I think it’s fine to look at general biological markers and categorize people for healthcare reasons. Most of the time being in the ballpark works for most people. Maybe in the future we can have some full body scan thing that picks up the optimal healthcare setup for each individual but in the meanwhile, we’ll go with what we got.
But that doesn’t have to have shit to do with their internal experience of themselves, or how the social environment should react to them. And I reiterate: “most people”. Meaning there’s going to be outliers and that’s okay, and they’ll need more individualized care. Being abnormal is normal.
This would only make sense if humans were some neutral sexless gender until they decided, which would have to be biologically enforced until the brain was sufficiently developed enough to choose.
There’s an episode of TNG where Data builds his child. He specifically says that he designed their base form to be sexless and speciesless, so that they could choose it for themselves.
If only the Trek fandom at large would acknowledge how unfathomably based that episode is. I swear there’s still a massive contingent of right wing boomers driving the narrative.
Developmentally, babies don’t even have gender yet. Gender develops in the brain between the ages of 2 and 4 (and keeps developing until the end of puberty). I don’t think it’s developmentally appropriate to gender babies. All babies are nonbinary, and we should encourage children to choose a gender and pronouns as a rite of passage on their fourth birthday.
With only 1% trans, I think if we’re just willing to ACCEPT when they tell us we got it wrong, apologize and leave it at that, that would be enough.
Is it possible that any of them ever got it wrong?
The amount of people who detransition is incredibly small compared to the overall trans population, and even then most people detransition because society didn’t accept them and battered them down until they gave up.
I take that as a yes, people can be wrong about themselves and who they think they are.
People can be wrong about literally anything. That is not an excuse to say “fuck everyone else in this group.”
If you extend this argument, we shouldn’t believe what anyone tells us about absolutely anything because they might have made a mistake. Truly a great basis for human society.
Why would you presume that questioning someone’s beliefs would mandate to treat them like shit? What a bizarre worldview. Everyone deserves to be treated with kindness and respect, whatever they believe.
But your beliefs about the world do not dictate my beliefs about the world. That is surely not a hard concept to grasp?
Because there’s an explicit bias in your questioning. You wouldn’t question if I’m really cis-hetero, but you would question of I’m reeeeeeeeally gay or trans, even thought I’m sure there are more people who come up publicly as gay after having children than there are trans detransitioning.
This is the same as the maga mentality, where any man in a position of responsibility is accepted by default, but for women they demand justification for the role.
“Wrong” is probably not the best term for it. People’s understanding of their own identity can evolve over time, but their own assessment of their sense of self will always be the most accurate barometer to go by. Yes, some people detransition, but as others have stated they’re a small minority and ultimately that’s their decision to make whether it’s due to a change in how they identify or pressure from external forces.
But to the original commenter’s point, we should just allow people to be the masters of their own identity and meet them where they are at any given point. If that were the case, the idea of getting it “wrong” wouldn’t be a big deal at all, they could simply give us an update and the world keeps turning.
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I think you have your numbers confused. The right wants to reduce trans numbers to 0%. The left doesn’t care about increasing numbers, only treating trans people like human beings.
Why the fuck this joke about left wanting to turns everyone trans is not yet co-opted by the left
Everyone should be treated with kindness and respect regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they are from, and what they believe.
That does not mean that everyone has to accept whatever beliefs anybody else personally has. Everyone is free to believe what they want. That means that it is both fine to believe something about oneself, and fine not to believe what someone else believes about themselves.
Edit: A downvote. Huh! I didn’t think someone would disagree that everyone should be treated with kindness and respect and have the right to determine for themselves what they believe. Must be a transphobe.
Then can you, please, extend your respect and kindness to not indulge the actual transphobic misinformation there? As well as not stoking the flames over a single downvote? This shit is derailing the fun thread.
You accuse me of phobia. I am not phobic in the slightest. My sister is in a loving relationship with her girlfriend since ten years back, and my little brother is literally trans.
Please do not throw out frivolous accusations just because you have your ideas challenged, it is a vile practice and only outs you as dogmatic.
You accuse me of phobia.
No, I don’t. That was referring to the parent post.
Thanks for the lesson in not engaging in arguments unless absolutely necessary. What a fucking shit show.Pretty sure they’re actually a bot given that they nearly instantly reply and they’ve replied to almost every top-level comment in this thread.
If not, they’re just a total shithead tbh given that they talk about homosexuality being a choice elsewhere.
You replied to me. I support equal rights and humane treatment for everyone, I simply reject the idea that your beliefs require me to surrender my own judgments about reality.
I have not been offensive in any way, you are the one resorting to domination techniques and accusations and emotional outbursts. If you don’t want to accept other people’s beliefs you can always just move along.
I guess you’d be fine if everyone treated you as a lizard and required you to live and act like a lizard. It’s all good because you know you’re not, right?
