FSTDT Forums
Community => Society and History => Topic started by: Captain Jack Harkness on October 30, 2012, 02:35:59 am
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Okay, forgive my ignorance, but I would like someone to explain what it means to be a transgender. I mean, I suppose it has something to do with associating with the gender you weren't born as, but what does that mean practically? I'm not sure I get it.
Does it mean that you were interested in things marketed/intended "exclusively" for the opposite sex growing up? Seriously, I'd love to be enlightened on what makes a transgendered person different than a cis person.
Note: The thread is in Religion & Philosophy because I'm not really sure where else to stick it.
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Wow, I came across this thread right after I closed a tumblr tag search of "transtrender". That's weird. Anyway, I'm afraid I can't answer your question, but I will advise you not to try to find the answer on tumblr. They can't seem to figure out what makes a true transgender. They won't even agree on whether your first paragraph is correct. Some say you have to experience dysphoria with your body, some say you can love your body and still be trans, some say you don't have to experience physical dysphoria but can experience social dysphoria and that'll mean you're trans, some say that they're trans even though they never had the feeling of being born in the wrong body . . . . Honestly, it's one giant shitstorm.
Now I want to know what it means to be transgender.
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Going to let lovelies like Eric take this one, but quick note:
*a trans person is a trans person, not "a transgender." A trans woman is a woman, a trans man is a man. A trans woman may have a penis but she is still a woman.
*a trans person may act stereotypically like their gender (super macho or super femme), or they might not. You can have tomboy trans women and feminine trans men. This does not invalidate their gender identity anymore than being a cis tomboy makes you a man.
*being trans is separate from orientation. There are gay or straight or bi or pan or whatever trans people.
*sometimes people are not strictly one binary gender or the other. There are genderfluid/genderqueer people, agender people, or third-gender people.
* bisexual people are not inherently transphobic and anyone who says that is an asshole.
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Going to let lovelies like Eric take this one, but quick note:
*a trans person is a trans person, not "a transgender." A trans woman is a woman, a trans man is a man. A trans woman may have a penis but she is still a woman.
*a trans person may act stereotypically like their gender (super macho or super femme), or they might not. You can have tomboy trans women and feminine trans men. This does not invalidate their gender identity anymore than being a cis tomboy makes you a man.
*being trans is separate from orientation. There are gay or straight or bi or pan or whatever trans people.
*sometimes people are not strictly one binary gender or the other. There are genderfluid/genderqueer people, agender people, or third-gender people.
* bisexual people are not inherently transphobic and anyone who says that is an asshole.
Okay then. I appreciate the effort, but I'm not sure that makes things much clearer. I mean, if that's the definition of what a trans person is, then...how the hell are they different than someone who's cis?
So yeah. I'm still confused.
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The way I understand it is...
Cisgendered is when one's mental gender matches one's physical sex.
Transgendered is when one's mental gender does not match one's physical sex.
(Saying "a woman trapped in a man's body" or vice versa would be pretty accurate, as far as I know)
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Going to let lovelies like Eric take this one, but quick note:
*a trans person is a trans person, not "a transgender." A trans woman is a woman, a trans man is a man. A trans woman may have a penis but she is still a woman.
*a trans person may act stereotypically like their gender (super macho or super femme), or they might not. You can have tomboy trans women and feminine trans men. This does not invalidate their gender identity anymore than being a cis tomboy makes you a man.
*being trans is separate from orientation. There are gay or straight or bi or pan or whatever trans people.
*sometimes people are not strictly one binary gender or the other. There are genderfluid/genderqueer people, agender people, or third-gender people.
* bisexual people are not inherently transphobic and anyone who says that is an asshole.
Okay then. I appreciate the effort, but I'm not sure that makes things much clearer. I mean, if that's the definition of what a trans person is, then...how the hell are they different than someone who's cis?
So yeah. I'm still confused.
I seriously have a hard time coming to any conclusion other than these terms are being made up on a whim.
Particle physics makes more sense sometimes.
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The wiki article on transgenderism gives you the medical side of things, if that's what you're after. It's probably the most advisable course of action, seeing as it's an extremely emotional issue for a lot of people, and as such asking the internet will likely give you a bullshit answer.
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Going to let lovelies like Eric take this one, but quick note:
*a trans person is a trans person, not "a transgender." A trans woman is a woman, a trans man is a man. A trans woman may have a penis but she is still a woman.
A little more extrapolation here. A transgender person, is someone who identifies as a gender that is not the same as their physical sex. Hence why a trans woman is a woman because despite being transgender in a medial sense, the identity is that of a woman. This has absolutely no regards for physical sex.
A cisgender person is someone whose gender identity matches their sex at birth. The primary notion of cis and trans is the alignment or incongruity of ones gender identity to ones sex at birth. Hence a post operative transsexual who is legally considered to be their preferred sex and gender, is still considered to be trans and not cis, because their gender identity is still different from their sex at birth regardless of their current sex.
I hope this helps clarify thing a little.
Of course you can always throw a spanner in the works by trying to figure out the distinction between transgender and transsexual. I will be honest that I have not been able to truly figure out the distinction here. For me I have categorized it as a transgender person is someone who identifies at the gender opposite to their birth sex. A transsexual is someone in the process or who has completed physically transitioning from their birth sex to their identified sex and gender. In a way, for me, all transsexuals are transgender, but not all transgender people are transsexuals. I know this is not the correct or strict definition of the two terms. I was unable to figure that out correctly, so this is the best my mind could come up with.
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The way I understand it is...
Cisgendered is when one's mental gender matches one's physical sex.
Transgendered is when one's mental gender does not match one's physical sex.
(Saying "a woman trapped in a man's body" or vice versa would be pretty accurate, as far as I know)
I would just leave it at this definition. It's good enough. Throwing more into it turns into "hng....my brain"
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Trans & Cis are just two different things. For example, I was born male, but now live as female. I would like to believe if you saw me in public, you wouldn't think anything of me and just assume I was naturally female. Anyways, since I was born male and live as female, I'm trans. Likewise, if one is born female but desires to live as, or does live as, male, they too are trans. The prefix in these instances is "trans-" and the suffix is the gender we desire to live as. Thus, I'm "transfemale" or a "transwoman." Conversely, for most people, nature gets the whole gender thing right and they are fully satisfied living as the gender nature gave them. These people are cis. So, therefore, if you're (general you, but mostly directed at B-Man for asking the question) satisfied being male and don't desire to live as or be female, you are a cis-man.
The whole trans/cis thing can be difficult to understand if you're cis. For the most part, you only have yourself as a point of reference so it can be difficult to understand how one can not identify as the gender nature ascribed them. It also doesn't help that most people could go their whole lives and not meet (or not know they've met) a transperson. The thing to remember is that just because someone is born with male parts doesn't mean they identify as male. Gender is in the brain and not in the pants.
Does it mean that you were interested in things marketed/intended "exclusively" for the opposite sex growing up? Seriously, I'd love to be enlightened on what makes a transgendered person different than a cis person.
As per this, it can differ from some trans-people to other. It's kind of a nature v. nurture thing and I've heard example of both. I know that for me I definitely gravitated towards girl things; toys, shoes, clothes, activities, etc all while my parents tried to push male toys & things unto me. Using transwomen here for simplicity, some of us at a young age may be successfully socialized to like boy toys, clothes, activities, but sadly it just means the gender issue will pop up later in life. Likewise, to build off of Smurfy's 2nd point, socialization can play a role in this too. I know I can be super femmie or rather masculine acting for a female. On the one hand, I do enjoy doing feminine things, listening to girlie pop music (love Lady Gaga), or I guess acting more stereotypically female. On the other hand, I still play pokemon, love metal music as well, and keep my nails short because I can't give up guitar (all things I kind of picked up from trying to be male). While I don't think I'd play guitar if I was born female, I do enjoy it now and can't imagine giving it up (as I'm sure is the same with other stereotypically "male" things).
For all practical terms, it meant that I was born with male parts, everyone assumed I was a guy, and I eventually came out and decided to live as female though various medicines & therapies, and maybe eventually surgeries as well. It means when you see me, hopefully, you assume I was born female in spite of the fact I wasn't.
Also, as Iosa said, tumblr is the last place you should look for an answer as many people try to shoe horn the "trans" label unto themselves. Smurfy gave a good explanation and if you have further questions, I would suggest you think more about what you're trying to ask. Not that you're being offensive, but you're being very vague and its hard to explain what being transgendered is anymore than the answers you've been given (born in the wrong body, seeking to live as the "other" sex). Anyways, if you have questions, I wouldn't mind answering them, and I'm sure other posters wouldn't mind as well (though don't hold me to this since I don't wish to speak for others)
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Thanks, Queen of Hearts. I think that helps a little.
