Transgendered children

[SteelCurtain]

She'll be smaller in stature. But she'd go through puberty just the same. And will no ill effects on her reproductive ability.

[Neo-Scholastic]

No one is born the wrong sex. You're either XX or XY. A person's sex is a fixed biological fact. Sure you can change the outward appearance by surgery. And you can artificially suppress or stimulate the natural expression of their biology but in the end you remain the sex you were born. So-called sex change measures just disguise the reality. Gender is a social construct. So the "solution" for the transgendered is to overcome the approved cultural roles of femininity and masculinity society forces on us all.

Once you start talking about being one sex in the wrong body it starts to get metaphysical very fast. I doubt any atheist really wants to go there no matter how politically correct they are.

[rexbeccarox]

Gosh thanks, Doctor Wooters. Your unbacked assertions have made everything so clear!

[Napoléon]

You know what, I actually agree with Wooters (don't hate me).

Sex is fixed. You're born a boy or a girl. Who can really deny this? I am in disagreement when people are allowed to change their birth certificates to change the sex that they are born as. I think this is actually really wrong. I do understand how people can grow up, have a sex change and then have issues legally (like marriage etc.). But there should be another way around it.

You're essentially changing your personal history to suit your own preferences. I don't think this is all that right. That's just my opinion though. What is really of concern is gender. Gender is different to sex is it not?

Gender means more about what a person thinks inside their head. At least that's my understanding of it. Sex is something you're born with. I agree it can be changed medically later in life, but if you're born a man, you're always born a man IMHO.

[Pizza]

Gosh thanks, Doctor Wooters. Your unbacked assertions have made everything so clear!

He doesn't even understand the distinction in terms between gender and sex. I guess this to be expected since he lives in medieval Europe times.

[Napoléon]

Gosh thanks, Doctor Wooters. Your unbacked assertions have made everything so clear!

He doesn't even understand the distinction in terms between gender and sex. I guess this to be expected since he lives in medieval Europe times.

How do you define it then?

[Pizza]

He doesn't even understand the distinction in terms between gender and sex. I guess this to be expected since he lives in medieval Europe times.

How do you define it then?

Sex is the biological. Gender is the expression. You're man if you express yourself as such.
What if you went to the doctor and he said you have a rare condition in which you have a penis and etc but have the chromosome XX? Are you a woman?

[SteelCurtain]

Opinions are like assholes, Chad.

Meantime, I'll bring some facts to the table.

There are major differences between the brains of males and females. And not just size. The neural pathways are different, and there are also little pockets of white matter that are different. Guess what? We can look at brains now. While they're in your head!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20...T2HvSG4TIU

They found significant differences between male and female brains in four regions of white matter – and the female-to-male transsexual people had white matter in these regions that resembled a male brain (Journal of Psychiatric Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2010.05.006). "It's the first time it has been shown that the brains of female-to-male transsexual people are masculinised," Guillamon says.

In a separate study, the team used the same technique to compare white matter in 18 male-to-female transsexual people with that in 19 males and 19 females. Surprisingly, in each transsexual person's brain the structure of the white matter in the four regions was halfway between that of the males and females (Journal of Psychiatric Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2010.11.007).

And it doesn't just stop there. The neural pathways are markedly different as well, with female to male transgendered people having neural pathways that more closely resemble males, and vice versa.
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content...hu194.full

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Figure 1.
Average structural connectivity for female controls, female-to-male transsexuals, male controls, and male-to-female transsexuals for full (i.e., unthresholded connectivity matrices). Increased LCW was found in male-to-female transsexualsa,b,c between right subcortical (subc.)/limbic and left subcortical/limbic lobes (red, top). Decreased LCW was found in female-to-male transsexualsa,c,d between right subcortical/limbic and right temporal (temp.) lobes. Line thickness indicates connectivity weighting, whereas only connections with weights of >0.001 are shown (arbitrary choice to remove spurious connections as probabilistic tractography represents the robustness of the modeled tracts against noise). Nodes represent region of interest centers for frontal (green), temporal (blue), parietal (cyan), occipital (magenta), and limbic/subcortical brain regions (yellow). Characters indicate significant differences as compared with female controls (a), female-to-male transsexuals (b), male controls ©, or male-to-female transsexuals (d), see Table 1 for details. Axial images are in radiological view (i.e., left image side is right hemisphere).

Figure 2.
Average structural connectivity for female controls (FC, blue), female-to-male transsexuals (FtM, red), male controls (MC, green), and male-to-female transsexuals (MtF, black) for sparse connectivity matrices thresholded between 10 and 50% network density. Small-worldness was not significantly different between groups (A). In contrast, HCR of right subcortical/limbic connections separated patients from controls (B). The decreased HCR in transsexuals was caused by increased LCW in MtF © and decreased LCW in FtM (D). Values show mean ± standard error. See Table 1 for detailed statistics.

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But none of that matters, does it, Chad? Because your gut tells you *yuck* and that's all you need to know.

[Tiberius]

Sex is fixed. You're born a boy or a girl. Who can really deny this?

Nobody is denying this. People who undergo sex change operations aren't in denial about that fact that they were born a boy or a girl; it's the fact that they were born a boy but feel that they are a girl (or vice versa). The sex change operation is to make their outward appearance match how they feel.

I am in disagreement when people are allowed to change their birth certificates to change the sex that they are born as. I think this is actually really wrong. I do understand how people can grow up, have a sex change and then have issues legally (like marriage etc.). But there should be another way around it.

You're essentially changing your personal history to suit your own preferences. I don't think this is all that right. That's just my opinion though. What is really of concern is gender. Gender is different to sex is it not?

It's not changing your personal history to suit your own preferences, as should be obvious by the fact that I can't go and change my own sex on my birth certificate without first having a sex change. You can only change that detail (as far as I'm aware) if you first actually change your sex, so it's nothing to do with personal preference, and everything to do with anatomy.

In a sense it's changing "history" because yes the person wasn't born with the sex they currently are, but that brings me on nicely to my next point, which is that birth certificates aren't just used as a document proving you were born; they are used as documents which carry basic information about the person, such as your name, eye color, etc. A birth certificate is a valid form of identity in a number of situations, and having invalid information on it doesn't make sense from a identification point of view.

In addition, if you change your name legally, in most places you can request that your birth certificate is updated for precisely these reasons. If you can change your birth name, you should be able to change your birth sex (especially since changing your name is far far easier to do).

Now, the hospital records of your birth will probably have your actual birth name and sex, and I doubt it's very easy to get those documents changed, so there will always be some kind of "birth accurate" record, but I think it's understandable at least why people are allowed to change their sex on their birth certificates when birth certificates are used as identification.

[Napoléon]

In a sense it's changing "history" because yes the person wasn't born with the sex they currently are, but that brings me on nicely to my next point, which is that birth certificates aren't just used as a document proving you were born; they are used as documents which carry basic information about the person, such as your name, eye color, etc. A birth certificate is a valid form of identity in a number of situations, and having invalid information on it doesn't make sense from a identification point of view.

In addition, if you change your name legally, in most places you can request that your birth certificate is updated for precisely these reasons. If you can change your birth name, you should be able to change your birth sex (especially since changing your name is far far easier to do).

This is where I think it's stupid then. Shouldn't birth certificates instead list these changes as... well changes, instead of just blanket saying "this person was born a boy", even though they weren't?