Gay\transgender -- not by genetics, not by upbringing, not by choice

I wonder, any of you who are seriously considering that choice has anything to do with sexual orientation or gender identity (two completely separate subjects, I might add - a transgendered woman is in no way a homosexual man, for example), was there a time when you chose to identify as your biological gender, or to be attracted to the gender(s) o which you are attracted?For the life of me, I cannot recall a moment in time where I chose to identify as male, nor a time when I chose to find women sexually attractive and men not.I've spoken to quite a few gay and transgendered individuals. They report a similar experience in terms of choice - they had moments of realization where they figured out that something was different (ie, a person who identifies as female noticing that the other girls are biologically different from her, or a homosexual person noticing that most of their friends are attracted to a different gender, etc), but not a single one of them had a moment where they decided anything in those regards.You don't choose who you find attractive.You don't choose which gender identifies you.And even the choice to transition genders is not just a matter of preference - it's correcting a problem. Transgendered individuals don't just want boobs or a penis. They aren't crazy. It's become cliche, but they really do feel trapped in the wrong body.You know those ridiculously bad comedy movies that involve a man and woman swapping bodies? Remove the bad comedy and focus on that moment of distress that a real person would feel in such a situation - having your body reflect a gender different from your identity. How do you think that would feel? That is what a transgendered person feels. And that's why many of them seek to have their physical gender surgically and chemically reassigned to match who they are, since in real life there's no poorly written "comedic" plot device that puts everyone back in the right body by the end of the terrible movie.For the rest - identical twins studies have long been accepted as strong evidence in determining genetic factors, and I see no reason to disregard that fact simply because we start talking about sexual orientation and gender identity. Like all studies, you can't take a single case and pretend it has statistical significance...but when we have a plurality of twins studies and they all seem to show that neither genetics nor environment seems to be a factor in determining gender identity or sexual orientation, we should certainly pay attention.

That's a possibility.Another hypothesis is that Ms. Nixon is actually bisexual, sexually attracted to both genders, and her choice was simply to restrict herself to females for whatever reason. Perhaps she finds men just as physically attractive as women, but really hates football, or the toilet seat being left up, or finding beard trimmings in the sink.We all make certain choices about restricting our dating pools; I prefer to date atheist women, and will not date fundamentalist religious women. That has nothing to do with my un-chosen feeling of attraction, it's a choice I make to prevent future drama in a relationship. Some people choose not to date outside of specific economic classes, or outside of a specific culture, even if they could feel attracted to people outside of such subsets of the population.That hypothesis better fits my prior expectation, and so has an advantage over the hypothesis that Ms. Nixon really did "choose" to be homosexual in the absence of distinguishing evidence, and Ms. Nixon would be saying the same thing either way. From her article on Wiki:

quote:

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Regarding her sexual orientation, Nixon remarked in 2007: "I don't really feel I've changed. I'd been with men all my life, and I'd never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn't seem so strange. I'm just a woman in love with another woman."[7] She identified herself as bisexual in 2012.

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Just as a relevant aside, I'd also like to note that, outside of general curiosity, the actual causes of homosexuality and transgenderism are irrelevant. They don't matter.Whether a person is gay or transgender through genetics, choice, environment, or any other reason does not matter. They are the way they are, and they have just as much a right to be who and what they are as the rest of us. Attraction to a specific gender, regardless of your own gender, is not immoral or harmful in any way. Self-identifying as a gender that is different from your physical sex is tragic for the individual because of the mental and emotional distress they experience, but is not immoral or wrong, and the correct course of action is to help such a person transition to the gender they identify as.It's perfectly okay to be gay or transgender, no more wrong than being straight or liking the color blue or having naturally black hair.The discussion over the role of choice in sexual orientation and gender identity is typically used by bigots in their arguments that such things are evil and wicked. Those arguments are still wrong, even if it were revealed tomorrow that sexual orientation and gender identity really are choices.

...there are boys who like pink. Lots of them.A transgender person, a person trapped in the wrong body, is not simply someone who has a stereotypically cross-gender color preference.Transgenderism is a real and serious problem for those afflicted, and it's not just because little Jimmy prefers Barbies to GI Joes. A person who actually has a gender identity problem will feel real distress at the fact that their outward physical sex does not match the gender by which they identify themselves.

Their color and clothing and doll preferences are not what causes the distress, Ringo.What causes distress in a person who actually has the wrong sex is having the wrong body. A transwoman can wear a dress, or wear pink, or collect Barbie dolls. None of that causes distress. The lack of acceptance from others of those preferences causes social distress, sure - but that's still not what I'm talking about. Hell, all of that can be experienced by a transvestite, a cross-dresser, which is not even remotely the same as transgender.When you look in the mirror, what you see generally lines up with your internal identity. I'm a man, ergo I'm not distressed by the fact that I have male genitalia or grow facial hair, or that I have a (somewhat) deep voice.A transwoman would see her penis or her facial hair or hear her voice and feel wrong. She would feel literally trapped in a body that did not reflect her inner identity as a woman. It would be something akin to the outright panic I would experience if I woke up tomorrow with breasts and a vagina. The only thing that would eliminate that sense of wrongness is a gender reassignment, correcting the outside, physical sex to match the inner gender identity.Perhaps you should seek out an actual transgendered individual or two and speak to them.