I just suppose my major beef with the idea of transgender is that I find some, but not all, gender expectations to be a bit arbitrary and abstract to begin with. Hell, they fucking make razors different colors to appeal to different the different genders, even though as far as I can tell there's not much of a difference in performance. You know, it's all of that (IMO) stupid psychological marketing appeal bullshit that companies do.
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I just suppose my major beef with the idea of transgender is that I find some, but not all, gender expectations to be a bit arbitrary and abstract to begin with. Hell, they fucking make razors different colors to appeal to different the different genders, even though as far as I can tell there's not much of a difference in performance.
There is a difference in razors marketed to men and women. Women's razors are (mostly) intended to shave the legs, whereas men's razors are intended for the face. So the heads of a man's razor tends to move more since it has to reach the weird places and angles on a face. My fiancee (who has an endocrine disorder that causes her to grow some facial hair even though she is XX-female) used to shave her face with a woman's razor and kept cutting her face because the razor was not designed to do that. After I encouraged her to switch to a man's razor, she stopped nicking her jawline.
I do have a problem with gender-specific marketing to kids. We watch a lot of Cartoon Network, and there are very few toy commercials that show boys and girls playing with the same toy. (Play-Doh is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.) Same with baby clothes. When I've gone shopping with my mother-in-law for clothes for my (4-month old) niece, I've strongly encouraged her to buy clothes that are not pink, but yellow, blue, tan, etc. I foresee me buying gender-neutral stuff for the kid as she grows up, and encouraging her to play in the mud. ;D
OK, back to the topic at hand. Sylvana and Queenofhearts pretty much covered what I was going to say. I know there is supposed to be a difference between "transsexual" and "transgender," but I've never figured out what it is.
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Thanks, Queen of Hearts. I think that helps a little.
I just suppose my major beef with the idea of transgender
Please, don't say your "major beef" nor refer it as "the idea of transgender." Those choice of words come off as hostile and I was initially tempted to just cease responding in this thread.
is that I find some, but not all, gender expectations to be a bit arbitrary and abstract to begin with. Hell, they fucking make razors different colors to appeal to different the different genders, even though as far as I can tell there's not much of a difference in performance. You know, it's all of that (IMO) stupid psychological marketing appeal bullshit that companies do.
The flaw with this train of thought is that it assumes that just because gender expectations are arbitrary, then gender identity (identifying as male/female making one cis/trans) is likewise arbitrary. The key difference is that gender expectations are entirely social while gender identity is internal. While boys liking cars, girls liking pink, or women being differential are all arbitrary social norms, gender identity is certainly not. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)
And as far as I know a transsexual is a person who appears to be gender "A" although they have gender "B" parts. Therefore, until bottom surgery, transgender people are both transgendered and transsexual. Although a transgendered person is always transgendered. Not sure if I have the understanding right, but eh.
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Everyone else has pretty thoroughly explained the topic, but I also want to add that there have been studies using MRIs to look at the brains of transmen and transwomen to see any differences from cis-men and cis-women. And there were differences -- male-to-female transsexuals had patterns resembling those of a standard female, and female-to-male transsexuals had patterns resembling those of a standard male. There are differences in male and female brains, after all, and this article (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=girl-brain-boy-brain) gives an example of how brain structure correlates with gender, not necessarily biological sex.
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* bisexual people are not inherently transphobic and anyone who says that is an asshole.
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Who the hell says this?
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* bisexual people are not inherently transphobic and anyone who says that is an asshole.
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Who the hell says this?
Some people try to say that when distinguishing between bisexual and pansexual.
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I wouldn't be surprised if gender roles serve to intricate the dysphoria experienced by trans people, but they're not the causative factor. The fact that gender identity exists apart from gender roles and biological sex has been pretty thoroughly demonstrated by a multitude of medical and psychiatric studies, as well as cases like that of David Reimer.
It's also worth noting that transgenderism isn't some radical new SJW idea -- it's been accepted as a legitimate condition by the medical and psychiatric community for decades, and observed through the centuries across numerous cultures.
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Just to toss another question out there, is there a meaningful difference between transgender and transexual? Or is the difference a matter of semantics again?
And just to rain on a few parades, how exactly does David Reimer demonstrate that Gender is separate from Sex? Given the gender enforced upon him when he was young was not his birth sex, and he actively rebelled against it, if anything it would imply there's a serious connection between gender and birth sex regardless of social conditioning. Not to mention the initial study is easily one of the most inhumane abuses of children in the name of science I've seen in the later half of the 20th century. I'm not exactly up on the field, but it seems absolutely obvious the psychologist behind it was full of shit and destroyed the guy's life in an attempt to prove something that at the very least wasn't true in his case.
Edit:
I'll move this to society, as it's one of those kind of questions.
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I should have been clearer. David Reimer is an example of the distinction between gender roles and internal gender identity, rather than an example of gender/sex discontinuity. His case doesn't prove transgenderism, but it does offer a counter to claims that gender identity is entirely determined by the expectations that society puts upon each sex -- an argument that is often brought up in tangent to the "transwomen are just men who like traditionally girly things" claim.
I think most people would agree that the psychologist who tried to coerce him into living as a female was a colossal douchebag.
As for transgender/transsexual: It does seem to be a matter of semantics.
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It's already been brought up, but something I've been wondering about: If it were more societally acceptable to behave in ways that don't conform to standard gender roles (such as dressing in ways expected of the opposite sex), would that have any effect on a trans person's desire to change their physical sex? Like, if a trans woman could dress, talk, act, whatever in a feminine way without changing her physical sex and people accepted her for who she and didn't try to enforce a more masculine behavior, would the desire to change sex still be there? Would it still be just as strong?
I hope this question doesn't offend anyone. I'm just trying to understand better.
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It's already been brought up, but something I've been wondering about: If it were more societally acceptable to behave in ways that don't conform to standard gender roles (such as dressing in ways expected of the opposite sex), would that have any effect on a trans person's desire to change their physical sex? Like, if a trans woman could dress, talk, act, whatever in a feminine way without changing her physical sex and people accepted her for who she and didn't try to enforce a more masculine behavior, would the desire to change sex still be there? Would it still be just as strong?
I hope this question doesn't offend anyone. I'm just trying to understand better.
I can't speak for the transgendered folks here, but I think the desire would still be there because of body dysphoria. Folks could still feel uncomfortable about their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and that could still urge them to legally switch to the opposite gender.
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* bisexual people are not inherently transphobic and anyone who says that is an asshole.
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Who the hell says this?
It's a surprisingly common sentiment. Supposedly bisexuals are inherently transphobic because they have "binarist" thinking - that is, because "bi" implies that they believe people always fall within a certain gender "bi"nary. Because fuck the actual definitions of things.
A similar variation is that bisexuals simply can't be attracted to genderqueer people, and any bisexual who claims that they are is actually "pansexual."
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Does anyone esle picture a huge bull with stripes and a military cap when someone says "Major Beef"?
As for the topic I wouldnt have thought a less rigidly gender defined society would make too much difference. Although funnily enough there is a bit of a phenomena in places where there are rigidly enforced gender roles for homosexuals to be shoe horned into fitting transgenderism, Hijras in Bangladesh and the preponderance of iranian sex change operations come to mind.
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Does anyone esle picture a huge bull with stripes and a military cap when someone says "Major Beef"?
...Well, I'm picturing it now.
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It's already been brought up, but something I've been wondering about: If it were more societally acceptable to behave in ways that don't conform to standard gender roles (such as dressing in ways expected of the opposite sex), would that have any effect on a trans person's desire to change their physical sex?
It's no secret that trans-women seem to be more prevalent than trans-men, which raises a question similar to this. Why? Is it because there are just fewer trans-men? Is it because trans-men tend to pass easier, so are less likely to be obviously trans and are more likely to stealth? (In other words, there are as many men as women, but the men hide better.) Or is it because it is more socially acceptable for a woman to appear and act masculine than it is for a man to appear and act feminine?
I have always seen being trans as a continuum - it isn't yes/no. This is seen a lot with trans-men, as there are so many levels to which someone wants to transition. (Anywhere from just binding breasts and cutting their hair, to going for full-bore genital surgery.) This would indicate that there are people right on the edge between being trans and not being trans. For those people, society's views may be the difference in the steps they take. A XY-person may be tipped in the direction of transition because they believe society will not allow them to be a "feminine man" (especially if they are attracted to women), whereas a XX-person may decide not to transition because they believe society will let them be more masculine (especially if they are attracted to women).
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For the people who are asking about the difference between transgender/transsexual (prefacing this with I'm not trans so I'm going solely from conversations I've had with my trans friends and not actual life experience, so I could be totally wrong): from what I understand, it is actually possible to be transgender but not transsexual, or vice versa.
Example: some people have sent me questions on my blog saying stuff like, "I'm a woman, and I know I'm a woman, and I know I'm not trans because I am comfortable as a woman, but I keep feeling like my breasts are not supposed to be there and I feel the need to keep them down with sports bras because even accidentally touching them horrifies me," or, "I know I'm not trans because I feel female inside, but I cannot be comfortable thinking about my genitalia unless I think of it as a penis."
