10 ms·

> any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any

by scubbo 5y ago

> any claim to be male, female, non-binary or whatever must be accepted at face value. And that the person who is making the claim should have the right to any treatment that they wish, up to and including surgery. I can understand some caution around the latter part of this quote, given how traumatic, invasive, and costly surgery can be. It is a defensible and reasonable position that there should be _some_ barrier-to-entry to such major decisions (especially for children), even while there's also a simultaneous reasonable concern that such barriers will be used to prevent access to folks who genuinely do need, want, and would benefit from it. But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? Even the position of "they are confused" or "this is a phase that will pass" or "they have been pressured into that belief" doesn't hold water - until that phase passes, that person's gender, their self-image, _is_ whatever that phase dictates. That doesn't make the current situation any less true. If you told someone "I like broccoli" and they responded "that's just a phase, you'll grow out of liking broccoli soon", your response would, presumably be "...so? I like broccoli _now_, what does your guess about the future have anything to do with it?" Does your position on "accepting gender at face value" change if the statement "I am male" is replaced with "I see myself as male"? Are you more comfortable accepting the fact that someone's self-image can change over time, rather than imagining that gender is some abstract immutable inherent property?

jhrmnn 5y ago
I think your last paragraph hints at the root cause. Many people simply have a trouble seeing gender purely as self-image since it has originated from sex, which is objective. And this development is quite recent.
- lordCarbonFiber 5y ago
  Two things here. 1. Sex isn't nearly as objective as you're making it out to be. It's a bimodal spectrum of correlated traits; meaning there isn't a single marker you can choose to separate everyone into neat buckets that wouldn't misclassify some cis people (and jeez yall get mad when you get misgendered). [0] 2. None of this is even remotely new, Im not sure where you're getting that impression from. Germany had an entire institute dedicated to studying trans people at the turn of the 20th century [1]. I'd agree that for a variety of (usually discriminatory and religious) reasons it hasn't been well studied, but trans people certainly arent new. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2470289718803639 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/24702897188036... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
  - orand 5y ago
    Humans can only produce two different types of gametes (sperm or egg), and never both in the same body. And it’s never a “spectrum” with “speg” or “sperg” variants.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
      Many people are infertile and make neither. Surely, if we're trying to group people by biological sex, we'd use chromosomes and ternary logic: male / female / intersex.
  - jhrmnn 5y ago
    1. I didn’t say that sex is binary, just that it’s objective. You’re male, female, or intersex, and this is decided by objective facts. Gender is not. 2. Transgender is not new. But the broader public debate about the distinction between sex and gender is recent.
    - lordCarbonFiber 5y ago
      Two limits with a large space of indeterminate in between sounds an awful lot like an analogue signal. A system that classifies as A, B, other: grab bag of unrelated conditions isn't particularly useful in a societal nor medical context (and why it isn't used anywhere). You can objectively measure certain karyotypes, measure how someone's body reacts to hormones (and what hormones they produce), how that makes them feel, what that body can then do reproductively, (almost like a spectrum of correlated traits) but not make nice neat boxes that fits in the reproduction section of the text book you had in the 6th grade. By that measure, gender is just as "objective". Ask a person what gender they are, exactly 1 measurement required boom you're done (and with better accuracy than trying to measure anything else to boot). Your specific exposure to the public "debate" is recent, sure. But just because you hadn't heard of it before the heritage foundation spent millions of dollars to insure you did didn't mean it wasn't happening.
  - johnjj257 5y ago
    This is full of false information about sex, it is most certainly NOT just a spectrum of traits that is one shallow dimension that you focused on for the benfit of your agenda and the least scientific approach. You won't easily find support for that on hacker news =)
meetups323 5y ago
The point is clearly that we should discourage folks from undertaking any permanent life alterations while they're still in the "it could be just a phase" stage. To use your analogy, we're dissuading the person from tattooing "I hate broccoli" on them until they've reached age 18 or whatever. Nobody is saying we should deny them their self-image outright.
- freemint 5y ago
  While wise it ignores the fact that the intervention can save lives which would be ended by 18 years of age. Would you be for puberty blockers so that puberty can be delayed until 18 and automatic sex transformations be paused until the person can make a decision which way they want to go?
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    The current mental problems of young people will not be solved with puberty blockers.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    This might come off sounding a little rough, but as someone who had one sibling die of overdose and another by suicide, I don't think teenagers are the best stewards of their own bodies or sanity. Sometimes allowing them to make their own decisions about who they're going to be friends with or what they're going to do with their bodies ends up losing a life. I can see how lives might be saved by being permissive to them having what they want, when they want it, but I've also seen lives lost that way. So I find the "save lives" argument a little disingenuous or misinformed. An open conversation and a working plan for what they want to do later in life is a good thing. I'm not opposed to hormone therapy as an interim measure. But I'm opposed to catering to teenage whims that aren't thought through very well, or discussed well, or which are driven by a desire to be part of a popular group, because I've seen the results. Confusion and self-hate and self-destruction can happen as a result of not being able to express yourself, but they can also happen as a result of too much unrestrained emancipation for a teenager, who doesn't understand the consequences. I'm not even speaking about trans issues here, just about teenage decisions in general. They're not fully rational people. I wasn't, either.
