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Trans Women are not Women

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Belz... said:
I know of that post since I mentioned it in the post you quoted. I'm asking you what your criteria are.
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Under what contexts? Generally speaking, I think the criteria outlined by links about gender affirmation therapy are good.

God, really? I forgot to put it in, ok. It changes nothing of what I said. Could you address that rather than play stupid games?
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It changes what I said about what you said.

I'm not play games. Try putting in some due diligence.

caveman1917 said:
Your dishonesty keeps showing, Rolfe didn't respond to your post. Indeed I was the only one who responded to it, showing the nonsensical nature of your argument and source. But you're right that you ignored that refutation and simply waited a bit of time before making the exact same argument again whilst handwaving my refutation away as:
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Yes she did. She didn't quote my post, but she did respond. It turns out she did so through yours though, so yeah, I was wrong about getting a 'because' answer only.

I got a 'because' answer and a 'because silly handwave'.


And I don't generally spend much time on your posts either, exactly because I once tried arguing this in good faith with you only to find you don't have the slightest shred of intellectual honesty.
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You aren't arguing in good faith though. It would not surprise me in the least if you were trying to, but you're taking every chance to avoid meaningfully addressing the flaws of your assertions.

Do you think that a difference between most women and most gay men is that one is sexually attracted to men and the other is not?
 
theprestige said:
Just change the sign on the Men's to "Open", and put a different sign on each stall in the Women's.
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That wouldn't work for Rolfe et al's demands though. I was thinking this the other day but what they want isn't meaningfully possible. As I said, butch cis women exist. Trans women exist. Trans men exist. What they want is to have control over who is allowed in based on their perception of how woman the other person is, which will inevitably hurt more butch cis women than trans women. And the way the 'rate' who is femme enough will constrict until their womanhood isn't femme enough.

The sign would be 'Femme Cis Women, all others by invitation only', and the other would be, well, 'Other'.
 
GlennB said:
Yes, as women take far more crap in terms of sexual harassment than vice-versa.
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It seems to me that laws against sexual harrassment, for instance, work for both sexes even if they protect women more simply by the numbers. I'm usually more in favour of doing things that way.

A woman being ogled by a straight man is being ogled by a man. A man being ogled by a gay guy is being ogled by a man. Nothing like the same as far as harassment or threat is concerned.
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Aside from the fact that you're discounting weaker men being ogled by bigger ones, I don't think you should just hand wave harrassment of males away.
 
tyr_13 said:
That wouldn't work for Rolfe et al's demands though. I was thinking this the other day but what they want isn't meaningfully possible.
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Suppose all they asked for was "no dicks out" (for Harambe or otherwise) in the ladies changing rooms / ponds / etc.

That's actually super easy, yeah? Would you be okay with it?
 
JoeMorgue said:
I'm sure at some point I'll get answer as to why a woman being uncomfortable with a man watching them undress and a man being uncomfortable with a gay man watching them undress are so radically different.
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Males tend to feel comfortable that other people won't just blatantly violate our personal space. I'm a small guy, but even in high school I never really felt afraid that another man or a group of men could just walk up to me and violate me against my will. And I'm sure my peers felt similarly. Contrast that with women who don't have that social shield if you will, if a man were in the room with them. They have a whole set of problems to deal with cause of their body.

A gay man would probably recognize the utility of his male body in that respect.
 
I read another section of Serano's paper. I'm reading it slowly so that I can actually grasp what is going on. Frankly, trying to keep the terminology straight makes my head hurt. Let's see….an androphilic transgender woman versus an autogynephilc transsexual MtF...and one of them is a homosexual which means he likes....which was it? I have to read slowly to make sure I'm getting the point.


Well, the point of this section was easy enough to grasp. It dealt with whether Blanchard's two subtypes were a legitimate categorization, and it concluded they were not. Based on the evidence presented, that seems a logical, indeed unavoidable, conclusion. From there, a lot of people have jumped to, "See! Blanchard is a fraud! Totally discredited." Well, not so fast.


The main evidence presented was from research conducted as much as two decades after Blanchard. What that research showed was that not everyone fits into the nice two neat categories Blanchard found. Fair enough, but a lot changed between 1989 and 2009. For one thing, Blanchard was studying people in his clinic, while later studies were recruiting people via the internet. Meanwhile, societal attitudes toward transgenders, homosexuals, and every other variation on sex and sexuality had changed a great deal in those two decades. Most importantly, I think, is that Blanchard was actually studying a different population than later researchers. He was specifically studying people who were applying to undergo sex change surgery. (The term "gender reassignment surgery" would only be coined at a later time.) Later researchers were studying anyone claiming to be transgender. Those are two different groups, even if yu ignore the changes in the intervening two decades. In short, people have tried to cite differences between Blanchard's results and later results in an effort to cast aspersions on Blanchard, personally, or on his research. I don't think that's reasonable. I think Blanchard's work was limited because the opportunities to conduct research were limited. He didn't have a lot to work with. His work isn't discredited. It's just a bit dated.