Like, it sounds a lot like dysphoria, but minus the gender part. Just the body part. Which is kind of fascinating.
Now, why that is might be for a lot of reasons (completely armchair neurology, but I'm wondering how much body mapping has to do with it), but it does call into question how gender is different from physical body.
Additionally, there was a trans female speaker who came to our school. To her, getting facial feminization surgery was more important than bottom surgery, because for her it was more how she was perceived and what pronouns were used automatically rather than her parts. So that would be I think where the divide between transgender and transsexual came in, too.
So, basically, from talking to my trans friends: most but not all transgender people are also transsexual, but there are exceptions. There are also some people define transsexual people as fully transitioned people, though it depends on what your definition of "fully transitioned" is.
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It's no secret that trans-women seem to be more prevalent than trans-men, which raises a question similar to this. Why? Is it because there are just fewer trans-men? Is it because trans-men tend to pass easier, so are less likely to be obviously trans and are more likely to stealth? (In other words, there are as many men as women, but the men hide better.) Or is it because it is more socially acceptable for a woman to appear and act masculine than it is for a man to appear and act feminine?
The main reason for this according to the medical fields has to do with the way they believe transsexualism occurs. It is believe that during pregnancy there is a hormonal imbalance on behalf of the mother that changes the developmental process of the brain. This is also believed to be one of the primary causes of homosexuality.
Now given that all fetuses start out female in all aspects except genetically, the base human form is that of a female. As a result in order to have the fetus develop into a male, the application of the developmental hormones needs to be triggered. However, because the males are not the default developmental form of the human body, there is a greater potential for things to go wrong, especially in the development of the brain which is especially sensitive to the hormonal levels in the process.
As a result, all things being even, there is less chance that during development that a female will not develop properly while the chance of a male not developing properly with regards to brain structure is noticeably higher. Hence the higher incidence of trans-women than trans-men. Think of it this way, for a trans-woman to be developed, all that is needed is for there to be too little male developmental hormones during brain development, a deficiency in chemicals can happen easily in nature. While a trans-male would require an unusual spike in male developmental hormones during brain development which would be less likely to happen. Remember though that the brain is especially sensitive to these hormones so said spike or deficiency need not be particularly large to result in cross gender brain development.
Again on transsexual and transgender, I was led to believe that there is a very distinct difference between the two. A transsexual is someone with gender dysphoria (regardless of transition status or desire to transition). However, I was never able to really understand the definition of a transgender.
For me I used to see it as transgender is what a transsexual is before physical transition. Hence I used to call myself a transgender, however I eventually was informed about the difference, and changed that to transsexual. However, like I said I still don't understand the real difference.
The main thing to my knowledge is that transgender people do not transition at all, not even living as the preferred gender. If I remember a transgender person is more similar to a transvestite in action, than a transsexual. I personally think it brings an unnecessary layer of complexity to an already complex issue and terminology. Personally, I would rather see it as a transgender person is someone before physical transition while a transsexual is someone during and after transition. Alternatively, I also vote for both terms meaning exactly the same thing, but I know there are people who identify as either term who would take great offense at that (for reasons that I don't understand.)
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Or is it because it is more socially acceptable for a woman to appear and act masculine than it is for a man to appear and act feminine?
I'm going to point at this and scream yes.
When my fiancee goes around in doc martins and a bald head it's considered rather cute. I get funny looks over the fact that I'm generally the one who cooks. Throwing meat over fire is apparently not a manly enough activity for some people.
On the gender vs sexual business. From what I can see in a bit of research there's no real consensus on just what the difference is. The term 'true transsexual' starts popping up and I get the feeling poking the subject with a stick is a rather bad idea. The core definitions are more or less the same, deviating from the expected role of their sex, however beyond that you get into prickly as shit questions which I doubt lead to much productive discussion. If I was going to guess as to the difference people want to find between the terms then Smurfette got it. you can't really toss around any 'true' transgender claims out there as gender is pretty much an in the head deal, while physical sex is a much less mutable and more provable characteristic.
And I have to say Dr Money was one creepy mother fucker. The more I read the less of it I want to remember.
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I've never worried terribly much on the terminology and just how it is physically expressed in actions and emotionally through desires. I wonder if that makes me a terrible boyfriend since my boyfriend is a trans-something male.
There are two things that are missing from this debate though... which is liable to make it more confusing. Intensity, or the power of this desire. Someone might be trans, but really, really doesn't care that much what they are. There is the continuum aspect as well with intensity, so less of a line and more of a square thingie with intensity as the Y. I've yet to hear mention of that aspect, which is liable to effect how strongly people they move one way or the other.
Finally... it is slightly adjustable. Y tends to be more prone to it than X, and sometimes it is more or less realizing where your X is that can increase the trend of Y. Could be since females are more pressured to be demure by society that their Ys are not as high as more aggressively intended men, but this is little more than guessing.
I know I've been around all over on the X and Y. Why? I don't know and this is all anecdotal. But it was linked heavily to my exploration of sexuality. Before I knew I was bisexual, I came to really regard my male body as ugly as well as all other male bodies. Just a huge pressure to stay away from it and uncomfortableness with it. Realizing my bisexuality in turn gave me a lot stronger love for the male body, mine and others. Almost a reactionary and strong urge to be extremely masculine. Since then I've slowly slipped to the middle and probably had my Y drop down pretty hard. I'm less comfortable and more unconcerned, I think. But I'd probably be CIS.
Sexuality is a lovely continuum too. Being in the middle is weird. Feminine men and masculine women. Since there's intersex, sure, but no hermaphrodites in the human species.
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I'd contribute, but my eyes are glazed over.
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Additionally, there was a trans female speaker who came to our school. To her, getting facial feminization surgery was more important than bottom surgery, because for her it was more how she was perceived and what pronouns were used automatically rather than her parts. So that would be I think where the divide between transgender and transsexual came in, too.
There are also a number of "non op" transfolk who don't feel the need to have bottom surgery at all. I suppose to them the fact that they're perceived as their target gender by society is enough and genital surgery is not necessary, but what do I know?
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Additionally, there was a trans female speaker who came to our school. To her, getting facial feminization surgery was more important than bottom surgery, because for her it was more how she was perceived and what pronouns were used automatically rather than her parts. So that would be I think where the divide between transgender and transsexual came in, too.
There are also a number of "non op" transfolk who don't feel the need to have bottom surgery at all. I suppose to them the fact that they're perceived as their target gender by society is enough and genital surgery is not necessary, but what do I know?
This is true. Further, during the process of transitioning ideally the consulting psychologist helping with the process would help the person to realize at what point they are happy. Ideally, from a medical perspective, as little surgery and such should be done as possible, hence if the person is sufficiently happy without undergoing surgery then they shouldn't. Of course, ones primary sexual characteristic is generally the primary cause of the discomfort so such cases are somewhat rare. Additionally female to male transsexuals often do not go for surgery because the operation is hugely expensive, incredibly difficult and has a success rate of about 60%. Right now it is not worth the risk for them, however the methods are improving with time and eventually it should be as easy and successful as male to female sexual reassignment surgery. (On a note relating to costs, think of it this way this is in South African rands, but it shows the scale. Breast implants = R30 000, Sexual reassignment surgery = 120 000, female to male surgery 500 000 )
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I should have been clearer. David Reimer is an example of the distinction between gender roles and internal gender identity, rather than an example of gender/sex discontinuity. His case doesn't prove transgenderism, but it does offer a counter to claims that gender identity is entirely determined by the expectations that society puts upon each sex -- an argument that is often brought up in tangent to the "transwomen are just men who like traditionally girly things" claim.
I think most people would agree that the psychologist who tried to coerce him into living as a female was a colossal douchebag.
As for transgender/transsexual: It does seem to be a matter of semantics.
It would be a good example if David Reimer's identity was that of an effeminate male, yet as far as I know he not only wanted to be male but also desired to follow male gender roles, so in his case "gender identity" and "gender role" do line up.
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Yes, but he rebelled against strictly enforced female gender roles and was led to believe that he was female up until he started questioning his identity, which throws a major wrench in the idea that upbringing is the deciding factor in one's gender identity. Whether or not his decision to follow male gender roles upon discovering the truth was internal or a response to societal pressures is really up in the air.
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Yes, but he rebelled against strictly enforced female gender roles and was led to believe that he was female up until he started questioning his identity, which throws a major wrench in the idea that upbringing is the deciding factor in one's gender identity. Whether or not his decision to follow male gender roles upon discovering the truth was internal or a response to societal pressures is really up in the air.
What about the complexity of societal pressures? Just because it can't have been societal pressures in the most straightforward way we can think of doesn't mean societal pressures had nothing to do with it.
