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 easysauce wrote:
ahhh 21st century problems

Psychiatric problems aren't something exclusive to the 21st century. She needs help.

 whembly wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
The conflation of gender and ethnicity is certainly something, but I think Frazzled has the right idea.

Why is that?

I mean... the biggest difference between the 2 cases is that Bruce has been open and honest about his transformation.

He's not trying to fool anyone. He has a bloody reality show!

Rachael, on the other hand has weaved a complex web of lies and deceptions for many, many years. If she had been open and honest about being a white person who identified as being black, would she be where she's at now????

Who knows.

And yet... at the end of the day, one isn't black, and the other isn't a woman.

technically, true, but being technically true in the case of trans gender is considered trans phobic in that if you are to call Kaitlyn Jenner a man, you are a trans phobic person for not acknowledging her identity.
maybe we should enforce some sort of skin dye post op procedure to discern between legitimate trans-racials and illegitimate ones?


I only have one good trans friend, but she is a she, and refers to herself as such in all respects and will deny every being a man or born with a penis ect ect.

to her its not a web of lies, but who she really is, so where do we draw the line between what is "true" or not?



I mean, what is the determining factor on our acceptance of someones identity?

that someone is born male/female, or black vs white?

Or that they have undergone a specific *process* (ie open vs closed, surgery vs just dressing differnt, ect) to show the outside world this identity?

 easysauce wrote:

 whembly wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
The conflation of gender and ethnicity is certainly something, but I think Frazzled has the right idea.

Why is that?

I mean... the biggest difference between the 2 cases is that Bruce has been open and honest about his transformation.

He's not trying to fool anyone. He has a bloody reality show!

Rachael, on the other hand has weaved a complex web of lies and deceptions for many, many years. If she had been open and honest about being a white person who identified as being black, would she be where she's at now????

Who knows.

And yet... at the end of the day, one isn't black, and the other isn't a woman.

technically, true, but being technically true in the case of trans gender is considered trans phobic in that if you are to call Kaitlyn Jenner a man, you are a trans phobic person for not acknowledging her identity.
maybe we should enforce some sort of skin dye post op procedure to discern between legitimate trans-racials and illegitimate ones?


I only have one good trans friend, but she is a she, and refers to herself as such in all respects and will deny every being a man or born with a penis ect ect.

to her its not a web of lies, but who she really is, so where do we draw the line between what is "true" or not?



I mean, what is the determining factor on our acceptance of someones identity?

that someone is born male/female, or black vs white?

Or that they have undergone a specific *process* (ie open vs closed, surgery vs just dressing differnt, ect) to show the outside world this identity?

Yes... I was being *technical*.

In public, I'd be courteous to whatever they want.

oh yes, of course whembly, I dont mean to insinuate you personally as being trans phobic.

I just meant to discuss that there is a grey area between what is the objective, technically correct, scientifically provable "truth" and the subjective, politically correct, emotionally provable "truth"

I don't have a problem with her identifying as black. I have a problem with her taking a picture of a black neighbor and claiming that he's her dad. Same as claiming her adopted brother is her son. The lying.

 Psienesis wrote:
I think it raises an interesting question, though:

Do you have to be a person of color to advocate for the advancement of people of color?

It doesn't raise that question. It raises the question of whether people can choose their race.

Or (to cut out the choice issue): if just about everyone recognizes you to be a certain race, is that enough to be that race?

I don't really see this as an issue of any kind at all.

She obviously has identity issues.

Some of them pathological.

Has this impacted on how she does her job?

Maybe?

The existence of pathologies among the Social Justice Movement (the extreme left) is as common as the existence of pathologies among today's conservatives (who have largely become extremists as a rule, rather than an exception).

MB

 kronk wrote:
I don't have a problem with her identifying as black. I have a problem with her taking a picture of a black neighbor and claiming that he's her dad. Same as claiming her adopted brother is her son. The lying.

trans people claim their surgically altered bodies are their real bodies all the time, and they are allowed/encouraged to do so without shame, and we are encouraged to believe/treat them as real men/women. In fact to call them out as liars is politically incorrect and makes you trans phobic.

You are just ok with their "lie", but not this womans "lie" is all.



(just to be clear, not im not literally trying to call all trans people liars)

 easysauce wrote:
I mean, what is the determining factor on our acceptance of someones identity?

