I find it interesting and notable that the connections between pornography exposure and this confusion are not brought up in court. It's clearly difficult for the detransitioners who testify about the misleading path of what's euphemistically called "affirmative care" to tell how they were lured into sissy hypno porn through smart phones and friend groups, but the psychologists now treating these unfortunate patients should be bringing this up. Why? Because it is an outside influence and obviously contradicts the trope of "wrong body since birth." I'm also stumped as to why no one is talking about the long accepted Piaget stages of child development, which also contradict this mythical early awareness of "wrong body." Toddlers in the age 3-6 phase, Pre-Operational in Piaget terms, do not have the language or cognition to express this clearly. Adults are interpreting and indoctrinating.
10-15 years ago, few people would be shy about saying that a movement which encourages kids to use breast binders, penis packers and penis tucking--let alone drugs and surgeries --is psychologically and physically abusive. Would we encourage kids to think they are born with the wrong face and tell them to put a paper bag over their heads?
Exactly right. There could theoretically be some placebo effect from any of the social, chemical or surgical interventions being employed as part of "transition." That would not justify any of it.
The idea that anyone is born with the necessity to chemically and/or surgically alter their body to appear the opposite sex, or the necessity to be referred and treated as if one is the opposite sex, to have any semblance of happiness or avoid torment and suicide is religious in nature, as it cannot be proven and is also unfalsifiable.
I, for one, am not willing to lie to children or, more importantly, to both lie to pre-teens and teenagers and to chemically and surgically drastically alter their bodies in permanent ways that have serious health consequences based purely upon a religious notion that requires blind faith - and, frankly, goes against my gut feelings as well as being contrary to logic, reason and medical science.
Further, nobody has a "male brain" in a "female body" (or vice versa), any more than someone can have a male kidney in a female body or a male heart in a female body. This idea is simply nonsensical and illogical.
Thus, in addition to noting the total lack of proof - after years and years of trying to get it - that these medical interventions (or social interventions) have any overall benefit to psychological functioning, we must be clear that the entire premise upon which "transition" is based is lacking in logic or reason.
This may be the right time to resurrect the term “pervert”. Trans is a made-up word, while pervert has a definitional meaning. Men who keep their dicks and then have the balls to call themselves women meet the definition of “pervert”. What they demand is “pervert privilege”.
It is perverse to tell children they may be born in the wrong body.
It is a perversion to mutilate healthy body parts of adolescents.
From the Cambridge Dictionary…..Pervert..“a person whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable”. We need to make it unacceptable once again.
I've seen some institutional backtracking (and reframing) but I suspect that many of these ideas will not shift until the status rewards turn around, or until the financial resources are cut off. As long as peer groups, credentiallers, graduates programs, and nonprofit employers still parrot this nonsense their members will too.
"Ideologies do not admit error, even if people do. They are unwieldly tools with which to understand the world and they should be assiduously avoided. Anyone who tells you that some value (safety, kindness, social justice, equity) is above ‘truth’ is not your friend."
Excellent point! We cede ground and effectively validate the gender identity movement when we argue only about outcomes. Thank you for fighting this important battle!
I’m told my grandfather liked to dress up as a lady and go out. I’m told he wasn’t gay. That he was a man’s man in every way, but that he liked to dress up as a lady. My grandmother told me he stopped when he almost got killed by a bunch of men that figured out that he was not a woman.
I find all that strange. But, I just found out his mom actually named him Lorina because she wanted a girl. I’m gonna wager that she probably dressed him as a girl too.
When he turned eighteen, he changed his name to Luther.
On the flip side. I never really knew him. I met him a couple of times. He seemed like a real fuddy Duddy. Strait as an arrow. Looked down on the rest of the world.
Spot on Colin, thank you. I can’t remember: did you write anything about the UK’s decision to fund a new trial for puberty blockers? This decision seems to cut sharply against reason and good, ethical science.
I mentioned some of what you say here in my fight against the transmafia in the NYC schools last night, particularly how MUTILATION is what the medical-pharma industry is pushing for. I've cued the Links to where I start speaking and combined, it is a less than 5 minute watch.
My personal email also appears below the Links, in case anyone like-minded would like to reach out:
"Second, it asserts that a person can have a “brain sex”—equated with “gender identity”—that diverges from his body, creating a mismatch that drives gender dysphoria. The goal, then, is to align the body with this purportedly immutable “brain sex” through hormones and surgeries."