Maybe this "chemistry" isn't of "Gender identity" but rather directs which gender a person tends to direct role-modeling behavior towards, and then the result of having role-modeled oneself towards so many "appropriate societal responses of that gender" leads the person to label themselves and identify themselves as that gender, then learn that their "gender" is supposed to have certain parts and get upset if they have the other set of parts. And if that's the case maybe we can teach people to decouple the "role" aspects from the "physical" to come to a conclusion that their early experience of "becoming boy/girl" was really "growing into their innate masculine/feminine personality trend" but does not mean they are or have to become a "boy/girl", respectively. Transsexualism could all be a psycholinguistic effect. Because of a child's limited exposure to words it doesn't instantly occur to them to equate the word "boy" with what "boy" means and are more likely to construe it based on various things they see associated with the word "boy" in their environment. For example, for the longest time in my childhood I thought the word "injured" meant "to become to have to wear glasses". Probably because my gym teacher when I was in 1st grade said at one point "no one likes to get injured" I hadn't been following along to the rest of what he was saying, he was wearing glasses, I was unfamiliar with the word "injured" and so I came to the conclusion that "injured" meant you needed glasses.
Similarly, a boy who says "I am a girl" at three years old does not mean the same thing as when an adult says they are a girl. The boy means "girl" based on his understanding of the concept, not ours. If his understanding of "girl" is based off an exposure to girls doing various play activities it could be he is calling himself a "girl" based solely on his enjoyment of these play activities, not understanding that that's not what the word means. But once people label themselves they often make decisions based on that label, he might decide that because he is a "girl" he then should try to participate in things he comes to associate with the concept, eventually he learns the actual definition, and then he wants to be physically changed into a girl.
In these cases simply getting through the message "you're not a girl, you just like girly stuff, which is fine, but you're not a girl" (perhaps not in that exact way) could break the trajectory and the boy could grow up to be comfortable with his body.
I generally don't hold labels in much esteem. I like what I like because it appeals to me. I'm not going to decide that because I am an "X" therefore I must like or dislike A,B,or C. I use labels for purely descriptive purposes. I acknowledge that certain subsets of behavior within society might hold more sway to me than others and that's just natural and comes through experiences, but I don't go out of my way to bring myself in line with a particular label. I consider myself a liberal, if someone told me "but you can't be a liberal because of X" I'd say, "OK, then I'm not a liberal." and that would be true since the "liberal" we are discussing is that other person's conception of the word, maybe they have a much narrower definition, I call myself a liberal because it seems like my views taken together tilt my significantly enough into what is generally considered "liberal" pro-gay marriage, universal health care, we should have free college... Still the rightness of one's actions, beliefs, positions does not depend on whether or not it fits into to some label, so I could have a position on something people say is against liberalism or even say that therefore I'm not a liberal and it's like "whatever".
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Ok, lets get the basics out of the way. TheResonator, I have only a vague idea what you are talking about, that block of text was incredibly difficult to read. From what I can make out of it, you are wrong and don't quite understand how the David Reimer case proved that societal pressure has no determining factor in transexuality.
In the case all of society and his family brought him up to live as and be perceived as a girl. He was never told about the accident and was encouraged by his parents and society to be a girl and do and enjoy female activities. Despite this, he still showed innate traits for cross gender behavior, including things like urinating while standing. He would be reprimanded for such things and pressured more to fit the female role. Eventually he submitted to pressure and tried to continue to live as a woman despite how he was feeling inside but that all came to a head, as all repression does. As a result his family eventually told him the truth and after that he switched to living as a male.
In all aspects, society, and family, was encouraging and forcing him to fit the body he had. Despite that, he still felt that he did not fit, proving that gender and sexuality is innate and not dependent on physical sex or society.
I will admit though that the aspect of linguistics that you touch on has some tangential relevance. You are right that when a young boy says he is or wants to be a girl, it is different from when an adult says it. However it goes a bit deeper. Young children have not undergone puberty yet and as a result their body and gender are more androgynous and cross gender feelings are not as intense. The sexual aspect is diminished because children don't understand sex yet, however there is a genital aspect. Young children who are cross gender will try and make their genitals imitate those of the other gender, even though they wont understand it. This however should not be used as a diagnosis because its hard to spot the real thing for young children messing around. The point though is that it does happen.
However, societal linguistics do not influence someone to become cross gender. If anything it specifically helps to keep them in the closet or in denial about themselves. You seem to think that through societal influence people may get confused and decide to become transgender, or may start thinking they are transgender. While that may have some point initially, the hard truth is that transsexuals don't do what they do because they are confused and want to. The reality of actually living in a cross gender role and life is really hard and if it is not truly for you you would not wish it on anyone. Transsexuals manage to do it because that is who they truly are. It is because living like that is better than the alternative that they can manage to survive and handle the harshness of it, despite society and everyone telling them to be happy with the body and life they have.
Lastly, it is not about liking girly stuff. It is not about being masculine or feminine in action, it is about gender identity and what gender you intrinsically relate to. I use myself as an example of a girl who is more into masculine activities than feminine activities but who still intrinsically relates to being a woman. I can look back at my past and remember in early childhood taping my penis away at night, where no one could see me or would know, because for some unknown reason I wanted to be a girl. I remember stopping that because my mom once told me about gays and it made me afraid to do it anymore. I remember being called a girl while I was playing with my neighbors barbies or when I wore pink and how it resonated within me to stop doing girly things and never wear pink again. I remember shutting off all my emotions and becoming emotionally dead as a teenager to get by and keep the feelings I had in check, despite wishing to become a girl every night. I remember looking for an answer to why I felt this way, and the complete psychological breakdown I had when I finally found out. Society and my family and my life in general had always been pushing and re-enforcing me living as a male. I had found plenty of masculine hobbies to be fun and I find numerous feminine hobbies to be boring. Despite that I still felt like this within the depth of who I was.
You may not understand this, but your sexuality is incredibly closely linked to the core of ones identity and personality. We are sexual creatures and our gender and physical sex are of great significance to us as humans. Despite the efforts of the gender equality lobby and their constant repetition of the supposition that gender is meaningless or a purely social construct, it is not. It is a core part of who we are. The different genders are equal, but not interchangeable. We can both do the same things and perform each others roles, but there is still within us a part that links who we are on the most basic level to our sexuality. That is the essence of transsexuality.
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Ok, lets get the basics out of the way. TheResonator, I have only a vague idea what you are talking about, that block of text was incredibly difficult to read. From what I can make out of it, you are wrong and don't quite understand how the David Reimer case proved that societal pressure has no determining factor in transexuality.
One case proves "no", one case proves for all cases? That isn't scientific at all.
Unless we have a physical test that can detect transsexuality 100% of the time there are other factors, which may or may not be active in every case or may just be active in some cases.
And furthermore, I'm not talking about consciously-directed societal influence, I'm talking about how a person may be influenced accidentally based on their misunderstanding of context. I gave my example of thinking "injured" meant "needing to wear glasses". So, if a kid associated "girl" strongly with a propensity to eat bananas and "boy" with a propensity not to eat bananas that could then become a determining factor in how the child thinks about his/her own gender, at least until they(if they) encounter, observe, and absorb enough counterexamples.
There's also the factor of "role-modeling behavior", if the child's innate tendancy is whether to watch mostly boys or mostly girls and learn behaviors mostly from them then that will influence the number of "boy" labeled and "Girl" labeled things they do and so increase the possibility that they come to label themselves as that gender. In that case it would be environmental but not socially-directed, merely an outcome of the interaction between an innate role-modeling drive, leading the person to observe and identify with behaviors at a younger age in contexts where they are more likely to hear the words "boy" and "Girl" and realize at some point it is being applied to the people they are watching, and then there could be a string of events where once the person learns in some way to associate "boy" things with boy anatomy and "girl" things with girl anatomy but still does not unlearn the association with other things.
Environment does NOT have to mean direct or even deliberate social instruction. Plenty of communication especially in early childhood is communicated by accident. An anti-huffing commercial left me obsessively breathing out harshly for several years as a child because it said "when you're sniffing you're brain thinks you're drowning" and at that age I thought it meant sniffing like you'd sniff air in and forget to release enough of the CO2. Society influenced me, just not in the way it intended, or even for a cause it was interested in(society wanted to discover me from huffing, instead it encouraged me to obsessively cough).
Also, there's the matter of the extent of role modeling, role models can be tv characters, and sometimes men or women are portrayed as gender non-conforming on tv. Kids obviously don't recognize this initially and will naturally assume the character is behaving according to their gender if they(the kids) are thinking about "gender". So, even really butch tomboy mtfs could've possibly role-modeled off of a lot of butch female characters as a child or even just heard the word "girl" at a very young age while watching tv.