You can start with "is this a plausible claim?". In the case of transgender people we know that everyone starts out as a genderless/sexless blob of cells and then an extremely complex process of development, both before and after birth, adds a long list of sex/gender characteristics to the initial blank slate. And we have indisputable evidence that this process doesn't always work correctly in people who have a mix of male and female physical attributes. So all the transgender person's claim requires is the entirely reasonable belief that it's possible for the process of sex/gender development to go wrong in another way and have a brain/body mismatch instead of just a body/body mismatch. And once you grant that possibility the obvious conclusion is that brain gender is more important than a person's physical body in defining who we are, so a person with a female brain is a woman regardless of what physical characteristics she has.

But in the case of someone who claims to identify as a different race no such plausible explanation exists. Things like skin color don't have the same development issues as sex, and the vast majority of our concept of racial identity is based on cultural attributes not physical ones. So someone could have a strong desire to join the culture of a different race, but it doesn't make any sense to say "I'm really black and this white body is just a mistake".

To some degree social identities of race and gender are socially created and plastic. Acceptance as a particular race or gender depends on social acceptance.

The majority of people these days accept transgender people and recognise them as their adopted gender. I don't think that is the case for "trans-race" people.

I think that probably would be because there are so few "trans-race" cases that there has been no public debate on the issue. This is the first one I have heard of, at any rate.

 easysauce wrote:

 kronk wrote:
I don't have a problem with her identifying as black. I have a problem with her taking a picture of a black neighbor and claiming that he's her dad. Same as claiming her adopted brother is her son. The lying.

trans people claim their surgically altered bodies are their real bodies all the time, and they are allowed/encouraged to do so without shame, and we are encouraged to believe/treat them as real men/women. In fact to call them out as liars is politically incorrect and makes you trans phobic.

You are just ok with their "lie", but not this womans "lie" is all.



(just to be clear, not im not literally trying to call all trans people liars)

I have a lot of trains friends, and this is a subject we have often discussed:

Their chromosomes.

One of the issues (which I have studied formally in school, and which I hope to do some work on in grad school) has to do with the origin of the gender-dysphoria:

Is the origin genetic, epigenetic, or some other cause (it would be very/extraordinarily difficult for the cause to NOT BE genetic or epigenetic - all current evidence points to the latter).

But it does pose an interesting dilemma for those who suffer from gender-dysphoria:

IF the dysphoria is genetic or epigenetic, and the goal of those suffering from gender-dysphoria are seeking an eventual total genetic transformation (from XX -> XY or from XY -> XX), then the source of the dysphoria is important.

Because the dysphoria could simply be transmitted along with a chromosome change. The genetic or epigenetic queues could remain, so that a person with XX genotype and phenotype, who felt they should be XY phenotype could wind up (if we had the transformation at the level of the genes) as an XY genotype/phenotype who felt they should be an XX phenotype.

To put that in plain language. It could wind up that a genetic woman who felt they should be a man, could wind up transforming into a genetic man who felt they should be a woman (or a genetic man who felt they should be a woman could wind up as a genetic woman who felt they should be a man).

So... Here is where the REAL PROBLEM arises:

IFF the basic source of the gender dysphoria is genetic, and it carried along through any genetic level gender swap, then it would need to be fixed before a person could successfully transition.

Yet in successfully fixing the genetic cause for the gender-dysphoria, you then remove the desire, or "feeling" that one should be the other gender/sex... So there is no need for the transformation.

And this is the case for not just gender-dysphoria, but for a great many other conditions we are faced with encountering, such as this woman.

What if there really is a case of ethnic-dysphoria, where a person feels like they are really a different ethnicity? (I know that sounds utterly ridiculous, and it is on many levels, since ethnicity is primarily a phenotypic (physical appearance) issue).

I COMPLETELY SUPPORT both genotype and phenotype morphological freedom.

People should have the ability to transform themselves into centaurs, satyrs, dragons, or futonari if they wish to do so; people who want to turn themselves into Daleks or Cybermen (what exactly is the difference in those two??? I see no real distinction other than the shape of the case for their brain) should have that freedom.

So I see the whole changing yourself into a man or woman as a basic right.

Our current attitudes toward gender and sex are largely trapped by religious conservatism that fears sexuality, and who tend to fear morphological freedom as a threat to humanity itself (which is already threatened by far more dangerous stuff).

So... This woman is basically trapped by a society that places arbitrary distinctions and qualities upon physical appearance, and this created a psychological pathology in her where she felt the need to pretend to be black.

Which is kind of sad.

MB

Strikes me as really problematic to tie sexuality, gender, race, and other social concepts to genetics (at least proportionally speaking; that is, I don't disclaim that genetics could play some role -- the problem is overemphasizing it to make some kind of claim to objectivity).