It is corrective surgery, though insurance providers don;t recognize it as such here in the States.Did you know that German healthcare will cover the full transition, from initial hormone therapy to the eventual reassignment surgery?Yet they don;t cover the elective removal of a limb.Why? Because one of these is indicative of a mental disorder, and the other is a person in need of medical and surgical help.The very same attitudes you and others are espousing here are why transgendered people often feel alienated even within the GLBT community.It's curious that all of you have such strong opinions regarding how "fucked up" it must be to want to have your gender reassigned, without having ever even tried to comprehend what it means for the individual in question. If you actually took the time to speak to and understand the position of a transgendered person, you might find your opinions would change.

One of those desires denotes a mental health problem. The other does not.I presume you can ascertain which is which.

Psychiatry. The same way we determine whether depression is a mental disorder or just a state of being. The same way that we have determined that being gay is actually not a mental disorder, even though a lot of people don't "get it."There have been many studies on transgenderism. I'll see if I can dig up some of the ones I've seen in the past.

More specifically...Typically patients are required to attend therapy during their entire transition, and are also required to have a psychiatric evaluation prior to even starting to ensure that it's a genuine case of transexuality.The patient must then live as the desired gender for a period of time, 24/7. This is before even hormone therapy. A transwoman would live as a woman, acting, dressing, identifying as a woman all day every day. She would acknowledge female pronouns and not male, would usually change her name to one more feminine, frequently she would wear makeup, etc.After a period of time and another psychiatric evaluation, hormone therapy would begin. Over the next few months, the hormones would make some of the initial physical changes, like starting/stopping the growth of facial hair, some voice changes, etc. If the patient is being treated prior to puberty, early hormone therapy can actually stave off the pubescent development of secondary sexual characteristics and make the eventual adult transition (surgery is not performed until adulthood) much easier. Note also that at this point everything is completely reversable.During this entire time the patient has continued to functionally live as their intended gender, and continues to participate in therapy.After more significant time, often years, the actual gender reassignment surgery can happen, again after more psychiatric evaluation.The process is intended to make damned sure that the patient is in fact transgender and needs to transition before performing surgery.Transgenderism is not a fickle phase a person goes through. It's a lifelong affliction. It's a cause of depression (in patients who have not yet transitioned, or who are ostracized for what they are), not caused by depression, as an example. A transwoman is for all intents and purposes that actually matter a woman, and always has been; she simply had the misfortune to be born with a medical condition that caused her body to incorrectly grow as male. Surgery and hormone therapy correct the problem.

I've directly interacted with three (at least that I know of...), in varying states of transition. One even made a journal of her transition (it's posted in a private online forum, so I won't be re-posting it here unless I gain her specific approval).Of those I've interacted with, only one has ever been flagged as possibly a little "off"...but quite seriously it makes absolute sense to me that every last one of her hangups and insecurities and "odd" attitudes were due in large part to how she was received by family and "friends" and the rest of the world. Out of the three, she's also the only one from the States, and was the only one to have a strikingly negative reception, almost universally, among her previous support groups. Disowned by the family, met with hostility from friends, etc. Some pessimism, depression, and paranoia are not entirely unexpected given the general public attitude toward transsexuals in the US.And even in her case, those issues have largely seemed to subside, as she's recently been married and has made a new group of friends who don't reject her.The striking part for me is that, as they have transitioned, all of them have become more well-adjusted, happy, productive people than they were before. As their outward sex is transitioned to match their inner gender-identity, they've all experienced a true improvement in their life situations.I really don't find any reason whatsoever to question the right of a person to seek treatment, including hormone therapy and surgery, to correct their physical sex, beyond the perfectly reasonable therapy, psychiatric profiling, and multi-phased transition they already have to go through.As opposed to a person who simply wants to cut off their leg, gender reassignment does no actual harm (in fact, you'd be surprised at the quality of the reassignment surgeries these days), and it actually provides a significant improvement in quality of life for those who actually have a gender identity problem.What right should anyone have to say "that's fucked up," when the actual patients feel better afterwards, and nobody's body is affected but their own?It seems to me that most of the people who get all obsessive over whether someone's lady parts were originally included are just paranoid that they might accidentally insert their penis into a surgically created vagina, and that this would somehow be "gross" or make them gay. Popular culture still reinforces the view that transsexuals are "icky," and that even after a full surgical transition they're still really their birth gender.I recall a recent Family Guy episode where Brian has sex with Quagmire's father who recently transitioned to a woman. At first he was excited to have found a person he considered beautiful and interesting...and the moment he found out that the person he slept with had recently been a man, it turned into a puke gag.Even gays still receive some of the same treatment - straights who are for some reason afraid that some gay guy is going to hit on them, and that somehow this will make them gay, too.People bring up nonsense like "he's not really a woman, surgery only changes the way he looks," as if only genetics or the presence of ovaries or the ability to bear children can make one a "true" woman. I can't see genetics, nor does the specific presence or absence of a second "X" chromosome directly have an effect on whether I find a person attractive. I can;t see ovaries, and plenty of "real" women have either needed to have them removed or otherwise can't have kids.Personally, if a person looks indistinguishable from a woman, and wants to be identified as a woman, I'm going to call her a woman, regardless of whether she was born looking otherwise. And if I were to find out that my fiance had actually been born male...well, I don't want kids anyway, and I'd want to shake the hand of that surgeon.Why all the hangup? Why is even considering disapproval necessary?