In all aspects, society, and family, was encouraging and forcing him to fit the body he had.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Not saying this is what they should've done, but we will never know what would've happened had his family allowed his male-typical behavior but encouraged him to not to identify as a boy or to change his body, or even to identify as a boy but with a female-transformed body?
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
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Reasonator, have you ever actually sat down and had a conversation with a young child? They understand a hell of a lot more then you seem to realize and they have a pretty damn good idea of who they are and what they are. We actually refer to my workshop as the "Philosophers shed" because my five-year-old daughter always wants to come and hang out with me and inevitably ends up with me getting no work done and the two of us siting in the big comfy chair that just happens ;) to be in there discussing how and why the world around her works. She's been doing this for a couple of years, and at this point some of these conversations are getting pretty damned involved. At one point this summer she asked out of the blue 'what if we are fleas on a giants' back?' without any external stimulus to lead her to even ponder that question.
Frankly, I think you are grossly underestimating a child's capacity to understand who and what they are and their ability to question their own preconceptions of the world around them.
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Canadian, thank you so much for encouraging your daughter to contemplate the world around her.
Teaching a child to think for his or herself is quite possibly one of the best things you can do for them.
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Canadian, thank you so much for encouraging your daughter to contemplate the world around her.
Teaching a child to think for his or herself is quite possibly one of the best things you can do for them.
Thank you for the compliment.
Truthfully, in my experience children are sponges who naturally want to lean and explore and it takes active discouragement to make them stop. Sadly stifling that urge that is something far too many people do.
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I've noticed the "children can't know any better" argument doesn't seem to apply when a child is cisgendered or straight.
For instance, nobody questions a teenager who says that they are straight. But if that same teenager says that they are gay or bi, then people will say that they can't "know for sure," that it's "a phase," or that they'll "grow out of it."
A similar thing happens with cis and trans* minors. A cis child who conforms to gender roles is never given a second thought, but a trans* child (or even any child who doesn't conform to gender roles) is treated as if it's a "phase they'll grow out of" because "they can't be sure of who they are yet when they're so young."
Just a thought.
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I've noticed the "children can't know any better" argument doesn't seem to apply when a child is cisgendered or straight.
For instance, nobody questions a teenager who says that they are straight. But if that same teenager says that they are gay or bi, then people will say that they can't "know for sure," that it's "a phase," or that they'll "grow out of it."
A similar thing happens with cis and trans* minors. A cis child who conforms to gender roles is never given a second thought, but a trans* child (or even any child who doesn't conform to gender roles) is treated as if it's a "phase they'll grow out of" because "they can't be sure of who they are yet when they're so young."
Just a thought.
Fuck yeah'd for that.
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Please be so kind as to actually read and understand the counter point I am attempting to make. It seems like a lot of what I wrote previously was ignored including the direct example I gave as a counter. For once, please read and pay attention to the points provided by the members of this community that are actual transsexuals. They may just know what they are talking about.
One case proves "no", one case proves for all cases? That isn't scientific at all.
Unless we have a physical test that can detect transsexuality 100% of the time there are other factors, which may or may not be active in every case or may just be active in some cases.
Well yes, this one case does manage to prove no, because the fact of the matter that is possibly most defining was that David Reimer was not a transsexual. He was someone who would have grown up as a perfectly normal cis male, had he not had a botched circumcision. This didn't start of with a potentially androgynous child, this was a male who was forced to live as a female, it is about as 100% definition of transsexuality that you can get. This single experiment basically proved the lack of upbringing and environment as being a determining factor because all aspects of the example were taken to absolute extremes.
And furthermore, I'm not talking about consciously-directed societal influence, I'm talking about how a person may be influenced accidentally based on their misunderstanding of context. I gave my example of thinking "injured" meant "needing to wear glasses". So, if a kid associated "girl" strongly with a propensity to eat bananas and "boy" with a propensity not to eat bananas that could then become a determining factor in how the child thinks about his/her own gender, at least until they(if they) encounter, observe, and absorb enough counterexamples.
Give children some credit. While the example you gave of injuries meaning glasses is unique, children figure out the basic difference between boys and girls at an extremely young age. They may not understand the full sexual complexities of that meaning, but they know enough to not have some strange confusion like you are implying. Even in the case where there was some initial confusion, such confusion is removed relatively quickly during childhood. Of course the best example to prove that this has no impact or effect is to simply ask transsexuals if they ever encountered such a scenario. I can tell you on my side I know I never had such a problem.
There's also the factor of "role-modeling behavior", if the child's innate tendancy is whether to watch mostly boys or mostly girls and learn behaviors mostly from them then that will influence the number of "boy" labeled and "Girl" labeled things they do and so increase the possibility that they come to label themselves as that gender.
Additionally, role model has no effect because if it did we would be seeing problems with single parents, or single sex boarding schools. Neither of these scenarios have had any influence on either the occurrence of homosexuality or transsexuality. If anything what you are describing, influences learned gender roles which have already been proven to be unrelated to transsexuality by the behaviors of transsexuals themselves.
Environment does NOT have to mean direct or even deliberate social instruction. Plenty of communication especially in early childhood is communicated by accident. An anti-huffing commercial left me obsessively breathing out harshly for several years as a child because it said "when you're sniffing you're brain thinks you're drowning" and at that age I thought it meant sniffing like you'd sniff air in and forget to release enough of the CO2. Society influenced me, just not in the way it intended, or even for a cause it was interested in(society wanted to discover me from huffing, instead it encouraged me to obsessively cough).
Again this was addressed in my previous post. The current cis and hetronormative environment and society would only encourage children to act like their birth sex and to fight against their cross gender feelings. Further, with societal pressures being what they are, any early confusion would be quickly resolved, I even gave the example of how I was chastised for feminine behavior and that led to me stopping such behavior. Regardless, it did not have any effect on me as a transsexual other than keeping me in the closet for longer.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Not saying this is what they should've done, but we will never know what would've happened had his family allowed his male-typical behavior but encouraged him to not to identify as a boy or to change his body, or even to identify as a boy but with a female-transformed body?
This piece is just plain rubbish, while the argument can be made that children will rebel against excessive pressure from a parent, the case of David Reimer proved that was not the case. There are plenty of cis children who are pressured both socially and environmentally to fit gender roles. These children do not rebel against such actions to the degree where they develop a gross gender identity. They are you more typical hyper-masculine males for example.
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
Lastly, gender roles and term definitions have nothing to do with trans-people. As I already pointed out, the scope of the significant gender dysphoria only manifests during puberty. By that time gender roles would be primarily focused on ensuring that the child follow their birth sex's roles and they will also have an accurate understanding of what the term boy and girl means.
Something you seem to be missing, something I pointed out at least once before, is that becoming a transgender person is incredibly difficult. One faces massive amounts of social stigma not to mention the practical difficulties involved. For someone to choose to put themselves through all the trouble involved with being trans means they have deeply analyzed their own feelings. There is no confusion of terms, no confusion in role-modes, no confusion in societies expectations and pressures, no confusion in environment or gender roles. The only confusion would be the scope of their own inner turmoil.
I've noticed the "children can't know any better" argument doesn't seem to apply when a child is cisgendered or straight.
Just a thought.
I think the main reason for this is really just statistical numbers. Homosexual and trans people make up a small percentage of the total population. Hence in any given situation is it assumed that the majority would be cicgendered and straight. Further the very existence of the closet with regards to homosexuality proves that non cis and heterosexual people will attempt to fit the norm of being cisgendered and straight.
Although to be honest, for someone to actually come out as such, given all the pressures to remain in the closet, they should be given more credit for their statement. After all no one wants to be homosexual or transsexual (except SJW but there they are just faking it to gain prestige in the oppression Olympics.) hence, if anything they should know better.
There are plenty of homosexual and transsexual children who would swear they are normal, simply because they don't understand or know about the meanings of the feelings they have.
However, I will say as one final note, it is possible that a teen may be confused about their sexuality temporarily. After all, puberty is an extremely confusing time for children. Of course I am inclined to say that would be pretty rare.
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However, I will say as one final note, it is possible that a teen may be confused about their sexuality temporarily. After all, puberty is an extremely confusing time for children. Of course I am inclined to say that would be pretty rare.
For what it's worth, I was only confused about my orientation when I didn't know that such a thing as bisexuality existed. After that, it wasn't so much confusion as it was inner turmoil, self-loathing, doubt, and fear, but never confusion.
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Please be so kind as to actually read and understand the counter point I am attempting to make. It seems like a lot of what I wrote previously was ignored including the direct example I gave as a counter. For once, please read and pay attention to the points provided by the members of this community that are actual transsexuals. They may just know what they are talking about.
Seriously. This cherry-picking of a few details while ignoring the bulk of the evidence and the picture it paints is highly reminiscent of a creationist trying to disprove evolution.
