Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

acbytesla said:
Are you saying body chemistry is not involved? Do females produce more estrogen than men? Do males produce more testosterone? If you said yes to either of these questions you would be wrong. You could only say "generally."
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There's a completely different thread out there where you're welcome to make the argument that sterile males aren't actually males, or that menopausal females aren't actually females all on the basis of hormone production.

But in the interest of being a bit less bitchy than I currently feel... Hormone production does not define sex. My godchild's disorder prevents their body from naturally producing ANY sex hormones... and yet they are unquestionably 100% still female.
 
Emily's Cat said:
There's a completely different thread out there where you're welcome to make the argument that sterile males aren't actually males, or that menopausal females aren't actually females all on the basis of hormone production.

But in the interest of being a bit less bitchy than I currently feel... Hormone production does not define sex. My godchild's disorder prevents their body from naturally producing ANY sex hormones... and yet they are unquestionably 100% still female.
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Sex is merely a box.
 
acbytesla said:
That's your problem. Because biology disagrees with you.

How do you define a male? By genitalia? By game size? By chromosomes? By testosterone levels? Because any way you look at there almost always be people that don't fit. It's comfortable and useful to categorize but it isn't all encompassing.
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Stop trying to gish-gallop this with the Deepak Chopra version of sex.

Sex is defined based on the type of reproductive system. In anisogamous species, there are two sexes. One sex has the reproductive phenotype that evolved to support the production of large gametes, and we call that sex female. The other sex has the reproductive phenotype that evolved to support the production of small gametes, and we call that sex male. Aberrations in the development of those systems do NOT invalidate the definitions.
 
Hey listen Emily. I get it. Your world is black and white and you're totally uncomfortable with gray. Most people are like that.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Stop trying to gish-gallop this with the Deepak Chopra version of sex.
Sex is defined based on the type of reproductive system. In anisogamous species, there are two sexes. One sex has the reproductive phenotype that evolved to support the production of large gametes, and we call that sex female. The other sex has the reproductive phenotype that evolved to support the production of small gametes, and we call that sex male. Aberrations in the development of those systems do NOT invalidate the definitions.
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I like that. Good one. (y)

So how do you explain the cause of gender dysphoria? Do you think it is some kind of mental illness? Or is there a biological reason that leads to it?
 
acbytesla said:
I was just responding to the title. But I am not trying to cause confusion, I'm trying to get people to stop looking myopically at reality. What I see over and over is naive realism at play. Egocentricsm is natural and a tendency we should fight against.
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What I see is a retconning of the word "woman" to mean "anyone who says they have some sort of womanly feels even if they can't explain what those feels are in any plausible fashion" and then leveraging that redefinition to override female boundaries and give males carte blanche access to places where females are disadvantaged, naked, or vulnerable... like prisons, rape shelters, and sports.

"Oh it's nuanced" is completely useless when there's a 200 lb physically intact sex offender now sharing a cell with a female prisoner without her consent or even consideration, all because that male "discovered" their "true self" and claim to "feel like a woman".

From where I'm sitting, it's the egocentrism and rank carelessness of males who feel entitled to disregard female safety, dignity, and basic goddamned consent in order to affirm the feelings of a male.

So yeah. I think it's myopic when activists argue that transgender identified sasquatch-looking hairy males with giant feet need to use the female showers at the gym because those males feel uncomfortable sharing spaces with other males... but those same activists don't give any ◊◊◊◊◊ at all that sasquatch makes ALL of the females feel uncomfortable, and those activists frequently resort to calling females hateful bigots if we don't relinquish our spaces to males with gendery feels.
 
acbytesla said:
That's a box, a category, a label which organisms don't fit as neatly into as you would like. How do you define a male? Tell us. And what do you do when the organism doesn't fit that definition perfectly?
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Male: the sex within an anisogamous species that has evolved the reproductive anatomy and structures associated with production and delivery of small gametes.

Nobody has to fit perfectly, but there is absolutely no "in between sex", as there are ONLY two reproductive roles, and ONLY two evolved reproductive anatomies within anisogamous species.
 
acbytesla said:
How about a person with both male and female genitalia?
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Are you imagining someone with labia AND scrotum, penis AND clitoris AND vagina AND cervix? Are you imagining someone who developed this doubled system naturally... or someone who went out and had something artificially created to mimic elements of the opposite sex?
 
acbytesla said:
Hey listen Emily. I get it. Your world is black and white and you're totally uncomfortable with gray. Most people are like that.
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No, it's that there are very few truly black and white areas, and denying their existence because you are enamored with the concept of ambiguity is pointless. Leave wondering if you have hands to the Intro to Philosophy class.You're not mostly dead or sort of pregnant. There's a hard line with very very few anomalies on the fringes that do not negate the rule. Even the vanishingly small outlier cases in sex development are recognized as being one or the other. There are two sexes. There isn't a third, or a halfway sex.
 
acbytesla said:
Individual human beings don't "evolve." Evolution happens over generations. Any discussion of any individual organism "evolving" is simply wrong.
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Nice tap dance. You should audition for America's Got Talent.
acbytesla said:
However, there have been individuals with XY chromosomes that have a uterus and given birth.
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That has nothing at all to do with my question. At no point whatsoever did I mention chromosomes, because sex is not defined by chromosomes.

