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Transgendered Folks Encountering Document/Database ID Hassles
An anonymous reader writes "Most of us hear the equivalent of 'let me bring up your record' several times a week or month when dealing with businesses and government agencies; sometimes there's a problem, but clerks are accustomed to dealing with changes in street address, phone numbers, company affiliation, and even personal names (after marriage). But what about gender? Transgendered folks are encountering embarrassing moments when they have to explain that their gender has changed from 'M' to 'F' or vice versa. While there are many issues involved in discrimination against transgendered individuals, I have to confess that the first thing that came to my mind was the impact on database design and maintenance."
Nothing has really changed...
I used to work for the government of Canada at an agency which I cannot name. I ran into an awkward situation when I was speaking with a woman who had recently gotten married to another woman and as I was putting the info in, the software I was using told me there was an error that needed to be corrected before proceeding. I was both embarrassed and furious. I could not believe our software was not written with same sex couples in mind and I apologized to her and kept on going with the rest of call. I doubt this issue has been fixed yet, this happened about a year ago.
Boolean should still work fine, as long as it's not read only. The issue is that they are changing it.
Make the field optional. In addition to male and female, add both and neither. Also, review the reason you even keep that information. It may not be necessary at all.
Why does the gubbmint need to know what our parts are? Unless it involves public health or medical care, it's irrelevant unless you live in Big Brother land.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Databases are annoying, as no-one really models gender changing over time (most glaring to me in the medical industry, where I work). That said, i'd much rather see something done about the reactions of people, rather than the contents of databases. I now live 600 miles from my hometown, because I got tired of being physically attacked for being myself in public. Show me how changing a database table will turn around a truck full of beer 'buzzed' rednecks, and i'm all game.
Anonymous, for all the wrong reasons. I'd rather post as myself, but I've learned not to be honest in public, unless I want death threats. Thanks for the 5 minutes of attention, but we've got trouble all day.
And why not? Call the column isMale or isFemale instead of Gender to avoid any confusion and you're good to go, while making it technically impossible to enter invalid data and sidestepping any issues of character based data in non-canonical form.
Of course that breaks down a bit when encountering hermaphrodites or asexuals (biological ones, we're not discussing sexual orientation), but those are such a vanishingly small percentage of the population that it's unlikely the database would be coded to handle them anyway.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Now that's what I call a vocal minority.
Who the hell voted this up?
The reason why it's embarrassing is because trans people are still treated like crap by a large portion of society and we'd rather not have our private lives paraded around in front of others so that we can be treated like a fucking circus exhibit. That's why.
Besides, for most things you don't even NEED to know our gender.
I can understand the database keeping track of a salutation like Mr/Ms/Miss/Mrs/Dr/Rev/etc. And a salutation can of course change, a Miss can easily become a Dr or Mrs.
The status of M/F doesn't usually seem necessary for customer service or governments, as using personal pronouns can be ambiguous or unnecessary. But the salutation can be a convenient, comfortable and respectful way to address a person on the phone.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I presume you'll be fine with the doctors refusing to help you when you get struck down with some rare form tropical disease then?
A problem being suffered by a minority is still a problem.
This illustrates how discrimination is embedded in our society. We want to know details about someone (gender) so that we can assume other things (entitlement to maternity leave, say). But this supports treating people differently. The entitlement should be that anyone who gives birth or (or perhaps adopts) a baby is entitled to the leave. No need to identify gender.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
. But what about gender? Transgendered folks are encountering embarrassing moments when they have to explain that their gender has changed from 'M' to 'F' or vice versa.
Transgendered folks are still having to explain to people like the original poster that 'M' and 'F' designate sex, not gender. There's a wide variety of reasons why a person's sex needs to be recorded, at least medically. A transgendered woman will have different medical needs than a non-transgendered woman, and the same for men. But for some reason, despite research going back over fifty years now, we still idiotically only have one field, with two options.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Hmm, on second thought gender is actually a fairly poorly defined concept in medical terms. We tend to classify people based on whether they come equipped with a slot or a dongle, but that's just the most obvious marker, and doesn't necessarily correlate well with several other biological gender properties (as hilighted not-so-recently by that African female olympic runner)
I suppose a more accurate measure would be a floating point value indicating the degree and polarity of genderdness, but that would still have trouble distinguishing asexuals and hermaphrodites. Perhaps two semi-independent values indicating degree of maleness and femaleness? I doubt anyone would want to get a thorough medical exam just to be able to put a number in a box though, much less have any particular desire to share that data. And even if we could formulate the tests I imagine there could be significant personal and sociological fallout from quantifying such a thing on a wide basis, and not necessarily much benefit.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If it is an Identity database, then gender matters. If it is a medical database, it matters. If its a customer database, it does not matter
If you don't want that, then don't turn yourself into a circus attraction. These people are mentally disturbed. Not only are we not getting them the assistance they need, we are absolutely encouraging them to mutilate themselves based on their delusions, and trying to force everyone else to think it's a genetic imperative and indulge them in every way possible.
So because there is one exhibitionist out there, everyone must be an exhibitionist? Does that also mean that, because you're a bigot, everyone must be a bigot?
I'm in my mid-30s and just starting down the road of correcting my body. It is because of people like you that, despite knowing since I was 3 years old, I tried to live in denial. It is because of people like you that trans people have a suicide rate nearly 3 times higher than gay people. So you don't support us because you don't even try to understand us... that's fine. But don't belittle us.
I didn't wake up one day and decide that I want to spend $50-100k (just facial electrolysis can cost anywhere from $5k and up and can't be done in one session, it takes months, sometimes several years, to catch all of the hair follicles during their growth phase so you can kill them), have to endure the social stigma of telling my friends and family - all while knowing that I would lose some of them in the process, etc on a whim. I've struggled to deal with who I am for my entire life and I've been suicidally depressed for most of the last ten years. My need to change stems from the fact that, if I don't, I cannot continue to live this life in the way I was forced to.
There are lots of reasons behind gender issues ranging from genetic to in utero underexposure to hormones (or chemicals that mimic estrogen being present in our public water supply). It's amazing that, in a day where we can accept people are born gay, that it isn't a choice, that we will mock and degrade people who feel that their external sex doesn't match their internal gender.
I hope one day, something doesn't cause you to face the same ridicule you're so happy to perpetrate on others...
It is not a choice. It's who someone is. A lot of people feel like they're not in either one of the two "Gender" categories.
If for any reason, someone is trans-gendered it should be made as easy as possible. There's already enough bigotry and phobia out there making their (and our) lives miserable.
The SSA has now formalised their new arrangements recently to reflect on recent developments and have dropped requirements for surgery from their process [ http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/06/14/social-security-removes-surgical-requirement-gender-marker-change ]
While I may not fully understand why it happens, I try my best to make trans folk feel as comfortable as I can. When you live with someone who has faced all the discrimination, sat through the tears or seen the pain in their eyes just for trying to be something they hate less than the alternative, you'd be slightly more understanding.
Trans people are people too.
What I understand even less is that my gender needs to be noted in most databases anyway. There are still rules saying that as a male I can only marry a female (which for me works well), so I guess the government needs to know so that they can stop me pissing off their god by marrying someone of the same sex. And maybe my insurance company needs to know so they can better charge me according to my risk. But the various utility companies don't need to know, and neither does my bank. A title (Mr/Ms/Lord/Lady/Dr/Comrade etc) or something might be required which would hint at gender but that would be about it.
Don't forget File_Not_Found
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I imagine you're part of the "pray the gay away" crowd.
Just because you think it's a mental disorder, and that they are circus freaks, and that they are delusional, and that they are mutilating themselves, doesn't mean it's so. All it does is show that you are an insensitive and ignorant asshole.
Of course that breaks down a bit when encountering hermaphrodites or asexuals (biological ones, we're not discussing sexual orientation), but those are such a vanishingly small percentage of the population that it's unlikely the database would be coded to handle them anyway.
So, they won't be recoding Match.com?
Hermaphrodites getting together could make for some serious hookups... vapor lock, even...
If you use both isMale and isFemale they can be Boolean and you have all bases covered. 1 and 1 for hermaphrodites, and 0 and 0 for asexuals... anybody else should be a 0 and 1 or 1 and 0.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It may be unique but it is becoming more common. For better, or worse, we will need to figure something out at some point.
I have some ethical questions about "fixing" what is a mental health issue with something so drastic as surgery but I'm fortunate to not be in that position so I'm not sure my ethics matter.
So yeah it is interesting. There's a site that I frequent which has an amazingly high percentage of transgendered people on it. (It is Fark actually.) They have, for whatever reason, managed to attract a lot of them. I've made it a point to be open minded and to listen to them (I don't much care as it doesn't apply to me but I am a curious person) and I'm not sure that I agree that modifying the body to fix a mental illness is a good solution.