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Well yes, this one case does manage to prove no, because the fact of the matter that is possibly most defining was that David Reimer was not a transsexual. He was someone who would have grown up as a perfectly normal cis male, had he not had a botched circumcision. This didn't start of with a potentially androgynous child, this was a male who was forced to live as a female, it is about as 100% definition of transsexuality that you can get. This single experiment basically proved the lack of upbringing and environment as being a determining factor because all aspects of the example were taken to absolute extremes.
1. That still wouldn't prove that psycholinguistic causes of transsexuality don't sometimes occur. If that were the case for even 1% of cases then that would be important to identify and separate.
2. David Reimer was born a male, he had XY chromosomes. Chances are being a male would greatly increase any inclination to imitate other males, so this doesn't disprove my hypothesis that instead of "innate gender identity" it could be "innate role modeling" giving rise to "gender identity".
Give children some credit. While the example you gave of injuries meaning glasses is unique, children figure out the basic difference between boys and girls at an extremely young age. They may not understand the full sexual complexities of that meaning, but they know enough to not have some strange confusion like you are implying.
Please show this somehow. The two facts that make me doubt you on this are:
1. Children are not born with a dictionary in their head. They must learn words by being exposed in their environments.
2. Nudity is taboo, so noticing through enough contexts to figure out that a male has a certain body and a female has a certain body at a very young age is not a guarantee, and indeed by the time they have figured it out they've likely already heard "boy" and "girl" and their synonyms attached to so many other situations, including ones referring to themselves or to their friends that they link it more to "behaviors". A child may even mistakenly think an adult was referring to them as a "girl" and then if they have enough feminine behaviors they associate with "girl" they are likely to accept this as the reality, engrain it as part of their identity, and then feel like it means their body is wrong when they learn that "girl" really means you have to have a certain body type. For such a child the healthy thing would be to come to realize he is effeminate, not a "girl", to accept his personality but to come around to accepting that he is a "boy". That may not be all of the cases that result in a person feeling "Trapped in the wrong body", but it's certainly a possible complication that could lead to it.
Even in the case where there was some initial confusion, such confusion is removed relatively quickly during childhood.
Assuming you mean the second confusion, the confusion of "maybe I have the wrong body" that would come about after learning the words "boy" and "girl" and synonyms actually refer to body parts then how exactly would it be removed quickly? What would guarantee the child realizes they aren't really trans?
Especially if they express this to their parents and then get encouragement from parents and counselors who miss the signs that it's not real transsexuality (which is especially likely since psycholinguistics is just starting to get big i.e. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, enough experiments have not been done to determine what sort of specific problems people may face from misinterpretations of what words mean during childhood).
Of course the best example to prove that this has no impact or effect is to simply ask transsexuals if they ever encountered such a scenario. I can tell you on my side I know I never had such a problem.
That would prove nothing. That isn't scientific. I would have to ask hundreds of them in a randomized fashion. And even then they might not remember how they came to identify themselves as "male" or "female" even if it was because of how they associated the words and not innate gender identity if it started happening early enough in their lives.
Additionally, role model has no effect because if it did we would be seeing problems with single parents, or single sex boarding schools. Neither of these scenarios have had any influence on either the occurrence of homosexuality or transsexuality. If anything what you are describing, influences learned gender roles which have already been proven to be unrelated to transsexuality by the behaviors of transsexuals themselves.
1. It's "role modeling has no effect" otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense.
2. You have a highly simplified view of how "role modeling" effects people.
Sometimes people can be influenced by society in ways society does not intend. Just because something looks rebellious, or looks anti-mainstream doesn't mean the influence for it did not come from other people. Look up "contrarian". I'm not saying transsexuals are mostly contrarians or ODD, although I'd hope that's something the doctors try to look for to make sure they are for real.
But other than that people can be confused about society's expectations, and people may give more weight to certain members of society than others and even then more weight may be given to some people on their fashion sense, others on the nature of reality, others for one's views on morality, others for one's politics. If a person's innate tendency is to give more weight to the opposite gender in trying to learn what games to play or what clothes are best and they keep hearing the word "girl" next to it they may conclude that liking it means they are a "girl". If they ever dress the way society expects the opposite sex to dress and get mistaken for a girl they are more likely to think they are a "girl" and then by the time they learn that "girl" means you have to have certain body parts they may think there's so much other stuff as evidence showing they are a "girl" that they have to have the body parts.
Again this was addressed in my previous post. The current cis and hetronormative environment and society would only encourage children to act like their birth sex and to fight against their cross gender feelings. Further, with societal pressures being what they are, any early confusion would be quickly resolved, I even gave the example of how I was chastised for feminine behavior and that led to me stopping such behavior.
1. Each individual is influenced differently. Otherwise with societal pressures being what they are why would anybody voluntarily do anything "different"? But people do and it's not always "contrarianism" and it's not always "genetics", sometimes they are conforming to a subset of society or to a misinterpretation of society or a misinterpretation of a subset.
Furthermore, being chastised for feminine behavior reinforces the idea that gender means you act a certain way rather than it meaning you have certain body parts. What would've happened if they didn't care about you acting like a girl, and maybe even let it go that you liked calling yourself a girl. And then when you're like 10, showed you what "girl" means in the dictionary, what "boy" means, and then what "feminine" means. Maybe today you would be a feminine male rather than an mtf transsexual. Or maybe you still would be trans. Unfortunately, we can't construct a time machine and go back and figure it out.
This piece is just plain rubbish, while the argument can be made that children will rebel against excessive pressure from a parent
Not what I was arguing at all. Pointing at certain behaviors and saying "boys can do this" and "girls can do that" would reinforce the notion that these things are part of "what it means to be a boy" and "what it means to be a girl". Looking at what he would prefer to do it would be the logical thing, given the information he had to identify as a "boy".
Society as a whole tends to do this, and the effects on the individual interacting with society would more likely than not be uneven because every individual is exposed to different messages, even down to what they were watching on tv one day.
We'd really have to purposefully create a gender-neutral society where the view that boys can do girl things and they are still just as much boys and girls can do boy things and they are still just as much girls is pushed and any media that would suggest otherwise is censored and the way children are taught things is construed in a careful manner to prevent psycholinguistic confusion of any kind(I think we should do this already, why adults expect children to understand context as well as they do when they've been at for so long compared to the children has always puzzled me) see how many people still want sex change operations as adults.
, the case of David Reimer proved that was not the case. There are plenty of cis children who are pressured both socially and environmentally to fit gender roles. These children do not rebel against such actions to the degree where they develop a gross gender identity. They are you more typical hyper-masculine males for example.
Some of them do, most of them don't. However, most people don't grow up to be transsexuals.
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
Lastly, gender roles and term definitions have nothing to do with trans-people. As I already pointed out, the scope of the significant gender dysphoria only manifests during puberty.
Then why are people always so believing the kid is really trans instead of cautious about it whenever there is a kid who says he thinks he is a "girl" and she thinks she is a "boy"? The fact that significant gender dysphoria only manifests during puberty is a red light that it's even more likely to be from reasons other than innate gender identity if it happens earlier.
When a young child, like 5 or 7 says they are the wrong gender do doctors currently consider the potentiality of psycholinguistics in shaping their worldview of what things like "boy" and "girl" and "sex" and "gender" mean? Do they consider that words that may seem commonsense to adults sometimes have totally different meanings to children? If not, then this could mean there are an awfully large number of mistakes being made.
By that time gender roles would be primarily focused on ensuring that the child follow their birth sex's roles and they will also have an accurate understanding of what the term boy and girl means.
Um, no focusing on gender roles means it's more likely to lead to things like the child thinks the word "girl" means "wears dresses". As to "accurate understanding" an accurate understanding would be "boy"="male body parts" "Girl"="female body parts". Think about how squeamish parents are about even talking about sex to their children. Plenty of parents will never verbalize to their children that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, and even then it will likely be after all the times they say "boys/girls play with...".
I've noticed the "children can't know any better" argument doesn't seem to apply when a child is cisgendered or straight.
Just a thought.
I think the main reason for this is really just statistical numbers. Homosexual and trans people make up a small percentage of the total population. Hence in any given situation is it assumed that the majority would be cicgendered and straight. Further the very existence of the closet with regards to homosexuality proves that non cis and heterosexual people will attempt to fit the norm of being cisgendered and straight.
Because if the child "makes a mistake" about being cis here they can correct it (as much as any transsexual) with surgery. If the mistake is about being trans and they go through with surgery they can only half-correct it.
Although to be honest, for someone to actually come out as such, given all the pressures to remain in the closet, they should be given more credit for their statement.
Based on that logic whenever someone says they think they are supposed to be a minority race and want treatment since that just seems so weird we should give them more credit.
There are plenty of homosexual and transsexual children who would swear they are normal, simply because they don't understand or know about the meanings of the feelings they have.
Talk about an abstraction. Them saying they think they are "normal" and what that means depends on their understanding of the term in context.