 MrDwhitey wrote:
My problem comes with her presenting someone who isn't her father as her father.

Agreed on that one.... The one article that I read on this issue (posted by a black dude I served in the army with), her parents acknowledge that since her teenage years, she's "always identified more with African culture than European culture"


Also, the reported "hate crimes" directed against her, I would have to see the write ups on them, to see the language used. If she has indeed spent some time in Mississippi, I would not be in the least bit surprised to see that she had been a target of hate crimes for helping black communities by the still remaining racists in that part of the country (and they are definitely there in MS)

 Manchu wrote:
Strikes me as really problematic to tie sexuality, gender, race, and other social concepts to genetics (at least proportionally speaking; that is, I don't disclaim that genetics could play some role -- the problem is overemphasizing it to make some kind of claim to objectivity).

Really it is tying it to epigenetics, which is related to genetics, but is a sort of larger control system for various variable traits.

Epigenetics is a huge organization of what amount to if-then-else statements for our genes to produce certain proteins, which in turn control other regulatory systems.

It is not reducing everything to a single gene (which is what genetics attempted to be), but rather to a genetic or epigenetic SYSTEM of genes and epi-genes (methylated sugars on codon sequences on our genes which trigger those genes only in the presence of certain environmental factors).

I still only know the most basic aspects of epigenetics, as I have not yet taken the upper-division epigenetics courses, nor the graduate level stuff I will need to take to finish my eventual PhD), but I know enough to know that everything in our body is tied to at least one epigenetic system (and most of what we currently know about shows a vast number of things tied to exactly one epigenetic system - like the size and shape of our nose or ears).

Sexuality and gender perception specifically is probably tied to at least three epigenetic systems, so what I described is likely a worst case scenario that would only happen in a limited number of people. But it remains a possibility, and even with many possible systems involved, it leaves in place the question involving the "fix" for these "malfunctions:" Do we just fix the malfunction, leaving the person as they are, without a gender-dysphoria, or do we alter their gender/sex and then fix the dysphoria?

Because ultimately, this question needs to be answered at some point, when we gain enough control over our genetic systems to be able to write whatever we wish into them.

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
Do we just fix the malfunction, leaving the person as they are, without a gender-dysphoria, or do we alter their gender/sex and then fix the dysphoria?

The answer seems to be pretty clearly "fix their body to match their brain", as demonstrated by the successful use of that option in the real world. It works, and the only reason to oppose it is bigoted beliefs about what a person "should" do. So I don't see what technobabble speculation about magically changing all of a person's genes has to do with anything.

This seems appropriate here:

 easysauce wrote:
her race identity is black, and she obviously is a black woman trapped in a white womans body.

Honestly...if noone ever doubted her capability in doing her job, what else would firing her now be except for racist?

 Peregrine wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Do we just fix the malfunction, leaving the person as they are, without a gender-dysphoria, or do we alter their gender/sex and then fix the dysphoria?

The answer seems to be pretty clearly "fix their body to match their brain", as demonstrated by the successful use of that option in the real world. It works, and the only reason to oppose it is bigoted beliefs about what a person "should" do. So I don't see what technobabble speculation about magically changing all of a person's genes has to do with anything.

You are missing the issue here.

One of the goals of the trans community is full genetic change.

So that a man who wishes to become a woman would go from having an XY genotype to having an XX genotype.

But if the dysphoria is caused by an epigenetic factor that causes a dysphoria regardless of the genotype, then ALL that will EVER be possible is outward physical change (what we call "phenotypic change" rather than at the level of the gene, or "genotype © change").

Think of it this way, you have a problem whereby you think you are a different color (let's say you are a Smurf who FEELS like he/she should be purple, and not blue). Simply painting you a different color might provide you with some comfort, but you would prefer if your body naturally WAS that color (purple).

But, we discover a way to make your genes make you purple, but the color-dysphoria remains unchanged. Now, you are purple, but you FEEL like you should be Blue (as you originally were), because the epigenetic markers producing a "dysphoria" remain.

If we discover a "fix" for the dysphoria, it removes the need to turn you purple. You no longer FEEL that you really should be purple instead.

Simply altering people's phenotype (appearance) remains the only way to help people feel like they are whole, or feel like they are in the right body.

But it does not really put them in the right body. They remain in a body that is genetically their original sex. Only their phenotypical gender display has been altered.

People do not understand that our phenotype (appearance) and (genotype) are not as connected as we often think they are, and our self-image is not as fixed as we think it is either (nor is it controlled by our actual appearance).

