? A disorder? It depends on the environment, obviously (both social and natural) but it also depends on whether a person who cannot see color finds the condition limiting and/or painful. Does it get in the way of his ability to seek and find happiness?
To some extent, a homosexual person is at a disadvantage. His “condition,” being the exception rather than the rule, means that his potential partners must be drawn from a far smaller pool. It means he and his partner cannot conceive a child together. These two issues present themselves no matter how society treats gay people, and I assume that gays and lesbians have to somehow make their peace with this, or find work-arounds.
Still —-leaving aside the activists and sticking with the ordinary Folks I Know—they seem to muddle through well enough, carrying their burdens as all of us must, and demanding no more help or accommodation in doing so than anyone else. At least in my experience.
But the ordinary Folks I Know who are transgendered do ask everyone else for help and accommodation. We are expected to go along with the new name and pronoun (surprisingly painful for parents) and politely pretend not to know what we know about, again, the most basic biology.
What bothers me, as I’ve mentioned, is that both of these persons have other, demonstrable mental illnesses. There is no evidence that I know of that massive doses of hormones and dressing in different clothes is an effective treatment for bipolar disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Indeed, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that it’s particularly effective even for the dysphoria it aims to heal. In the current climate, not only are researchers strongly discouraged from seeking a cure (why would you “cure” something Perfectly Normal?) they aren’t supposed to investigate it at all.
One of the transgendered (M to F) persons I know and love once confessed —in a moment of frailty, perhaps, or was it faith?—that if s/he could swallow a pill and be cured of the dysphoria, s/he would do it in a heartbeat, and live life as the man she actually is. But no one seems to be trying to create such a pill, nor is he being offered the kind of psychotherapy that might enable him to live with his affliction more comfortably. Instead, the shrinks push “transition,” the doctors offer to maim him and the rest of us are supposed to sit around congratulating ourselves for entertaining as fact the idiotic proposition that there is something called “womanhood” that floats around untethered to chromosomes, morphology, anatomy and physiology, and in no way dependent upon the experience of dwelling within a female body. It’s —frankly—crazy.
Little boys, by the way, accompany their mothers into the changing room because they can’t safely be sent into the men’s locker room to manage it themselves. My husband used to bring our small daughters into the men’s locker room with him, too—what else could he do with a two year old at the swimming pool?
That’s not evolution… the word is actively being vandalized for strategic political purposes. Surely you’ve seen numerous videos of angry protestors swearing, and smug young people reading the latest talking points in a ridiculously condescending manner. That’s not what evolution looks like.
But either way, when a word is in flux, for whatever reason, as a practical matter, it’s fruitless to try to make a point based on its meaning.
Sorry, GrannyDude, that I had to edit your post for length before responding. I think you are spot on. I made a similar argument from biological norms back during Ricochet’s “SSM Wars” a few years back. I suggested that homosexuality was a kind of handicap in that the “parts” didn’t work in the way they were biologically intended and suggested that redefining marriage to accommodate the handicap would be akin to giving driving licenses to blind people. For that, I thought, scientific, non-judgemental and non-biblical take on the issue, I was called a bigot by Cato or Zafar or both. Perhaps you have better bona fides and will get away with it.
I made a suggestion way back in the beginning of this thread about bathroom and locker room use that seems to have been ignored (or, as Cato admitted, went unread). In brief, I suggested male “equipment” should only be exposed to males. Trans women (ie, men dressed as, or working on becoming, women) who could “pass” should be able to use a ladies’ restroom, as long as they do so sitting down (like a lady!), regardless of equipment. Someone who has undergone surgery should be able to go where their body looks most appropriate, regardless of genome. Those who fall somewhere in the middle may not be able to use locker rooms during their period of transition. If no full transition ever occurs, they may well never be able to use the locker room where they might feel more comfortable because the presence of their naked body will greatly discomfort the greater number. Sad for them, but not everyone in every sad situation in the world can be accommodated. We’re still not giving driving licenses to blind people. And I suspect that makes every other driver on the road much more comfortable! The needs of the many… Now if we could just do something about the drunks and texters.
I think your understanding of homosexuality is spot on. I’m less certain about your understanding of transsexuality. But then again, I’m just generally a lot less certain about transsexuality generally, it being a subject I know far less about.
I will, however, encourage you to consider the possibility that the stigma associated with it contributes significantly to the mental health problems these people apparently suffer at a far higher rate than the general population. It may not be the only cause, but it seems hard to deny that it is one of the causes. And it is one we understand and, at least collectively, could do something about.
As a gay man I was once (correctly) diagnosed as severely depressed and suicidal. It was entirely situational and recovery came when I learned to accept who I was, cease loathing myself for it, and find a way to pursue a fulfilling life as the person I was born, not the person my parents, my church, my teachers and my community told me I should be. I’m not sure I ever would have found those things had I been born in a different time or place. It was my good fortune that those people and institutions outside me were changing their views of homosexuality at the same time that I was coming to terms with it. But gay people sympathize with trans people because so many of us share experiences similar to that and can draw the analogy very easily.
Precisely. The fact that you don’t like the change doesn’t mean that a change isn’t occurring.