Either way, there's going to be conflicts in databases. There are going to be issues and bathrooms and additional healthcare are a couple of places where this is going to come into play as it becomes more popular. There are plenty of bigger problems with society though so this isn't all that important. If you dye your hair then you put your real hair color on the form at the DMV. If you wear contacts to the appointment at the DMV you still tell them that you need corrective lenses to drive even though they can't see them. But, well, none of those changes are permanent. Then again, sex changes may not be considered permanent either. So, it's a quandary and we're going to have to face it eventually. We can't stuff it into the closet and hope it resolves itself.
Now, HOW we resolve this will be a measure of our growth as a society. That, though, is a topic for another day.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Gender? Words have gender. People have sex.
for legal purposes, if someone starts off one gender are they always legally considered that gender or does gender altering surgeries change your legal gender.
http://interserver.net/
There are a lot of biological causes for transgenderism, the mental health issues stem from these, not the other way round. A lot of people find that just going on HRT fixes long standing anxiety and depression that nothing else has been able to touch.
How is it substantially different from getting a boob or nose job? We pander to people's dissatisfactions with their bodies left, right, and center, what's one more indulgence?
And it's not like gender is a two-state classification to begin with, for all that we like to pretend it's fully determined by what's between your legs (and even by that measure there are still a few individuals who are either both or neither). Physical gender is actually the combination of several largely independent biological properties, so if you could somehow measure your "maleness" and "femaleness" the two numbers would not necessarily bear any relationship to each other. In fact the discrepancies can get so extreme that there are occasionally people born whose physical gender is actually at odds with their genetic gender - sometimes puberty can trigger at least a partial transformation (I seem to remember reading about a south-american villiage where this is actually not uncommon - some promiscuous ancestor several generations back with an interesting genetic anomaly), but some people only discover the discrepancy when getting a genetic test for unrelated reasons.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hey guys I know what I could add to this already shitty thread, a political jab directed at Obama!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No offense, but being transgendered does not automatically make you an authority on the origins of transexualism ( just as being human does not in itself make one an expert on the origins of humanity. )
The degree to which transgender people are born transgender is quite an open question, and there is currently not a whole lot of strong evidence to support that claim (as reflected in the wikipedia article you linked to -- evidence of genetic contributions is scant, and differences in brain structure cannot indicate innateness). Most likely transgenderism involves a complex interaction of genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, developmental, psychological and social factors.
In some sense I understand why transexual people and gay people (the majority of whom in my experience seem to be committed to the idea that sexual orientation is innate) want this to be the case -- we have good societal analogies for a class of people who are innately different gaining equal status. But in the long run the case for equal rights and humane treatment should probably separate itself from this question, which is purely scientific and far from settled. If the case for equal rights is built upon such an assumption, it may fall like a house of cards as science progresses, and the fact is that we should treat people humanely regardless of the origins of their condition.
XY = Male ... XX = Female
What if you're mixed? There are XX males and XY females. XXY and XYY are also possible. Sometimes twins are conceived, but one absorbs the other. It's not quite as simple as you make it out to be.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Supposedly this is more than made up for by the fact they can live the rest of their life how they feel they should be.
Maybe. There are people that do regret it. If you do, there's no magic reset available. On this earth you will never fully be again what you once were.
Are sex change operations justified?
Sex changes are not effective, say researchers
'I will never be able to have sex again. Ever'
But what worries other psychiatrists is the mounting evidence that surgery may not actually improve the lives of those who feel they were born with the wrong body. A review of more than 100 international studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham found there was no scientific evidence that surgery was effective and, in many cases, patients were left feeling more distressed. Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University — which housed one of the pioneer gender clinics — no longer performs sex-change surgery due to such concerns.
A recent British review found suicide rates of up to 18 per cent among people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery. Doctors from London's Portman Clinic say they see many patients who feel trapped in "no-man's land" after surgery, finding themselves with a body which is no longer recognisable as male or female. Psychotherapy, the experts believe, may have saved them from such a fate but few gender clinics offer it. -- more
Long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment surgery
It's a difficult issue for all concerned.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
To the biologically illiterate AC:
47,XXX
48, XXXX
49 XXXXY syndrome
49, XXXXX
Klinefelter's syndrome
Turner syndrome
XX gonadal dysgenesis
XX male syndrome
XXYY syndrome
XYY syndrome
I'm surprised at all the bigotry here on Slashdot. I hope you guys get a chance to know a transgendered person at some point, it might change your attitudes. I have, and it totally changed my misunderstandings on the subject. I suppose it is natural to be unbelieving in things which seem foreign to our way of thinking, but even if you cannot accept the idea right now, at least give people the benefit of the doubt rather than spew your ignorance as if it were facts. Why not have a look and see attitude? You might be surprised. I feel lucky to have met the transgendered persons I have known in my life, I hope you get the chance.
Comments like this make me proud to have had you on my "foes" list for a good long time. You're going to die. Hopefully your place is taken up by someone more open minded, more sympathetic, and more understanding. No, I'm not a transgendered person. I see them as mentally ill, certainly, but I don't see that as a bad thing - just a thing that they are and of no concern of mine. They don't deserve pity, they don't deserve extra attention, they don't deserve anything special - they deserve to be treated as individuals who are judged by their deeds.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I believe his point was that the surgery was optional. That's a tough one to argue against and while I appreciate your sentiment I'm not entirely certain that it applies. As you can probably tell (if you make the effort, which is doubtful and that's not a comment against you but rather an observation of reality) you'll see my posts are supportive and understanding. Your desire to lash out is neither commendable or necessary. The surgery to change one's gender is elective and shouldn't be a source of embarrassment.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I know exactly how they feel. The puzzled stares... The uncomfortable questions... It's gnarly.
I suspect it is a database tie-in that makes it suitable (according to some) here on Slashdot. I agree that it isn't enough of a tie-in to really belong but it is hardly a new thing and we have the option of leaving should we want to. You're also free to submit better stories so you have choices up to, and including, leaving. I have, of course, elected to remain but that's my choice. You, on the other hand, are just another AC who won't be missed and who has anything they say mixed with too much noise to be considered relevant to many folks here.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Seriously? The choice for most of us is to transition and embrace the way our heads our wired or suicide. I don't see a choice there. I didn't have a choice. I didn't choose to have my marriage explode either. Our society is about gender binaries, Male or Female, for the number of people who fit someplace outside of that precise box, having documentation and paperwork that does NOT match their presentation can be crippling in this binary society where people think that if looks don't match that M/F field, then something is very wrong automatically.
How would you like to hit a TSA checkpoint and almost be denied in the ability to pass beyond the checkpoint to catch your flight because your ID says your Male and you have breasts and look like a Woman? Or better yet, when you present your identification, and people completely change their interaction with you, their tone of speaking, and begin using word that remind you of the pain that you endured.
Preventing the ability to change documentation is not only for people that are transgendered, its for everyone else who has to see/interact with that identity information. It is inhumane to both parties to prevent the ability to correct the information.
I think that the severity needs to be considered as well as the underlying issues that cause one to want to modify themselves. Gender re-assignment surgery is not realistically compared to a piercing, a tattoo, or similar. However, there are those who would take such to extremes where they are obviously mentally ill. First, being mentally ill isn't a bad thing entirely of itself (the term is mentally ill and I didn't make that term up but it does imply connotations of badness). Second, the severity of change needs to be considered. Would I say that those people should seek mental health assistance prior to getting alterations done? I would say that's a broad subject... I'd say that when such alterations impede your life, or will be seen as so life-changing that they are deemed a requirement by the subject, then yes they should seek mental health care prior to engaging in those acts. Would I FORCE that, the mental health care bit, on them? By no means.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
How about we have 3 boxes on the forms. Male, Female, Other. So simple, problem solved.
Which is why the OP is full of bull. Impact on database design and maintenance? Being able to change gender has no influence on database design or maintenance, unless you're indexing based on gender (which is extremely unlikely), and then the impact is so minimal you won't notice. Gender isn't exactly part of your primary key. You're not going to have somehow read-only'd it.
It may have an impact on your ORM/data access layer (where it may be read-only) or your UI (where it may not allow or save changes) but it has no impact at all on your database design or maintenance.
That is true in some cases. There are others who have no biological issues at all but simply feel they were born into the wrong body (I've spoken to a few of these who've gone ahead with the gender re-assignment) and it's a difficult position for them to be in. While your statement is true for some it certainly isn't true for all.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
In my area of the United States, best estimate is 0.3-0.5% of the local population, and since there is a prevalence for people to go into deep stealth to to insensitive society, who really knows....
Hormones and surgeries require you to see medical professionals. GRS, in particular, requires you to go through counseling and to get multiple letters saying that you are, indeed, transgendered and a candidate for surgery.