MB

The way I understand the issue is: Traditionally, social categories are almost completely externally derived -- that is, what race or gender I am is mostly a matter of how people around me treat me, regardless of what I might prefer. And I am expected to "live up" to others' expectations by conforming to those categories. The challenge to this notion is that I should be able to decide which social categories are applied to me, how I want to conform to them or challenge them, and others should be expected to comply with my choices about my identity. This is a pretty dramatic reversal. While not discounting the possibility that genetic and/or physiological "defects" are relevant in certain cases, I think such explanations are red herrings in the larger social issue about who gets to choose who "I am." And there is also the problem of saddling these people's identities with medical-sounding terms like "disorder." Many people nowaccept that homosexuality is not some kind of "disorder" that needs to be cured/treated. Trans people still face that and I think a lot of trans people even see their own experience in that light, because of all this pseudo-biological baggage that is weighing down an essentially social question.

I don't mean to trivialize this matter but the most recent edition of Dungeons & Dragons was widely praised for explicitly stating that characters are not bound to a binary gender scheme. We're talking about a fictional world in which a person's biological sex can be magically changed. So if transexuality was purely a matter of wanting to be XX rather than XY, what is the need for a transgendered character? I think the answer is, because being transgendered is not as simple as a matter chromosome configuration (even in a world where that is no obstacle).

BeAfraid wrote:
One of the goals of the trans community is full genetic change.

So that a man who wishes to become a woman would go from having an XY genotype to having an XX genotype.

Which, at this point, is scifi technobabble. Why are we still talking about it?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BeAfraid wrote:
But, we discover a way to make your genes make you purple, but the color-dysphoria remains unchanged. Now, you are purple, but you FEEL like you should be Blue (as you originally were), because the epigenetic markers producing a "dysphoria" remain.

This is contradicted by the fact that gender dysphoria does go away when the person's physical body is changed. I don't really see why you're assuming that making changes through scifi technobabble "genetics" instead of surgery and hormones would produce a different result.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Manchu wrote:
Many people nowaccept that homosexuality is not some kind of "disorder" that needs to be cured/treated.

I don't think this is a good comparison at all. A transgendered person does have a disorder, they have a body that doesn't match what they think it should be. And they consider this a problem that needs to be fixed, with the desired treatment for the disorder being changes to their body to make it match their brain. The same isn't true at all for someone who is gay. They don't see themselves as having any kind of problem (unless they've been convinced by external pressure), other people believe that something is wrong with them. A gay person living in a bigot-free environment would be perfectly happy with who they are, a transgendered person in that same environment wouldn't.

There was a time, not long ago, when many gay people did see themselves as suffering from a disorder and there were attempts to treat it. I don't challenge that this was a result of social pressures. What I am suggesting is that perhaps the current way that many transgendered people see themselves, as suffering from a disorder, is also a result of social pressures and one day many transgendered people may also not see themselves in this way any longer.

 Manchu wrote:
There was a time, not long ago, when many gay people did see themselves as suffering from a disorder and there were attempts to treat it. I don't challenge that this was a result of social pressures. What I am suggesting is that perhaps the current way that many transgendered people see themselves, as suffering from a disorder, is also a result of social pressures and one day many transgendered people may also not see themselves in this way any longer.

I guess that's theoretically possible, but I don't think it's very plausible. With homosexuality there's a clear correlation between feeling disordered and external factors saying "you're disordered", and a gay person in a tolerant environment wouldn't feel the same way as one in a bigoted environment. And that was still true even when tolerant communities were a minority of society as a whole. But with transgendered people there isn't the same effect when you take the external pressures away. They'll probably think "I'm not subhuman filth like people kept calling me, but I still have the wrong body", but even in really tolerant and open-minded environments they don't go all the way to "I'm happy the way I am".

 Manchu wrote:
There was a time, not long ago, when many gay people did see themselves as suffering from a disorder and there were attempts to treat it. I don't challenge that this was a result of social pressures. What I am suggesting is that perhaps the current way that many transgendered people see themselves, as suffering from a disorder, is also a result of social pressures and one day many transgendered people may also not see themselves in this way any longer.

I'm not so sure about that, IIRC, in one of the previous "trans-threads" we had, someone posted a link or picture of an article in which, they found that many trans-people who had undergone "corrective" procedures still ended up committing suicide due to actually having a host of other mental health issues.

