Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it seems clear that GP wrote without hate. A charitable reading is that they just don't have the experience to understand transgender experience. In the context of a discussion about the motivations for and arguments against political correctness it seems to me that we should try to create a safe space for folks (like deltasevennine) to express their perspectives evidently offered in good faith. (Even, and espe…
>Things that seemed like bedrock (i.e. "There are only two genders") crash up against reality where that "rule" is just not applicable (i.e. there are human cultures with more than two genders, and biologically there are e.g. hermaphrodites, etc.) Have you heard of BIID? The term body integrity identity disorder (BIID) describes the extremely rare phenomenon of persons who desire the amputation of one or more healthy…
I was brought up with the general idea that what consenting adults get up to is pretty much their own business. E.g. if a guy wants to wear a dress or two women want to get married or Tilda Swinton is just over the whole gender thing or whatever, it ain't no skin off my nose, eh?
But in practice "there are limits", for me I get uncomfortable with autophagy and cannibalism. There have been a few cases of voluntary cannibalism!? That's where I draw the line personally. To each his own, but you can't eat each other, or yourself. BIID too for that matter falls into the "beyond the pale" category for me. (But even then, if the otherwise healthy limb is causing serious distress somehow? And we can't operate on the brain to fix the cause? Maybe you do remove the limb? What if you take it off and the problem remains!? Phantom BIID?)
Really, though, this is between the person and their doctor. It's none of our business. That should be emphasized IMO: if this is a medical condition we're talking about then it's just deeply inappropriate for other people to meddle, IMO.
Next, the thought occurs that there's at least one very obvious difference between BIID and gender change: having a limb off is generally bad, whereas being a woman (or man) is generally A-Ok.
It's fine to be a man, it's fine to be a woman, but changing from one to the other is not fine? "Where's the fun in that?" as John Cleese often says.
Also, people don't typically beat up or murder folks for having BIID. When we're discussing things like societal acceptance of transgender folks, you have to keep in mind the historical (and in many places still current) violence that they have had to put up with. It's not an armchair discussion for these folks. They are fighting for their lives. (E.g. talking in code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari )
I grew up reading sci-fi stories where e.g. a man might take a pill before bed and wake up a woman. To me the future would obviously and naturally have gender change as a normal thing (though perhaps uncommon) along with things like new synthetic genders, or body changes like fur or tails, or even becoming "transhuman" entirely though mutation or "uploading". What gender is a disembodied consciousness in a cybernetic matrix anyway, eh?
Last but not least, speaking as someone who has dedicated much of his life to logic, the world is trans-logical. You're talking about "grasping the logic" or crystallizing the logic, which is a good thing to do: logic is better than illogic. I'm pointing out that the real world is not fully covered by logic, in fact only a tiny minuscule portion of the real world is susceptible to logical comprehension. This doesn't mean a descent into irrationality, rather it leads to a new higher-order rationality that can take into account contradictory models and yet still function.
Well met! Cheers