This is why I don't think "science" is the key to knowledge. I put "science" in quotes because it has been truly disconnected from the scientific method as a discrete idea. No longer do scientists try to truly measure a factual and objective world. Instead their minds are poisoned by subjectivism. Have you read Simulacra and Simulation? It is a seminal work in post-modernism, and its basic thesis is that all frameworks by which we understand the world are merely constructs, and that there is not truly any reality being observed. This is the thesis by which modern "science" is done. There is no real concrete thing being studied, instead there is a vague amalgam of intersubjective ideas called LGBTQIA with no meaningful definition or characteristics. Cults of peer review support their own, and since it's all subjective we can use critical theory to debunk or support any idea at will. There is no testing for truth because there is no acknowledgement that truth exists.
The hormonal and sociological arguments by which you justify your womanhood are the same sort of magical thinking I have seen in sovereign citizens. A is a thing B does, and C is doing A, so C is B. By this game of associations we can make anything into anything. Women wear dresses, and I'm wearing a dress, so I'm a woman. Racism is something white people do, and you're white, so you're racist. Christ was the son of God, and Ra was the son of God, so Ra and Christ are the same. Etc. It's something that has the seemingness of reason, but isn't really reasonable at all. Magical thinking is how cults reason with you. Magical thinking is how the fat guy at a convention center with a white board convinces you that the Vatican owns your soul because of your birth certificate, and if you just write a check to the vatican in red ink (that i can wash off) and the amount (50,000$) in black ink, the vatican will give you all your money back! You don't want to be a slave, do you Tommy? Come on, write me-uh, I mean, write the vatican the check!
You win a Tommie Award for being the first Kiwi Farmer to accept my invitation to have a deep and friendly discussion on a topic that has been irritating the shit out of me in the forums for years, with the armed and inbred religious fanatics and their prosperity gospel and all the queers battling it out in the Oppression Olympics Shame and Blame Games, one side armed with ancient religious texts and obsolete biology and the other side swinging pseudoscience, with everybody operating on paranoid delusions generated anecdotally. You get special props for bringing one of the pseudoscientists I had never heard of to the table. I was wondering if the fat guy in the convention center was hypothetical or did that actually happen? I've never heard of the Vatican running out that line. That comes from evangelical fundies like Kenneth Copland, Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen, who have all done very well for themselves with it.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a
www.taylorfrancis.com
en.wikipedia.org
Psychobabble like this guy shits out of his brain through his fingers isn't science. You may as well call this stuff Baudrillardism just like the Material Dialectic is what Marxism is; somebody's opinion people believe; ISMs that attracts ISTs. I think Kurt Vonnegutt called things like this Wampeters , Foma and Granfalloons that cause drupelets to aggregate into a karass in the Bokononist culture he created in Cat's Cradle. It's been many years since the last time i read it, so i'm probably not nearly accurate. there were several more terms I'm not remembering. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and the suffering of the Malachi Constant , in Sirens of Titan has a lot of deeply profound lessons too.
When somebody is giving you a "but , the science" argument, remind them with the W. Edwards Deming quote "“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” and that the burden of proof is on them. I get paid to research things. Prove your own points, bubba.
White privilege is real, but racism is something everybody does. You don't get a pass just because of the power disparity. if you hate somebody for no other reason than their race, that's racist, no matter what race you are. I do think we need to ditch this arbitrary and unscientific definition of race all together and talk more in terms of culture, like mohammed ali does in this interview. I definitely agree with Morgan Freeman. We need to stop talking in terms of people being black or white altogether. As long as we talk in those terms, people will walk that talk in those terms and people don't come in black or white.
Correlation is not causation and the dress thing is especially absurd. Dresses don't have anything to do with anybody's womanhood and having a penis doesn't automatically make you masculine. vice versa for femininity and vaginas. Vaginas and uteruses aren't what makes a woman feminine either.
We need to clarify what is a "gender identity" and what is a "gender role" first. Gender identity* is innate feelings of masculinity or femininity embedded deep in the cerebral cortex translated out through the hippocampus, hypothalmus, pineal and pituitary glands through the lymphatic system nerves to the muscles manifesting in a potential for masculine or feminine movement, posturing and speech patterns. This is where the cultural construct kicks in and it kicks in early, programming girls for pink and boys for blue.
The arguments justifying my womanhood are genetic and neurological. I'm Intersex, not Transsexual. the hormones in my case work a hell of a lot better in managing my behavioral health issues than anything the shrinks ever tried to give me.
* everything after the asterisk came off the top of my head and is far from accurate in terms of the pathways. it's just a little descriptive nugget of how we're born with a gender identity and build our gender role from the genetic potentials along with conforming to the local cultural norms for the gender role we've chosen from how our gender identity makes us feel.
It's not about wanting to be a man or a woman with trans people. We feel like men or women, so therefor we are men and women, despite our transness with our genitals. The cliche' mongers like to say it's about hearts, not parts. Basically physical sex is limited to the genitals and has no control over the gender identity of the brain. Further, the brain is not dimorphic in terms of a distinctly male or female brain. There are structures that are thought to be dimorphic, but gendered behavior is controlled by a mosaic of structures in the brain, so that in the overall population, masculinity and femininity present on a spectrum. i never score 100% female; most often in the 60-80% range.
Like seriously, when did you realize you were cisgender and heterosexual ? I didn't know I wasn't supposed to be a girl until i was almost four when i was informed that girls don't have penises and boys only cry when they bleed. Don't even try to use the XX/XY shit on me over orientation either. Try to wrap your head around this. My karyotype is XY, but my brain hormone panel was more female than male. My heart is attracted to a more masculine, but softer, Sam Elliot or Willie Nelson sort of man, but my penis is attracted to vaginas. my sex fantasies are of me being penetrated by a man, but i'm horrified with the thought of a pecker in my pooper. I think a trans man penetrated by trans woman is heterosexual and trans woman penetrating cis woman is transbian, but start getting into the outer realms and that's all hybrid identities formed from gender roles and orientations and it's invalid to call that shit anything but social constructs. To assert that the basic identity and orientation potentials we're born with to be a construct is invalid. It is the gender role we play and presentation that we build that's a construct.
When the genetics and physiology of gender are looked at in the current consensus, you will find four sexes; male, female, intersex males, females and hermaphrodites. There are actually 39 different Internet Body Variations (usually called Differences of Sex Development, down graded from Disorders by intersex activists in recent years) We want to ditch DSD completely and use IBV instead. Not all intersex people are transgender, but i think that intersex people with typical genital formation and gender ambiguous secondary sex characteristics like myself are the most common. True hermaphrodites are very rare as are most of the others. Not all of those people consider themselves transgender either.
The basic genetic genders are agender, bigender, cisgender and transgender. Still , there's too much variation, both physically and psychologically to adequately define people with just those few classes. Everybody is uniquely crafted and everybody makes their own decisions how to present themselves to the world. Everybody is valid. Celebrate the diversity. The Rainbow Agenda as I know it is to love all and hate none, in peace , love, unity and respect. If you don't like it, don't look and if they don't want to hear it, stop trying to tell them. Happy Pride Month everybody.