Sex is defined by the type of reproductive systems that a species has evolved. Sex is determined (as in provides instructions and sets the pathway for a fetus to develop) by different mechanisms in different species. In mammals, that mechanism for determination is chromosomal karyotype, with XX resulting in a normal female and XY resulting in a normal male. Some karyotype variations can occur as a result of anomalies, interruptions, and mutations... but they don't alter the mechanism or the definition. No more so than the existence of people with Down Syndrome changes the definition of humans having 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs.

The mechanism is different in different species. For example, the mechanism for sex determination in alligators is the temperature of the nest at a key point in fetal development. When it's above a certain temperature, the fetuses develop as females; when it's below that temperature, they develop as males (or maybe the other way around, I don't recall). If some random yahoo comes along and blasts one side of an egg with a torch and the other with some dry ice, and the fetus gets all messed up... that doesn't change the definition of what male and female are in alligators.

Consider a very simplified analogy. Let's say that there are two types of buildings in the entire universe, houses and garages. There are some ways in which those are the same, and other very important ways in which they are different. In this universe, houses have plumbing and electric and closets; garages have rolling doors and concrete floors. Those are the definitions for houses and garages. In order to produce a house or a garage, builders use blueprints, and those blueprints all show up through a gigantic blueprint fax machine. The blueprints are the mechanism for building determination.

Sometimes the fax machine hiccups, and the blueprints get messed up. Sometimes the fax machine works just fine, but Jared spills coffee all over the blueprint and the layout gets screwed up. That results in errors during the building process. Every now and then, a blueprint for a garage errantly has an electrical outlet in it with no actual electrical lines attached... but it's still recognizably a garage even though it has an outlet attached to nothing. Sometimes a blueprint for a house slaps a rolling door on the back in addition to the electricity and plumbing and closets, but it's still recognizably a house. Sometimes the blueprint is labeled "house" but it has a rolling door and concrete floor and has no electricity, plumbing, or closets... so despite the blueprint saying "house" everyone who looks at is can tell it's a garage, and nobody puts their dresser and TV in there. And very, very, very rarely the blueprint is so messy that it's difficult at first glance to figure out if it's a house or a garage - but with a bit of work and some common sense, we'll come to an agreement about how to use the building.

Now... even with the 0.02% of times when the blueprint has an error... has that altered the definition of "house" or "garage" in any way whatsoever?
 
acbytesla said:
Yeah, he saying that anyone that identifies differenty than specific biological markers are pretending.
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Would you prefer mistaken, brainwashed, or delusional as an alternative?

There is no other situation in which anyone has a mental image or feeling about themselves that is observably contradicted by reality, and in which other people are expected to accept that individual's subjective interpretation of themself as superseding reality. Not one. The anorexic perceives and believes themself to be overweight, but nobody else is expected to affirm their feeling of being fat. The person who truly and deeply believes themself to be Napoleon doesn't get given governance of France as a result of their false belief.

Someone who genuinely identifies as black cannot compel black people to accept them as being actually for realsies black, no matter how strongly they feel it to be true.
 
acbytesla said:
Hey listen Emily. I get it. Your world is black and white and you're totally uncomfortable with gray. Most people are like that.
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Don't get patronizing and condescending, tesla.

You're the one in here trying to force-feed us a dogmatic ideology that baselessly asserts that a male's feelings about their brain-gender should grant them the privilege of seeing females naked without consent. You're the one trying to coercively insist that the depth of space is gray, and so is newly fallen snow.
 
acbytesla said:
I like that. Good one. (y)
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I was pretty proud of that one - I'm not a particularly clever person, so I really enjoy my once-a-year successes.
acbytesla said:
So how do you explain the cause of gender dysphoria? Do you think it is some kind of mental illness? Or is there a biological reason that leads to it?
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I think that some gender dysphoria is a mental illness, in exactly the same way that anorexia is a mental illness, and so is body integrity identity disorder. Some I think is a coping mechanism, a way to flee from trauma enacted on the body by blaming the body instead of the trauma.

Gender dysphoria is a symptom, not a diagnosis. And just like other symptoms, it can be expressed as a result of several different underlying causes. Many illnesses can express as a fever, fever is a symptom. And while most fevers are caused by bacterial or viral infection, they can also result from fungal infections, some auto-immune disorders, or cancers.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I was pretty proud of that one - I'm not a particularly clever person, so I really enjoy my once-a-year successes.

I think that some gender dysphoria is a mental illness, in exactly the same way that anorexia is a mental illness, and so is body integrity identity disorder. Some I think is a coping mechanism, a way to flee from trauma enacted on the body by blaming the body instead of the trauma.

Gender dysphoria is a symptom, not a diagnosis. And just like other symptoms, it can be expressed as a result of several different underlying causes. Many illnesses can express as a fever, fever is a symptom. And while most fevers are caused by bacterial or viral infection, they can also result from fungal infections, some auto-immune disorders, or cancers.
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My point with the question is I'm convinced that there is often if not most of the time some underlying biological condition that causes a male to identify as a female or a female to identify as a male. That it isn't simply a mental issue that needs to be fixed.
 
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