Just as a quick note - many of the doctors sought be transgendered folks are themselves uncomfortable with transgenderism. One of the transwomen I know was refused a pass to progress with her treatment multiple times by multiple doctors because she didn't go sufficiently overboard on the "feminine thing." According to those doctors, you had to dress like a sideshow transvestite, with a dress and clown-level makeup, to qualify as "living as a woman." They wanted her to portray a caricature of a woman, because that's what they expected a transwoman to actually be. The patient preferred to not wear dresses, and still prefers to not wear dresses even after completing her full surgical transition...just as my fiance and many other women don;t always like to wear dresses or wear excessive makeup all the time.What I'm getting at is mainly that a lot of the "odd" behavior observed in transsexuals is simply the result of their treatment in society, even amongst those who are supposed to help them. If your only chance to continue your transition is that you act "over the top" with your femininity...you very well may play the role required of you.

I can only speak for what I've actually seen and heard. And while I occasionally point out incidents where transsexuals have essentially been forced or traumatized into some "oddness," I'm also certain that the incidence of real mental disorders is not too significantly different among any subset of the population, including those who have a mismatched gender identity. That some might not simply have an eccentricity or two and might actually be seriously mentally unstable is not unexpected.As far as I'm concerned, I strongly disapprove of attempts to further stigmatize or demonize transgender people, I think they're just as much people as you or I and deserve the ability to make their own choices even if others don't always understand or agree, I want them to have the option to complete a transition with safe medical treatment if that's their real choice, and that's about the end of my opinion on the matter.I'm not saying that you're actually my opponent on any of those points, I'm just expressing my position on the matter.

In the case of gender identity...The mind defines the person. I couldn't much care less about the fleshy sac of blood and bone that happens to hold that mind, whether it has what sort of genitalia, or what chromosomes it may or may not have. The person is all that matters, and the mind defines the person.If a person identifies as a woman, I will refer to her as a woman, even if she happens to have a penis and a "y" chromosome. I don;t care about those things; they are irrelevant to me. All that matters is how the person honestly identifies.Transgendered individuals are not under the psychotic illusion that their bodies are something other than what they are. They don't hallucinate. They are well aware of how they were born, they don't for a moment believe themselves to be something they are not. There is no dissociation from reality in cases of real gender identity dysphoria. They are not crazy, they are not schizophrenic.Continuing to refer to a transwoman as "he" serves no useful purpose except to hurt her feelings and seriously offend her. It is, quite bluntly, nothing more than an attempt to cause emotional distress. It's on a level of appropriate conduct with using the word "faggot" to refer to a gay person.Transgenderism is not at all like a person who dissociates from reality and believes that he is, in fact, Napoleon Bonaparte, French dictator. Transgenderism is a person who identifies as one gender, but who is aware that his/her body is physically a different gender. Some individuals so afflicted choose to surgically alter the body to outwardly match their inner identity, because the mind is the person, not the fleshy meat-bag that contains it. They do not suddenly believe that reassignment surgery will allow them to bear children or impregnate a woman. They simply want to be able to live their lives according to how they identify themselves in their own mind.And I don't see anything wrong with that.As an aside, I actually did once know a man who preferred to be called "Napoleon Bonaparte." He did, in fact, believe that that was his name. Everyone went along with it.And, of course, it actually was the name on his birth certificate. He was a muscular, 6'+ 250-lb black man. He didn't believe he was short, French, white, or a dictator, and he was perfectly aware of the year. He was one of the nicest bosses I've ever had, and he had an excellent sense of humor regarding his name.

So what does this mean in relation to, say, a transwoman?Will you refer to her as "he" or "she?"
Will you use her feminine name, or insist on using her male birth name? Does it matter if the name has been legally changed?
Is it okay to allow a transwoman to use the women's restroom, or should she be forced to use the men's room?
Should her state-issued ID say that she is male, or female?What defines a person to you, ringo? Are you identified by an accident of your birth? Or are you able to decide for yourself who you are, what you want to be and how to identify yourself?

What if he gets liposuction, and no longer looks fat?