I would regard "brain sex" as far more mutable than "body sex," being a software fix rather than one in hardware, the problem is that we don't know how to change it. Well, that's not quite true: if we simply wait it corrects itself in the vast majority of cases. Ken Zucker showed us that, and as a side-effect free (and cost-free) treatment, it seems a far more desirable approach than turning healthy kids into infertile, anorgasmic lifetime recipients of pharmaceutical hormones.
"Centrists Libs will try to use “logic and reason”, or studies showing harm being done by “affirming” children. But that isn’t going to convince their progressive and leftist friends. The “basilisk of history” is always on their minds, they imagine reality as an Oscar-bite historical movie, with two sides of a political topic already deemed as either the good side or bad side of history. Opposing trans inclusion into Women Spots, makes you just like those bigots that protested de-segregation, it didn’t matter if you show a trusted and well researched study, or the basic facts of the biological difference between males and females. The “basilisk of history” has already decided, so your daughter must go ups against a six-foot male if she wants to play sports."
Thoughtful. I strongly support your position, and would give an additional perspective. The history of science is one of corrections. Geocentric solar system model was replaced with Heliocentric, miasmas -> disease, phlogiston -> oxidation, creation -> evolution etc. People are looking for some explanation, a bad one is proposed, and over time, it is replaced. Kuhn and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (63 years old I note).
We don't have an accurate scientific description or explanation of men who have a compulsion to imitate women (my description) which is a behavior found in males of all types of higher animals, except amphibians (sexual mimicry). It's a remarkably simple description and observation - humans are animals after all. It leads to very simple explanation for all observed behaviors by these men, and indeed the entire range of behaviors involving men who don't imitate women.
These men have a compulsion to imitate women to avoid male competition and conflict. At a 'physical' level, they are very successful, as you and others note, men imitating women have half the rate of death by male violence compared to other men.
In relation to women, the behavior generates a series of ways to avoid males to access women and perform stereotypical male actions. These men are attracted to women's prisons to reproduce without male presence, prison rape. These men are attracted to women's restrooms to mark them - urination - as their territory, without men to compete with them. These men are attracted to women's intimate spaces for sexual pleasure, like spas and locker rooms where they can leer at female bodies, without men to interfere. These men are attracted to women's sports where they can (paradoxically) exercise male dominance over female groups, without any competition from other men. These men are very attracted to lesbianism, because it presents sexual opportunities with a guarantee of no men ever. This is only off the top of my head.
What you write about is related to the fragility of the impersonation. It's generally quite easy to see these men are imitating women - they announce it. In order to preserve the impersonation, they have additional tactics. One is to restate the entire schema of biology and reproduction to be about their imitation. It isn not men and women, it's cis-men, and cis-women. It's not mothers, it's pregnant people. The intent is to reduce ordinary language and ideas to a state of ambiguity, where their presentation and behavior could be deemed within the range of women.
The word gender, in relation to humans, has no biological meaning, but it creates ambiguity with the uncountable number of possible "genders". These men then claim in some ambiguous gender to be actually female, or not-male. Gender, in common usage, actually means "ambigous sex", in the way it is used, but intentionally creates ambiguity and uncertainty in biology. There is no way to "affirm" sex uncertainty, it is a meaningless concept.
Likewise the ambiguous feelings (not sex) of boys and girls who are becoming gays or lesbians, are used to assert they are not male or female, to create uncertainty, that they are imitating the opposite sex without knowing it, something to be affirmed.
My opening point was that bad science, the science of gender, cannot just be stated "is false", but must be replace with a real explanation. Everyone want a science of sex, that explains these people - biology states they are sexual mimics like other animals, and that explains all behavior. Likewise, people need to understand why children are unhappy with their sex during adolescence - they are unhappy with feelings, which are new, still quite unusual, and bring them into roles they aren't entirely prepared for. It's called puberty. We need a better science of puberty.
Lesbians and Gays used biology relatively successfully for a long time. Homosexual sex is common in all animals. Humans are animals, there is nothing exceptional about lesbian and gay behaviors, and they harm nobody, as no animals harmed with homosexual behaviors. Penguins, bulls, and apes area all fine. A large number of people eventually responded to the fact that there was nothing psychologically perverse, damaging, or unnatural (the most common term) about the most natural of activities.
