That touches on a subject a lot of my gay friends talked about with me. Most didn’t want science to find “the gay gene.” They didn’t want there to be any reason for them to be who they are. They just are. They also didn’t want to have something tangible bigots to point to as to why they are “wrong.”
I agree with them, very much so. There is no benefit to this kind of research because it’s based on a false premise to begin with. Gender does not correlate with biology at all. It’s part of who we are as people. There is no cause of transgender identity, and even attempting to find one is flawed. The transgender experience is not universal, and there is a vast amount of differing feelings and experiences amongst even just binary trans people. Any attempts to find a “cause” are really just attempts to find new justifications for gatekeeping trans people or subjecting trans people to conversion therapy.
I am, by and large, against the further reduction of trans experience to a medical one. We aren’t diseased. We are fortunate to live in a time where we can access care that improves our lives tremendously. There is a very real medical component to treating dysphoria. But being transgender is not a disease.
But isn’t this the same situation with other discrimination like racism? There are genes creating the differences we call race, but does that change how we should treat people? Yes, it’s. Problem that’s not solved but at least we know what should happen
It is very difficult to list situations where more knowledge leaves you worse off. In any case does it really matter? We had bigotry long long before we even had a concept of evolution. People don’t start from facts and develop theories, we do the opposite.
For what it’s worth as of now the monotheistic religions are falling in numbers in the West so things could get better
It’s not knowledge, though. It’s assuming an outcome “there is a reason transgender people are transgender” and then attempting to match different things to that outcome. It’s based on the incorrect belief that gender is rooted in biology and that, therefore, any trans person must be biologically broken in some way to identify the way we do. A simple glance at the vast array of different transgender people with many different and distinct experiences is evidence that there is no root cause. That being trans is just who we are.
Of course there is a reason behind it, there is a reason behind everything. We might not know what it is, it might be really complicated, but it is there we just have to find it.
Believing in a cause and effect view of the universe is not the same as a value judgement. If science finds out what makes X happen it says nothing about the value of X.
I really don’t see the issue here. The monotheistic people who hate trans people are always going to hate trans people and not give a shit what the science says.
I think there is one concern that cant be argued against: if a genetic basis were found, that opens the way to parents selecting against those genes in their unborn children. Like… imagine parents or the government deciding that theyd very much like to eradicate LGBT people before theyre born and having the capability to make it happen.
Not sure I really want people like that being parents. If you view children as a status symbol and anything your “friends” view as an imperfection is unacceptable to you then what kinda parent are you going to be?
But to be fair my narcissist mother would sometimes not totally suck.
I guess it will be a bit annoying that there will be slightly less LGBT people tens of millions of years from now compared to today. I will set an alert if you want.
You are talking about an insanely small effect that requires a precise sequence of events
Company makes a pernatal LGBT test
The product actually works, which holy shit no it won’t. It is way more complicated than screening for say Down syndrome.
It is widely accepted as working
The average human on earth makes a few dollars a day and yet they have the money to pay for this and do reproductive counseling and decide to abort on this
Somehow someway all 8 billion people have this removed from them and it is maintained for tens of millions of years to get enough distance between those future humans and us to prevent random mutations from reverting it. Hell chickens are still born with teeth in rare occasions. That is a 80 million year reversion.
So yeah not worried. If you need something to worry about you can read up on climate change.
There will be exactly the same amount of queer people. They just will have been subjected to even more gatekeeping and conversion therapy because it was believed that by genetically altering them they would not be queer. Which isn’t true, being queer is not a product of genetics.
But transgender isn’t an outcome, you’re still not understanding. Transgender people are not fundamentally different from any other group of people. We just are transgender. Some of us don’t even have dysphoria or seek out medical transition. The cause is entirely relativistic and unique to each transgender person.
Transgender isn’t a property of a person it is a description of their relationship with the gender society assigned them.
The cause is entirely relativistic and unique to each transgender person.
Cool. Thank you for confirming that there is a cause. As you might have noted I already said the cause can be complicated. See an object on the floor. There might have been a million ways it could have gotten there, there still was a single way it got there for a given object. A --> B.
Transgender isn’t a property of a person it is a description of their relationship with the gender society assigned them.