btilly 5y ago
But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? How do you define denying the first part? According to my child's world view, I need to ask them every day what their pronouns are today. And any accidental slip-ups on any adult's part are a demonstration of transphobia, which justifies a raised voice and lecture. While I'm perfectly OK with making an attempt to treat people as they wish to be treated, at what point does the inconvenience and stress that your constant demands make on others become an unreasonable ask of them? (Which is a question that every parent of teenagers winds up asking at some point, for some reason...)
- samat 5y ago
  Really sorry about the stress of raising a teenager!
- ithkuil 5y ago
  Teenager brains have a outstanding circuitry designed at discovering what infuriates their parents (and the generation of their parents) and just hammer on it, whatever that thing is.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - parineum 5y ago
    I was going to say, having been a teenager, this sounds an awful lot like the kind of thing I'd pull. Not exactly to make my parents upset but them being upset was an indication of success. I honestly don't know what my real end goals were but I'm sure it's at least partially understood by professionals.
  - indemnity 5y ago
    In my experience this skill is present much earlier, but honed to precision in the teens when they are smarter than they ought to be.
- 5y ago
exporectomy 5y ago
> How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? Because people lie about themselves all the time. Especially teenagers. We don't take every claim made by teenagers about their feeling as true on face value. We know they're practicing how to deceive people as part of growing up.
pchristensen 5y ago
The concepts of "man" and "woman" are already doing a lot of work in language, society, law, etc. Redefining those terms would cause/is causing a lot of upheaval. Think of the concepts of "citizen", "resident", "immigrant", "ex-pat", "DREAMer", etc - all terms related to where someone lives and what set of laws applies to them. Regardless of how the person feels, the label isn't just for their own sake. Someone can be a citizen and an immigrant if they are naturalized, saying someone is a resident implies (but not definitely) that they are not a citizen, ex-pats are assumed to be temporarily in the place where they reside. Labelling trans women as women is a lossy translation that ignores a lot of societal edge cases.
- apocolyps6 5y ago
  Do you think that "labeling" black women as women is similarly lossy? Or female cancer survivors to pick another example
  - pchristensen 5y ago
    I think for those two examples you listed, the modifier is orthogonal. While "black" or "cancer survivor" tell me more about them as a person, they don't help understand gender/sex. Gender and sex, or the residency words I listed, provide different information about the same attribute. Saying someone is a cancer surviving resident doesn't add anything to my knowledge of their medical history or which laws apply to them, but resident vs ex-pat tells me a lot.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - likeclockwork 5y ago
    Where do you think black babies come from? Do you not think black people are human?
fxtentacle 5y ago
My <2 year old can already convincingly fake an accident if he believes that doing so will lead to tasty food. I can imagine thousands of reasons why teenagers would lie, and maybe they'll come up with new pronouns just to annoy you. Because that's what kids do, they constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior and the limits of your patience. That said, I agree with you that people can choose what gender they feel like and others should accept it as an opinion. But trying to force others to change their behavior to accommodate your opinion very quickly becomes unreasonable. So gender is fine, but pronouns are already a slippery slope. Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked? It's a tradeoff between people living out their believes and the inconvenience that this causes for others.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  > Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked? No, I don't. Living out that type of switch for any length of time is an enormous investment, which will change the way your peers view you forever. It is worthwhile if you're actually trans, but anyone else would be so much better off just browsing the internet. That said, I also think single-gender spaces are in need of an re-think. Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender can't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?
  - grips 5y ago
    > Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender won't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point? Same sex locker rooms don't only assume people of same gender are not attracted to each other, but also that women are disproportionally exposed to potential sexual abuse from men than the other way around. Protecting women from men specifically is very central to the idea.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? A lot of us remember similar mistakes from their own teenage years. I had a short phase where I thought I was gay, because my classmates were starting to date girls but I had a close guy friend and wasn't very interested in girls. Then I looked it up, found some resources clearly explaining that's not what being gay is, and walked away more secure in my identity. If someone had told me that I couldn't be wrong, because nobody knows how I feel better than I do, I would probably have come out and then been confused and insecure for years.
noduerme 5y ago
Sure, you are what you are __now__, but as a teenager that is going through radical changes. That's why you can't even get a tattoo in the US until you turn 18. In some states, not even with parental permission. Because it's irreversible. The whole trouble with reassignment surgery for minors is precisely due to the fact that who they are today is not who they will be as adults. Of course people should be treated as they want to be treated __now__, but society recognizes that adolescents are not capable of seeing far enough ahead to adulthood to be entrusted with making certain kinds of permanent, life-altering decisions. There's no debate I'm aware of about lowering the age for getting a tattoo, or drinking, or acting in porn, or other things which are fine for adults, but which we don't permit 12 year olds to do.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? Some people claim to be cats. The argument is fairly leaking too. You might argue it is different for gender and to a degree that is true. Doesn't But this argument is pretty leaking too.