Of course, with some states now giving anyone with any mental illness (it's not defined) the same treatment as convicted felons, it's not like we've further stigmatized people with mental health issues, discouraging them from seeking help entirely.
Be strong, you are not alone.
.
A few years ago I was looking for genealogy software. One of my requirements was the need to handle a F-F marriage with kids in the family. Fortunately, The Master Genealogist was up to the task. Amazingly, there were few choices that met an important requirement that I had.
Mostly, it's just a head's up to database designers: transgendered people exist, make your database able to correct gender changes or input mistakes easily.
There are good reasons to identify the physical gender of a person rather than their self identified one. Short of an operation, it doesn't change. In medical databases I have worked on, we needed it for health reasons as to what areas exists. We needed it for family medical history. We needed it to help identify people who were injured or killed. For the same reasons, gender neutral identification don't work for us either. If people feel like their physical sex should be kept private, it could be treated as HIPAA info, but we still need to track it.
(This is the same AC as the GP.)
Okay. As the sibling points out, counselling is necessary for surgery. I have a friend who is trans* who complained quite a bit about how absurd the counselling requirements are and how he had to essentially lie to the psychologist to be the textbook perfect "good trans* person" in order to be allowed to get surgery.
I do think you are commenting in good faith, but your comments sound a bit like concern trolling, which is why I am poking you to think about your positions.
we'd rather not have our private lives paraded around in front of others
Forgive my ignorance but is it really any more embarrassing to correct that information in a database than any other? I would imagine vast amounts of data are inaccurate on everybody. I've called and changed my birthday, I've accidentally listed 'male' for my girlfriend when filling out forms online (out of habit). If you're embarrassed just say you erroneously filled out the form or say you were reviewing your records and noticed a big inaccuracy.
I've heard a number of transgender people ask for options which are more inclusive and specific--but that would go against your complaint since it would make your transgender status front and center and 'parade around it around in front for others'.
I agree though on the point that tracking gender is pretty pointless for almost all forms.
I'm aware of this. Others/some/all even force you to go a year (I think it is a year) living as the opposite gender before you can get the surgery. That doesn't change my view though. It seems drastic, to me, to go through gender reassignment to overcome a mental health issue BUT, as I clearly stated, I'm not in a position where it impacts me thus I'm not sure my ethics apply to the situation at all. I understand that there is a lot of social stigma surrounding this but lashing out at me is futile and I'm on your side. I can understand the instinct to lash out but make sure you read and understand what I write before doing so - I mean no harm and only want equal rights for you, your fellow transgendered folk, and everybody else. I'm a strong supporter and advocate for equality and individual freedom.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Undoing a mod to reply to you.
John Hopkins... humm...
A recent British review found suicide rates of up to 18 per cent among people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery.
Feh. Beats the 50% rate of suicide without bottom surgery. All it shows is how uncaring and inhuman people like you are.
What you don't realize is the huge bias against transgendered identities in psychology.
Here's the whole problem. Trans folks are routinely denied their voice in these matters. The system prefers objectifying them and finding every excuse to discredit any benefit they've found from HRT and bottom surgery.
This is how deep the problem goes. We're talking about "transgendered folks," but nobody yet in this entire /. discussion has acknowledged trans men.
Trans men exist. There are a couple in the local support group. Yes, that's right. Folks born with their reproductive systems on the inside who desire becoming men. They take testosterone. They have facial hair. Their voices deepen and become male voices. If you met one, you'd never know it, because they become practically indistinguishable from cis men (men who were born with their reproductive systems on the outside).
How do you explain that in terms of childhood sexual abuse or a desire to rape women in the bathroom or any other kind of theory of sexual perversion and sexual domanance that psychology assures us that the misguided trans woman is merely trying to acquire?
I'd recommend the book Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. It adequately sums up how utterly broken the treatment of trans women is. Did you know that it was until recently that trans women weren't even allowed to start HRT unless they could appear sexually stimulating to a psychologist?
There is a trifecta of religion, psychology, and feminism that is utterly undermined by the idea that somebody born into the male gender caste would desire being a woman. What I mean by gender caste is the idea that the gender one is assigned at birth on the basis on body parts is somehow far deeper than skin, much like the caste system in India. Religion finds this idea natural in its sole focus on reproduction. Feminism finds its construction of a woman as a victim undermined by the idea that someone who was born a rapist/aggressor/man would, of their own free will, desire to become a victim/woman. However, psychology has the solution. The trans woman could only make the decision to undergo gender transition on the basis on mental illness. Here we finally see the trans woman as the depraved serial killer in a woman suit she is.
The research you linked to is a direct product of that bias. We have bought into this narrative that men are sexual aggressors and women are victims so deeply that we cannot comprehend why a sexual aggressor would choose to become a victim except by painting it as mental illness.
Let me clue you in on something. When strangers see me, they believe I'm female. I also have no reason to argue with their assessment. This presents a dilemma. How can you tell somebody who is obviously female and being gendered female by others that she is really, somehow, a man? The only option you have is to do a Crocodile Dundee test and grab me in the crotch.
So, how, exactly, do these researchers figure that sex change surgery is not effective? It's highly dubious, especially after one considers how many trans women have had their lives improved by bottom surgery. However, their voices are easily dismissed because they do not fit into the narrative that femaleness is artifical vanity that womyn-born-womyn are helpless victims of and that maleness is somehow authentic. We look at the trans woman and we are deeply suspicious of her going about her day with long hair, which we understand the womyn-born-womyn only wears long because she's forced to by some vast male conspiracy (see the article "My Hair Is My Accompli
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s/embrace the way our heads our wired or suicide/embrace the way our heads are wired or commit suicide/
Eh, no worries. Next incarnation you'll figure it out. It's just karma. No sympathy. Do not change anything.
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For those not familiar, go look up "epigenetics". I've been pointed to some studies in which there are identical twins who grow into adulthood -- one is gay (for example, pick your LGBTQ?) and the other is not. This being evidence that it's not "genetic" per se, but is epigenetic.
Nonetheless, I think epigenetics essentially bolsters the claims that most LGBTQ would make, that it's not a conscious decision but it's WHO they ARE.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
And it's not as simple as just saying that all humans are equal regardless of gender.
Men cannot typically compete in women's sports, because human males tend to have an advantage in several areas of athleticism. Mothers tend to have default parental and custodial rights beyond those of the father. There are a multitude of medical reasons to categorize humans as male and female.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
There's nothing more fun than watching ignorant bigots parade just how contemptibly stupid they really are. Thank you for sharing you small minded bigotry.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Transgender people may be born transgender.
That is not always true, I have this from good authority from someone who decided he was a she sometime in their late-20s and had the gender reassignment done in their late 30s. She's quite open about it and frequents Fark.com in case you're curious. They will tell you they weren't born that way but that they chose, over time, to be that way because they started (key word there) feeling as if they were a female sometime in their mid-20s. I understand the desire to fight and argue but being transgendered doesn't mean that they're all like you or that they're subject to the same feelings you had.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
that's bit-ist
There are various diseases, dysmorphia, accidents and disorders that affect how one perceives one's gender and which affect how other's perceive one's gender.
If we want an accurate Object definition for Class>>Gender it has to be implemented to have a pair of small integers as attributes and presented/interacted with as a pair of Sliders.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
you can thank the socialist left for this situation... libertarians think the government and all it's associated minions should just stay the fuck away from all that, which is the way it should be
This.
Frankly, I don't give a damn. If they want to be M, they can put M. If they want to be F, they can put F. But I'll be damned if I'll change my database just because THEY decided to change a letter on a form.
Their decision, they can deal with it. It is quite literally not my problem.
We'll also be paying for you to extend your life way past its useful point. If it resolves a mental health problem (which is subject to debate) and increases their quality of life then it's probably worth it. A healthy populace is good for everyone as a whole.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Every perversion seeks to legitimize itself. This necessarily means branding and stigmatizing those who disagree with it. Even though they're not actively oppressing the perverse.
Yeah, I think transgendered people are emotionally ill. So fucking what? I'm not doing anything to harm a transgendered person. Nor would I consider it. I don't go around insulting them. I don't hate them. I simply think they're emotionally ill and that their inability to cope with their own nature is a perversion. Guess what? I am entitled to feel that way. No one is entitled to harm them. See the difference? I don't agree with it and I don't have to agree with it and that's okay. In a free society we accept peaceful non-forcible dissent.
The accusations of bigotry against people who have done nothing to harm the transgendered is an attempt to make those who disagree into the "circus freaks". So many transgendered are thus no better than those they complain about! Hypocrites. Guess what? The idea that everyone must agree with and accept and actively facilitate every weird lifestyle choice is MADNESS. But if you want to do it, you can start by practicing all religions AND practicing Atheism, that way you embrace everybody. Silly huh?