Doesn’t change what I said even slightly. Something only has a particular length due to it’s relationship with the standard unit of length. Got a 3 meters long thing? It is related by multiplication and “3” with the meter. Philosophy got this totally ass backwards when it tried to view relationships as distinct from properties. As if there could somehow be movement without matter. And breaks emergence.
Besides which even if being LGBT was completely relational instead of intrinsic it wouldn’t mean much. The parent child relationship is relational and it could be studied just fine.
Trans people are not a phenomenon examinable in the same way as the laws of physics or observations about the natural world.
Gender is socially constructed. It’s a thing humans came up with. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real, but it does mean that how we examine it is entirely independent of biology. I don’t know why I am transgender. It’s perfectly possible as a child I just decided I wanted to be a girl and here we are. Does it matter whatsoever? Does it change literally anything? What if it’s not true, what if I just decided one day as an adult? Just woke up and thought hey I’d like to transition because that sounds fun and I want to. Am I still transgender? What about agender people, or people who withdraw from gender entirely and refuse to participate in it? Are they the way they are for a reason?
Why do you like the color blue? Why do you hate the taste of certain foods and love others? Why is your favorite book your favorite book? Is there a scientific reason for those things? Can we scientifically examine why your favorite book is your favorite book and then create a theory that whatever we came up with causes people to have that book as a favorite book? Gender is an abstract concept not routed in anything biological. It appropriates biology to justify its own existence. But it is not biology.
Being LGBT has no cause. We come up with our own personal explanations for it. I personally do not and never will. I dont give a shit and am aware that any explanation I come up with is ridiculous and unfounded because being trans isn’t anything specific. This view that transness is some kind of intrinsic property is not true and is not founded in any observable evidence.
You may want to look into trans people some time. Read some shit on google. You don’t seem to really get it, and I’m adverse to having someone repeatedly tell me I’m wrong about something I have personal experience with.
Your entire comment is special pleading. You, like the free willists and theists and spirituality types, want a supernatural explanation for something while conceding that everything else doesn’t need one. You plead for a special exception.
Sorry, doesn’t work that way. All we are is matter and energy. No God, no Spirit, no ghosts, no kabbalah, no astrology, no supernatural, no Jesus loves the little children. Just the universe as it presents itself to be.
Don’t waste time on anyone who tells you not to think, not to research, not to learn, and to accept them on faith. Which is exactly what you are doing right now.
Idk why the fuck youre talking about religion. Never mentioned anything supernatural whatsoever. It’s amazing to me how you are so blown away by the concept of gender, that you think we must be describing something supernatural. I am not religious, never thought that would have to be said in this conversation lmao.
Whats your fav book? Scientifically explain to me why that book has the property “afraid_of_zombies” favorite book. Gender has a much larger impact on our lives than that property, but it is still an abstract property detached from biology in any way.
Thing is… that mentality has lead bigots to argue that LGBT people chose to be the way that they are and used that to attack them. The reality is that the only way that bigots will ever be dealt with is by hammering home the concept that people should be left the fuck alone regardless of whether they had any agency in being who they are or are the result of genetic differences. Any argument that doesnt include that message is susceptible to attack and at some level falsely concedes that bigots somehow would have a point if a genetic basis for being LGBT were found. They dont. Genes or not, LGBT people should be left the fuck alone and treated just as well as anyone else.
It’s not so much a mentality as it is objectively the truth though. Advocating for a genetically immutable cause for queerness does not do anything long term towards acceptance. We can see that in the modern wave of transphobia and homophobia. Arguing that we don’t have a choice to be this way is also fundamentally different from “we don’t have a choice because we have genetic abnormalities, or because we were abused as children”. We are the way we are and we deserve respect and human dignity. We deserve autonomy and access to healthcare that improves our lives. People who disagree with those things are not going to be swayed by patently false “cause and effect” arguments. The medical science shows that giving us access to gender affirming medical care when we went it shows massive improvements in our well-being and in our long term health. The science surrounding our care is entirely detached from any kind of malformed research into a reason why we are this way.
If someone only accepts you because they dont know why you are the way that you are, thats not acceptance. Thats a bigot that is one excuse away from attacking you.
