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Notes -
(1) Yes.
(2) Yes.
(3) Yes, with the caveat:
This works similarly to anti-discrimination law. You're allowed to refuse to date any individual, but you aren't allowed to refuse to date people because they're transgender (or, more broadly, because you do not accept their gender identity). You can express preferences based on gender identity, and you can sometimes get away with expressing preferences based on physical traits, but you can't express preferences based on transgender status or things that obviously correlate with it (like "gender assigned at birth").
(You can't even express preferences in favor of them, that's called being a "chaser".)
Ok, thanks for responding again.
My next question is this:
What's the evidence that "gender" exists in the way you have defined it? Is there any evidence other than self-reporting?
Speaking as a very pro-trans person: I don't especially believe that "gender" "exists" in some objective sense separate from subjective preferences - nor that it needs to.
I think it might help you understand my perspective if we look at another marker of identity with huge emotional significance to individuals, but very little biological basis if any: names. If an individual whose legal name is William would prefer to be known as Bill or Tex or Archimedes, it's clearly the correct thing to do to call him by his chosen name. In some technical contexts it might be necessary to bear in mind that the name on his ID papers is "William", but it would be dickish and bizarre to chime in whenever he says "Hi, my name's Tex" and go "ackshually, your name is William; either you're lying or you're delusional". If one of Tex's coworkers keeps passive-aggressively calling Tex "William" no matter how many times he explains that he doesn't like hearing that stuffy-sounding name that doesn't feel like it reflects him as a person, that coworker would clearly be engaged in a kind of low-grade psychological harassment.
Social transition, to my way of thinking, works very much like this, except in addition to a "William" who would rather be an "Alice", it's a "Mr" who would prefer to be called a "Miss", a "he" who would prefer to be called a "she". It is clearly, I feel, the nice, the civil, the moral thing to do to respect that person's wishes; and it doesn't require anyone to be confused about what William/Alice has got in his/her pants. She can be a conversational "she" and a medical "he" in the same way that the first guy was a conversational "Bill" but a legal "William". It's just that, unless you're a doctor/an IRS employee, the underlying technicalities of Tex or Alice's identities are none of your business. If a guy tells you "I'm Tex" it's none of your fucking business whether it says "Tex" or "William" on his driving license, outside a few specific technical circumstances; likewise if someone tells you "I'm a woman" then it shouldn't be any concern of yours what she looks like naked, unless you happen to be a doctor, or a prospective date. To put it another way, under normal circumstances, the only relevance that the sex of a random person has to you, whatsoever, is by what titles and pronouns it would be polite to address that person; how you should refer to them if you don't want them to feel insulted or misrepresented. So if that person dislikes the pronouns and titles that their biological sex would normally entail, sex loses relevance altogether, trumped by self-identification.
And a similar analogy can be devised for medical transition. Let's say you like to shave your chin but keep a mustache. Is there some specific factor in your brain that makes you a Person Whose Inner Identity Is A Mustache Guy? Probably not. It's besides the point. It would still be dickish of someone to say "biology says the male Homo sapiens is meant to have hair all over his face, you're not allowed to shave your chin", or indeed "it's better for society if grooming norms are cohesive, shave that mustache as well or you're a hippie freak". How you want to style your facial hair-growths is your business; if it's emotionally important to you to present the face of a Mustache Guy to society, and you don't feel like yourself with a lumberjack beard or a full shave, then it would be dictatorial of society to force you to do otherwise; it would be rude and invasive of any private third party to tell you how they think you ought to be styling your body.
"Gender identity" is just a kludgy concept lumping together a lot of disparate preferences, positive and negative; and even when two trans people share a preference, they might have come to it for completely different reasons (much as you may like to shave your beard because you think a full beard makes you look like some kind of caveman, while I like to shave my beard because I don't like how sweaty and itchy it makes my neck). But all those preferences, individually, should be valid in any free, humane society.
A name doesn't claim to be a statement of fact about anything except an arbitrary designation. A term about sex does.
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There have been relatively low-quality MRI studies that attempt to draw physical evidence of the concept of gender identity, but mostly it is by definition a self-reported trait, so the fact that people are self-reporting it is the evidence.
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
If you would feel negatively about this change, this demonstrates that you have an innate gender identity, and it's at least possible to imagine your body not being aligned with that identity. It just so happens that your body happens to be aligned with your gender identity. Lucky you!