Here's something I have learned myself because of my light recreational use of drugs: if you choose a lifestyle that goes against the norm, some will not view you as normal. So fucking what? Have the guts to do what you want in spite of the fact that not everybody will agree with it. I'm not forcing anyone else to use drugs and that's good enough.
"treated like crap by a large portion of society" or not, they voluntarily agreed to the process and they are the ones asking for an update to a record in some database.
A whole lot of prying into someone's medical history would be unreasonable, but some explanation is in order, same as, say, a correction to date of birth.
Does it really matter which side of the aisle it came from? Injecting politics into an unrelated thread is the issue, no? ;)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
is that we have systems which are based on the assumptions of hetero couples for marriage, so same-sex data entry will fail, these are validation rules. This has to change, but in the meantime, well, it will cause issues. grin and bear it.
I'm not going to flame you because I came at this from the same direction. I discovered that I was wrong. You are correct that transgendered people have a mental-physical mismatch, and you can certainly describe this as a mental problem and be accurate, if perhaps insensitive.
That said, there is no treatment available that works better than sexual reassignment surgery. I feel that the minor adjustments that we need to make to accommodate these people pale in comparison to what we do to accommodate people with physical handicaps, and we should probably help them if we want to see ourselves as compassionate. If a person who is obviously a dude wants to behave as a lady, the least I can do is go along with the ruse if it means they are more likely to be happy and less likely to commit suicide.
Like any condition, if an option someday arises that works as well or better than surgery, they should definitely pursue that - but in the meantime, just have some compassion for someone with a very difficult life.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Perhaps a clerk encountering a transgender with incorrect record is a rare enough situation that we can just let the DBA handle it? OTOH for the person that just changed sex, it means a lot of delays, at least if he/she cares to get the record changed.
The trans woman could only make the decision to undergo gender transition on the basis on mental illness. Here we finally see the trans woman as the depraved serial killer in a woman suit she is.
1/4 of the country is mentally ill according to psychologists so I wouldn't take it so personally.
All I ever once was was a girl who was routinely abused by being exposed to testosterone against her will
I was curious about whether you tried testosterone therapy and it didn't work? I can't tell if that's what you're saying or if you feel like you were abused by yourself for producing testosterone.
Maybe these women weren't satisfied because they had to survive a full-on assault by charlatans who sought to reminder them at every goalpost that they never really would be women, despite what their hearts were telling them.
I'm curious about this statement too.. you're saying your heart may tell you you're a woman. What does that mean? Is there some feeling that all women have that men aren't supposed to feel?
If a woman asked me what it feels like to be a man because she wanted to know if she was supposed to be a man, I'd have absolutely no idea what to say. I'm sure women are the same way. So there's no way you described how you felt to a group of women and they said "Oh wow you're actually one of us." What was your realization process really like?
What makes you say that having none reproducing members of the family/clan/tribe to help the reproducing members raise their children is suicidal? I'm pretty sure there have been studies that show that species where some members reproduce and other members assist them is beneficial to the group and species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Wow, that must cause hell at the restrooms... :)
Seriously, I bring my daughter into the men's room because she is too young to use the restroom herself. I think we are putting too much weight on this stuff. A gay man can get his jollies in a men's room, or a gay woman can hang out in the ladies' room, I suppose, but in practice it isn't a real problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't know about "better" but it is less invasive and less risky to their overall health.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You keep calling it a mental health issue yet from my understanding, it's usually just having their brain wired differently with the wiring being done in the womb by exposure to different hormones.
There might be some who as an example, had parent[s] who really wanted a different gendered child and warped the kid but the ones I've known it has been the opposite which does cause mental issues as everyone wants to be accepted as themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There will be certain cases - a lot of medical data, for example - where gender truly is important.
But in a lot of cases, you could reasonably have a person simply refuse to provide the information in the first place, or even just need a temporary value if gender is unknown at the time of record creation. A serious database has to anticipate those cases; this is not a big step.
And a database which needs gender for some legitimate medical purpose already needs to deal with special cases.
(And that's all without worrying about the question of whether those cases are lifestyle choices, genuine metabolic disorders, or something else entirely - the technology does not care about attitudes.)
You/someone needs to come up with a better solution. I'm tired of your 3 year old staring at my junk.
ALTER TABLE Person DROP COLUMN Gender;
I see them as mentally ill, certainly, but I don't see that as a bad thing
If it's not a bad thing to be mentally ill, why use the word ill?
She's not staring, she's squinting ;p
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I've never considered it before, but was this always a backdoor into same sex marriage? Sex change, update database, marry, update database, sex change, update database? Or did the government stop people from getting that 2nd sex change, or automatically cancel the marriage?
Those poor 0.0000001%. It's so tough for them.
Are you trying to tell me there's only 6 transgender people in the world? You clearly have not been to Thailand.
This isn't a joke. It's about a tiny but very real group of people being able to live their lives safely and in dignity.
Leaving aside questions of what data is needed in the medical profession to handle biology correctly - which is a completely different issue - the attitude that people deserve to have their secrets outed so that other people can entertain themselves by laughing at them is just... not the geek world I grew up in having programmed computers since the age of 8. My mum got me into it, in a family where everyone writes code.
As a lesbian geek girl, I'm disgusted by a lot of the comments here, and really don't know if I even belong on this forum any more. I don't write much but have been reading on a daily basis since the late 1990s.
The transgender community seems to be under attack these days since they're small enough not to be able to fight back in the way that the gay and lesbian community and various ethnic minorities have. Finally all the bigots and religious fundamentalists have found a group of people who it is "safe" to bully.
But please, not on slashdot!!
Surely, as so called "nerds" you would know something about the history of your industry. Have you heard of Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing), who developed the model for the general purpose computer, only to be arrested for being homosexual, clinically castrated, and driven to suicide? You probably have, and I assume he's one of the reasons why a lot of IT companies are very good at accepting gay men and lesbian.
What about Lynn Conway, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, who literally wrote the book on VLSI design (Introduction to VLSI systems). She's alive, fortunately, but we all lost a lot of her work when she was forced to start again "at the bottom of the ladder" as a contract programmer in mid-career to hide her gender past from your bigotry and intolerance.
What about Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski who co-produced the Matrix Trilogy? She came close to not surviving the hate growing up, and if she hadn't survived, we would never have gotten to see The Matrix.
And - he might not have been a geek, but - what about Mike Penner, who committed suicide after an unsuccessful attempt at gender transition?
Seriously, wannabe geeks, as tiny a minority as the transgender community is, the IT industry is packed full of transsexuals and transgender people. And many of us here have romantic partners, or parents, or brothers and sisters and friends who are. At least here in Melbourne, Australia, you can't write code and hang out in the industry without getting close to many of them.
It seems that all the gay men and lesbians are too successful and too powerful for you to attack now. So like all bullies, you run off in search of an easier victim.
Getting back to the topic, why exactly do you need databases to say things about people's gender that don't match how they present themselves? To out them and embarrass them because they "deserve" it? How little compassion and caring do you have for other people? Would you want to be treated this way yourselves if you had some type of secret you had to keep from people who would hate you because of it?
If you were in Europe circa World War 2, would you insist that records there included whether or not a person was Jewish, based on genetic testing? With no ability for a person to change their record to say they were, say, Russian, if it could give them a better chance of finding employment or even survival?
In case you think the analogy isn't fair (and yes, I am Jewish, and migrated from Russia with my parents as a three year old), have a look at what the Salvation Army (who the government in Australia got involved in finding jobs for the unemployed a few years ago) are saying and doing:
That's right you database developers you. Take that! And while you're at it, make our race field selectable too. While we (or most of us anyways) are Human, we might have intelligent extraterrestrial visitors soon. Plan ahead!
Life is not for the lazy.
what about caring about intersex people who were born with ambiguous genitalia and have to deal with this shit as well? Is it okay to be persecuted by tyranny of the majority because we are, as you put it. "a tiny minority" that is even smaller than the TG minority? Is that okay in your opinion?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You forgot genetic mosaicism
XX/XX
XX/XY
XX/XXY
XY/XXY
etc.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The incidence of intersex conditions is a hell of a lot higher than .0001%.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Okay. As the sibling points out, counselling is necessary for surgery. I have a friend who is trans* who complained quite a bit about how absurd the counselling requirements are and how he had to essentially lie to the psychologist to be the textbook perfect "good trans* person" in order to be allowed to get surgery.
Depends where you are, but yes, that's a story I've heard a lot as well, from several trans friends. I do community outreach through the local LGBT center, and deal with trans folk on a regular basis because of it....
That being said, things are changing in most places. The US is still batshit insane, but I know a transwoman who went through the folks in Toronto last year, and didn't have to pretend to be anything she wasn't. She even blatantly told the psychiatrist that she was a lesbian and had no intention of ever being with a guy, and still got the surgery... something that even 5 years ago wouldn't have been possible because it wasn't "textbook".