For men imitating women, I am sticking to "sexual mimicry" "mimesexuality" "men imitating women" and working on a book for the lay person the next few years, to in my own way replace the entire paradigm of gender, "trans", and entirely natural behaviors with simple scientifically valid descriptions and explanations which have antecedents in the animal world. We don't have to accept the mimicry, because its nature of concealment is what distorts and damages everything which encounters it, but doesn't recognize it. That's the core of the scientific problem.
The current nonsense, non-reality must be replaced, not negated. I don't see any other way to move on, as you rightly demand here.
I'm a bit concerned about the Skrmetti decision, if truth be told. Even if the court decides against the plaintiffs, this won't be the end of gender treatments; indeed, the arguments didn't really focus on the evidence, such as it is. If the Tennessee law is upheld, I worry that the states which protect these dubious procedures will simply double down, leaving us with half the nation on the absolute wrong track.
I'll take victories where I can find them, of course, but I wish we could anticipate something along the lines of the UK decision.
Colin, I understand that there are basically two different groups who suffer from so-called "gender dysphoria" (I think it would be more accurate to call it sex dysphoria): 1. The childhood group, and 2. The prepubescent/adolescent group. According to studies prior to the application of "affirming therapies," in the subgroup that suffered from dysphoria since childhood, approximately 88% overcame it after puberty. It's plausible that in the subgroup that suffers from this discomfort since puberty, the percentage who would overcome "gender dysphoria" without affirming therapies would be even higher, since dysphoria in this subgroup can be explained by various other factors. But even so, there is still a small percentage that we could call "authentic trans."
Let me clarify that I accept that sex is binary and that people who cannot be pigeonholed into one of the two existing reproductive functions are infinitesimal.
I believe trans people deserve the same respect as everyone else, but MtFs don't have the right to participate in women's sports, nor should convicted men be imprisoned with women. I also disagree with so-called affirmative therapies. I believe trans people should accept the bodies they have and live however they want as long as they don't harm others. I believe it's not a good idea to be hormone-treated for life or undergo mutilating surgeries when your body is healthy.
The point is, is it really scientifically untenable that there are people who can have a "brain sex"—equivalent to "gender identity"—that differs from their body?
How would it be sustainable for there to be people whose sexual orientation differs from their body? Furthermore, there are studies that show the existence of brain differences in these people, but it wouldn't be in the other case—and there are also studies finding brain differences in trans people.
Do we agree that sexual orientation is basically immutable and that it is formed during gestation? And that in the case of homosexuals, the orientation opposite to what would be the normal and appropriate mode for their sex is formed in a way opposite to genitalia by hormonal influences? Why couldn't the existence of authentically trans people be explained by a mechanism similar to that which causes homosexual orientation?
being gay is a sexuality. identifying as opposite gender is not a sexuality. yes, some people who ID as opposite gender are also gay. but there are also gay grocers, postal workers, lawyers. so what? what does being gay have to do with IDing as another gender, other than the entire gender belief system and practice is one of the most homophobic things of all time. people who are gay are pretending to be straight via gender ID. whats more homophobic than that?
Sex emerged on Earth as a form of reproduction approximately two billion years ago. It is an evolutionary product that involved the combination of the genetic material of two individuals of the same species. Sexual orientation is another evolutionary product, an impulse that emerged much later, but is inextricably linked to it. It appeared, and then persisted, because it granted reproductive success to its bearers, who passed it on to their offspring. The same could be said of so-called gender identity (although the term seems rather inappropriate to me; a better term would be "brain sex"); it is a psychological configuration that has characteristics associated with the individual's sex, which, like sexual orientation, provides greater success to its possessor. Thus, we could say that orientation and identity are part of the equipment that favors genetic survival.
Current scientific knowledge maintains that sexual orientation is imprinted in the brain during gestation, so it is not at all unreasonable to think that the same is true of brain sex. And just as we explain the existence of homosexual people due to abnormal hormonal processes during pregnancy, we can affirm that the same could occur with respect to "brain sex."