If you would genuinely feel ambivalent (are you sure you're not repressing anything?), then... okay, that probably exists and is a valid category of gender identity. But lots of other people do have strong feelings about that, and gender ideology is the most inclusive way to support those people.
Ok, thank you. So it seems there is nothing to distinguish trans people from those who self-report as being Jesus; or who self-report as having been abducted by aliens; or who self-report as having been spoken to directly by some deity; etc. Agreed?
I think this argument proves too much. If I woke up tomorrow morning and found that I had been transformed into a man who looked pretty much like Henry Cavil and was 25 years old, I would be pretty happy about the change. That doesn't say anything about my innate identity as a short mediocre-looking man in his 50s with graying hair, though.
I think the assumption here would be that there are people who would basically go crazy and try to tear their skin off every time they looked in a mirror and saw Henry Cavil. Like, the fact that you would be personally fine with it is not necessarily a generally true fact about how identity works.
(Sadly, we'll have to wait until the singularity to properly test this.)
There may be people like this, but I'm not. (But I'll make it even easier. If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was transformed into a 25 year old version of myself, I'd be delighted. ) This single counter example disproves the entire generalization.
Unless of course, what transgender really means is that the person desires to be the other gender. Which I strongly suspect is pretty close to the truth.
Nobody in this thread is saying it's universally true though. In fact lots of people, me included in the comment you're replying to, say that it isn't.
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These other claims all, to varying degrees, depend on external facts to be true. For example by asserting you've been abducted by aliens, you're asserting that aliens exist.
Gender ideology views gender claims as being more similar to someone saying "I had a dream about aliens last night." If you're talking to some weirdo who's never had a dream before, you may need to convince them that it's possible, but to most people it's obvious that the claim is both plausible and not really possible to disprove.
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be Jesus?
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be black?
What external facts need to be true in order for a person to be a cat?
To be Jesus: Jesus needs to actually be the religious figure he is depicted as in the Bible. (Or, I guess it's possible that Jesus was just an ordinary guy, but reincarnation is possible more generally.)
To be Black: The definition is usually something like "My ancestors were born in Africa [during some specific time period]", but it is more difficult to nail down, and different people often mean slightly different things.
To be a cat: Some people do accept that you can be a cat in the same purely-internal-identity way that you can be a woman. Other people would draw a line based on genetics or physiology in a way that's acceptable to do for species but not gender.
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That thought experiment seems to prove to much - would you accept transracialism if people would be happier transformed into a different race? Let alone other identity features such as age, nationality, weight, sexuality, etc.
Maybe I’m reaching a bit, but if you think about it, progressives do support an equivalent of trans “ethnicicity”, in the form of immigration!
In this case “biological sex” would map to race, which is unchangeable, but gender would map to nationality. For a conservative, a German is someone that’s born German, but leftists say that a Middle Eastern immigrant that gets German citizenship should count too.
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Sexuality is definitely another one of those unobservable things that you have to take people's word on.
On the other hand, weight is straightforwardly an observable physical trait, and age is a straightforward historical claim (the date on which you were born). Race and nationality are social constructs that are hard to pin down, but generally people agree that they involve some combination of physical and historical traits.
"Racial identity" does exist, but it is not considered very useful most of the time; it's mainly used as a tiebreaker when the physical/historical facts don't fit nearly into the categories. A lot of gender ideology boils down to a values claim that "gender identity" is a much more important concept that everyone should care about.
There are many people who wish they could change their sexuality magically - but does that mean they "really" are of the desired sexuality rather than the one that corresponds to how they are attracted?
You say that race and nationality incorporate physical traits. Are you claiming that gender does not?
I will say that one of the main things that broke me off of accepting transgender perspectives was how credulously accepting advocates are of transgender self reporting while being completely unaccepting of the idea of transracialism (e.g. Dolezal). Race is, to me reckoning, far more socially determined than gender is, but the political left sees it as immutable and sacred.
Yes. Gender ideology axiomatically defines "gender" as not requiring any physical traits. Some physical traits are typical of some genders, but they're not a requirement.
(FWIW I think nationality is often primarily a historical question, along the lines of "what country were you born in" or "what country has granted you citizenship", which is also something that "gender" is defined as not being.)
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Yeah, I made a similar point before I saw this comment. But now that I think about it, the argument is rather telling. Because I strongly suspect that most, perhaps all, trans identifying men are simply men who really enjoy the fantasy of being a woman.
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