Serafina wrote:His premise is simply false. Just because an argument is logically sound it's conclusion is not right.
However, the fact that it's
logically sound means that you aren't able to address it correctly by saying:
Serafina wrote:Unfortunately, results count. You are not making an actual argument right now, instead you are creating a large ad hominem "she is emotional, hence she is wrong".
Understand now how you goofed up? How you address such a claim is to re-quote yourself and demonstrate that you were, indeed, making material arguments, and not just emotional appeals. Instead, you claimed a lack of argument with the substitution of
ad hominem, attacking the form of what was, in fact, a perfectly sound argument in form.
Or, to recycle your analogy, this would be a little like responding to the claim that the Australian army would beat the US army by criticizing the idea that more powerful armies have an advantage, rather than saying something that addresses the assumption of the argument directly, such as pointing out that the US army can field almost as many tanks as the Australian army can field soldiers.
Oh, really? Well, let's see.
He brings it up:
If they start to think that way, one day there may exist two or more commonly used terms for what transgenders are in all Western languages that are not merely derivations of man or woman.
See, he's saying that
this thing might happen. Nowhere is there a judgement as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
In South Asia there are such terms already: For example in India there are people who are called hijra. These are physiological males who adopt feminine gender identity, women's clothing and other feminine gender roles – or with other words, they are what we would call transwoman. But unlike some Western transsexual women, hijras generally do not attempt to pass as women. Reportedly, few have genital modifications. Their identities have no exact match in the modern Western taxonomy of gender and sexual orientation, and challenge Western ideas of sex and gender [O].
Since the late 20th century, some hijra activists and Western non-government organizations (NGOs) have been lobbying for official recognition of the hijra as a kind of "third sex" or "third gender", as neither man nor woman.
Here he notes that
there are groups advocating the recognition of hijra as a third sex legally. (A sentence directly copied off the Wikipedia article he linked to, if you clicked through to it.) Again, no judgement offered as to whether this is good or bad.
Maybe someday the German language will have similar terms and will have developed further grammar genders respective noun classes as there are in other languages more than two or three genders respective noun classes too (Swahili for example has 18 genders) [O].
Now he suggests that the German language, specifically, might change in the future. Once again, he doesn't say whether this is good or bad at all.
You're trying to read an opinion into his speculation as to what
might happen. This is how "straw man" arguments are constructed.
It is the same with the claim that I advocated implementing a new social class similar to those of the Hijra, who have next-to no legal rights and are heavily discriminated against. That never happened.
I merely considered the possibility that not only transsexuals are neither man nor woman if, as Serafina argues, not the sex but only the gender decides if someone is a man or a woman. Because than it could be possible as well that there are more than two genders. And indeed, since the late 20th century, some hijra activists and Western non-government organizations (NGOs) have been lobbying for official recognition of the hijra as a kind of "third sex" or "third gender", as neither man nor woman.
Serafina would likely argue that these hijra do not know themselves if they think that they are a third gender and not either a man or a woman and of course they want to have no legal rights and be heavily discriminated because that is the only possible outcome of the implementation of a third gender. These hijra activists and Western non-government organizations (NGOs) have to be as unreasonable as I am if I consider the possibility of a third gender.
He clearly tries to defend the implementation of a third gender.
At this point, you're even going so far as to decide that he's lying to you when he says he's
not advocating the creation of a separate class. Again, there is nowhere in that entire block of text where he offers any actual endorsement of the
hijra; the nearest is when he
again quotes the Wikipedia article (this time without citation, which is bad form).
Now, you can reasonably argue that he does not want to create a rightless case like the Hijra - but he is clearly defending categorizing transsexual people as neither men nor women and as a third gender instead.
He's not
defending it, but
predicting it. That's a distinction you've completely missed. You're either not spending enough effort on reading what was said (and therefore responding too quickly - "Oh, he's talking about a third gender => he must want to segregate the TG from the rest of society in a separate caste!" or trying to read too much into it - "He's spending so much time talking about the
hijra activists, he must really want them to succeed."