The tech-relevance is that making assumptions about your data doesn't just ruin the elegance of your table design but has real-wold impact on actual people.
Really? You cant even read the post?
BTW the reason everyone has a gender is so a computer can send you your junk mail with a proper salutation, Mr. Jennifer.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Ahhh gotcha that sucks. So your driver's license will perpetually remain M even if you are now F and result in constant conflicts of "that doesn't match your driver's license".
I was envisioning a system similar to changing your legal name. How many states don't allow gender/sex changes on their official IDs?
Pet Peeve: Coders that bring up the earliest record in history. If a customer with 7 years of history calls up with a problem, likely it's with the latest order, not one they made 7 years ago.
That said, a database should treat all information in it as frangible. Nothing is ever written in stone, and all input can never be 100% validated by rules. The best you can do is say "Did they really go from Male to Female?" or "Customer unique identifier change is not supported on this version. See your supervisor for how to proceed."
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
For those not familiar, go look up "epigenetics". I've been pointed to some studies in which there are identical twins who grow into adulthood -- one is gay (for example, pick your LGBTQ?) and the other is not. This being evidence that it's not "genetic" per se, but is epigenetic
The counterpoint to this being that even though there's examples where one's gay and the other isn't, the statistical probability that both twins are gay is several orders of magnitude higher than it is for non-twin siblings, suggesting that there is probably still a genetic correlation.
The counter-counterpoint is that there's also a statistically significant probability that later children will be gay (a woman's 1st son has X percentage chance, her 5th son has X+Y percentage), which suggests that homosexuality may actually be a biological response to overpopulation, and that there's hormonal triggers in utero which can cause it.
Likely, as the GP says, there's a very large number of factors, and people are making mistakes by trying to single out an individual factor as the cause. This also goes for transgenderism, which, as the GP says, should be treated on basis of "they're human, they deserve equal treatment", not "they're different, they deserve equal treatment".
"a tiny minority of people who knew going into it"
You mean before they were born?
(This is going to sound a lot like the kind of lecture you used to have to give people about sexual orientation, but that's how it goes....)
Being transgender isn't something that someone just decides to do one day, as an adult. It's about people who are designated "male" or "female" at birth (usually based on whether they have an identifiable dick or not) but grow up feeling that they've been miscategorized. The "how"s and "why"s of it aren't especially well understood, but the fact that it happens is (or at least should be) well established and accepted.
Those who go through with legal and/or physical gender reassignment don't do it by "choice", but because they feel a need to. Yes, they know they'll face pointless bureaucratic red tape, and possibly a lifetime of trying to explain to friends, coworkers, employers, and service providers with crappy customer service. They do it for their sense of self-identity and emotional well-being. It can be a nightmare. Even though it doesn't need to be. But it is, mostly because of dismissive jerks like you, who don't want to be bothered by taking it seriously.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Actually, it's a heavily politicized issue in most of the world... there's *very* few countries in the world where gender reassignment surgery is covered by public health care, and it's usually a very politically charged argument over whether it should be covered.
Such political impetus is usually the main reason that trans people in some areas have a really hard time getting databases updated, and in others it's really easy, too. In this neck of the woods, it's simply a question of getting a letter from your doctor, and they'll update your health card, your driver's license, your birth certificate, and your passport. Don't even need to have surgery.
Have gnu, will travel.
I've never considered it before, but was this always a backdoor into same sex marriage? Sex change, update database, marry, update database, sex change, update database? Or did the government stop people from getting that 2nd sex change, or automatically cancel the marriage?
Probably varies by country, but I think in Australia if you are born with something that looks like a penis then you are labelled a man and the database can't be changed. So if you identify as a female but are a lesbian it would actually be a win (assuming the fact that the government had labelled you incorrectly didn't bother you) because you could get married. Of course this may be outdated and/or completely wrong... not really my area.
If you're really sincere about supporting equality, then please make a little genuine effort to better understand the subject. Talking about transgender identity as a "mental health issue" is about as respectful - and medically accurate - as referring to homosexual or left-handed people as having mental disorders.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yes. I know several. I work with one on a regular basis at the local LGBT center.
You raise a good point, but sometimes it's not as easy as you seem to think... In some jurisdictions, all you need is a letter from your doctor and they'll change the sex on your driver's license. In some, they won't change it at all, even after you've had reassignment surgery. Without more information, we have no way of knowing whether the person in question chose not to update her driver's license.
The issue is that it's even required at all. The solution is to stop asking people for their gender. It's irrelevant. They don't ask people for their eye colour do they?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why did they choose 1/2? Could they not have gone with A and B? 419 A and 419 B
I really do not understand why someone tagged this "Democrats". LGBT issues cross party lines, even if some Republicans oppose these issues.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
Thank you. I was trying to find a good way to tell that person he was quoting idiots, but I don't think I can do it any more eloquently than you.
There's a particularly insidious branch of feminism (and I use that word because that's how they identify, not because I consider them feminists) which seems to think that you are only female if you were born that way, and that you're only male if you're born that way. One of the most obvious examples of this would be the kerfluffle that blew up over the last few years with Dianic Wicca, but that opens up an entirely different can of worms on this forum, and isn't really germane to the discussion.... the point I'm making is that these people claim to be feminists, but the ideas they espouse are the antithesis of feminism. These are the people who believe that it's not possible for men to be feminists, either, which is utterly wrong. Real feminism is inclusive, both of men who want to do more to help women be treated as equals, and of transwomen who should be accepted as women, without the need for the "trans" identifier. (and the same for transmen)
Now, I fully expect that some people are shitheads, and will probably find a way to give you flak for what you've written. For that, you have my sympathy. But you do have allies here, and out there, and I wanted you to know that.
But gender isn't a simple boolean value. Not medically, not psychologically, and not even sociologically.
And if we aim to be a society which treats people equally regardless of gender, why should it matter whether we treat it as a single-bit boolean or a floating-point or a short string of ASCII? Isn't it something we should be working harder to simply ignore (except where genuinely relevant)?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I am the author of a small university dating website, and I recently had this explained to me. Looking at something like the "Genderbread person" it seems that sexual-identity isn't the simple set of options that I originally designed i.e. "{Male ,Female} seeks {Male, Female, Either}". In fact, it's a 16-dimensional space, with floating point coordinates
(4 axes, each with a mean and std-dev, and the same 4+4 for what you seek).
BUT... what is a computer programmer to do? I don't have the slightest idea even what pronouns to use, let alone how to sensibly represent this 16-D space, or make it searchable. Any ideas? There's an excellent site about "Falsehoods programmers believe about names"... could someone write something similar for gender?
In the end, my response to the requestor was that, regrettably, we had started out with a design saying that sex was boolean (M/F), and would they please pick the nearest match for themself, then elaborate in the comments. I made a design error when I started out, but haven't the time to fix it now (I estimate a man-week to fix and test all the instances where the codebase assumes that !M F), and for a 600-member site without membership fees, this isn't practical. But I'd love to see some documentation of the correct way to handle the problem, so that maybe in future I can fix the design.
I was curious about whether you tried testosterone therapy and it didn't work? I can't tell if that's what you're saying or if you feel like you were abused by yourself for producing testosterone.
Most of the transwomen that I know view the body's natural production of testosterone to be the body slowly poisoning itself, in a circumstance where they have a hard time convincing a doctor to give them a treatment which can stop it. This is one of the major reasons why transgendered people have a very high suicide rate among those who haven't had treatment.
I'm curious about this statement too.. you're saying your heart may tell you you're a woman. What does that mean? Is there some feeling that all women have that men aren't supposed to feel?
Self identification. You think of yourself as a man (I assume). The GP identifies herself as a woman. The difference is that you (assuming you're male) have the dangly bits to go with it, so there's no discord between your identified gender and your physical sex. For a transgendered person, their physical sex does not match their identified gender, and that clash can cause serious body image issues, severe depression, and suicidal behaviour. Usually, the only effective treatment for somebody in that situation is to start living as their perceived gender, and almost universally, once a transperson starts their real life experience (long before they get any kind of surgery), the depression and other mental issues disappear very quickly.
I know it's difficult to wrap your head around... usually the only way to understand it is to go through such a change yourself or (in some cases) to know people before/after their transition and see for yourself the positive difference it makes in their life, but there is a distinction between a person's physical sex and their gender identity. These are two distinct and separate variables that go into the definition of "you", and when the two do not have the same value, it causes problems. Since there isn't really a way to change one (gender), the only effective treatment is to look at the other.