Great! Now let’s change the meaning of the words freedom and liberty.
According to the latest woke terminology, sex is “assigned at birth.” I’m not 100% clear what is meant by that phrase but it seems to suggest that sex is a category imposed on an individual from without by society.
Also, what about parents who have an ultrasound and announce “it’s a boy!” well before birth?
I think we need to be conscious of what rules are there to achieve. If/when our understanding of this changes, so should the rules. Rules are there to serve us, not the other way round.
I am honestly not sure about trans people in rest rooms – or elsewhere – but I do think we should think it through rather than just refer to the rules and decline to consider the issue further.
And I do think we should talk to, rather than just about, trans people when we do this.
That is a gender assumption.
And yes, I understand why parents take little children to the showers at swimming pools. :-). I’m not criticizing, just commenting on how we instinctively adjust gender expectations to accommodate something that is so obviously necessary. That is part of the rules, not an exception.
Biological men (gay, straight, whatever) do not care who is in the bathroom or locker room with them. Biological women only want other biological women there. Biological women have a right to be accommodated to much greater extent than anyone else. They get a veto.
If they change, they change. The concepts don’t vanish simply because the words change. And words simply do change. Being angry about it is like being angry about the wind or the rain.
Yea, that “assigned at birth” phrase is Orwellian. No doubt about it.
It’s a gender fact. All human societies have to find ways to explain and cope with the biological (and for that matter geological, zoological, epidemiological…etc.) facts on the ground. One of the most significant facts on the ground is that men and women are different. That difference is—quite literally—the reason all of us are here, walking around, breathing, typing, falling in love, etc. etc. Men and women formed relationships, had sex, the sex resulted in babies, the babies were parented well-enough (through years of virtually complete helplessness) to survive and reproduce themselves. You, Zafar, are the product of male and female. No one is the product of male and male.
As you know, this doesn’t strike me as a huge problem, since the hazard posed by gays and lesbians to rates of human reproduction is dwarfed by the hazards posed by birth control, abortion and, frankly, heterosexual dysfunction and solipsism.
Yes…except the rate is so unbelievably high that “stigma” seems an inadequate explanation. Someone (can’t remember who?) pointed out the transgendered suicide rates are higher than those of combat veterans with full-blown PTSD, higher than in Nazi concentration camps, higher than…well, gays and lesbians. By quite a lot. And (at least as far as I’ve seen) the rates aren’t significantly better in countries—Sweden—that are uber-accepting of sexual difference.
I don’t discount the role of stigma—it is depressing to be constantly seen as “other” no doubt—but, again, I return to the fact, agreed to by all concerned, that a man who believes himself to be a woman is suffering. The only question at issue is how to address that suffering.
By the way, Body Dysmorphia Disorder (BDD)–a fixated obsession with a perceived flaw in the body—is also associated with high rates of suicide—higher than those for major depression, for example. And people with BDD request surgery to “correct” the unbearable imperfection they believe they have. This doesn’t mean that gender dysmorphia is “just” a variation on BDD, but it does suggest that human beings can feel disconnected or wrong in their bodies in a number of ways, and that this seems to be an extremely distressing sensation. Also worth mentioning is Bodily Integrity Identity Disorder, in which “there is a profound experience of incongruity between the biological and the desired body structure.” Again, there are requests for the body to be surgically altered (amputation of limbs, for example) in an attempt to make the fleswh conform to the sufferer’s internal sense of what the body should be.
Interestingly, I was at a seminar on neurology for trauma specialists (or something like that) and the lecturer pointed to the place in the brain that are crucial in coding embodiment—the temporo-parietal junction and the extra striate body area. The brain structure called the insula has also been identified as playing a role in the experience of bodily self-awareness and the sense of body ownership. Per the NYT: “The bottom line, according to Dr. Paulus and others, is that mind and body are integrated in the insula.”
The brain—TPJ, ESA, insula, et —bewilderingly—cetera—is also a biological fact.
The phenomenon of a biological man who is firmly convinced he is a woman is—or ought to be—interesting. It presents us with so many fascinating questions that would beg for scientific investigation even if there were no pain or suffering involved. (and yes, the same is true for “why does lesbianism exist?”) That there is pain and suffering takes the question out of the realm of the merely intellectual and makes it a matter of human urgency. Or should.
The brain is a biological fact, but we don’t fully understand it. And we don’t fully understand transsexualism, or the mental health problems correlated with it. I’m not sure we’re disagreeing. I’m confident my explanation has some explanatory power and you don’t seem to doubt that. I on the other hand certainly don’t claim it’s a complete explanation and I frankly don’t know whether it’s 95% or 25%, because in this area I don’t know what I don’t know. And frankly you lost me with the brain talk. It’s above my pay grade and outside of my ken. I hope that people working to understand the brain add this to the list of things they’re working to understand. I only know enough to know that the brain isn’t super well understood at present. If there’s a miracle in nature, the human brain seems to be it.
It would be interesting to know whether bodily integrity identity disorder or other glitches in the experience of embodiment are cured, or at least alleviated, by, say, surgically removing the offending but otherwise healthy limb?