In either case, you've constructed a strawman - and he rightly called you out on that. He is clearly getting fairly sarcastic towards the end of it, needling you on your high-handedness in dismissing non-Western culture and organized activist groups so brusquely, but he still avoids taking an actual position on the issue.
Big deal
No, not really a big deal. Just a small pointer.
- got anything to say on the content?
Not particularly. It's pretty standard for what it is, and it's not saying anything new or disagreeable as far as I'm concerned.
I already own several books. In german. Whose content you can not verify. Do you want me to post unverifiable evidence?
Verification is my problem, rather than yours. Or W.I.L.G.A.'s, as the case may be. Translation is a bit of an issue for me; if it's not a book with an English translation published in the US, it's a little more difficult for me to directly confirm what's being said (Google Books is a wonderful tool, but its coverage is spotty outside of what's contained in American university libraries).
Again - people who are loosing a debate often dishonestly shift to general arguments, and to unrelated specific arguments if they can.
I believe you are not quite grasping the reality of debate mechanics here.
People who are losing a debate often shift topics, it is true, but generally to something quite unrelated. For example, demanding to see a photocopy of someone's degree and rattling on about whether or not their education is
real, or going from talking about using phasers to drill to an absurd depth into a planet to debating whether or not it's possible to change from being male to being female.
Shifting to the big picture and back is something that an expert talking about something they know very well will do. They first may spend some time talking about stellar spectra, then shift to experimental results from a lab, then go back to talking about stellar spectra, then from there zip back out to someone else's model about stellar formation, and then return to talking about how in order to test this
other model, they're going to need another five million dollars' worth of lab equipment.
It's not possible to carry out a competent debate on the firepower of the
USS Enterprise without looking at both very specific incidents, and the larger picture of the whole collection of those incidents. It's the mark of a debater in over his head - such as Point45 on SB.com (still) or DMJay on ST.com (several years ago, at least) that they get lost when you shift between the big picture and the small details.
Neither is he by the way, he made blunders no one who is educated in law would make (or defend if he made them by accident) and his supposed diploma was clearly fake.
Either way, he presented no actual evidence except a third-party article to reinforce his statement that German law is lacking.
While the process certainly requires some improvement as well as the wording, in practice the outcome is pretty damn good.
Furthermore, WILGA is advocating changes that would give transsexual people less rights than they do right now - if his third-gender policy were to be implemented, transsexual poeple would logically no longer be legally recognized as members of their law - which is currently the case after you jump trough some hoops.
Hence, he is advocating abolition of current german law.
I found one post where he was actually
advocating change, and addressing the question of what he would make law, were he in charge. This is the canonical endorsement of changes offered by him:
Who is like God arbour wrote:If I could change the law, I would introduce next to the already existing category sex the category gender. And I would change the category name to a category earlier names and introduce a category current name.
Everyone would be allowed to declare their own gender as everyone would be allowed to change their name.
Pick gender, pick name, list prior such when filling out paperwork. OK. This does enable the possibility of discrimination, which might make it an unwise thing, but it's actually not that strange to have to fill in things like this in paperwork when the paperwork gets serious.
I would make laws that are forbidding discrimination of anyone based on their life style (gender, sexual preferences etc.). Schools would have to teach the facts about gender, sexual preferences etc. and are obliged to promote tolerance.
Forbidding discrimination based on lifestyle is actually quite broad, and wholly positive.
But I also would forbid transgenders to keep their sex secret. They do not have to announce to everybody they meet their sex. But if asked from someone they have to answer (that usually happens very seldom because the sex and the gender is not really relevant in the day to day life), they have to be honest because their sex has nothing to do with their gender and to reveal their true sex is no discrimination.
This one is probably what you find the most disagreeable in his actual policy recommendations. That, if asked if you are in fact trans, you should reply yes rather than being permitted to stay in the closet on the matter with a little white lie.