Obviously, I have no solutions to this problem, other than to say, "treat everyone with respect!" But, while I can't say from personal experience, I would have to kind of assume that a person with "boy parts" but feels like they should have "girl parts" and vice versa would naturally feel like there's something wrong with them. In this case, it could probably be more of a confirmation bias?

 Peregrine wrote:
But with transgendered people there isn't the same effect when you take the external pressures away.

The pressures I'm talking about are more about internalized expectations. For example, there is pressure on men to be sexually attracted to women. Men who do not experience that attraction can come to feel disordered. This is all experienced internally. Similarly, there is pressure on men to want to embody manliness. Men who instead experience a feminine identity similarly can come to feel disordered. Over time, people (including gay men) have started to accept that a man who is not attracted to women is not disordered. The same could eventually happen with transgendered people, both in terms of how they are perceived and how they perceive themselves. I am a skeptical about the "wrong body" phenomenon because I think we live in a culture where gender and physiology are pervasively conflated. I don't think we experience our bodies "biologically" except inasmuch as social conceits about gender are constructed with biological-sounding vocabulary.

 Peregrine wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Do we just fix the malfunction, leaving the person as they are, without a gender-dysphoria, or do we alter their gender/sex and then fix the dysphoria?

The answer seems to be pretty clearly "fix their body to match their brain", as demonstrated by the successful use of that option in the real world. It works, and the only reason to oppose it is bigoted beliefs about what a person "should" do. So I don't see what technobabble speculation about magically changing all of a person's genes has to do with anything.

It matters because if we, in the process of "fixing their body to match their brain", change how the brain works we could just have created an "un-fix", as it were, where one problem is replaced by the same problem in reverse.

 Manchu wrote:
The way I understand the issue is: Traditionally, social categories are almost completely externally derived -- that is, what race or gender I am is mostly a matter of how people around me treat me, regardless of what I might prefer. And I am expected to "live up" to others' expectations by conforming to those categories. The challenge to this notion is that I should be able to decide which social categories are applied to me, and others should be expected to comply with my choices about my identity. This is a pretty dramatic reversal. While not discounting the possibility that "genetic and/or physiologic "defects" are relevant in certain cases, I think such explanations are red herrings in the larger social issue about who gets to choose who "I am." And there is also the problem of saddling these people's identities with medical-sounding terms like "disorder." Many people nowaccept that homosexuality is not some kind of "disorder" that needs to be cured/treated. Trans people still face that and I think a lot of trans people even see their own experience in that light, because of all this pseudo-biological baggage that is weighing down an essentially social question.

OK, here you are onto what epigenetics is about.

Certain aspects of our psyche are not Genetic (absolutely fixed by a gene at our birth), but are Epigenetic (altered by our environment over time).

It is just that SOME THINGS are fixed at some point, even though that fix came from an epigenetic factor rather than from a genetic factor.

As I said, it is a huge number of "if-then-else" statements throughout our chromosomes, which control various protein activations throughout our lives.

As I already pointed out, the shape of our ears and nose are known to be epigenetic traits (they are alterations to proteins made by HOX genes while we are in the womb, depending upon the levels of certain hormones in the womb at certain points during the pregnancy, and then different hormones and nutrients in our diet post birth up to the age of about seven to ten).

Now, let me address a few other things.

NO WHERE did I claim that it is a "disorder" of the sort you are using (as in "Such-and-such" is "wrong" - morally or judgment ally).

When I use the term "disorder," it means "A departure from what we normally find."

It is not a moral judgment, it is simply pointing out there there is something causing a person to feel "Not right."

And... If that "disorder" remains intact while trying to make a person feel "right," they are never going to feel "right."

They will always feel like something is wrong, no matter what is done for them.

Homosexuality is another epigenetically determined trait. It can be thought of as a "disorder" in that most people are not gay. It doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with it (most of my boyfriends, and some of my girlfriends identify as gay. I did for a short period of time).

But this does not mean that there is not an epigenetic switch somewhere that can be flipped to alter a person's attraction to the same or opposite (or both) sexes.

We think that homosexuality is an irreversible epigenetic trait, though (many epigenetic traits are irreversible. I'm some epigenetic factors, once the "If-then" statement has been executed, it removes itself from the genome, making it impossible to activate again - theoretically it should be possible to re-assemble it, but we currently have no idea if this is the case or not). All current evidence points to epigenetic factors in the womb that make a person predisposed to homosexuality, and then other epigenetic factors in the person's life prior to puberty then fix their attraction to the same sex (currently we guess this happens between two and ten years of age).

So the issue of what it is that causes a person to feel like they are "not the right gender/sex" is a vitally important question.