Anyone who claims—as Colin Wright does—that it is untenable that there are people who can have a "brain sex" that is different from their body should explain why the explanation is valid for one aspect but not for the other.
in 1988, the pope had piece of cloth carbon dated. they found out it was from 1200's. for centuries some people thought it was a shirt worn by jesus. sci fi novels seem real. but theyre not. if you x ray someones brain, it looks different if they are religious or not. does that mean religion is real? peoples brains look slightly different with different ethnic background and if gay or not. but they dont look differnt for people with differnt gender ID. people who claim it does are once again grouping gender ID, which is a hobby like fishing or sports, with gay sexuality, an immutable trait that doesnt change. the story of the five blind men and the elephant doesnt work in reverse. and thats what people are trying to do when they claim gender ID is a thing. sometimes a rope is just a rope. and tree is just a tree. because we are all blind to what we dont know. some are claiming these things are elephants
Dimorphic psychological characteristics between men and women are well known within the scientific field and beyond. They are not discrete, like sex, but they are no less real for that. People who claim to be the opposite sex to their phenotypic sex are also real. Although there are several reasons for this, it is not possible to completely rule out the existence of people whose brain configuration corresponds more to the opposite sex or to an intermediate position; the mechanism would be similar to that which explains homosexuality.
Dimorphic characteristics can be mimicked. when that occurs in this context its just more of the same garbage where men off load their worrys via the vice of gender ID, which is no differnt than other vices. ask a heroin addict if his habit helps or hurts. if he thinks he can continue his habit by saying it helps, he will say it. a better question is how can man avoid harmful vices. one way is recognition that vices are harmful and should be avoided. ciggarette smoking was reduced substantially after a public information campaign warning of its dangers. prior to that, there were plenty of people in denial that cigarettes were even harmful. theres nothing holy about studies. often they are complete garbage. we now know 1000s of studys about gender this are that are complete garbage. based on opinions only, with zero evidence to their claims. the only thing it proves is that people are unable to escape their own biases and opinions.
I find it interesting and notable that the connections between pornography exposure and this confusion are not brought up in court. It's clearly difficult for the detransitioners who testify about the misleading path of what's euphemistically called "affirmative care" to tell how they were lured into sissy hypno porn through smart phones and friend groups, but the psychologists now treating these unfortunate patients should be bringing this up. Why? Because it is an outside influence and obviously contradicts the trope of "wrong body since birth." I'm also stumped as to why no one is talking about the long accepted Piaget stages of child development, which also contradict this mythical early awareness of "wrong body." Toddlers in the age 3-6 phase, Pre-Operational in Piaget terms, do not have the language or cognition to express this clearly. Adults are interpreting and indoctrinating.
10-15 years ago, few people would be shy about saying that a movement which encourages kids to use breast binders, penis packers and penis tucking--let alone drugs and surgeries --is psychologically and physically abusive. Would we encourage kids to think they are born with the wrong face and tell them to put a paper bag over their heads?
Exactly right. There could theoretically be some placebo effect from any of the social, chemical or surgical interventions being employed as part of "transition." That would not justify any of it.
The idea that anyone is born with the necessity to chemically and/or surgically alter their body to appear the opposite sex, or the necessity to be referred and treated as if one is the opposite sex, to have any semblance of happiness or avoid torment and suicide is religious in nature, as it cannot be proven and is also unfalsifiable.
I, for one, am not willing to lie to children or, more importantly, to both lie to pre-teens and teenagers and to chemically and surgically drastically alter their bodies in permanent ways that have serious health consequences based purely upon a religious notion that requires blind faith - and, frankly, goes against my gut feelings as well as being contrary to logic, reason and medical science.
Further, nobody has a "male brain" in a "female body" (or vice versa), any more than someone can have a male kidney in a female body or a male heart in a female body. This idea is simply nonsensical and illogical.
Thus, in addition to noting the total lack of proof - after years and years of trying to get it - that these medical interventions (or social interventions) have any overall benefit to psychological functioning, we must be clear that the entire premise upon which "transition" is based is lacking in logic or reason.
This may be the right time to resurrect the term “pervert”. Trans is a made-up word, while pervert has a definitional meaning. Men who keep their dicks and then have the balls to call themselves women meet the definition of “pervert”. What they demand is “pervert privilege”.
It is perverse to tell children they may be born in the wrong body.
It is a perversion to mutilate healthy body parts of adolescents.
From the Cambridge Dictionary…..Pervert..“a person whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable”. We need to make it unacceptable once again.