I would say this is a pretty ill-advised policy to try to enact into law, but strangely, you have chosen to concentrate more of your time on this topic:
And then I would let the language develop. Everyone could decide if they want to address someone according to the sex or according to the gender. But regardless how someone is addressed, it is no discrimination as long as the gender and the right to decide how one wants to live as such is recognised.
I would not force by law people, who are used to chose the grammar gender accordingly to the sex of an individual, to change their language and start to chose the grammar gender accordingly to the never really obviously gender.
This is the whole 'third gender' stuff.
Let the language develop, he says. He's not endorsing - or ruling out - anything here, just saying that the language ought to be let develop on its own. As policy recommendations go, that's pretty non-committal.
At the beginning, that may be difficult not only for transgenders but for other people too. But in the long run all would get used to it and the result would be a more tolerant society who really understand that sex, gender, sexual preferences and life style are not the same.
Today many people are raised with stereotypical gender roles in mind. My hope is that this would stop. It is not only better for transgenders but for everyone if everyone can live how they want and are not pressured into certain roles by expectations of their society. If a boy wants to play with a doll, let him. If a girl want to play football, let her. If a boy cries, do not say such stupid thing like how real man do not know pain and do not cry. Let the human be as they are. Have a society where it is not necessary to keep facts a secret to enable someone to life as they want.
And one more endorsement of policy: Down with stereotypical gender roles! I don't see a problem here.
You
have plenty of actual disagreements to focus on, as I said, and some of them are both important and material. Those are getting robbed of airtime when you focus instead on strawmen and
ad hominem talk of how mean and callous your opponents are.
Pretty much pure speculation.
Not at all. This is a
very well documented effect. Tell a woman that she's really half a man and
if she believes you, she's likely to attach significance to many of her old memories. Several years later, she might be telling people that she'd always suspected she wasn't a very girly girl, never mind what the reality was.
Wait - didn't you just critizise me for linking to an overview over the standards of care instead to their actual content, while the overview contained a visible link to the latter?
Double standard much?
No, not really. You were linking to a front page with no actual content. I was linking to a couple of pages with quite a bit of content, including a complete academic article in full text, which in turn had numerous references of their own.
To dismiss them as "not primary sources" is simply silly. Now, could I have done a better job, linking directly to the sources of figures and listing them out? Perhaps. I'm not going to claim to be perfect here.
This is addressing the fact that trans- and intersexuality are mutually exclusive how?
Quite simply because
prior to actual medical evaluation such individuals would generally not know they were intersexual, much like your acquaintance.
I'll put it another way. Based on
how intersexuals with ambiguous and then "corrected" genitals have been treated in the US by the medical establishment, i.e., with near-complete secrecy, with in many cases the parents barely aware of what's going on, with doctors pretty much burying the medical records, and
the number thereof, if a
majority of incorrectly assigned individuals were interested in sex change, then the genital "clarification" cases alone - not even other types of intersexed individuals - would account for at least
one in four of those going through legal [and physical] sex reassignment as adults.
That study precisely demonstrates my point (much as the ones referenced in the site I linked you to did.) Identical twins do not necessarily share a sexuality. It is influenced by genetics, but is not strictly determined by genetics. Understand the difference?
I would call up to 39% influence significant and major.
I call it moderate. It's less than 50%, but not by too much.
Also, note that that figure might easily be higher in the case of transsexuality.
Quite possibly. Eventually we may even see some good studies on the topic.
And i never claimed that it was purely genetic, quit the strawman.
No; you did claim, however, that nurture played no role, and only nature, and that it was strictly determined by biology (something that is very difficult to claim of sexuality).
Would you like me to re-quote yourself on the topic? You made quite a powerful assertion of simplicity back then, and it's that assertion of simplicity I have criticized.
There have been other studies, this is merely the most well-known example.
