I Don't Care

[I_am_not_mafia]

I would say that not identifying someone the way they identify is not dehumanizing.  

But talking about them in that way and treating them that way is dehumanising.

I wrote a post about this very subject on AD. I don't want to repeat myself so I shall just copy and paste a couple of paragraphs of relevant text here.

If there's one thing that trans people are good for it's to be fodder for other people's idle debates about their very existence. Very basic things that everyone else just takes for granted get debated as if it's some pressing issue when it is not. Like where they can go to the toilet, whether they can have sex without having to reveal their medical history, whether they can get married or adopt, access medical services, where they change their clothes or use the showers, whether they can take part or compete in sport, whether they should be given help from rape crisis centres or women's refuges, or change their name or birth certificate to something that won't lead to them being openly discriminated against, or whether they should be allowed to be put in a prison that won't get them raped on a daily basis. Generally the message is, yes, we'll allow you to exist because we can't actually kill you off, but don't you dare think about actually living because we consider you to be deluded, psychologically ill and pretending to be something that you are not. It is because of this that trans people talk about being erased. Because their very lives and core identities are being negated.

I'm not putting a negative valuation on any body form or psychological association with it.  I don't think trans-women are men in disguise.  Nor do I think they are identical in all regards to most females of the human species.  They are something different than either-- but they are certainly fully human, and I wouldn't want to put them down for expressing themselves however they like.

Thing is that transitioning is not just about matching the external appearance with internal identity. It's also about being socialised in the gender that you feel yourself to be. Because it's not just about reverting the physical effects of testosterone, it's also about rolling back the wrong socialisation and relearning your position in life.

Trans-women are different from other women. But you could also make the same argument about cisgendered women who have undergone FGM, or cisgendered women who have been sexually abused as children or any other radically different childhood. Trans-women were denied the upbringing that cisgendered women generally take for granted and this does affect how they have developed as people. How can you feel comfortable hugging other women and being as equally tactile with them for example if you have had a history of being physically beaten up at school and told from a young age that other girls see you as different? Same way some trans-men are not sure what it means when another man punches them affectionately in the arm. But as I said earlier, this is not exclusively a transgendered problem as it applies to any person who has had their life interrupted by traumatic events.

All humans are a mixture of nature and nurture. There is how our brains have developed in a way that doesn't change. But also our environment which continues to influence how our brain re-wires itself. This is why counselling doesn't get rid of transsexuality, or body dysmorphia, in the same way counselling does not stop someone being autistic or a sociopath (not saying they are the same). But in the same way, a person's environment can either exacerbate or ameliorate how they have naturally developed. So living as the gender that you feel yourself to be, being seen and thus being treated as that, helps shape the rest of your brain to be consistent with the parts that cannot change.

Transsexuals transition to reduce the divergence between their natural development and their nurture. This isn't just physical. This includes repairing the damage from having the wrong upbringing and trying to live the life that is wrong for how you have naturally developed. And you can't do this if everyone is debating whether you should even be living as the person that you really are.

So while the transgendered label is useful to acknowledge that many trans-people have parts of their brains that have developed consistent with how they were assigned at birth. This may be because they are 'intersex' in the brain, but it's also down to having being treated as the wrong sex for so long.

Put it like this bennyboy. If you thought that a trans-women were woman then why would it matter to you that they didn't tell you about their medical history? Do you also care about a cisgendered woman's medical history? Say that they are infertile? Or maybe if they suffer from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and are XY but were assigned female at birth? What about a trans-woman who is XXY because they have Klinefelter syndrome and were therefore assigned male at birth but still have many physical aspects specific to women, such as period pains?

I know for a fact that a straight transphobic man can sleep with a transsexual on repeated occasions and never know. I have seen it with my own eyes. Deny this and you are calling me a liar. I have also personally closely inspected two neo-vaginas and can tell you, unless you are a gynecologist, you would not know the difference. And by closely inspected I mean legs wide open on her back for my personal perusal.

It may be that I'm wrong about this, but I don't think so.  I think the things I mentioned-- the way the smell changes during lubrication, the way the walls of the vagina pulse during orgasm, and so on, cannot be reproduced.  I don't know how many men notice those things, but I'm particularly fascinated by the female body, and I've definitely noticed them.  In fact, if I were unable to stimulate a woman to get those results, I would probably be worried that she found me unattractive.

However, there may be XX women who might not respond the way I expect, either.  I'm perfectly open to the possibility that I'd be less able to tell than I thought.

Well maybe you are one of the few men that would be able to tell the difference. Question is, how would you know? Have you ever slept with a trans-woman? They have pelvic floor muscles as well that can massage the head of a penis. Do you have a multi-pronged penis that can grope around inside? Most men just have a single digit down there that goes in and out of a vagina. And you are assuming that women all function the same way.  There are many women who are anorgasmic you know. I am middle aged now and have never had an orgasm before, whether alone or with someone else. Men generally assume that women have the same sexual responses and will respond immediately to touch, forgetting that they need foreplay. So you can't think that it will be any different for trans-women compared to cisgendered women. It won't be. Because not all women respond the same way.

As for my comments about PC-- I don't agree that all trans people are as you've described: just realizing in due course that due to circumstance, they've ended up with a body that doesn't match their view of themselves, or the gender they were labeled with at birth.  There are plenty of cases where sexual abuse and other factors contribute to an identity crisis, and there are plenty of cases where the psychological stresses aren't only due to external prejudices.  I think pretending this to be so is dangerous.  Different people are different, right?

I am talking about transsexuals, not trans people in general. Transgendered is an umbrella term that includes transsexuals.

At the risk of presuming too much, why did Yonadav transition to female and then back again?  Might it be that there's more to his sense of gender than just aligning external appearances with internal feelings about his identity?

Yonadav is a very rare creature indeed who is unrepresentative of the transsexual community. No one knows what's happened with him, possibly not even him.