My point about dysphoria has no requirement for them to feel uncomfortable. Though I'd say knowing your gender isn't matched with your sex would make you uncomfortable. And I'd certainly want to get surgery to make it fit. But, dysphoria is about that sensation of mismatch, not the reaction or the actions taken to relieve the commonly bad reaction.
Look, you plainly don't even understand the concept of dysphoria, I'm gonna link you to this reddit thread about transmedicalism (which is essentially the viewpoint you're espousing) and I'm done because wow is this tiring and nonproductive. If you're going to try to talk about trans people at least listen to what trans people have to say about themselves. reddit
I'm not arguing people have to get surgery, or they have to be uncomfortable, or that they can't ignore stereotypes (sidenote; aren't genderfluid(interesex) and agender(androgonous) not trans?). I'm just saying there is a biological basis and that affects how it functions. And the biological basis is what makes it so innate and unchangeable, distinguishing it from delusions that you are a man/woman or self-styling as such.
I think an important note is that nervousness of surgery, nervousness of new science/technology, desire to have biological children, under-education and under-accessibility contribute massively to the population who avoid gender-reassignment surgery. So how can you be sure they aren't just kind of suppressing their body issues? There's few things the human brain is more shockingly skilled at than fooling itself.
Genderfluid and intersex aren't the same thing, neither are agender and androgynous. Agender and genderfluid are largely considered to be subsets of transgender. If you want me to educate you, I will try, but I will not argue with you over whether some trans people are actually just delusional, especially when for years all trans people were considered just delusional by the same medical field you obviously hold in such high regard.
Just saying, I accept an experience of gender without body issues as long as it's medically validated, but body issues would seem to go with the territory. If you were born in a dog body but you felt innately, unchangeably human, wouldn't you desire a human body?
What's the difference between those then? Enlighten me. Also, I would love to hear a definition of demisexual that doesn't equate to pan.
I don't see why it's so hard to accept that some people with mental problems might develop an illusion of transgenderism. We're talking mental illness, where there are few limits to the diversity and potential intensity of malfunction.
Every year the amount of religiousness in the world goes down. And in the last 100 years the standard of empiracy and skepticism in science has gone up dramatically with higher questioning of common assumptions that aren't properly tested. As a result, science is closer to the universal standard it should be. And medical school is an intense, rigorous process that allows only very talented students to get in as practising doctors. So I do trust them to a high degree, but it is far from absolute, I assure you.
The bottom line is that I don't see the validity of non-cis gender identities without a significant degree of biological factors, so the innate, unchangeable nature of it suggest biological factors to me. And there is plenty of evidence to support that conclusion and actions we take based on it.
We should probably stop this some time soon. We're kind of dominating a thread that was originally about how to depict a character, not the scientific explanation of transgenderism, which is not even the one they asked about.
All right six AM I-really-want-to-go-to-bed attempted primer: Agender = not feeling as if any gender (male, female, otherwise) fits you. Androgynous = not applied that frequently as an identity so much as a description of performance, namely as one that includes aspects of both femininity and masculinity. Genderfluid = feeling that your gender shifts/isn't a static point. Could be feeling that you're sometimes male and sometimes female, feeling that you're sometimes female and sometimes agender, etc. Intersex = actually a physiological state, applied to people with 'ambiguous' reproductive organs, not my wheelhouse but read about it here. From what I know, some intersex people who id as trans may consider their being intersex a factor, but plenty of others don't; they're not solidly connected. As for demisexual, okay, first off are you aware of the difference between romantic and sexual attraction? I'm going to assume that you do know that asexual people exist, the defining characteristic of that id being a lack of sexual attraction / sex drive. Ace people are still capable of romantic attraction (though aromanticism is also a thing and there are plenty of people who are both ace and aro), and demisexuality applies to people who can begin to experience sexual attraction for people they've become romantically attached to. It's also not my wheelhouse but that's my understanding. How that's been equated to pansexuality/romanticism for you I've no idea. Keep in mind also that ace and aro people also experience attraction based on gender, eg someone could be heterosexual and aromantic or homoromantic and asexual or pansexual and panromantic, etc. Sexual and romantic attraction are often conflated because for many people they line up, but there is a difference. But yeah, I feel quite bad for the OP given how off the rails their thread has gone, which was another reason to gtfo.
Cool, so then androgynous isn't really the same kind of innate identity, it's style stuff. As I suspected.
To inform you; I have somewhat pronounced assertive and submissive sides, so I sometimes speak more or less confident than I mean to. Just keep that in mind.
Instead of us keeping it in mind, how about you work to curb it? I had you blocked for a long time, unblocked you because I was interested in this discussion and it was hard to follow with all of your posts missing. But I'm going to reblock you now, because your posts are an exhausting waste of time. You're seventeen years old and you think you know everything about everything. Maybe when you're talking to your friends you can get away with making bold statements and just be obnoxious until other people agree with you, but you're not talking to children here, and most of the people on this thread are pretty well educated and intelligent. That doesn't mean you have to agree with us, but you can't just pull responses out of your ass and expect them to be respected. So, when people ask for references or citations? Give them, or else admit you don't have them. A seventeen-year-old's opinion is not a credible source on anything but that seventeen-year-old's personal experiences. And we're not talking about your personal experiences in this thread.