How society interacts with the individual is extremely complex, not a simple society says something and the individual does it or rebels. It's how does the individual perceive(doesn't matter what society says, all that matters is how it is perceived) society and its various parts(such as girls or religious preachers) and in various ways(such as fashion tips even if you don't care what their opinions are on right and wrong or vice versa) applying to various aspects of life and how does the individual respond to it?
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Please show this somehow. The two facts that make me doubt you on this are:
2. Nudity is taboo, so noticing through enough contexts to figure out that a male has a certain body and a female has a certain body at a very young age is not a guarantee, and indeed by the time they have figured it out they've likely already heard "boy" and "girl" and their synonyms attached to so many other situations, including ones referring to themselves or to their friends that they link it more to "behaviors".
Guess you've never seen kids playing doctor...
A child may even mistakenly think an adult was referring to them as a "girl" and then if they have enough feminine behaviors they associate with "girl" they are likely to accept this as the reality, engrain it as part of their identity, and then feel like it means their body is wrong when they learn that "girl" really means you have to have a certain body type.
Do you have a basis for this theory, other than pulling out of the ether?
For such a child the healthy thing would be to come to realize he is effeminate, not a "girl", to accept his personality but to come around to accepting that he is a "boy".
Who are you to determine what is "healthy" for any child? Maybe the healthy thing for the child would be transition at some point in life.
Especially if they express this to their parents and then get encouragement from parents and counselors who miss the signs that it's not real transsexuality
If it isn't right, the person will know. When I started transition, I had support from friends who had already transitioned. But even with that support, the idea was only a possibility until the first time I dressed as male and looked in the mirror. That is when I knew it was right for me. No matter how much support and encouragement I had, the only one who could make the final decision was me.
If a person's innate tendency is to give more weight to the opposite gender in trying to learn what games to play or what clothes are best and they keep hearing the word "girl" next to it they may conclude that liking it means they are a "girl".
There is a long jump from "I like feminine things" to "I am a girl." There are a lot of feminine men and masculine women who know they are not TS.
If they ever dress the way society expects the opposite sex to dress and get mistaken for a girl they are more likely to think they are a "girl" and then by the time they learn that "girl" means you have to have certain body parts they may think there's so much other stuff as evidence showing they are a "girl" that they have to have the body parts.
I will again ask what your basis for this theory is.
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
Except that society does not put such options in kids' minds. Society does not let kids know that TS/TG exist. Without such knowledge, a kid is not going to just decide (permanently) that they are in the wrong body. Heck, even a lot of adults do not know that FtM's exist, which further minimizes the chance that someone who is XX will just decide one day to transition. (If someone does not know an option exists, there is no way they can take that option.)
Then why are people always so believing the kid is really trans instead of cautious about it whenever there is a kid who says he thinks he is a "girl" and she thinks she is a "boy"?
Little kids think this a lot. Anyone who freaks out over a little girl saying "I want to grow up to be a daddy" is overreacting. An overwhelming majority of kids who say things like this do not actually feel the need to transition.
Because if the child "makes a mistake" about being cis here they can correct it (as much as any transsexual) with surgery. If the mistake is about being trans and they go through with surgery they can only half-correct it.
I cannot imagine a doctor allowing a child to transition. Hormone blockers to delay puberty, yes. Surgery? No.
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Guess you've never seen kids playing doctor...
Far from a universal experience. I never played doctor as a kid.
Do you have a basis for this theory, other than pulling out of the ether?
The basis is that you are born with ZERO linguistic knowledge, and then you need to try to figure it out, so in the course of trying to figure it out what's to stop a boy from hearing an adult use "girl" and thinking the adult is referring to him?
Who are you to determine what is "healthy" for any child? Maybe the healthy thing for the child would be transition at some point in life.
Who am I? Wow, so who is who to determine anything? Maybe we should all just throw up our hands and just trying to figure anything out.
A sex change is a BIG thing. If it's not really the kid's innate gender identity and is instead just the result of the development of words and associated concepts at a young age then that's important.
If it isn't right, the person will know. When I started transition, I had support from friends who had already transitioned. But even with that support, the idea was only a possibility until the first time I dressed as male and looked in the mirror. That is when I knew it was right for me. No matter how much support and encouragement I had, the only one who could make the final decision was me.
People can get confused. A person who was influenced by the psycholinguistic develop of concepts might very well feel the same.
Also, you knew by dressing as a male? What if it just felt right because of the clothes?
You are essentializing gender roles. Why can't a woman dress like a male and still be a woman? Why can't a man dress like a female and still be a man?
There is a long jump from "I like feminine things" to "I am a girl." There are a lot of feminine men and masculine women who know they are not TS.
You are overgeneralizing. Just because one person gets confused by that doesn't mean every single one of them will.
I will again ask what your basis for this theory is.
Children are born without a knowledge of what words mean. They have to learn them over a long period of time and that involves associated the words with a variety of things. Typically the kid is not going to open up a dictionary at the age of 2 and learn every definition according to the official definition.
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
Except that society does not put such options in kids' minds. Society does not let kids know that TS/TG exist. Without such knowledge, a kid is not going to just decide (permanently) that they are in the wrong body. Heck, even a lot of adults do not know that FtM's exist, which further minimizes the chance that someone who is XX will just decide one day to transition. (If someone does not know an option exists, there is no way they can take that option.)[/quote]
It could become permanent if as a young child they start talking about it and get encouragement from their parents and counselors.
Society does not need to teach kids about the concepts/words of "Transsexuality/transgender" for a child to come to think that they should change their sex. The child could just as easily reach such a conclusion just because they have come to understand the words "boy" and "Girl" to mean certain things including referring to a physical body type but also behavioral and personality traits which they then ascribe to themselves and then internalize themselves as being "boy" or "girl" which could later lead to them reading about "transsexuality" and thinking "That's it, I must have been born in the wrong body and should transition" even when it's really just because through a long process starting before they can remember most things they came to think identify as for example a person who likes to play with dolls, a person who likes pink, ... and then learned that such persons were typically labeled "girl" and so decided they were a "girl" and then learned that "girl" meant "you have a vagina" and then instead of realizing "ok I'm actually a boy" they think "that means I should have a vagina too".
I cannot imagine a doctor allowing a child to transition. Hormone blockers to delay puberty, yes. Surgery? No.
And what happens when the kid changes his/her mind and doesn't want to transition after hormone blockers? Is there any way to restore them to how they would've been otherwise?
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Guess you've never seen kids playing doctor...
Far from a universal experience. I never played doctor as a kid.
So your experience trumps that of other people's? And you seriously never took a bath with other people as a kid? Or saw people getting dressed ever? Or saw babies being changed?
Do you have a basis for this theory, other than pulling out of the ether?
The basis is that you are born with ZERO linguistic knowledge, and then you need to try to figure it out, so in the course of trying to figure it out what's to stop a boy from hearing an adult use "girl" and thinking the adult is referring to him?
Please show evidence that this theory is in any way plausible and that kids are really so ignorant that they assign gender based on arbitrary characteristics. Because from what I'm given to understand (having two much-younger siblings and babysitting a shitload of kids), if you tell a boy "only girls like pink" and he likes pink, he is more likely to stop liking pink (at least publicly) than declare that he's a girl.
Who are you to determine what is "healthy" for any child? Maybe the healthy thing for the child would be transition at some point in life.
Who am I? Wow, so who is who to determine anything? Maybe we should all just throw up our hands and just trying to figure anything out.
A sex change is a BIG thing. If it's not really the kid's innate gender identity and is instead just the result of the development of words and associated concepts at a young age then that's important.
You have to prove that your theory is valid using science before you start frothing at the mouth, dude.
If it isn't right, the person will know. When I started transition, I had support from friends who had already transitioned. But even with that support, the idea was only a possibility until the first time I dressed as male and looked in the mirror. That is when I knew it was right for me. No matter how much support and encouragement I had, the only one who could make the final decision was me.
People can get confused. A person who was influenced by the psycholinguistic develop of concepts might very well feel the same.
Also, you knew by dressing as a male? What if it just felt right because of the clothes?
You are essentializing gender roles. Why can't a woman dress like a male and still be a woman? Why can't a man dress like a female and still be a man?
What the fuck, dude. That's not the point at all and you are being deliberately obtuse.
There is a long jump from "I like feminine things" to "I am a girl." There are a lot of feminine men and masculine women who know they are not TS.
You are overgeneralizing. Just because one person gets confused by that doesn't mean every single one of them will.
Oh, you're accusing Eric of over-generalizing? Are you seriously going to down that route, Mr. No-Child-Knows-What-Gender-Is?
I will again ask what your basis for this theory is.
Children are born without a knowledge of what words mean. They have to learn them over a long period of time and that involves associated the words with a variety of things. Typically the kid is not going to open up a dictionary at the age of 2 and learn every definition according to the official definition.
Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
Except that society does not put such options in kids' minds. Society does not let kids know that TS/TG exist. Without such knowledge, a kid is not going to just decide (permanently) that they are in the wrong body. Heck, even a lot of adults do not know that FtM's exist, which further minimizes the chance that someone who is XX will just decide one day to transition. (If someone does not know an option exists, there is no way they can take that option.)
It could become permanent if as a young child they start talking about it and get encouragement from their parents and counselors.
Society does not need to teach kids about the concepts/words of "Transsexuality/transgender" for a child to come to think that they should change their sex. The child could just as easily reach such a conclusion just because they have come to understand the words "boy" and "Girl" to mean certain things including referring to a physical body type but also behavioral and personality traits which they then ascribe to themselves and then internalize themselves as being "boy" or "girl" which could later lead to them reading about "transsexuality" and thinking "That's it, I must have been born in the wrong body and should transition" even when it's really just because through a long process starting before they can remember most things they came to think identify as for example a person who likes to play with dolls, a person who likes pink, ... and then learned that such persons were typically labeled "girl" and so decided they were a "girl" and then learned that "girl" meant "you have a vagina" and then instead of realizing "ok I'm actually a boy" they think "that means I should have a vagina too".
You're extrapolating without any actual proof. If what you say is true, and we only associate gender based on what we see in society, then I should be genderqueer right now, because as a kid I did "boy things" (played with boys in the dirt, hated wearing dresses, thought Barbie was boring, ripped off spider legs) and "girl things" (cuddled baby dolls, pretended to be a princess, wanted to wear nail polish and high heels and makeup). The evidence (http://worldsavvy.org/monitor/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=603&Itemid=1050) is more (http://voices.yahoo.com/media-gender-stereotypes-tv-movies-more-impact-578445.html?cat=7) in favor (http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/elb9501.html) of the media (http://www.sociology.org/media-studies/care-bears-vs-transformers-gender-stereotypes-in-advertisements/) influencing gender expression (http://ts-si.org/guest-columns/29266-does-gender-expression-have-an-age-requirement) (through adherence to gender roles and conventional attractiveness) (http://www.pta.org/3736.htm) rather than gender itself (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4189061).
I cannot imagine a doctor allowing a child to transition. Hormone blockers to delay puberty, yes. Surgery? No.
And what happens when the kid changes his/her mind and doesn't want to transition after hormone blockers? Is there any way to restore them to how they would've been otherwise?
Short answer: yes. Long answer: Hormone blockers simply delay puberty. If the kid changes their mind, then they simply get taken off them and go through puberty later, say in their twenties instead of their teens. It's not like giving hormones which shunt you in one direction or another.
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Guess you've never seen kids playing doctor...
Far from a universal experience. I never played doctor as a kid.
So your experience trumps that of other people's? And you seriously never took a bath with other people as a kid? Or saw people getting dressed ever? Or saw babies being changed?
Eric contends that linguistics is irrelevant to the formation of identity even for a tiny number of cases. Eric insists this couldn't possibly even happen to even one child. So, no I am not claiming my experience trumps that of other people's. I am saying that Eric's example would only be valid if it was universal since I'm not contending that everyone's self-perceived gender identity is ultimately because of linguistics, just that given that we are not born with a knowledge of what words mean it's likely to happen at times.
As for a baby taking a bath, baby isn't ready to put together the word "boy" or "girl" with their genitals at that stage.
Please show evidence that this theory is in any way plausible and that kids are really so ignorant that they assign gender based on arbitrary characteristics. Because from what I'm given to understand (having two much-younger siblings and babysitting a shitload of kids), if you tell a boy "only girls like pink" and he likes pink, he is more likely to stop liking pink (at least publicly) than declare that he's a girl.
This isn't about explicitly telling children things. I'm thinking more of subtle and unintended effects.
Oh, you're accusing Eric of over-generalizing? Are you seriously going to down that route, Mr. No-Child-Knows-What-Gender-Is?
Where did I say "no child"? Every child is different.
Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
The conclusion is true, however it does not follow from the premise. At some point the boy will learn that the real reason he is a boy is because he has a penis.
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Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
The conclusion is true, however it does not follow from the premise. At some point the boy will learn that the real reason he is a boy is because he has a penis.
So you just invalidated the gender identity of every single trans person ever. Great job, asshole.
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Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
The conclusion is true, however it does not follow from the premise. At some point the boy will learn that the real reason he is a boy is because he has a penis.
Congratulations!
You have just undermined your entire linguistic influence hypothesis. If the meaning of terms can change with time, they will clearly not have a long term effect on the person involved. They will learn about the difference and understand the real meanings of words. Hence, though a very young child may be confused initially this will not continue into early adolescence. However the transgender feelings remain regardless of definitions of words. Further more, transgender feelings are discordant and prominent before most trans people even learn that things like transgender even exist.
Your linguistic confusion premise as a cause of trans-sexuality is undone by your own admission that linguistic confusion is removed with time when the correct understanding is achieved. Hence the net result is such confusion is negligible, especially with regards to the effect on the persons identity.
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Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
The conclusion is true, however it does not follow from the premise. At some point the boy will learn that the real reason he is a boy is because he has a penis.
So you just invalidated the gender identity of every single trans person ever. Great job, asshole.
How so? If we're talking about transsexuals then they want to have a certain set of genitalia so it's too far off the mark.
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Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
The conclusion is true, however it does not follow from the premise. At some point the boy will learn that the real reason he is a boy is because he has a penis.
Congratulations!
You have just undermined your entire linguistic influence hypothesis. If the meaning of terms can change with time, they will clearly not have a long term effect on the person involved. They will learn about the difference and understand the real meanings of words. Hence, though a very young child may be confused initially this will not continue into early adolescence. However the transgender feelings remain regardless of definitions of words. Further more, transgender feelings are discordant and prominent before most trans people even learn that things like transgender even exist.
Your linguistic confusion premise as a cause of trans-sexuality is undone by your own admission that linguistic confusion is removed with time when the correct understanding is achieved. Hence the net result is such confusion is negligible, especially with regards to the effect on the persons identity.
Just because correct understanding is achieved on a dry, logical, formal level does not mean correct understanding is necessarily achieved on an emotional level.
What I have been suggesting is that after this "clarification" the child may still carry the emotional associations they made with the word and the various things in their environment they associate with it, and so even though they now know boy=certain body type and girl=certain body type the emotional connections they made with that word under conditions where they held it to have other connotations is still there and still strong enough that they feel they must be "boy" or "girl" and now that they know a requirement is a certain type of body they will want that. They need not remember that they grew to understand themselves as "boy" or "girl" under a different understanding of what those words meant in order for this to work. In fact if they did realize that it could cause it to not work.
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And you base this hypothesis on what?
A post-secondary degree?
Researching the subject out of personal interest?
Relevant work experience?
Being a parent?
Your ass?
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Direct question: a child with a penis tells his parents that he knows he's a boy because he likes cars. Is his conclusion valid?
The conclusion is true, however it does not follow from the premise. At some point the boy will learn that the real reason he is a boy is because he has a penis.
So you just invalidated the gender identity of every single trans person ever. Great job, asshole.
How so? If we're talking about transsexuals then they want to have a certain set of genitalia so it's too far off the mark.
Except that's not how being trans works, which you would know if you read the earlier posts. Having certain parts does not make you be a certain gender, or else men who lose their penises in freak accidents would suddenly be ladies.
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If we're talking about transsexuals then they want to have a certain set of genitalia so it's too far off the mark.
Then how do you explain transmen who do not wish to have genital surgery? They take hormones, have a double mastectomy, and live entirely as men, but never change what is between their legs.
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So I'm building brick walls for everybody because it sure seems like a lot more fun the arguing with Reasonator here.
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So I'm building brick walls for everybody because it sure seems like a lot more fun the arguing with Reasonator here.
And a lot more useful.
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If we're talking about transsexuals then they want to have a certain set of genitalia so it's too far off the mark.
Then how do you explain transmen who do not wish to have genital surgery? They take hormones, have a double mastectomy, and live entirely as men, but never change what is between their legs.
I was generalizing. I thought that was apparent. In the vast majority of cases the male child will have a penis. In some cases he will not.
Even when it comes to transmen who do not want genital surgery they still want a body that is reshapen to be masculinized assuming that in the context "transmen" means "transsexual man".
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If we're talking about transsexuals then they want to have a certain set of genitalia so it's too far off the mark.
Then how do you explain transmen who do not wish to have genital surgery? They take hormones, have a double mastectomy, and live entirely as men, but never change what is between their legs.
I was generalizing. I thought that was apparent. In the vast majority of cases the male child will have a penis. In some cases he will not.
Even when it comes to transmen who do not want genital surgery they still want a body that is reshapen to be masculinized assuming that in the context "transmen" means "transsexual man".
You're not trans*, so I frankly have no idea why you're continuing to act like you can speak for all of them.