No, I haven't time nor interest in trolling. Thanks for your concern but, frankly, I'm capable of thought on my own. I don't need guidance and I doubt your skills of provoking my positions. You're dismissed.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It is expensive to do that. Your increasing the amount of work people need to do when filling out forms. Then you have to deal with mistakes. You have to give a long explanation why your asking the same question twice. It doesn't make the transaction any less weird for anybody either. Your also potentially collecting information that could be used to discriminate against people.
Please go back to your cave.
You're awfully closed-minded as shamans go. Native american cultures held transgendered tribesmen in special regard.
Your particular culture isn't the end-all be-all of human relations nor some fountain of cosmic truth.
Having their brain wired differently is a mental health issue, many mental health issues are exactly that. Unfortunately calling it that includes peoples biases - I'm not biased about it (I don't think) nor do I think there's much benefit to being entirely mentally healthy.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Because it is the term that is correct. Do you have another? It is not me who applies the connotations.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Does it need the political angle in this thread?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No, really. Stop doing this. I don't care if it's inconvenient - next time wrap that shit up.
It *is* a mental health issue. There's no "nice" way about it - it is what it is. It isn't a bad thing unless you want to see it as one.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I was curious about whether you tried testosterone therapy and it didn't work? I can't tell if that's what you're saying or if you feel like you were abused by yourself for producing testosterone.
As one of the AC MTFs in the thread, I have enough excess testosterone that I started male pattern baldness. My testosterone shortage likely came in the womb, giving me a female wired brain, not after puberty.
I'm curious about this statement too.. you're saying your heart may tell you you're a woman. What does that mean? Is there some feeling that all women have that men aren't supposed to feel?
If a woman asked me what it feels like to be a man because she wanted to know if she was supposed to be a man, I'd have absolutely no idea what to say. I'm sure women are the same way. So there's no way you described how you felt to a group of women and they said "Oh wow you're actually one of us." What was your realization process really like?
I knew I was female from a very young age... It was made abundantly clear to me that my parents would not accept that role for me, so from that point on, I knew I had to hide whom I really was from everyone else, including myself. I can remember being 5 years old and being upset that I didn't get to wear a dress to school like the other girls. A few years later, my sister was born and when my parents took her to get her ears pierced, the doctor jokingly pretended that he was going to pierce mine and I felt elated and then let down when he didn't. By the time I hit puberty, I realized I wasn't simply attracted to women, but I felt an innate need to want to be the women I was attracted to.
Things start to get confusing for a lot of people around that age... it's also when my parents split up. I'd visit my grandfathers, both of whom had daughters living at home, and play with their clothes, shoes and makeup when nobody was around. I'd skip school to wear my mom's clothes. I'd masturbate to things like Fredericks catalogs, pretending I was the women wearing the clothes. I started having a recurring dream about meeting my identical twin, though they were female, and us switching roles to fool our parents. I completely lacked the courage to ask out the girls I liked (something I'm sure most of us here at slashdot can relate to), but it was because I felt like I could never offer them what the other boys my age could.
All the while, I kept trying to lie to myself and prove my manhood... I signed up for football, where I became the wild guy on the team, not scared of anything. I got a hunting license because my dad expected me to enjoy such manly things as killing my own food. I nearly signed up for the military, but was informed that my not-so-secret health conditions (asthma among other things) would preclude me from doing so.
In my 20s, my dad became disabled and I dropped out of an engineering degree to take care of him... Looking back, though I knew I was giving up a likely promising and relatively lucrative career, the sacrifice both felt right out of a sense of nurturing a loved one, but was also a way to seek his acceptance, since I never felt like I could live up to his expectations for me.
When I was 25, I became suicidally depressed after I found out that my girlfriend not only lied to me about everything, but used me and cheated on me. Here I was, supposedly a man, yet I felt completely inadequate. A couple years after her, I met another woman, the one I thought I was going to marry, and finally had sex for the first time. It was horrible... not just "first sex bad," but everything about my role in it felt wrong. I couldn't maintain an erection despite being very much attracted to her and in love with her. After a couple years of her breaking up with me and getting back together, only for her to cheat on me multiple times, I broke it off for good...
Six months later, I realized I couldn't keep lying to myself. The reason why I couldn't ever succeed at being a man is... because de
It should be recorded as what your DNA says you are.
I think a lot of folks on slashdot that have problems with these people do so simply because while they don't care about transgender/gay/whatever, they _do_ care about calling a spade a spade. Since saying that a man is a woman clashes with things pretty hard.
Having behaviours typically ascribed to women does not make you a woman. Same with men.
Meh. The odds are far better that they're being checked out by the lesbian than the transsexual. Well, I suppose I don't actually know for sure, but I would make guess that the lesbian ratio among former men is substantially lower than among the general population. Major surgery is after all not something to be undertaken lightly, and a lesbian trapped in a man's body has a lot more romantic options and a lot less social stigma than they would face post-transformation. Seems to me there would be substantial temptation in that case to just play the hand they were dealt, even if they're not totally at ease in their body.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Mental health issue makes it sound like they're defective whereas they're just at a different point on a natural spectrum. It would be like saying I have a physical health issue because I'm somewhat short or saying the same about my parents who were even shorter due to growing up in a war environment with food shortages. We're just at one end of a spectrum, not having physical health issues because we were born with a tendency to be short, amplified by food shortages in some our cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Is we need to define what we mean when we ask for someone's sex or gender on a form. I think part of the problem is different people identify what it means differently. Some in the transgender community say it is 100% about what you personally choose to identify as. So you could be genetically male, have an XY chromosome set, and biologically male, as in have male genitals and body structure, but identify yourself as female and that's what you should mark down. However other people might disagree. If you went in to the woman's dressing room at a rec center the biological women in there might not be at all comfortable with that since they identify you as male, due to your biology.
So one of the things we need to do is clarify the terms, and perhaps have different terms for identifying someone's genetic structure, biological makeup, and sexual identity.
Like when you are talking to a doctor, the genetic definition matters. Reason is that health issues do NOT affect both genders equally, and it has nothing to do with appearance or identity, it has to do with genetics. So even if you've had a sex change operation and all that, proper identification as genetically male could be relevant to medical providers.
For most people it is more about biology, as in what bits do you have between your legs. We visually identify people as male or female, and most are pretty clearly one or the other. That is one of the reasons it gets asked for lots of forms of ID is to help ensure that the ID is for the person holding it. For that, we might want to use your biological appearance. If you undergo a sex change surgery, then you change that identifier.
In terms of the pronoun you wish people to use to identify your gender, that really is up to you, though you need to understand it can be confusing to people if you appear and sound different than you identify.
So as you say we need to review why the information is collected, and then define terms to say what sort of thing we are talking about. We can't just say "Well let people identify as whatever they want," since reality doesn't work that way. However if you are just collecting it for no real reason, then don't and let people identify how they wish.
I had my bank account disabled once. When I called up the bank to find out why my card didn't work, they told me that an unknown woman had called and attempted to access my account. I'm a male, so that action caused them to red-flag my account and disable it until they could determine what was going on. I was understandably concerned, and asked them for more information. Turns out, the "woman" who accessed my account was me, and the underpaid foreign telephone agent had misidentified me as female. Now, I am in no way female (the neckbeard is a dead giveaway), so having my account disabled simply because some idiot thought I sounded like a girl was pretty bad.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
on that note
Interesting, and if I hadn't posted that is how I would mod it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Doesn't your definition mean that persons who have had voluntary sterilization, i.e. a vasectomy, have committed suicide? Talk about mental health issues - there appear to be whole groups of walking, talking people you can't accept as living, quite possibly including me and others who have chosen by surgical means to stop doing any more reproducing.
Even if you aren't lumping me in your special group, classifying some people you disagree with as dead certainly stops you from having to consider their current opinions, but it doesn't sound like an evolutionarily successful strategy, anymore than classifying some traffic signs as not being real, working traffic signs would be.
Who is John Cabal?
Are you a cartoon?
Bollocks [sic]. Attitudes like this are why trans people have such a struggle day-to-day. Wake up, it's not about balls, it's about brains. As a signifier for gender, what you have between your legs is irrelevant, and it's about time people started to understand that.
As one, there are probably more MTF lesbians than in the general population (given that we have a gender identity difference, it's more likely that we'd have a higher rate of orientation difference since the two are loosely connected)... I don't know if I'd be attracted to men had I been born into the proper body, but as things are, I have no attraction at all to men. Sex using my penis was an emotional nightmare to the point of being pretty much non-functional anyway. Try being a man and telling a woman that, while you guys can have sex, you're not interested in sticking your penis in her at all, ever, and see how far that gets you. Men sexually disgust me, so I have no interest in having sex with them at all.
I can't speak for all transgendered people, particularly since many of them successfully reproduce prior to transitioning, but I'd rather go without sex entirely than to be forced to have sex again with the tools that I was given.