What are you talking about? It is not my fault that they are bigoted towards me. There is no reason I am the way I am, I simply am a transgender woman. I shouldn’t be subjected to bigotry because discrimination is wrong. Like, youre asking me to pretend something is true because you claim that pretending that thing is true will appeal to bigots.
No I am asking you not to make definitive statements about something that you could be wrong about. And definitely do not use it as a basis for arguments for why you deserve not to be discriminated against. The rationale for why you should be treated with respect and dignity does not depend on whether there’s a genetic basis for why you are the way you are. That is a solid foundation. Betting that science will never discover something is not.
It’s not a bet it is you misunderstanding what being transgender is. Human cognition does not work that way. How we perceive ourselves is not attributable to definite factors. It’s coming up with an answer, that being trans is a product of biology or some early childhood environmental factor, and then working backwards in an attempt to discover what those things are. But being trans is not a product of those things.
There are scarcely any universal commonalities amongst trans people, and all of them have to do with how cisgender people and cisheteronormative society treats us. Some of us feel dysphoria and need hormone therapy and surgeries, some don’t. Some feel like they’ve known their whole lives, some were perfectly fine until 2 months ago. Some people don’t change much at all through transition, purely changing terminology and internal identity. Some people leave everything behind and become very different people after.
Gender variance is a part of human expression. Gender is an abstract concept that humans created. It’s come to impact so many aspects of our lives but it is still a concept we made up and attached to reproductive biology. We would thusly need to examine why cisgender people identify as their gender and come up with some scientific reason why someone has a gender at all. As though Gender is a product of some scientifically measurable process. It isn’t. It’s a part of someone’s personality. How and where it forms is different for everyone. Someone isn’t “not transgender” because they don’t fit some specific circumstances, being trans is purely an observation of the relationship someone has with their assigned gender. Someone is transgender if they do not identify with the Gender they were assigned at birth. Someone is cisgender if they do identify with the Gender they were assigned at birth.
It’s based on the incorrect belief that gender is rooted in biology and that, therefore, any trans person must be biologically broken in some way to identify the way we do.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? Of course I’m trans because of my body, my society, my physical world. But that doesn’t mean me being trans is wrong or broken at all. I’m a woman because of my body and my society and my world just like every other woman is. Literally every one of them. Only difference is how long it took everyone to figure it out.
That touches on a subject a lot of my gay friends talked about with me. Most didn’t want science to find “the gay gene.” They didn’t want there to be any reason for them to be who they are. They just are. They also didn’t want to have something tangible bigots to point to as to why they are “wrong.”
I agree with them, very much so. There is no benefit to this kind of research because it’s based on a false premise to begin with. Gender does not correlate with biology at all. It’s part of who we are as people. There is no cause of transgender identity, and even attempting to find one is flawed. The transgender experience is not universal, and there is a vast amount of differing feelings and experiences amongst even just binary trans people. Any attempts to find a “cause” are really just attempts to find new justifications for gatekeeping trans people or subjecting trans people to conversion therapy.
I am, by and large, against the further reduction of trans experience to a medical one. We aren’t diseased. We are fortunate to live in a time where we can access care that improves our lives tremendously. There is a very real medical component to treating dysphoria. But being transgender is not a disease.
But isn’t this the same situation with other discrimination like racism? There are genes creating the differences we call race, but does that change how we should treat people? Yes, it’s. Problem that’s not solved but at least we know what should happen
It is very difficult to list situations where more knowledge leaves you worse off. In any case does it really matter? We had bigotry long long before we even had a concept of evolution. People don’t start from facts and develop theories, we do the opposite.
For what it’s worth as of now the monotheistic religions are falling in numbers in the West so things could get better
It’s not knowledge, though. It’s assuming an outcome “there is a reason transgender people are transgender” and then attempting to match different things to that outcome. It’s based on the incorrect belief that gender is rooted in biology and that, therefore, any trans person must be biologically broken in some way to identify the way we do. A simple glance at the vast array of different transgender people with many different and distinct experiences is evidence that there is no root cause. That being trans is just who we are.
Of course there is a reason behind it, there is a reason behind everything. We might not know what it is, it might be really complicated, but it is there we just have to find it.
Believing in a cause and effect view of the universe is not the same as a value judgement. If science finds out what makes X happen it says nothing about the value of X.
I really don’t see the issue here. The monotheistic people who hate trans people are always going to hate trans people and not give a shit what the science says.