Exactly—I hope so too. But there are indications that studying gender dysphoria is verboten. This is too bad, because it is often by seeking the cause of a seemingly inexplicable variation on the norm that we understand how and why the “normal” brain works the way it does. ( *EDIT: regardless of whether we decide we need to correct or cure the variation!)
Is the sense of being male a product of life in a male body, or is it a discrete perceptual function mediated by areas in the brain that can be distorted or absent if those areas are underdeveloped or damaged? Much of our understanding of normal brain function comes from the study of brain-damaged people. Heck, much of the reason we “get” that something is a brain function is that there are people who lack it —for example, the ability to recognize a human face as a human face.
To ask why a man can be homosexual (given the obvious Darwinian disadvantages) is to inquire into the properties of heterosexuality, and the same goes (in spades) for gender dysphoria. To shut down the investigation with aggressive handwaving about “it’s normal!” is no more scientific (or helpful) than to say “it’s sin!”
By the way, if the only relief a gender dysphoric person can obtain from her suffering comes from mimicking the habits, dress, behavior and appearance of a member of the opposite sex, far be it from me to stop her; I’m willing to call her “Frank” and ask my kids to call her “Uncle Frank” not because she is actually a man but because it makes her feel better.
This is more or less what my now-elderly transgendered loved one asked for from her family, and it’s what we gave her. That is, him. I’m okay with that. It is possible that the hormones he took to make himself appear masculine are making a large contribution to the heart disease that will probably end his life, prematurely by today’s standards. Perhaps he would say that the trade-off between a long life spent in turmoil and pain and a shortened life of relative internal peace is a reasonable one, and who am I to argue otherwise?
At the same time, is also quite possible that it would have been better—that is, more loving— for all of us to have instead insisted that no, we wouldn’t pretend with him that he, that is she, was male. That we would instead support her (financially, socially) as she attempted to resolve her pain through psychotherapy? Maybe it would’ve worked, and she would be happier now, and minus the heart disease? I honestly don’t know.
When in doubt, however, surely primum non nocere demands that, before healthy bodies are maimed and flooded with carcinogens (estrogen is one), other less heroic means should be sought to alleviate the symptoms of what clearly, as mentioned, meets the criteria for a mental disorder. (The symptoms are emotional—“I feel like a woman”—and it hurts.)
I agree 100% that the taboo on studying this or pretty much any other observed phenomena for political reasons is baneful. The one thing I’d suggest is referring to it as something other than “gender dysphoria.” I understand that to some ears it may simply sound like a technical term of art, but to a wider population it sounds laden down with value judgment – kind of like the Catholic church’s “objectively disordered” to describe gay people. I’m assured all the time here that no offense is meant by that term and yet I find it dismissive, judgmental and insulting (as do something asymptotically approaching 100% of gay people).
In the case of “gender dysphoria” there really are two schools of thought about the observed mental health issues: 1) they’re external – a function of marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination by others, and 2) they’re inherent in or intrinsic to the dissonance of the condition. If you advocate for studying the relative roles that these two causes (or any others) play, it doesn’t help if you start out describing the condition with a name that appears to prejudge the outcome. I think “gender dysphoria” sounds very much like it prejudges in favor of the “intrinsic” explanation. A word like “transsexualism” seems (to my mind) to avoid that pitfall in its neutrality (though I’m sure somebody will object to it, god knows somebody always does).
You had me until the last paragraph. When in doubt, my instinct is to permit the individual most directly involved to decide. No one has a greater interest in the outcome or more unconflicted reason to make the best decision available, and that person has access to information about their own experience that no one else can ever have.
If, 100 years from now, we have enough evidence about how the two options have played out for thousands of people and one is demonstrably better, the doubt may be removed and I might take the view that there are things we shouldn’t do or participate in to or for such a person. But at our present state of knowledge, I think deference to their choices is called for.
Don’t bother changing the word to avoid the negative connotations. The left is always trying to change the word for something because of its negative connotations, only to find that the negative connotations migrate to the new word because society views the underlying thing in a negative way. Think, for instance, of all the gyrations we have gone through in the last 40 years over the word to describe people with physical handicaps. Physical handicaps are no fun, and we feel sorry for those who are saddled with them, whether we call them “crippled” or “disabled.”
I actually don’t think that a certain degree of sensitivity to the feelings of others is a failing. I grant you it’s sometimes demanded ad absurdum, but making a reasonable effort seems to be virtuous to me.
I don’t disagree with any of that. But where is the sensitivity in constantly calling a person’s physical disability to everyone’s attention by demanding that they use the word du jour to refer to him? At the end of the day, “disabled” is no more sensitive than “handicapped” or even “crippled.” They all mean the same thing.
Even to bring it back to the original topic, is it so bad to use a word that seems to incline to the intrinsic explanation? Most of the evidence does. Mental illness and suicide at the rate experienced by the transgendered cannot be explained by teasing and bullying.
The problem is that right now the Dems are ratcheting up their social engineering efforts such that those parents who allow their 6 yr old boys to be girls and then undergo hormones and surgery while teens are considered to be superior parents. This is not going to end well.