The accusations of bigotry against people who have done nothing to harm the transgendered is an attempt to make those who disagree into the "circus freaks".
Calling people circus attractions is bigoted and harmful.
So many transgendered are thus no better than those they complain about! Hypocrites. Guess what? The idea that everyone must agree with and accept and actively facilitate every weird lifestyle choice is MADNESS.
Calling bigotry what it is is not the same thing as abuse. Being called a bigot for expressing bigotry (obviously!) doesn't make you agree with, accept, or facilitate anything. This is the same kind of false equivalency that racists and sexists and all manner of other bigots raise when being called out.
And you know what? I want to be absolutely clear on this point: you can go on believing that people are circus attractions because of who they are. I'll go on believing you're a bigot. Neither of us has to change a bit.
How about we have 3 boxes on the forms. Male, Female, Other. So simple, problem solved.
You forgot the Cowboy Neal option.
No left turn unstoned.
Neither gender or sex belongs in most databases any more than race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or any other sort of information that has no bearing on the business or government agency's interaction with the person. Storing more information than you should in your database only leads to headaches and possible legal liabilities.
It is not a choice. It's who someone is.
Your genetics aren't a choice but *how* you live your life and portray your gender *is* a choice because all those things rely on our actions, which we all have control over. "it's who someone is" is inaccurate. It would be more accurate to say "it's who someone wants to be". If you disagree with that then I'll have to deem you a bigot.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Im just curious. How common, statistically, are all of those disorders combined?
Ultimately, these are all still categorized as male or female despite the various combinations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_chromosome_disorders
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Trans people are people too.
I dont think anyone is arguing that theyre not; however this...
It is not a choice. It's who someone is. A lot of people feel like they're not in either one of the two "Gender" categories.
Is irrelevant. No amount of wanting will change your "default" hormonal state, or give you functional sex organs from your chosen gender.
Self identification. You think of yourself as a man (I assume). The GP identifies herself as a woman.
I know.. I'm wondering what the distinction is between a guy who identifies with women vs. a guy who identifies as a woman. What does it mean to feel that you are a woman? Does it require a belief in a soul, and a gendered soul specifically?
I'm assuming you don't believe that gender is a social construct, since that means our gender is defined by society's view of us, not some inherent feeling. What do you think decides which way that feeling points?
The right wing libertarians seem to think that only the better people should be allowed to discriminate, and government aren't the better people being servants of the rich. If you're rich or the owner of a business, then it's fine as those poor losers can always sue for equality. Stupid aristocracy worshipers who think they're better then others because they have a broader view of what makes an aristocrat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
So the real issue you have is that other people have a problem with your decision. Okay, that makes sense and I'd be pissed off if someone had issues with a choice I made and went so far as to chastise or persecute me for it. If I know ahead of time that there are, unfortunately, ignorant people in this world then that needs to be one of the factors I take into consideration for making a decision and acting on it; that's just a fact of life. There are, however, people who will disagree with you on fundamental grounds that it is still a choice to change your sex. They won't persecute you for it. They will still accept you as a person but that doesn't mean they have to accept your decisions or your choices, nor are they obligated to do so. You may claim that lack of acceptance in and of itself is persecution but you would be wrong. It's called disagreeing. And it is a part of everyday life that everyone needs to realize and be able to recognize so that person who are surprised that not everyone accepts their actions (I'm still only talking about the people who do so respectfully) don't go crying back to mommy or the government demanding that person A or group B who disagreed with said action be punished for the disagreement.
These statements also are true for the LGB portion of the LGBT group.
If you want to share your side of things with someone who can relate to the problems you face, try talking to a Christian sometime, specifically one who has been chastised for their beliefs, ridiculed, silenced, maybe even attacked physically (because they are expected to not fight back and then are ridiculed if they do).
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Brains are as much physical organs as livers or ovaries.
I see one big, important distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality in your example. Homosexuality doesn't require a third-party to participate to make you what you into what your feelings tell you that you should be. Someone who has sexual attraction to those of the same gender is a homosexual whether or not they ever fulfill their attractions. By contrast, it requires active participation to have gender reassignment surgery to "correct" the external body appearance and genitalia.
If I question a particular individual's thoughts on transsexuality, it's because I know my own struggle with self-identity, without even considering any part of my body to be fundamentally incorrect, and I know that my self-identity changes over time. Because of understanding how my attitude toward myself can potentially change, I do not make permanent modifications to myself. Loads of people are very fickle about themselves, and will take actions that permanently change them without necessarily reasoning those decisions all of the way through.
Years ago, I was introduced to a young man who was going through his own crisis, he basically had run away from all of his friends and family and was struggling with the idea of having a sex-change operation in order to become a lesbian. At the time I was not in a position to comprehend the right questions, but at the same time I did not feel that the new friends that he had taken up with were the right people to advise him either. In my opinion he needed to find therapy that would cover why he wanted to do this, and by why I mean going over his life to attempt to help him understand, if even only for himself, why this was a desired course of action, before actually taking such an action.
I do not deny that I am not terribly supportive of gender reassignment, but at the same time, I will not obstruct either. I feel that it is only my business in the sense that I have to deal with people who sometimes come to regret important actions they took previously in life, and I think that someone must be absolutely, positively certain beyond any doubt at all that something this permanent is the right course of action before doing something that can't really be undone.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I agree that modifying the body to fix a mental illness is a good solution.
Riddle me this: is a phantom limb in place of a lost one a mental illness?
Why assume that physical is right and mental is wrong? For all of neural plasticity, why do TG people exist at all?
All rites reversed 2010
Depends on the mutilation. Piercings and tattoos are some examples of self-mutilation that are somewhat socially acceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
it's unlikely the database would be coded to handle them anyway
That would be a very small database. Would Microsoft Excel fit your needs? No, you probably don't need the power of Access.
All rites reversed 2010
Any half-decent database system already DOES have the ability to change both gender and race.
Not so much to support transgender or theoretical "transrace" people, but simply because users sometimes make mistakes and systems must allow such mistakes to be corrected.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
... If it was a personal choice, one should not be embarrassed. And if others look at you strange, have confidence in your choice and yourself, and know that you're right and they're goofy...
And then, fully on the topic -- welcome to reality. Change anything, and things get complicated. Try moving. It's as if every single business you ever dealt with needs an update. Change your partner? That's a complicated matter called 'divorce' and for some reason the law and judges are involved. Crazy...
Things are tough all over.
That would be "Rarely", "Damn Rarely", and "What's that?"
You shouldn't respond to these. Myself and others routinely mod everyone posting Offtopic with their UID -1 because Slashdot puts a troll thread above a good one if it has more points in it.
The article is the topic. If you don't have anything to contribute with respectfully STFU, even if this is called the 'comments' section. Important stuff get posted here too and we don't want it lost due to a bad signal-to-noise ratio.
All rites reversed 2010
Something like 3-4 per 1,000, though the numbers may be higher than that due to under-diagnosis, as the most common ones (XXX and XYY) are frequently asymptomatic.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You mean just like you?
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Most technical and social structures are designed in a way to maximize performance of the average case. If they wanted to improve worst case performance they had to sacrifice average performance. Or in non-technical terms: They typically cannot just add resources to better support the minority, they would have to pull the resources from somewhere else, where the same resources would help many more people. Is it worth it? Maybe sometimes, but certainly not always.
The illness comes from having to learn to deal with the emotionally retarded, sociopathic, unintelligent, wilfully ignorant and embarrassingly neurotic nutcases who make up the vast majority of the population of this planet.
If you're not perfect, you're hurting someone. That hurting can have consequences like anxiety, atonia, mania, hypomania, seizures, hypokalemia, dry mouth, excessive sweating, restlessness, suicide.
All rites reversed 2010
if your son came up to you and told you he didnt "feel" like a person who was mobile, and wanted to break his own back and or neck and become a quadriplegic, you would support him right? because thats what he "feels" he is right? cutting off your own cock is totally normal, no one thinks its wrong to chop off your cock with a knife at all....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
biologically, any "relationship" that not result in reproduction is not "useful"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
While i hate to agree with the parent post (i've had this discussion with them on 'that other website' they mentioned, different pseudonym for myself there) transgender is still considered a mental illness by the medical community. The problem in discussing mental illness is that there is no good way to separate ones that are pathological brain structure differences from those that are pathological chemical imbalances from those that are personality disorders with no (yet) known pathology. So, we lump them all together and some people assume that means one type of treatment must work for all types of illness or disorder. It's like the infancy of antibiotics, in the mental health field. What the parent poster has not taken away from this discussion in the past, is that as of this moment in time, GRS and HRT are the treatments with the best results for gender dysmophic disorder (or what ever name ends up on the DSM). Statistically, they work. In the future, we may find better treatments or we may improve on the surgeries. But for now, if surgery and hormones help someone, and they seek it out, why care? And to parrot what someone above posted, intersexed individuals would benefit from the same database changes. Hopefully, soon, we won't all be dealing with fixing data after infant assignment surgery (may that whole school of thought fade quickly). But even so, the whole gender binary seems to be fading away. It may take 50 years after another Kensey type study, but it will fade. /please forgive the typos and such. This cellphone keyboard hasn't gotten used to me yet
Actually there are far more intersex people than transgender. And many transgender people are in fact intersex people who suffered forced sex assignment surgery as an infant. We are talking about up to 1:150 people here, if not more. From XXY, to AIS to full-blown hermaphroditism. Intersex conditions are everywhere and often lead to the gender hell described.