I think there is one concern that cant be argued against: if a genetic basis were found, that opens the way to parents selecting against those genes in their unborn children. Like… imagine parents or the government deciding that theyd very much like to eradicate LGBT people before theyre born and having the capability to make it happen.
Not sure I really want people like that being parents. If you view children as a status symbol and anything your “friends” view as an imperfection is unacceptable to you then what kinda parent are you going to be?
But to be fair my narcissist mother would sometimes not totally suck.
Thing is… they are going to be parents. They just wont be parents to someone that is LGBT. Its eugenics.
I guess it will be a bit annoying that there will be slightly less LGBT people tens of millions of years from now compared to today. I will set an alert if you want.
You are talking about an insanely small effect that requires a precise sequence of events
Company makes a pernatal LGBT test
The product actually works, which holy shit no it won’t. It is way more complicated than screening for say Down syndrome.
It is widely accepted as working
The average human on earth makes a few dollars a day and yet they have the money to pay for this and do reproductive counseling and decide to abort on this
Somehow someway all 8 billion people have this removed from them and it is maintained for tens of millions of years to get enough distance between those future humans and us to prevent random mutations from reverting it. Hell chickens are still born with teeth in rare occasions. That is a 80 million year reversion.
So yeah not worried. If you need something to worry about you can read up on climate change.
There will be exactly the same amount of queer people. They just will have been subjected to even more gatekeeping and conversion therapy because it was believed that by genetically altering them they would not be queer. Which isn’t true, being queer is not a product of genetics.
But transgender isn’t an outcome, you’re still not understanding. Transgender people are not fundamentally different from any other group of people. We just are transgender. Some of us don’t even have dysphoria or seek out medical transition. The cause is entirely relativistic and unique to each transgender person.
Transgender isn’t a property of a person it is a description of their relationship with the gender society assigned them.
Cool. Thank you for confirming that there is a cause. As you might have noted I already said the cause can be complicated. See an object on the floor. There might have been a million ways it could have gotten there, there still was a single way it got there for a given object. A --> B.
Doesn’t change what I said even slightly. Something only has a particular length due to it’s relationship with the standard unit of length. Got a 3 meters long thing? It is related by multiplication and “3” with the meter. Philosophy got this totally ass backwards when it tried to view relationships as distinct from properties. As if there could somehow be movement without matter. And breaks emergence.
Besides which even if being LGBT was completely relational instead of intrinsic it wouldn’t mean much. The parent child relationship is relational and it could be studied just fine.
Trans people are not a phenomenon examinable in the same way as the laws of physics or observations about the natural world.
Gender is socially constructed. It’s a thing humans came up with. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real, but it does mean that how we examine it is entirely independent of biology. I don’t know why I am transgender. It’s perfectly possible as a child I just decided I wanted to be a girl and here we are. Does it matter whatsoever? Does it change literally anything? What if it’s not true, what if I just decided one day as an adult? Just woke up and thought hey I’d like to transition because that sounds fun and I want to. Am I still transgender? What about agender people, or people who withdraw from gender entirely and refuse to participate in it? Are they the way they are for a reason?
Why do you like the color blue? Why do you hate the taste of certain foods and love others? Why is your favorite book your favorite book? Is there a scientific reason for those things? Can we scientifically examine why your favorite book is your favorite book and then create a theory that whatever we came up with causes people to have that book as a favorite book? Gender is an abstract concept not routed in anything biological. It appropriates biology to justify its own existence. But it is not biology.
Being LGBT has no cause. We come up with our own personal explanations for it. I personally do not and never will. I dont give a shit and am aware that any explanation I come up with is ridiculous and unfounded because being trans isn’t anything specific. This view that transness is some kind of intrinsic property is not true and is not founded in any observable evidence.
You may want to look into trans people some time. Read some shit on google. You don’t seem to really get it, and I’m adverse to having someone repeatedly tell me I’m wrong about something I have personal experience with.
Your entire comment is special pleading. You, like the free willists and theists and spirituality types, want a supernatural explanation for something while conceding that everything else doesn’t need one. You plead for a special exception.
Sorry, doesn’t work that way. All we are is matter and energy. No God, no Spirit, no ghosts, no kabbalah, no astrology, no supernatural, no Jesus loves the little children. Just the universe as it presents itself to be.