I've seen some institutional backtracking (and reframing) but I suspect that many of these ideas will not shift until the status rewards turn around, or until the financial resources are cut off. As long as peer groups, credentiallers, graduates programs, and nonprofit employers still parrot this nonsense their members will too.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/quietly-correcting
Excellent post!
"Ideologies do not admit error, even if people do. They are unwieldly tools with which to understand the world and they should be assiduously avoided. Anyone who tells you that some value (safety, kindness, social justice, equity) is above ‘truth’ is not your friend."
Clarity. Well done.
Excellent point! We cede ground and effectively validate the gender identity movement when we argue only about outcomes. Thank you for fighting this important battle!
I’m told my grandfather liked to dress up as a lady and go out. I’m told he wasn’t gay. That he was a man’s man in every way, but that he liked to dress up as a lady. My grandmother told me he stopped when he almost got killed by a bunch of men that figured out that he was not a woman.
I find all that strange. But, I just found out his mom actually named him Lorina because she wanted a girl. I’m gonna wager that she probably dressed him as a girl too.
When he turned eighteen, he changed his name to Luther.
On the flip side. I never really knew him. I met him a couple of times. He seemed like a real fuddy Duddy. Strait as an arrow. Looked down on the rest of the world.
I’m betting he was a democrat.
Spot on Colin, thank you. I can’t remember: did you write anything about the UK’s decision to fund a new trial for puberty blockers? This decision seems to cut sharply against reason and good, ethical science.
Thank you, Colin.
I mentioned some of what you say here in my fight against the transmafia in the NYC schools last night, particularly how MUTILATION is what the medical-pharma industry is pushing for. I've cued the Links to where I start speaking and combined, it is a less than 5 minute watch.
My personal email also appears below the Links, in case anyone like-minded would like to reach out:
https://www.youtube.com/live/mzKK2P5HG98?si=c4BWMHtMXGGk839L&t=3380
https://www.youtube.com/live/mzKK2P5HG98?si=VOpoPEknnjgLiKXv&t=10510
MY PERSONAL EMAIL:
JoannaVitalHealth@protonmail.com
"Second, it asserts that a person can have a “brain sex”—equated with “gender identity”—that diverges from his body, creating a mismatch that drives gender dysphoria. The goal, then, is to align the body with this purportedly immutable “brain sex” through hormones and surgeries."
I would regard "brain sex" as far more mutable than "body sex," being a software fix rather than one in hardware, the problem is that we don't know how to change it. Well, that's not quite true: if we simply wait it corrects itself in the vast majority of cases. Ken Zucker showed us that, and as a side-effect free (and cost-free) treatment, it seems a far more desirable approach than turning healthy kids into infertile, anorgasmic lifetime recipients of pharmaceutical hormones.
"Centrists Libs will try to use “logic and reason”, or studies showing harm being done by “affirming” children. But that isn’t going to convince their progressive and leftist friends. The “basilisk of history” is always on their minds, they imagine reality as an Oscar-bite historical movie, with two sides of a political topic already deemed as either the good side or bad side of history. Opposing trans inclusion into Women Spots, makes you just like those bigots that protested de-segregation, it didn’t matter if you show a trusted and well researched study, or the basic facts of the biological difference between males and females. The “basilisk of history” has already decided, so your daughter must go ups against a six-foot male if she wants to play sports."
https://birbantum.substack.com/p/the-trans-movement-is-here-to-stay
Thoughtful. I strongly support your position, and would give an additional perspective. The history of science is one of corrections. Geocentric solar system model was replaced with Heliocentric, miasmas -> disease, phlogiston -> oxidation, creation -> evolution etc. People are looking for some explanation, a bad one is proposed, and over time, it is replaced. Kuhn and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (63 years old I note).
We don't have an accurate scientific description or explanation of men who have a compulsion to imitate women (my description) which is a behavior found in males of all types of higher animals, except amphibians (sexual mimicry). It's a remarkably simple description and observation - humans are animals after all. It leads to very simple explanation for all observed behaviors by these men, and indeed the entire range of behaviors involving men who don't imitate women.
These men have a compulsion to imitate women to avoid male competition and conflict. At a 'physical' level, they are very successful, as you and others note, men imitating women have half the rate of death by male violence compared to other men.