Because it goes to the very bottom of the question of whether a truly genetic fix to the gender-dysphoria can really ever be produced.

If gender-dysphoria turns out to be an irreversible epigenetic trait, then the best we can do is to alter the phenotype as best as possible to make the person as feminine as possible.

But that is a worst-case scenario, and epigenetics tend to be much more forgiving in their mutability (changableness) than purely genetic factors.

As an example of the difference between genetics and epigenetics.

Genetics would be code that looks like:

For x = 1 to _number of traits_
. . . _trait_x = a++
Next x

An epigenetic list of traits would look like.

For x = 1 to _number of traits_
. . . If (protein_1a = yes || protein_6zz = no && (hormone_q11bj6 >= .00087 && hormone_h26fft1 <= .766))
. . . . . Set hormone_34hgz = hormone_34hgz - .01
. . . . . Make protein_12++
. . . . . If (protein_12 >= 200 $$ hormone_34hgz <= 4.923)
. . . . . . . . Set trait_x = (protein_12 + hormone_q11bj6 + mother's trait)
Next x


And that example is tremendously simple for an actual epigenetic trait. Very, very few of them have simple binary determinants (is there water at age X? What food did the child eat the most of?). But most are dizzying arrays of hormones, proteins, and base chemicals that influence a huge number of factors going into a single trait.

But, ultimately, the thing that almost everyone has a problem with accepting is that EVERYTHING is determined, at some point, by your genes (whether directly, as a genetic trait, or indirectly, as a combination of environment and epigenetic factors).

Most people rebell against that (for any number of reasons), but it all comes down to all animals (and life) being nothing but massively and vastly complex machines. Nothing occurs without a mechanistic reason. But having a mechanistic reason does not reduce things to a single cause-effect relationship.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Do we just fix the malfunction, leaving the person as they are, without a gender-dysphoria, or do we alter their gender/sex and then fix the dysphoria?

The answer seems to be pretty clearly "fix their body to match their brain", as demonstrated by the successful use of that option in the real world. It works, and the only reason to oppose it is bigoted beliefs about what a person "should" do. So I don't see what technobabble speculation about magically changing all of a person's genes has to do with anything.

It matters because if we, in the process of "fixing their body to match their brain", change how the brain works we could just have created an "un-fix", as it were, where one problem is replaced by the same problem in reverse.

OMG!

You just might be the very first person (non biologist, I am assuming) who understood this issue!

Soooo many people tend to think that my questioning this issue is some sort of anti-trans, or homophobic attitude, when my goal is to provide people of any sexual orientation or body-image with the freedom to be who they want to be.

It does present some very thorny questions, and philosophical implications that could be hijacked by Evangelicals with a very homophobic goal in mind.

But I am confident that the answers to these questions will make the evangelicals suitably unhappy and disappointed, and the gay and trans community quite happy (and, analogously, it should make the Furries quite happy as well, as we would then be able to turn them into the cat-people, dog-people, or overly sexualized My Little Pony-people of their dreams).

MB

I think one issue is that gender and race and sexuality are phenomena that people experience in their lives but epigenetics is really not. It's sort of like how we see red roses or blue violets rather than photons bouncing off of surfaces at certain frequencies.

P.S. Technically the systems biologists at school understood this issue. But no one outside of academia, or the trans people I talked to understood the problem.

MB

TBF the "problem" requires so much magic that it has little resonance.

 Manchu wrote:
I think one issue is that gender and race and sexuality are phenomena that people experience in their lives but epigenetics is really not. It's sort of like how we see red roses or blue violets rather than protons bouncing of of surfaces at certain frequencies.

Photons... But yes.

Technically we DO "see" photons bouncing off of surfaces at different frequencies.

BUT. . .

We do not perceive them in that fashion. We perceive them as colors. The color = (identical to)" photon z bouncing off surface n at angle θ and frequency x".

But most people also do not know to differentiate between sensation and perception. The word "sensation" in our vernacular often means "perception" ("What sensation do you have when you stick your hand in the water.", "What sensation does a mouth full of pop-rocks produce?" And so on. . .).

But the two are very different things.

Sensation is the nervous response of cells to their environment (haptic, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, and visual). Four of those respond to molecules, two of them to EM radiation, and two of them to air-pressure, one of which responds to changes in air pressure (that would be Haptic, Olfactory, auditory, and gustatory; haptic and visual; haptic and auditory; and auditory).

Perception is how we experience the sensations after they have been transduced to nerve signals to our brain.

MB