by scubbo 5y ago

jhrmnn 5y ago

I think your last paragraph hints at the root cause. Many people simply have a trouble seeing gender purely as self-image since it has originated from sex, which is objective. And this development is quite recent.

lordCarbonFiber 5y ago
Two things here. 1. Sex isn't nearly as objective as you're making it out to be. It's a bimodal spectrum of correlated traits; meaning there isn't a single marker you can choose to separate everyone into neat buckets that wouldn't misclassify some cis people (and jeez yall get mad when you get misgendered). [0] 2. None of this is even remotely new, Im not sure where you're getting that impression from. Germany had an entire institute dedicated to studying trans people at the turn of the 20th century [1]. I'd agree that for a variety of (usually discriminatory and religious) reasons it hasn't been well studied, but trans people certainly arent new. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2470289718803639 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/24702897188036... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
- orand 5y ago
  Humans can only produce two different types of gametes (sperm or egg), and never both in the same body. And it’s never a “spectrum” with “speg” or “sperg” variants.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    Many people are infertile and make neither. Surely, if we're trying to group people by biological sex, we'd use chromosomes and ternary logic: male / female / intersex.
- jhrmnn 5y ago
  1. I didn’t say that sex is binary, just that it’s objective. You’re male, female, or intersex, and this is decided by objective facts. Gender is not. 2. Transgender is not new. But the broader public debate about the distinction between sex and gender is recent.
  - lordCarbonFiber 5y ago
    Two limits with a large space of indeterminate in between sounds an awful lot like an analogue signal. A system that classifies as A, B, other: grab bag of unrelated conditions isn't particularly useful in a societal nor medical context (and why it isn't used anywhere). You can objectively measure certain karyotypes, measure how someone's body reacts to hormones (and what hormones they produce), how that makes them feel, what that body can then do reproductively, (almost like a spectrum of correlated traits) but not make nice neat boxes that fits in the reproduction section of the text book you had in the 6th grade. By that measure, gender is just as "objective". Ask a person what gender they are, exactly 1 measurement required boom you're done (and with better accuracy than trying to measure anything else to boot). Your specific exposure to the public "debate" is recent, sure. But just because you hadn't heard of it before the heritage foundation spent millions of dollars to insure you did didn't mean it wasn't happening.
- johnjj257 5y ago
  This is full of false information about sex, it is most certainly NOT just a spectrum of traits that is one shallow dimension that you focused on for the benfit of your agenda and the least scientific approach. You won't easily find support for that on hacker news =)