What I think is clear, assuming we accept the data, is that Blanchard's descriptions of two categories is not an exhaustive description of all transgender people. On the other hand, Serano's paper notes that many of Blanchard's findings are actually supported by later studies, just not in the complete, exhaustive, manner that Blanchard's work would indicate. In other words, an awful lot of 40 year olds who have lived lives as heterosexual men, but who now claim to be women, are in fact prone to cross gender arousal, and in fact are still attracted to women, and actually are aroused by thoughts of experiencing sex as a woman. The correlation is not complete, but there is a significant correlation. In other words, autogynephilia is not dead as a theory, at least not yet. Perhaps the next section will bring more enlightenment.
 
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Puppycow said:
I think we can safely dismiss Blanchard's theories.
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Really? I don't think so. I think that would be unsafe.

At the least, it (autogynaephilia) fits many observations in an intuitive way. It is also highly plausible that many if not most males (not just self identifying trans women) would loathe the existence of this as a correct diagnosis, and be very keen to deny it and see it discredited.

So that's a green flag for acceptance and a big red one against rejection.
 
Puppycow said:
And I'm saying that for me at least, the answer is yes. And yet I do not have gender dysphoria.

I don't have to watch porn, btw, I just threw that out as an example. I can do it all in my head and imagine the whole thing. In the fantasy, I am a woman. That's pretty normal too.
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Why is that not gender dysphoria?

(Common has nothing to do with it)
 
JoeMorgue said:
If Rolfe doesn't like a straight man watch her get undressed, she's not a sexist because....

Be aware the following are not valid answers:

- I'm a poor widdle scawed woman pearl clutching.
- Pointing at the "Official Progressive Victim Ranking Chart"
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You think that it is actually sexist for a female to object to a male watching her get undressed.

Yeah now I've read everything. Bye.
 
Francesca R said:
Why is that not gender dysphoria?

(Common has nothing to do with it)
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I'm not trans and don't have dysphoria, but this is my (admittedly limited) understanding.

It's not dysphoria because he does not, in general, see himself as female and having a male body does not cause him distress.

To be dysphoric, you would have to believe or perceive yourself as being someone different than what you physically are. It's not that someone wishes they had a body of the opposite gender, it's that the body they are in (or parts of it) do not match with their inner image in such a way that it causes distress. If you woke up in the morning in a body other than your own, you would most likely experience dysphoria.

Fantasizing about being someone else is not dysphoria because, while you might be curious or even turned on by the idea, you don't actually believe you are that other person.

Without reading any papers and just going by my understanding of the definitions, I think it's absolutely possible to experience autogynephilia (or autoandrophilia) to verious degrees up to and including something comparable to a fetish. But I don't think it would automatically connected with sexual orientation and/or dysphoria. There is no reason to classify dysphoria as stemming from erotic desires, though someone who is dysphoric is probably going to be most aroused by the idea of intercourse as the target sex because it feels most natural to them.

None of this really helps with the bathroom/changing room issue.
 
TomB said:
It's not dysphoria because he does not, in general, see himself as female and having a male body does not cause him distress. [ . . . ]
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I understand the answer. I don't agree with it or find it useful though.

Dysphoria is unease or dissatisfaction. The counterpart to that is ease and satisfaction. The example (and let's not single out a forum member) is a male experiencing ease with the idea of being female. Which in fact he is not and can not be. However temporary, that seems to also be dis-ease about being male.

So it seems like the same thing to me. I don't think distress is always an issue. Technically, at the time when a man is highly interested in imagining himself to be female, he would be uninterested and "distressed" in that moment to think of himself as male. It might account for 0.05% of his waking hours and be immensely enjoyable and nothing else.

It seems to fit gender (actually sex) dysphoria to me, which can surely exist along a spectrum from "never causes any issue" to "significant problem" and in between

TomB said:
There is no reason to classify dysphoria as stemming from erotic desires
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Actually yes there is, if that is either the origin or an inextricable part of the dysphoria. Doesn't mean that is always an association to be made.
 
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TomB said:
I'm not trans and don't have dysphoria, but this is my (admittedly limited) understanding.

It's not dysphoria because he does not, in general, see himself as female and having a male body does not cause him distress.
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Then how are they trans? How do we define it? I've asked this question before, and other than "they feel like the other gender" I've gotten nothing.
 
Francesca R said:
Why is that not gender dysphoria?

(Common has nothing to do with it)
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I don't know what gender dysphoria feels like because I am not transgender.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria

Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person feels due to their birth-assigned sex and gender not matching their gender identity.
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My biological sex (I don't care for the term "birth-assigned") matches my "gender identity".

What I was describing is merely a sexual fantasy. One of many. I don't confuse my fantasies with my reality.
 
Puppycow said:
I don't know what gender dysphoria feels like because I am not transgender.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria
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Fair enough. I think that wiki definition is far too non encompassing of a phenomenon that exists and is common and not necessarily distressing to anybody. I would also say that the fantasy you describe is autogynaephilia

But I acknowledge I will not get anywhere trying to re-write convention.
 
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