I have NEVER ignored a call for evidence. I don't even remember there being one for me to ignore. And if I did ignore, I am happy to either make my statements less certain or provide it now. I think the fact my intonation does not come through in text also helps it sound potentially different than I mean. And the tendency is a small thing, it's usually just a slight leaning. In this thread just recently I have repeated stated that is was "in my understanding." so it's not like I acting like I knew romotely close to everything. I have nowhere near that perception. I have loads left to learn because I simply have not had the time to learn as much as a full adult. Plus I get passionate so sometimes I become a little stubborn, but if I do please point it out and I will apologise. There's no need to be condescending, degrading and hyperbolic about this. Again, I will apologise for my failures and try to correct them. You don't need to be mean. EDIT: make that very stubborn.
Seriously, I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, just give me a chance and I'm sure you'll see it's not what I mean.
Well, people identify as furries, and they show up at ComicCon as whoever they like, so what do I care?
Okay, @ChickenFreak, @NeighborVoid , to contribute a third opinion, my position is thus. Your ethnicity is your literal ethnicity= genetically determined. Your nationality is whatever country you live in or did live in and continue to connect with. And your racial/national culture is whatever one you practise.
Hmm. Y'know, through this thread I've been wondering how Oscar can fail to understand that societal gender, and sex organs, don't necessarily go together? That the distinction between male and female involves a huge amount of societal behavior and customs that have nothing to do with those body parts. So what you just said hit me: He's. Seventeen. Oh, my. Seventeen. That means that life began in 1999. It means that awareness and memory and the foundations of empathy began around 2004. And in 2004, the differences between men and women, in terms of culture and behavior, were far, far less evident than they were in the past--in 1970, or 1950, or 1930. And the surviving differences would be much less evident to someone of high school age than someone who's deep into adulthood. So I can imagine that it might be hard to understand that those differences are there. @Oscar Leigh, I request that you look at this picture: http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Grant, Cary/Annex/Annex - Grant, Cary (Every Girl Should Be Married)_01.jpg Look at the man. Look at the woman. Do you see a difference? In appearance, in posture, in attitude, in their interaction? Do you see a difference that would be evident even if it turned out, in the bedroom, that the person in the suit and tie, and the person in the dress, didn't have the organs that you expected them to have? Those differences are societal. Biology didn't tell Cary Grant to put on that suit and tie, to cut his hair short, to sit with that square posture even when he's leaning forward. Biology didn't tell Betsy Drake (I think that's who that is) to pluck her brows, put on lipstick, make her hair long and soft, wear flowing clothes, and take up that attentive, submissive posture. Those are roles, roles created by society. You can say that they're stereotyped roles, that they're forced by society, but whatever you say, they are roles, they are expressions of identity. Maybe those two people enjoy and embrace the identity that they're expressing, maybe they hate it, but that identity is a thing separate from those people's private parts. Sure, the fact that their societal gender identification matches their biological sex makes it easier to express their chosen gender without a lot of extra tailoring in their clothes. But all the same, most of what you're seeing in that picture is about culture and society. Let's look at two photos of Ingrid Bergman: http://blue17.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/INGRID-BERGMAN-in-notorious-1946.jpg http://www.blue17.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/INGRID-BERGMANingrid-bergman-dr-jekyll-mr-hyde-1941.jpg They're both the same person. In both of them, she has biologically female body parts. But can we agree that there are some very different nuances in the gender message expressed by those two photos? I suspect that another part of this issue may be because you're male. Men have traditionally had more power in society than women. In the past, if a woman wanted to feel power, feel strong, feel like a full acting member of society, feel protective, feel responsible...she might be unable to make those things part of her identity without identifying as a man. She might not be able to create a completely new concept, a woman who is strong and powerful and capable. She might instead need to take an existing concept, that of a man, and claim that concept. The fact that a woman claims an identity linked with the concept of "man" does not necessarily mean that she cares even a little tiny bit about a man's biology. It does not necessarily mean that she wants his private parts. It may mean that she wants his power and freedom and the respect that he gets from the world. (Edited to add: I'm not saying that this is why any woman would feel that her identity is properly male. I'm just saying that the difference between male and female, in a societal and cultural sense, may be far less evident to a young man than to a woman.) My own mother once told me that she felt that she should grow her short hair out, because short hair made her feel strong and powerful, and she wanted to remind herself to be feminine and submissive, because she was under the delusion that that was how she could save her marriage. She had female parts with short hair, and she would have had female parts with long hair. But in the time and place that she grew up, short versus long hair was a gender signal, and she felt stronger with the "male" signal of long hair--even with a skirt and high heels. Another photo: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a0/2d/03/a02d0304521c22532857fd8706b9c858.jpg I'm guessing that to your twenty-first-century eyes, Audrey Hepburn looks thoroughly feminine. But when that photo was taken, that was (from what I read) an androgynous look. That photo, and this one: http://images.idiva.com/media/photogallery/2013/Oct/audrey_hepburn_big_foot.jpg had things to say about gender.