Well, people very often treat me as something I am not. They don’t know me. I don’t know me. Being human is hard. Knowing something about oneself is a very complicated proposition. Knowing something about others is even harder. What does it mean to “know oneself”? How can I expect others to know who and what I am if I can’t be certain myself?
If people thought I was a lizard I would question their sanity, for sure. Nobody in their right mind mistakes a person for a lizard. That is just crazy.
they do?
If that means more people have a voice, then I’m all for it.
Do you really think people just behave in certain, sex-related ways, because they’ve been told they’re this sex or the other? That sex-related behavioural differences don’t appear naturally (and are perhaps reinforced) but are just learned? Also, you definitely can “choose who you want to be”, lol, God made us all free-willed entities! But I cannot be a camel, nor can I be a non-material entity, or (ethnically) Nepali. We have degrees of freedom but we are fundamentally constrained by reality. If you deny reality (a very post modern, perspectivist approach that’s been very popular in the West for some decades now), then sure, you’re no longer constrained but then you lose the capacity to make any “objective” assertions about the world (because you denied an external reality).
I think it would be more interesting if you could change at will. Wake up and pick your gender line you pick your outfit for the day.
Ranma 1/2? 😅
The “and” in the title is key. Humans can currently choose their gender expression, so that part can be stripped out with no changes to the world. Not assigning gender at birth is an interesting thought. Some people are really, from my view, weird about making sure their children perform gender correctly as early and often as possible.
Also I think it’d be neat if it was “genre” in English too. People understand there’s more genres than horror and fantasy.
That’s pretty much how it already works. It’s just that the pressure to make the “correct” choice is fucking crazy.
For some of us we didn’t know there was a choice
For all of us we didn’t know there was a choice, we were all infants at the time the choice was made. We were still figuring out which amorphous blob gives us the milk.
This is why others decide on sex for us through observation. That much is sensible enough, infants are not great at that kind of thing. But we’re discovering more and more that this is an imperfect system and that more often than we realized the answer is not straight forward or in fact that our conclusions are sometimes incorrect even when it appears straight forward.
It’s just that the pressure to make the “correct” choice is fucking crazy.
I feel pressured to only ever present as a cisgendered heterosexual person regardless of whether that’s correct or not. The pressure is for LGBTQ+ people to simply disappear from public society. Correct has nothing to do with it.
To say that transgenderism is a choice is to argue that it’s not a result of anomalous brain development, and is instead an ordinary delusion, no different than believing you’re Jesus Christ. Which implies than gender-affirming care is harmful.
I suspect that’s not what you meant.
Why would someone not be able to choose their gender. Gender is a social construct. Of course people can choose. People can choose to be gay too, if they want. People have free will, don’t they? I mean by your logic, why wouldn’t you believe someone telling you that they were Jesus Christ?
People can choose to be gay too, if they want.
If homosexuality were a choice, I’d make it.
Literally nothing is stopping you.
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It’s not really that it’s a choice to not be cis, but yeah, we shouldn’t assume people’s gender at all imho until they tell us themselves (and as children can’t tell us until they’re older don’t assume until they’re older), and even when they do it shouldn’t need to affect stereotypes or the way we grammatically refer to them or anything, just maybe what body they want to have and who can be attracted to them
Why would you trust anything someone says about themselves outright? What if they’re crazy? What if they’re lying? What if they’re wrong? Is that impossible, or does every person on Earth have perfect knowledge of themselves and their true selves at all times, and always speak the truth?
Why would you trust what someone else says about them rather than what they say about themself? If someone says they’re depressed, do you believe them, or do you need ‘objective proof’? Gender [dysphoria/euphoria] is the same, it’s an internal experience.
Check out the Fluidum comic on Webtoons
Let’s be real. Who would actually pick to have a penis?
Probably men
Penis vs periods. That’s the ultimate battle.
:(
Can we do the blood type thing where like it’s O-Type?
I would. Every single time the better choice by far.
How do you know you didn’t and you just happened to guess wrong? Like you were like oh “seems cool” then your neurons grew in mismatched.
How do we know anything at all? How do we know that we’re not all just living in an alien simulation and in fact are multidimensional dragons from some parallel universe?
This is what I’m saying! Maybe it’s like that game from rick and Morty. 1% chance you get a brain tumor, 1% chance you just get put in the wrong body in some way or other cuz fuck you that’s why.
See the problem with “identity” and what is “reality” and what things “are” or “are not” are profoundly complex philosophical questions that have been deeply, deeply thought about by the most brilliant minds of mankind since thousands of years, and they are yet to be solved.
That is why all claims about what something or someone “is” or “is not” is fraught with paradoxes that just collapse on themselves, and all claims to some sort of objective truth and finality are just fantasies.
What matters is to treat people with kindness and respect whoever they are. That’s what I think. Doesn’t mean we are obligated to believe whatever it is they believe. Everyone is free to believe what they want. That includes the right not to believe what someone else believes. That’s what I believe.
Stop segregating by sex too, there’s no reason to do that unless you need a penis to complete an activity.
