Posted on 12/01/2015 8:17:17 PM PST by Kaslin
Since it’s a topic that never seem to fall very far out of the news these days, I was interested to see an analysis at the Washington Post on the subject of “transgender” Americans and how their status has changed under the current administration. Titled, Obama's quiet transgender revolution, the piece tells a rather sad story of a politically motivated, populist deep dive into the confused end of the pool as our own government moved the goalposts of reality back in marked increments.
Years before the White House was lit in rainbow colors celebrating the Supreme Court's decision legalizing same-sex marriage, President Obama used a routine bureaucratic tool that ended up significantly changing the government's understanding of gender and how it can be changed.
The process began during Obama's first year in office when he issued a memo in June 2009 instructing agencies to extend to same-sex couples some benefits that the spouses of federal employees receive. Over time, that directive led to a decision by the Social Security Administration to greatly lower the threshold requirements for changing one's sex on official government documents, a change that would determine how a person's gender is recorded on passports, tax returns, marriage licenses and other documents.
Since June 2013, someone wishing to change their sex classification on their Social Security card has needed to provide only a doctor's note guaranteeing that "appropriate clinical treatment" is underway.
It’s true that this simple act of the Pen & Phone presidency changed the ground rules, but the process had already been underway for quite a while. Prior to this loosening of the guidelines, you could already change your gender on your Social Security card if you had surgery to alter your genital region (read: permanently mutilate yourself) to match the gender you were “identifying” with. Now you apparently just need a sympathetic doctor to sign a card for you indicating that you’re “in process” in some fashion, probably indicating that you’re taking hormones or perhaps even just undergoing therapy.
I seem to get dragged into these discussions a lot on various shows and in online chats and it’s always been disturbing. Previously I’ve maintained that you are, quite simply, the gender indicated by your 23rd pair of chromosomes and that’s just the way of the world if you didn’t like it. I do believe that there are many people in this world who, for one reason or another, are extremely unhappy with their gender. (I’m unhappy that I didn’t wind up being 6′ 6″ too, but there’s no surgery or special political class for that.) There are also, I’m sure, some people who are extremely confused about the whole gender thing. This may be from the flood of SJW media they are constantly exposed to or some sort of mental disconnect which I will never fully understand, not being a psychiatrist. But none of this changes the apparently unpleasant fact that you are the gender you were born to. There are very rare, unfortunate exceptions of people with a genetic mutation who exhibit the physical attributes of both genders to one degree or another, but that’s not some new class of human. That’s a biological error. They deserve all the same rights as everyone else and should be able to “pick one” at some point if they wish, but they’re also not the topic of this discussion. We’re talking about clearly defined, normal (yes, I said “normal.” Go ahead and throw stones) boys and girls with the usual set of chromosomes and the body parts to match.
In the past, while struggling with this question as it relates to high profile stories in the media, I’ve tended to offer the benefit of the doubt to people who actually go so far as to have surgery. In those cases I began using the opposite pronoun for them because, well… that’s one heck of a lot of dedication on display if you’re going to get your essential bits lopped off and I figure they deserve it at that point. But short of that, I use the pronouns appropriate for the gender they were naturally born to.
Still, I’ve had opponents argue with me and claim that there’s some science behind this whole “misgendered” thing. The most common one I see thrust into the argument is a few older, very dubious studies indicating that the brain waves of the “transgender” individual are different than normal folks and match the opposite gender. Such studies have been widely disputed, primarily because we still know so little about the human brain and what all those squiggly lines on the EEG readout actually mean. Others have offered up “evidence” that the brain of the transgender subject is actually different in a physical sense. That didn’t seem terribly conclusive either to say the least.
Medics are keen to find concrete physical evidence to help those children who feel they are trapped in the body of the opposite sex. One key brain region involved is the BSTc, an area of grey matter. But the region is too small to scan in a living person so differences have only been picked up at post-mortem.
But now a new study has caught my eye, detailed at NBC News. Curiously enough, this one had nothing to do with transgender studies in specific, but simply an analysis of the brains of men and women to see what the real, physical differences were. They also did an number of tests on the same scanned subjects to examine their preferences and feelings about various things. Guess what they discovered? Even the doctors couldn’t tell a male brain from a female brain to begin with.