If you're aware of something more than a case study, linking to it would strengthen the argument you're attempting to make. Case studies make for interesting conversation starters, but generally don't show anything about populations.
You are not telling me nothing new, i learned that back in Psychology 101 in school.
And yet your assertions did not reflect that knowledge.
Ah, now who is misunderstanding whom?
Either way - if i say SIMPLE, i want to express something in simple terms. That does not mean that i explained it in detail - it means that i simplified it.
Try to be as precise as possible with your language when you debate. You seem to have more fluency with English than does W.I.L.G.A., but his language is usually more
precise than yours.
I addressed precisely what you
said; if you did not mean it, the problem is yours in imprecise expression, not mine in failing to read your mind.
No, it does NOT, since they do not do it out of their own desire and are forced to do so.
Forced? It's simply a very tough choice. There are options, and perhaps most of them are terrible. Perhaps you are lucky, and live somewhere where the options are
good. But the options available are likely to frame your identity.
As with sexuality itself, we could say that gender identity comes in a full spectrum and in a variety of strengths, something that has been claimed more or less sense the invention of the term transsexual (
e.g., see here).
There are men who only desire women. There are men who only desire women. There are men who desire men more than women, or women more than men, but are able to bat both ways. There are even men who can't really say which if either they desire more. There are men who desire nobody.
Similarly, I will suggest, much as Benjamin did in his primitive and fairly tangled-up fashion, that there is a full spectrum of intensities of gender identity, from those who
must live as a man to those who
must live as a woman.
Let us say for the moment that such a scale is measured as the Kinsey scale. For a male-bodied fellow sitting at (3,6) on (Gender,Sexuality) relative to (Femininity, Desiring Men), it would make perfect sense to wish to be female in Iran, but not to bother at all with being more than a flamboyantly feminine man in Germany. Is this person transgendered or not?
For a currently male-bodied fellow at (0,6) or (6,0), Iran lies somewhere around the seventh circle of Dante's
Inferno.
Never proclaimed otherwise, tough one might misread my posts that way.
Transsexuality HAS triggers, that is a well-accepted fact under specialist psychologists. However, most of these triggers seem to be related to discovering it or being willing to express it, while there seems to be a general underlying desire that can be repressed.
To give an example:
Many Transsexual people only discover their transsexuality later in their life. There are essentially three stages for discovery:
-Right from the point where a child expressed gender identiy
-around the beginning of puberty or during it and the following few years
-After that.
Before the conscious discovery, one generally tries to settle with the assigned gender role - some more, some less successful. But in general, this always feels somewhat artificial - like a trained behavior or even indoctrination. It does not come naturally.
This widely shows in interviews of transsexual people of all age groups and is a good indicator for transsexuality - how naturally does one express ones current gender role?
Of course, transsexual people express their actual gender role much more naturally than their assigned one.
I'm not as sure of the essentialist narrative as you are, but it's extremely difficult to try to test the difference between something that is repressed and triggered, and something which may come or go involuntarily. Nor is it a meaningful difference, really, when we're talking about policy or treatment.
A lot of gendered behaviour
is trained. The difference is that it's easier to feel natural in it when you're trained at an early age. There are, however, cis-women perfectly content to be women who have never mastered the art of femininity, and cis-men perfectly content to be men who have never mastered the art of masculinity. Those who are transgendered aren't the only ones who ever feel like acting feminine or masculine is a little artificial or trained.
It is one thing to learn how to walk like a woman or a man. It is another entirely to learn how to stop walking like a man or a woman when you aren't thinking about it, and it's easy not to realize quite how many behaviours are actually gendered until you're faced with the mountainous obstacle of actually successfully passing. (These behaviours aren't always gendered the same way from culture to culture, either.)
Actually, what you presented is more likely to be learned behavior (nurture) rather than brain structure (nature).
Of course, brain structure in general is a trend rather than a rule.
Variation within vs variation between. That's the main story of the great mass of human qualities and categories.
