Afro Cheese
Senior Member
Originally posted by Adam_PoE
Transgender people do not seek medical interventions, because they "believe gender has a basis in biology." They do so to ease gender dysphoria, or to be better accepted as the gender with which they identify.Imagine if you were short, or slight of frame, or had delicate features, and people constantly perceived you as a woman. Since you identify as a man, it is important to you that people see you as a man. So you might wear lifts in your shoes, or lift weights, or grow a beard, or get plastic surgery.
It is the exact same thing for transgender people, particularly because other people interact with their gender far more than with their genitals.
Are you sure that it's one or the other? That no trans women change their bodies because they prefer the female form over the male form?
And yes, society will treat them differently largely because we are instinctively used to (for the most part) being able to tell a woman from a man just by looking at them. As a sexually dimorphic species, this seems like a rather important manifestation of human pattern recognition, especially (but not limited to) when seeking out prospective mates.
If gender had a basis in biology, how would it not be uniform? Aside from intersex persons who have a congenital birth defect, there are no human beings who are not sexually dimorphic, so where would variations in gender come from? There is not enough genetic variation among human beings for there to be actual, separate races, yet somehow you believe that there is enough to account for variations in gender? And that it is somehow just a coincidence that concepts of gender change over time and across cultures?
When you speak of gender not being uniform, I assume you are largely speaking of the spectrum that exists with regard to masculinity and femininity, and the fact that some men are less masculine than others etc.
So, to answer your question, this doesn't seem at all at odds with the idea that these categories still ultimately arise from sexual dimorphism and human sexuality and mating strategies. Traits that are selected for sexually can very easily vary. This is similar to asking why a troop of baboons is going to have more and less dominant males.
As far as I know, the vast majorty of human societies have some version of these basic concepts. This is because female selection of male mates is an important part of human mating strategies. So the question you should ask yourself is if it's just an arbitrary social construct and particular to cultural expectations, why do so many widely different and isolated cultures share some form of this basic dynamic?
And to my eye, the easiest explanation for that is that biologically we can only mate between males and females, and in the tribal context especially we required rather specialized traits to develope in each of the sexes in order for the successful rearing of children to be feasible.
You need both female nurturers and mothers as well as male hunters, warriors and providers in order to be successful in that context. Keeping in mind that not all males will contribute to the gene pool where as roughly (most) women will.
What makes you think gender is chosen?This is precisely what I mentioned above. You insist you understand the issue, then you post, and remove any doubt that you do.
That is the logical equivalent of saying a homosexual prefers members of the same sex, when he is in fact exclusively attracted to members of the same sex.
You are operating from the presumption that transgender people are choosing another gender, rather than experiencing the gender they have.
Maybe "choice" isn't the right word, but my basic point is that the criteria for determining one's gender ultimately come down to self-identification, in the modern feminist model.
You might have some science that shows that some males have some sort of biological quirk which makes their brains more closely resemble that of a female, but that is ultimately irrelevant since the only criteria by which a male is categorized as a man or a woman is by self identification and not by any biological standard.
So to my eye, the advocates for this sort of thing often will appeal to biology and science to back up their claims when it is convenient to do so, but then simultaneously will claim that biology is utterly irrelevant to gender. As such, they seem (to me) more beholden to ideology than to intellectual honesty.