meetups323 5y ago

The point is clearly that we should discourage folks from undertaking any permanent life alterations while they're still in the "it could be just a phase" stage. To use your analogy, we're dissuading the person from tattooing "I hate broccoli" on them until they've reached age 18 or whatever. Nobody is saying we should deny them their self-image outright.

freemint 5y ago
While wise it ignores the fact that the intervention can save lives which would be ended by 18 years of age. Would you be for puberty blockers so that puberty can be delayed until 18 and automatic sex transformations be paused until the person can make a decision which way they want to go?
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  The current mental problems of young people will not be solved with puberty blockers.
- noduerme 5y ago
  This might come off sounding a little rough, but as someone who had one sibling die of overdose and another by suicide, I don't think teenagers are the best stewards of their own bodies or sanity. Sometimes allowing them to make their own decisions about who they're going to be friends with or what they're going to do with their bodies ends up losing a life. I can see how lives might be saved by being permissive to them having what they want, when they want it, but I've also seen lives lost that way. So I find the "save lives" argument a little disingenuous or misinformed. An open conversation and a working plan for what they want to do later in life is a good thing. I'm not opposed to hormone therapy as an interim measure. But I'm opposed to catering to teenage whims that aren't thought through very well, or discussed well, or which are driven by a desire to be part of a popular group, because I've seen the results. Confusion and self-hate and self-destruction can happen as a result of not being able to express yourself, but they can also happen as a result of too much unrestrained emancipation for a teenager, who doesn't understand the consequences. I'm not even speaking about trans issues here, just about teenage decisions in general. They're not fully rational people. I wasn't, either.

btilly 5y ago

But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? How do you define denying the first part? According to my child's world view, I need to ask them every day what their pronouns are today. And any accidental slip-ups on any adult's part are a demonstration of transphobia, which justifies a raised voice and lecture. While I'm perfectly OK with making an attempt to treat people as they wish to be treated, at what point does the inconvenience and stress that your constant demands make on others become an unreasonable ask of them? (Which is a question that every parent of teenagers winds up asking at some point, for some reason...)

samat 5y ago
Really sorry about the stress of raising a teenager!
ithkuil 5y ago
Teenager brains have a outstanding circuitry designed at discovering what infuriates their parents (and the generation of their parents) and just hammer on it, whatever that thing is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- parineum 5y ago
  I was going to say, having been a teenager, this sounds an awful lot like the kind of thing I'd pull. Not exactly to make my parents upset but them being upset was an indication of success. I honestly don't know what my real end goals were but I'm sure it's at least partially understood by professionals.
- indemnity 5y ago
  In my experience this skill is present much earlier, but honed to precision in the teens when they are smarter than they ought to be.
5y ago

exporectomy 5y ago

> How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? Because people lie about themselves all the time. Especially teenagers. We don't take every claim made by teenagers about their feeling as true on face value. We know they're practicing how to deceive people as part of growing up.

