Bradley Manning wants to be a woman

[DaShi]

I guess it's easier to post like a ****.

[MRT144]

Pretty sure reg is being deliberately acerbic there. I enjoyed his rant, personally.

So you enjoy the troll side of the "trannies can go **** themselves" troll...

[Hauldren Collider]

I think it's actually hermaphrodites that can **** themselves.

[DaShi]

So you enjoy the troll side of the "trannies can go **** themselves" troll...

What they are saying is that they aren't as stupid as the posts they make here. Their real intelligence is a secret that will never be exposed.

All their posts are troll posts, if you haven't noticed.

[Elok]

It is no longer considered a mental illness, at all.

Even if chromosomes are... correct for the sex of a person the brain function may be very different from people who do not have the condition.

1. Someone here said it's still listed in DSM-V. Don't know if that's true and can't be arsed, but either way it hardly matters. The whole process for determining what is or is not a mental illness is imprecise (two people diagnosing the same patient can easily come up with wildly different results) and deeply corrupted by money and politics. In general the line of reasoning is "does Pfizer have a drug for treating this? Must be a mental illness, then." It seems Gender Identity Disorder, OTOH, has merely succumbed to political pressure. Either way, I don't put much faith in it, as it typically has no basis in objectively observable fact.

2. Differing brain function does not indicate health, as Reg said. If your brain functions like a woman's and you are not a woman, that indicates that your brain is wrong. Reality is not determined entirely by one person's mental state; if my brain works more like a dog's than a person's, I'm still human, I'm just a human whose brain is all wonky. I could buy "fundamentally we are our minds" if something purely mental were at stake here, but sex/gender is all tied up in the exact opposite end of the body.

3. How do we know that their brains function like women's? If it's FMRI, there are about a dozen recently-published books explaining, in detail, how that entire technology has been blown ludicrously out of proportion. One of the more recent Ig Nobel winners put a dead fish up through an FMRI just to make a point--they noted that, by the standards generally used, its brain-use (actually oxygen consumption) pattern could be said to change in response to questions.

Of course, with all that said: I have no beef with just calling Bradley Chelsea or whatever. No skin off my back.

[Egbert]

I would like to put a poast here, in this thread.

[Lorizael]

It's not an illness, I swear! But it does indicate invasive surgery and prescription drugs with permanent effects.

I can't roll my eyes hard enough at that. It's ****ing stupid.

This "consensus" is just obviously bull****. Seriously, can you actually say with a straight face that someone that desires such treatment would be perfectly normal in any society? Really?

Your hang up seems to be that you think being transgendered = wanting sex reassignment surgery. That's not always the case, first of all, and there's no particular reason to believe surgery is the only solution. Really, there's no particular reason to believe solutions are necessary. What I said up above about societal pressure against transgendered people isn't just about explicit discrimination. It's about the very entrenched idea that gender is a binary, that boys acts a particular way and girls another, etc. If we were truly a post-gender society, and particular behaviors were not associated with a particular biological sex, then my guess (uneducated as it is) is that transgenders wouldn't feel much in the way of pressure at all.

So no, I'm not saying that desiring such treatment is perfectly normal, but I can say with a straight face that being transgendered can be perfectly normal in some societies.

[Felch]

What I said up above about societal pressure against transgendered people isn't just about explicit discrimination. It's about the very entrenched idea that gender is a binary, that boys acts a particular way and girls another, etc. If we were truly a post-gender society, and particular behaviors were not associated with a particular biological sex, then my guess (uneducated as it is) is that transgenders wouldn't feel much in the way of pressure at all.

If were in a kindergarten class and I saw a boy in a frilly pink dress, I'd think his parents were somewhere in the weird to abusive range. But if I saw a boy who was into dolls, or a girl who liked building with Legos, I'd be a lot cooler with that. I think there should be a distinction between activities like sports and games, versus other gender roles, like how at a wedding the ring bearer is a boy and the flower girl is a girl. Would that still count as imposing gender roles?

[Elok]

If we were truly a post-gender society, and particular behaviors were not associated with a particular biological sex, then my guess (uneducated as it is) is that transgenders wouldn't feel much in the way of pressure at all.

So no, I'm not saying that desiring such treatment is perfectly normal, but I can say with a straight face that being transgendered can be perfectly normal in some societies.

As we are not such a society, the point seems moot. That there have been such societies doesn't mean much either, as those same societies believed in any number of other concepts we would deem ludicrous or barbaric.

[Lorizael]

As we are not such a society, the point seems moot. That there have been such societies doesn't mean much either, as those same societies believed in any number of other concepts we would deem ludicrous or barbaric.

I'm not saying we should adopt the values of some random pro-transgender society. I'm saying we should adopt a pro-transgender attitude for ourselves. More precisely, I think we'd be better off being post-gender. I mean, why bother with all this silly gender crap? What good does it do us now? Sure, I can imagine our primordial ooze ancestors gaining an evolutionary advantage from sexual dimorphism, but who cares now? If we let people just be, we might discover that there are some pretty interesting ways of being.

[Lorizael]

If were in a kindergarten class and I saw a boy in a frilly pink dress, I'd think his parents were somewhere in the weird to abusive range. But if I saw a boy who was into dolls, or a girl who liked building with Legos, I'd be a lot cooler with that. I think there should be a distinction between activities like sports and games, versus other gender roles, like how at a wedding the ring bearer is a boy and the flower girl is a girl. Would that still count as imposing gender roles?

I think dressing your kindergarten boy up in a frilly pink dress is still imposing gender roles. There's this idea that being progressive about gender means exposing your child to different gender identities and letting them choose, but that's all silly. That's still letting gender have meaning. I can't think of a good reason why we should do that.

[Hauldren Collider]

Because women are biologically different than men? The idea of trying to eliminate distinction between the sexes is nonsense. There's a reason we have women's sports teams, for instance, and then there's the fact that men can't have children.

[self biased]

It's about the very entrenched idea that gender is a binary, that boys acts a particular way and girls another, etc.

this is a stumbling block for the regexcellent/collider entity.

[Lorizael]

Because women are biologically different than men? The idea of trying to eliminate distinction between the sexes is nonsense. There's a reason we have women's sports teams, for instance, and then there's the fact that men can't have children.

Yes, women and man are biologically different, and we should treat them different to the extent that such biological differences have meaning. Segregating sports teams makes some sense because the idea of sport is a physical contest within a defined context. If that context is too loosely defined, you get into debates about fairness and the like. But the same argument for segregating the sexes in sports could be used to segregate based on more specific features, such as body type. Boxing does that, after all.

As far as men not being able to have children, that means we probably shouldn't do pregnancy tests on men. What else?

[MRT144]

Because women are biologically different than men? The idea of trying to eliminate distinction between the sexes is nonsense. There's a reason we have women's sports teams, for instance, and then there's the fact that men can't have children.

Gender identity is more than sports and babies.