That’s the whole point of all of this though.
If gender isn’t hardline biologically based, then it is really no different than having a biased opinion. Because if it isn’t based on biological factors and hormone profiles, that means personal and social factors play a part in the “feelings” involved in “knowing” you are X gender.
Are you sure? Because that sounds suspiciously like a passive-aggressive excuse for not giving me a gift.
Just in case, here’s my brand:
http://static.jmslinks.com/WebService/ProdAdminImage.ashx?id=106
Then yes. ALL THE TIME. The kids and the adults - it’s unfair and almost guilty-making, the degree to which I grow and benefit from what I do.
Eradicate? No. Lessen? Yes. Dialogue is a good starting point.
Honestly, I’ve only been mulling this over for a few weeks.
I can’t see it being a deal at all, except in competitive athletics. Those differences would be at least partly mediated in young TG adolescents who have been seeing an endocrinologist to delay puberty or something like that. As I mentioned before, this is already the law in CA that TG individuals can compete in competitive sports according to gender identity. I think that will become the social norm eventually, and most of the time the TG kid isn’t going to be some elite athlete so nobody will hear much about it.
@ “TG females are as female” I keep coming back the extreme of having a twenty-something Caitlin Jenner transition MTF one year before the Olympics. Lets say your daughter liittle Miss ED is the best female track and field athlete in the world. You’ve watched her sacrifice and train her whole life. Lets say Caitlin comes in and takes all the medals and gets to be on the Wheaties box. Maybe this wouldn’t happen but let’s assume it did. I just can’t picture you saying, “Honey, that Caitlin is just as female as you are. Don’t be a sore looser. And certainly don’t say anything negative about it because everybody will be tweeting about your LGBT insensitivity before the day is out.”
Well, it’s hard to debate the status of TG individuals without sidebars related to the rights of other groups.
And to be honest, I wasn’t thinking of women’s rights in particular above. But now that you’ve brought them up, they allow for a good example re the point I was trying to make vis a vis the implications of research findings concerning gender differences. For example, suppose PP’s assertion that women are significantly less interested in competitive sports turned out to be unassailably true. What would be the implications for Title IX? Should it be jettisoned? Should it be altered to reflect the relative interest in competitive sports as revealed by the research?
Remind me, please, re which position you’re referring to here.
As someone deeply committed to realism and the scientific method, it is my hope to push through biases (including my own) and see the world as it is–to see reality as opposed to perceived reality. Of course, there are several philosophical schools which hold that doing so is impossible–a pipe dream. What’s your take on this? (Your referring not only to Emily, but also to anyone else who would like to chime in.)
You know, this thinking here is why there needs to be a “cause” in the first place.
You’re unwittingly hurting the “movement”.
There are no “group rights” or “women’s right”. There are individual human right inherent in our “creation”.
The only way a group has rights is because each individual in that group has the same rights as every other individual. Women aren’t special in that they have rights men don’t, same with race, religion, age, so on and so forth. That our government, and the vast majority of the population likes to pretend this isn’t the case, doesn’t make it false.
No one and nothing will ever eliminate everything that is subjective, therefore you and everyone else will always see perceived reality.
Not to mention the biological factors that alter realty, because you experience reality through your senses, which are changed, sometimes in an instant, by your own body.
Hunters the world over will tell you they don’t hear the shot. Almost to the man, everyone has said the same that I’ve asked. It’s pretty obvious that in “reality” the shot was very loud, and it’s also reality that their ears stopped working.
It’s a fairly well proven thing that stress changes the way your body functions. Hence part of the reason PTSD is such a big deal and complex PTSD so, well, debilitating. When you are in a state of hyper valiance 24/7 the reality in your world, is very much real, to you, but not to others. Which really isn’t all that different than the whole TG thing. Which leads me to say I’m surprised that you think it’s possible to remove bias from the way we see the world.
Because if being TG is “real” then it is based, at least in part, on subjective reality.
The anger would stem from the apparent fact that Caitlyn had ‘gamed the system’–ie, that she waited until the last possible moment to transition in order to gain a competitive advantage. It would be akin to a cis-gendered girl with gigantism refusing to have her pituitary adenoma removed until she was 6’8", in order to better allow her to dominate volleyball and/or basketball.
What are you considering racism? What about people who are otherwise civic-minded, peaceful, working, law-abiding, and treat everyone they come across on a daily basis respectfully, but… run their lives with race being a significant factor. That is, despite the aforementioned characteristics and behavior, they still choose mates of the same race, live in towns that are pretty much racially homogeneous, befriend those of the same race… AND… might even make irreverent remarks about others behind closed doors. Are these people racist? How can we tell if they are? And if we can’t tell if millions of people are racist or not, then how do we lessen racism. Same goes for sexism.
Bigotry is intolerance to other peoples’ opinions. This is not correctable for the most part.
All true. But the term women’s rights was never intended to denote or connote ‘special rights for women;’ rather, it referred to aspects of life wherein, for reasons either de jure or de facto, the rights of women lagged behind those of men. The goal of the mainstream women’s rights movement was always and simply to bring the rights of women into alignment with those enjoyed by men.
Did dialogue work in Yugoslavia? Did it work for Hutus and Tutsis? Germans and Poles? Did it work for Sunnis and Shia? In these examples, these were even people of the same race! I can go on, but I don’t want to be a nuisance with endless grilling. But such questions do reveal the idea for a utopia.
You’re probably right. But unless you’re prepared to deny the very existence of a ‘true’ reality (ie, adopt an anti-realist position), do you not agree that we can expect (or at least hope) to make progress toward seeing reality?
If they believe their race is superior, then by definition they are a racist.
I would venture that the proportion of Americans who hold racist beliefs has vastly decreased over the last, say, 100 years. Would you agree?
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So now we are left with changing people’s thoughts, an undoable task!
I really, really want to stay away from sarcasm, but the eggs cracked in the effort to make a utopian omelet in all cases were quite bloody, for real! That is, along with world changers forcing people into certain situations, millions of people were persecuted and murdered or otherwise had their lives made miserable! No one’s quotes helped them.
Do I believe in a true reality? Yes
I’m just not sure us humans will be able to capture it in any meaningful sense.
Sure I hope we make progress, but the issue is progress means different things to different people, and what is true is also different.
Such as if I hold two apples in one hand, and two in the other, true reality as far as we can tell, dictates that when I put them down in front of me, there will be four apples in a pile. It’s pretty objective. We can see them, touch them, etc. But if I cut each into ten slices, and give those slices to ten people, you’re going to have ten different opinions on how they each taste. It’s objective that they have a taste (more accurately we have a biological function that signals what we call taste in our brain).
So is it that each one of our taste buds are different, each of your brains interpret the same signals from the buds different or that we each prefer different signals from our buds?
I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) that there are studies that show the color I call red, and the color you call red aren’t the same color. As in what I see and call red is actually what you see when you think blue, but we’re all trained to call that one certain color we see as red. Even though we see different colors. I’m partially color blind, I know I don’t see the same as everyone else.
Forgive my bluntness, but that is an absurd assertion. People’s thoughts, opinions, beliefs, etc, change all the time. Now, if your point is thoughts cannot be changed on command, or that their change cannot be legislated, then of course you are correct. But no one on this thread has suggested otherwise.
Edited to point out that you haven’t answered my question, and to say I hope you will elect to do so.