In relation to women, the behavior generates a series of ways to avoid males to access women and perform stereotypical male actions. These men are attracted to women's prisons to reproduce without male presence, prison rape. These men are attracted to women's restrooms to mark them - urination - as their territory, without men to compete with them. These men are attracted to women's intimate spaces for sexual pleasure, like spas and locker rooms where they can leer at female bodies, without men to interfere. These men are attracted to women's sports where they can (paradoxically) exercise male dominance over female groups, without any competition from other men. These men are very attracted to lesbianism, because it presents sexual opportunities with a guarantee of no men ever. This is only off the top of my head.
What you write about is related to the fragility of the impersonation. It's generally quite easy to see these men are imitating women - they announce it. In order to preserve the impersonation, they have additional tactics. One is to restate the entire schema of biology and reproduction to be about their imitation. It isn not men and women, it's cis-men, and cis-women. It's not mothers, it's pregnant people. The intent is to reduce ordinary language and ideas to a state of ambiguity, where their presentation and behavior could be deemed within the range of women.
The word gender, in relation to humans, has no biological meaning, but it creates ambiguity with the uncountable number of possible "genders". These men then claim in some ambiguous gender to be actually female, or not-male. Gender, in common usage, actually means "ambigous sex", in the way it is used, but intentionally creates ambiguity and uncertainty in biology. There is no way to "affirm" sex uncertainty, it is a meaningless concept.
Likewise the ambiguous feelings (not sex) of boys and girls who are becoming gays or lesbians, are used to assert they are not male or female, to create uncertainty, that they are imitating the opposite sex without knowing it, something to be affirmed.
My opening point was that bad science, the science of gender, cannot just be stated "is false", but must be replace with a real explanation. Everyone want a science of sex, that explains these people - biology states they are sexual mimics like other animals, and that explains all behavior. Likewise, people need to understand why children are unhappy with their sex during adolescence - they are unhappy with feelings, which are new, still quite unusual, and bring them into roles they aren't entirely prepared for. It's called puberty. We need a better science of puberty.
Lesbians and Gays used biology relatively successfully for a long time. Homosexual sex is common in all animals. Humans are animals, there is nothing exceptional about lesbian and gay behaviors, and they harm nobody, as no animals harmed with homosexual behaviors. Penguins, bulls, and apes area all fine. A large number of people eventually responded to the fact that there was nothing psychologically perverse, damaging, or unnatural (the most common term) about the most natural of activities.
For men imitating women, I am sticking to "sexual mimicry" "mimesexuality" "men imitating women" and working on a book for the lay person the next few years, to in my own way replace the entire paradigm of gender, "trans", and entirely natural behaviors with simple scientifically valid descriptions and explanations which have antecedents in the animal world. We don't have to accept the mimicry, because its nature of concealment is what distorts and damages everything which encounters it, but doesn't recognize it. That's the core of the scientific problem.
The current nonsense, non-reality must be replaced, not negated. I don't see any other way to move on, as you rightly demand here.
I'm a bit concerned about the Skrmetti decision, if truth be told. Even if the court decides against the plaintiffs, this won't be the end of gender treatments; indeed, the arguments didn't really focus on the evidence, such as it is. If the Tennessee law is upheld, I worry that the states which protect these dubious procedures will simply double down, leaving us with half the nation on the absolute wrong track.
I'll take victories where I can find them, of course, but I wish we could anticipate something along the lines of the UK decision.
Colin, I understand that there are basically two different groups who suffer from so-called "gender dysphoria" (I think it would be more accurate to call it sex dysphoria): 1. The childhood group, and 2. The prepubescent/adolescent group. According to studies prior to the application of "affirming therapies," in the subgroup that suffered from dysphoria since childhood, approximately 88% overcame it after puberty. It's plausible that in the subgroup that suffers from this discomfort since puberty, the percentage who would overcome "gender dysphoria" without affirming therapies would be even higher, since dysphoria in this subgroup can be explained by various other factors. But even so, there is still a small percentage that we could call "authentic trans."
Let me clarify that I accept that sex is binary and that people who cannot be pigeonholed into one of the two existing reproductive functions are infinitesimal.
I believe trans people deserve the same respect as everyone else, but MtFs don't have the right to participate in women's sports, nor should convicted men be imprisoned with women. I also disagree with so-called affirmative therapies. I believe trans people should accept the bodies they have and live however they want as long as they don't harm others. I believe it's not a good idea to be hormone-treated for life or undergo mutilating surgeries when your body is healthy.