pchristensen 5y ago

The concepts of "man" and "woman" are already doing a lot of work in language, society, law, etc. Redefining those terms would cause/is causing a lot of upheaval. Think of the concepts of "citizen", "resident", "immigrant", "ex-pat", "DREAMer", etc - all terms related to where someone lives and what set of laws applies to them. Regardless of how the person feels, the label isn't just for their own sake. Someone can be a citizen and an immigrant if they are naturalized, saying someone is a resident implies (but not definitely) that they are not a citizen, ex-pats are assumed to be temporarily in the place where they reside. Labelling trans women as women is a lossy translation that ignores a lot of societal edge cases.

apocolyps6 5y ago
Do you think that "labeling" black women as women is similarly lossy? Or female cancer survivors to pick another example
- pchristensen 5y ago
  I think for those two examples you listed, the modifier is orthogonal. While "black" or "cancer survivor" tell me more about them as a person, they don't help understand gender/sex. Gender and sex, or the residency words I listed, provide different information about the same attribute. Saying someone is a cancer surviving resident doesn't add anything to my knowledge of their medical history or which laws apply to them, but resident vs ex-pat tells me a lot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- likeclockwork 5y ago
  Where do you think black babies come from? Do you not think black people are human?

fxtentacle 5y ago

My <2 year old can already convincingly fake an accident if he believes that doing so will lead to tasty food. I can imagine thousands of reasons why teenagers would lie, and maybe they'll come up with new pronouns just to annoy you. Because that's what kids do, they constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior and the limits of your patience. That said, I agree with you that people can choose what gender they feel like and others should accept it as an opinion. But trying to force others to change their behavior to accommodate your opinion very quickly becomes unreasonable. So gender is fine, but pronouns are already a slippery slope. Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked? It's a tradeoff between people living out their believes and the inconvenience that this causes for others.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> Do you believe a horny teenage guy would be willing to lie and say he identifies as female, if that means he gets to see all of his female classmates naked? No, I don't. Living out that type of switch for any length of time is an enormous investment, which will change the way your peers view you forever. It is worthwhile if you're actually trans, but anyone else would be so much better off just browsing the internet. That said, I also think single-gender spaces are in need of an re-think. Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender can't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point?
- grips 5y ago
  > Same-sex locker rooms inherently assume that people of the same gender won't be attracted to one another, which is simply not the case. So what's the point? Same sex locker rooms don't only assume people of same gender are not attracted to each other, but also that women are disproportionally exposed to potential sexual abuse from men than the other way around. Protecting women from men specifically is very central to the idea.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? How could anyone contradict an individual who states their own gender - on what grounds can you claim to know how someone feels about themselves better than they themself do? A lot of us remember similar mistakes from their own teenage years. I had a short phase where I thought I was gay, because my classmates were starting to date girls but I had a close guy friend and wasn't very interested in girls. Then I looked it up, found some resources clearly explaining that's not what being gay is, and walked away more secure in my identity. If someone had told me that I couldn't be wrong, because nobody knows how I feel better than I do, I would probably have come out and then been confused and insecure for years.

noduerme 5y ago

Sure, you are what you are __now__, but as a teenager that is going through radical changes. That's why you can't even get a tattoo in the US until you turn 18. In some states, not even with parental permission. Because it's irreversible. The whole trouble with reassignment surgery for minors is precisely due to the fact that who they are today is not who they will be as adults. Of course people should be treated as they want to be treated __now__, but society recognizes that adolescents are not capable of seeing far enough ahead to adulthood to be entrusted with making certain kinds of permanent, life-altering decisions. There's no debate I'm aware of about lowering the age for getting a tattoo, or drinking, or acting in porn, or other things which are fine for adults, but which we don't permit 12 year olds to do.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> But how can anyone _possibly_ deny the first part? Some people claim to be cats. The argument is fairly leaking too. You might argue it is different for gender and to a degree that is true. Doesn't But this argument is pretty leaking too.