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Magneto
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24 Nov 2014, 3:45 pm

Dammit, why did they switch the new topic and reply buttons around...

I suspect The Walrus (Paul? Paul, is that you?) wasn't being entirely serious, hence the smiley.

I really don't understand people who think that forcing a cisgendered person to act as the opposite gender, and finding that it fails, somehow proves that gender is mutable - and hence a male can develop a female gender identity because of upbringing, which can then be changed back to male. It does prove, if it proves anything other than "John Money was a jerkass who needed to take a course in ethics in science", that our gender identities are fixed before birth. Given that we know that intersex people exist, and that the brain develops at a different point to the genitals and gonads, it's a reasonable inference that it is possible for an individual of one sex to develop a brain, and hence gender identity, corresponding to the other.

The question then becomes, since something has to change, which part of the body is more important, the brain or the genitals. It astounds me the number of people who think the latter are more important. :roll:



The_Walrus
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24 Nov 2014, 6:11 pm

Orangez wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
1024 wrote:
Is there anything deeper? How do I know what my psychological sex is, if it's a distinct thing from the physical sex? In my mind, being male has no meaning other than having male physical characteristics; I would have no other way to decide in my mind what gender I am than look at the physical characteristics. When I'm not thinking about these characteristics or sexual things, I don't care about my gender.

Behold! Cis privilege! :)

Naturally, cis people never think about gender v sex because we just assume they are one and the same. Trans people show that they are not.

However, they are the same. John Money,who came up with this idea, was a crazy and caused his example, David Reimer, to kill himself. If his base of his thesis end up kill himself due to his experiments I think it is a cause to not believe in this thesis.

Also, check your NON-CIS privilege. You are very sexist if the first argument you can bring up against some is that they are not apart of your special social group. You are the sick sexist individual as you see their so called privilege before the person.

I don't have "non-cis" (the term you are looking for is "trans") privilege. I am cis too, and I explicitly said as much in my post. Pointing out cis privilege is not sexist (the correct term would probably be cisphobic or some such). I was not saying "you are a bad person because you are cis" or anything similarly ridiculous, I was saying "you don't have to think about gender dysphoria because you are cis". I am immensely glad that I do not have gender dysphoria, just as I am glad that I am not a woman, black, homosexual, or living in Saudi Arabia.

I don't think you've understood the implications of the David Reimer case. That shows that people have a very strong gender identity that is biological. It does not show that sex and gender are the same thing. There are millions of trans people who show that they are not and I'm not sure why you'd ignore their experiences.

Magneto wrote:
I suspect The Walrus (Paul? Paul, is that you?)

I was The_Walrus but now I'm... still The_Walrus.



beneficii
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26 Nov 2014, 6:40 pm

As a follow up to this statement from the article in the OP (which was probably not read by at least half the posters in this thread):

Quote:
The problem is that meeting the requirement of double-blind studies with control groups using transgender individuals is both impractical and ethically unacceptable, as summarized here:

Quote:
One problem with medical treatment (and obviously surgery) for transsexuals is that blinding of studies is not possible. It is immediately obvious whether a participant received treatment or not, substitution by placebo will not work for obvious reasons. Clearly, all sex reassignment studies thus fail the gold standard. The next issue is including a control group into the study. This would require to properly diagnose transsexuals, making sure they meet the requirements and indications for sex reassignment surgery, and then to randomly split the participants into two groups -- one receiving surgery and one not. Clearly, both groups have to be large for the result to be statistically valid. Then you could measure quality of life of the participants and compare the groups at intervals of several years. That's the theory, anyway.

In reality, you would find the pressure transsexuals find themselves under grow so much that a large part of the untreated group commits suicide (Haas, Rodgers, Herman 2014) or seeks treatment illegally or abroad. This makes such a study highly unethical, it would never get the okay from an approvals body! You simply cannot withhold treatment from a highly stigmatised group that has a prevalence of 42 to 46 % suicide attempts, compared with 4.6 % in the general population.


Double-blind studies are the gold standard of science! If there isn't a double-blind study showing it, I don't wanna see it! Don't tell me I need to wear a parachute to go sky-diving unless you have double-blind studies showing its efficacy!

Before I would wear a parachute to go sky-diving, I demand a double-blind study be done, in which half of the packs have working parachutes and the other half do not, and neither the participants nor the researchers know whose packs have working parachutes and those who do not. Show me that all of the parachute users survived and all the people without working parachutes died and you might just convince me. But because science has long failed to perform such a study (they have had over a century!), it's clear that the scientists are bought and paid for by the parachute manufacturers and when I go sky-diving I won't buy into the scam like a chump and how dare my taxpayer money go into funding parachutes for paratroopers! :jester:


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