The point is, is it really scientifically untenable that there are people who can have a "brain sex"—equivalent to "gender identity"—that differs from their body?
How would it be sustainable for there to be people whose sexual orientation differs from their body? Furthermore, there are studies that show the existence of brain differences in these people, but it wouldn't be in the other case—and there are also studies finding brain differences in trans people.
Do we agree that sexual orientation is basically immutable and that it is formed during gestation? And that in the case of homosexuals, the orientation opposite to what would be the normal and appropriate mode for their sex is formed in a way opposite to genitalia by hormonal influences? Why couldn't the existence of authentically trans people be explained by a mechanism similar to that which causes homosexual orientation?
being gay is a sexuality. identifying as opposite gender is not a sexuality. yes, some people who ID as opposite gender are also gay. but there are also gay grocers, postal workers, lawyers. so what? what does being gay have to do with IDing as another gender, other than the entire gender belief system and practice is one of the most homophobic things of all time. people who are gay are pretending to be straight via gender ID. whats more homophobic than that?
Sex emerged on Earth as a form of reproduction approximately two billion years ago. It is an evolutionary product that involved the combination of the genetic material of two individuals of the same species. Sexual orientation is another evolutionary product, an impulse that emerged much later, but is inextricably linked to it. It appeared, and then persisted, because it granted reproductive success to its bearers, who passed it on to their offspring. The same could be said of so-called gender identity (although the term seems rather inappropriate to me; a better term would be "brain sex"); it is a psychological configuration that has characteristics associated with the individual's sex, which, like sexual orientation, provides greater success to its possessor. Thus, we could say that orientation and identity are part of the equipment that favors genetic survival.
Current scientific knowledge maintains that sexual orientation is imprinted in the brain during gestation, so it is not at all unreasonable to think that the same is true of brain sex. And just as we explain the existence of homosexual people due to abnormal hormonal processes during pregnancy, we can affirm that the same could occur with respect to "brain sex."
Anyone who claims—as Colin Wright does—that it is untenable that there are people who can have a "brain sex" that is different from their body should explain why the explanation is valid for one aspect but not for the other.
Gender dysphoria is a form of body dysmorphia. It’s a psychiatric illness. And I don’t need 3 paragraphs to explain it. One sentence is enough.
in 1988, the pope had piece of cloth carbon dated. they found out it was from 1200's. for centuries some people thought it was a shirt worn by jesus. sci fi novels seem real. but theyre not. if you x ray someones brain, it looks different if they are religious or not. does that mean religion is real? peoples brains look slightly different with different ethnic background and if gay or not. but they dont look differnt for people with differnt gender ID. people who claim it does are once again grouping gender ID, which is a hobby like fishing or sports, with gay sexuality, an immutable trait that doesnt change. the story of the five blind men and the elephant doesnt work in reverse. and thats what people are trying to do when they claim gender ID is a thing. sometimes a rope is just a rope. and tree is just a tree. because we are all blind to what we dont know. some are claiming these things are elephants
Dimorphic psychological characteristics between men and women are well known within the scientific field and beyond. They are not discrete, like sex, but they are no less real for that. People who claim to be the opposite sex to their phenotypic sex are also real. Although there are several reasons for this, it is not possible to completely rule out the existence of people whose brain configuration corresponds more to the opposite sex or to an intermediate position; the mechanism would be similar to that which explains homosexuality.
There are studies that, even after considering the confounding variable of homosexual orientation, continue to find brain differences between the brains of trans and cis people. https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/5/2084/5062356?login=false
Dimorphic characteristics can be mimicked. when that occurs in this context its just more of the same garbage where men off load their worrys via the vice of gender ID, which is no differnt than other vices. ask a heroin addict if his habit helps or hurts. if he thinks he can continue his habit by saying it helps, he will say it. a better question is how can man avoid harmful vices. one way is recognition that vices are harmful and should be avoided. ciggarette smoking was reduced substantially after a public information campaign warning of its dangers. prior to that, there were plenty of people in denial that cigarettes were even harmful. theres nothing holy about studies. often they are complete garbage. we now know 1000s of studys about gender this are that are complete garbage. based on opinions only, with zero evidence to their claims. the only thing it proves is that people are unable to escape their own biases and opinions.