Scientists who tried very hard to find differences between male and female brains said they couldn’t do it not with brain scans and not even by asking seemingly obvious questions such as whether someone likes boxing or worries about his or her mother.
They couldn’t find any single pattern that distinguishes between a male brain and a female brain, and say only a very small percentage of people fall under clear all-male or all female brain patterns.
“Our study demonstrates that although there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a ‘male brain-female brain’ continuum,” Daphna Joel of Tel Aviv University and colleagues wrote.
Falling back on the unfathomable intricacies of something as unbelievably complicated as the human brain isn’t going to make some scientific case that you were born in the wrong type of body. The fact is, we still only have a few obvious things to go on when determining your gender: an examination of your private parts and a chromosome analysis. Once those results are in, we have our answer. As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as “transgender” in a normally formed and developed human being and the government needs to stop trying to deny abject reality in the name of winning liberal votes by catering to the SJW.
Transgender is a choice.
and a sick one. and they know almost NOTHING about the brain. NO LESS telling women apart from men.
after my brain injury, the scans indicated damage to cerebellum and thalamus. i visual test confirmed this.
later on, the scans were fine, though the visual test still showed damage.
but the scans were all mattered!! i was fine!!
except i wasn’t. And they have no idea where or why or how the multiple issues i have, some of which are very difficult, come from.
no idea where it is, how to locate it, how to fix it.
they have no clue saying they know anything based on what 100 years from now will be considered an absurd attempt to understand based no scans, is ridiculous.
It sure is
Most “sexually confused” people were molested as children.
That info doesn’t scan too well.
Would be asking to much for you to be more explicit regarding you on going problem?
insomnia, chronic spine head pain, headahces, stabbing head pain, sometimes dizziness, chronic pulsatile tinnitus, hearing loss, night terrors, waking with internal tremors, very short term memory loss (will go to look something up online then forget what i wanted to, long term and intermediate and even short term seem good), some issues i wont go into, shooting pain from brain stem to all parts of the body.
Doctor said he didn't find anything.
You don’t need a brain scan to tell what gender you are, you need a pants scan. Then shut up and accept the answer.
Who needs a freakin brain scan? I can look and see that I’ve still got the equipment they God gave me. Nope, haven’t endured the chopadicoffame. Nope, no bras or panties in my drawer. I must not be a tranny. No brain scan needed.
(at least not for a years worth of visits) cause we got a good thing going on here
“Transgender” is a mental defect. Gender is assigned at conception and is immutable.
Words have a gender people have a sex.
Exactly!
Gender is a word for male, or female.
Sex is something they DO together.
But Sex is NOT gender.
> Words have a gender people have a sex.
Maybe in languages other than English. In English words don’t have gender the way they do in, for instance, German (masculine der, feminine die).
In English, unlike German, objects don’t have a gender. In English “gender” indicates either a male or a female, never an object or an activity. “Sex” can indicate either a gender (male or female) or an activity (copulation).
So...
gender (male or female) is assigned at conception
sex is something a male and female will do together later on
Brain scans show mental illness in many cases. I would not be surprised if they showed this mental illness too.
I know a guy who says his son is transgender. So another person I know referred to the son as âsheâ. The father (who is very liberal and says he’s a transgender advocate) screamed that his son is a âheâ. The other person said, oh I’m sorry I thought transgender men were now called âsheâ. And this guy says transgender are whatever sex they truly feel and whatever gender they truly feel, and they’re not the same. So the other person said, ok, he’s a he with a she gender? Which just seemed to infuriate the âadvocateâ father even more. I just stood there listening, and from the conversation it just sounds like his son likes to wear women’s clothes occasionally and grow his hair out. I heard Thanksgiving at their house ended up in a fight, and what people are saying is the kid went off to college and came home with a beard and dressed like a man. The idiot father didn’t like it! College actually may have straightened the kid out or got him out of a house of lies. Can you imagine if your father has been trying to tell you your transgender when you’re not? I don’t know how long this kid has been “told” he wasn’t a boy or man, but it reminds me of the children that parents are now giving hormones to, as young as 3 or 4 years old.
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