Don’t waste time on anyone who tells you not to think, not to research, not to learn, and to accept them on faith. Which is exactly what you are doing right now.
Idk why the fuck youre talking about religion. Never mentioned anything supernatural whatsoever. It’s amazing to me how you are so blown away by the concept of gender, that you think we must be describing something supernatural. I am not religious, never thought that would have to be said in this conversation lmao.
Whats your fav book? Scientifically explain to me why that book has the property “afraid_of_zombies” favorite book. Gender has a much larger impact on our lives than that property, but it is still an abstract property detached from biology in any way.
Thing is… that mentality has lead bigots to argue that LGBT people chose to be the way that they are and used that to attack them. The reality is that the only way that bigots will ever be dealt with is by hammering home the concept that people should be left the fuck alone regardless of whether they had any agency in being who they are or are the result of genetic differences. Any argument that doesnt include that message is susceptible to attack and at some level falsely concedes that bigots somehow would have a point if a genetic basis for being LGBT were found. They dont. Genes or not, LGBT people should be left the fuck alone and treated just as well as anyone else.
It’s not so much a mentality as it is objectively the truth though. Advocating for a genetically immutable cause for queerness does not do anything long term towards acceptance. We can see that in the modern wave of transphobia and homophobia. Arguing that we don’t have a choice to be this way is also fundamentally different from “we don’t have a choice because we have genetic abnormalities, or because we were abused as children”. We are the way we are and we deserve respect and human dignity. We deserve autonomy and access to healthcare that improves our lives. People who disagree with those things are not going to be swayed by patently false “cause and effect” arguments. The medical science shows that giving us access to gender affirming medical care when we went it shows massive improvements in our well-being and in our long term health. The science surrounding our care is entirely detached from any kind of malformed research into a reason why we are this way.
If someone only accepts you because they dont know why you are the way that you are, thats not acceptance. Thats a bigot that is one excuse away from attacking you.
What are you talking about? It is not my fault that they are bigoted towards me. There is no reason I am the way I am, I simply am a transgender woman. I shouldn’t be subjected to bigotry because discrimination is wrong. Like, youre asking me to pretend something is true because you claim that pretending that thing is true will appeal to bigots.
No I am asking you not to make definitive statements about something that you could be wrong about. And definitely do not use it as a basis for arguments for why you deserve not to be discriminated against. The rationale for why you should be treated with respect and dignity does not depend on whether there’s a genetic basis for why you are the way you are. That is a solid foundation. Betting that science will never discover something is not.
It’s not a bet it is you misunderstanding what being transgender is. Human cognition does not work that way. How we perceive ourselves is not attributable to definite factors. It’s coming up with an answer, that being trans is a product of biology or some early childhood environmental factor, and then working backwards in an attempt to discover what those things are. But being trans is not a product of those things.
There are scarcely any universal commonalities amongst trans people, and all of them have to do with how cisgender people and cisheteronormative society treats us. Some of us feel dysphoria and need hormone therapy and surgeries, some don’t. Some feel like they’ve known their whole lives, some were perfectly fine until 2 months ago. Some people don’t change much at all through transition, purely changing terminology and internal identity. Some people leave everything behind and become very different people after.
Gender variance is a part of human expression. Gender is an abstract concept that humans created. It’s come to impact so many aspects of our lives but it is still a concept we made up and attached to reproductive biology. We would thusly need to examine why cisgender people identify as their gender and come up with some scientific reason why someone has a gender at all. As though Gender is a product of some scientifically measurable process. It isn’t. It’s a part of someone’s personality. How and where it forms is different for everyone. Someone isn’t “not transgender” because they don’t fit some specific circumstances, being trans is purely an observation of the relationship someone has with their assigned gender. Someone is transgender if they do not identify with the Gender they were assigned at birth. Someone is cisgender if they do identify with the Gender they were assigned at birth.
deleted by creator
That’s the trick, isn’t it? Of course I’m trans because of my body, my society, my physical world. But that doesn’t mean me being trans is wrong or broken at all. I’m a woman because of my body and my society and my world just like every other woman is. Literally every one of them. Only difference is how long it took everyone to figure it out.