I'm a hermaphrodite myself. I was marked as being male at birth because my female genitals weren't visible. During puberty my body however turned fully female (breasts, hips, etc.). Yet my ID card still said that I was male. This was really fun because everyone recognized me as being female (looks, voice), but my official gender said something else. So many embarrassing and awkward situations.
It's taken me over eight years now to get my condition acknowledged and my first name as well as my official gender changed, the latter being the first time ever for an intersex person here in the Netherlands. I'm also suing the largest gender team in the Netherlands (VUmc, Amsterdam) for dismissing me as possibly intersex, instead trying to fool me into thinking I had to be transgender.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Dating sites.
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Marketing would like to know gender. Eye color where visual identification matters (photo id's).
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Most transgendered people are similar to the most extreme religious fanatics. They have a belief that they were born in the wrong body, just like christian people believes in Jesus.
However, they are convinced that everyone else should believe the same thing as they do and get really angry when someone doesn't
Well, tough luck, I respect them the same way as I respect all religions, but I am too in my right to not believe that. I just can't understand how someone can believe they were born the opposite sex, when they have no way to know what being the opposite sex is like, and as much can imagine it, just as I can imagine myself being rich or being a ninja.
They try to become accepted by society using the analogy of gay people or black people being accepted too, but your skin color or sexual preference is a fact, not a belief. It's not the same!
So, yeah, I'm all for them doing whatever they want, believing what they want, doing surgery, be called as female, not be made fun of, etc, but I'm against them pretending me to accept their belief.
Hi Maya! I didn't know you're on slashdot!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Turns out that's not so simple either, and before that hormone levels were thought to be the test.
The problem with such definitions is when bunches like sporting associations decide that things like giving birth to a couple of children is not enough to be catagorised as female (that was thirty years ago but the same sort of stupidity reared up again recently with a South African athlete). Personally I think most of the time the box ticked is not going to matter. Where it does (eg. sending people to prisons or schools) society is going to be very nasty to anyone not easily defined no matter which box they tick because anybody seen as different gets a hard time.
There's a particularly insidious branch of feminism (and I use that word because that's how they identify, not because I consider them feminists) which seems to think that you are only female if you were born that way, and that you're only male if you're born that way.
The problem is, it isn't just a particular branch of feminism that questions it. It is a medical question as well since it doesn't seem to be a reliable cure for the distress. You seem to be reducing it to just politics, and that isn't really accurate.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Only been here since the 90s :D
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
I don't know about "better" but it is less invasive and less risky to their overall health.
I'm not really sure about that. Let me first clarify that I'm not jumping up and down about your use of the phrase 'mental heath issue' because I actually halfway agree with you. From my point of view, any mismatch between body and brain is an issue between the body and the brain. It could be corrected in either place to solve the problem.
Transgender issues are a perfect example, whereby the person mentally does not match the person physically. This could be corrected in two ways - either change the person mentally so that they are feel they fit in to the body they are in; or change the body so that it matches their mental state.
From my understanding, you're arguing for the former, whereas the majority of people argue for the latter.
While both would be solutions that solve the problem, the latter has some distinct advantages:
1) We suck at changing personality in others. Attempts usually end up with sub-standard results that have additional side-issues. Sure, we could improve, as we do with any field of science, but RIGHT NOW we'd do a pretty bad job of it on average. On this, I consider your statement that 'it's less risky to their overall health' to be possibly wrong. Their mental health would suffer far more under this attempt than their physical health under a gender reassignment operation.
2) In modern western society, we define ourselves as being the mind that occupies the body. The body isn't 'you', just the thing that's carrying you around. If it weren't, we wouldn't intuitively understand the concepts of 'out of body experiences', 'body swapping movies' or 'downloading yourself in to a computer'. Modifying 'you' is much harsher than modifying 'the thing that carries you around'. On this, I consider your statement that 'it's less invasive' to be possibly wrong. It is far more invasive to change the 'core being' of a person than to change any physical aspect of them.
I'd definitely find it interesting to hear your arguments against this though. You seem to be a rational enough person from looking at your posts, so I'm sure you've got interesting arguments to support your thoughts on the matter.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Even the U.S. military is going to have to deal with this issue, since Krintin Beck is presumably still eligible for VA benefits and the other benefits of being a veteran.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
you are free to have no idea what a libertarian is
The question here is why women should care who they are sharing a (public) bathroom with? As far as I know women normally 'do their business' in the privacy of a closed (and unless the lock is broken, locked) cubicle. In places such as clubs and at concerts and festivals where the queues for the female facilities are too long, women are quite happy to use the male facilities where men are using the urinals in open view. So if they are prepared to use the mens bathroom when it suits them, they should not care if the (to outward appearance female) woman using the adjacent cubicle used to be a man.
Almost? You are so cute,
Signed: Omar Muhammed
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
For me it isn't. I have not had contact with transgenders (as far as I know) but I have with people who did not confirm with the standard that the majority of people have.
e.g. a friend of mine came out to me as being lesbian and she was clearly disappointed in my reaction. I said something like "So?" or "Good for you.".
So just because the majority does not accept it right away, do not assume that nobody can. For me it is not difficult at all. The fact that you think that only people who went to the same situation can understand it, is YOUR problem. You make it difficult to be understood, because you assume that nobody understands you.
I do not make the difference between people, so why do you do it?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Eh. It's about way, way, waaay more than plugging fleshy bits into each other.
Because that is the standard where he lives? Programmers should write programs that consider reality. Reality should not change because you are unable to program
They could have gone with just 419 and 421 and leave out the box number altogether. There are even places that have NO house number and that often is a problem as well.
Sure, people will then enter a 1, but in reality it is sloppy coding that causes people to enter the wrong data.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What you (or whoever it was if it wasn't you) asked was "why is it embarrassing?", not "why would you think it'd never come up again?". Of course it'll come up again and again for possibly a long time. And yes, it shouldn't be embarrassing... but many trans people do have an intense degree of gender/body dysphoria. They feel awful about their faces, body shape, hair, skin, voice, pronouns, or about being seen or treated as that unloved other gender. This doesn't just magically clear up when you've reached the point where you (can) change your "official" gender. Yes, it takes effort and often some bravery to pull this off, but it can be a bravery born out of discomfort and need rather than out of "prouder" feelings like ambition or motivation.
Hi, I wanted to throw my 2 cents in, and this seemed like the best post to respond too. (Although the original poster has almost certainly run into this same type of response before.) I wanted to start by saying that this is my first post, ever, as an AC. I have never been afraid to state unpopular opinions or connect anything that I've said here with my real life. But this topic changes that. Not because I have an unpopular opinion, (I think, at least) but because I am transsexual. Now, the real horny issues here arise not only because I'm transsexual (TS), but because I'm not publicly out yet. Only a few friends, my therapist, and my endocrinologist have any idea that I'm not a normal twenty-something male. Not even my whole family, including my parents, have any idea. I have been on HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for about 11 months now. Because of living and social circumstances, I have not been able to transition socially yet, and probably will not complete a social transition for quite some time yet. Anyways, I just wanted to outline the reason that I am posting AC, aside from the general fears of physical violence, discrimination, and unemployment that transgendered (TG) people face anyways.
Now, before I really get to the meat of the post, I suppose a little background is in order. I am 27, was assigned male at birth, and have a shiny, almost new, only slightly scuffed BS in mathematics with a minor in computer science that I earned last year. I recently failed out of grad school, for reasons I will discuss shortly, and have relocated to a new city and state. (And if anyone has a job for a poor freak looking for work, let me know! I'm a good problem solver! Very outside the box, you know!) I came upon the discovery of my transsexualism later than I would have liked, as I only started to even suspect that I might be TG when I was in my early twenties. This story is, of course, completely anecdotal. However, it is a story that I've heard, first hand, many times before, and the conclusions that I will be drawing from it have been backed by research, or are standard views among those medical professionals that wish to treat TG persons in the most effective way possible.
I guess, to make my story as clear as possible, I should probably be a little overly verbose and in-depth. When I was very young, I broke gender norms, but I didn't shatter them. My favorite color was hot pink, but I love digging holes on the playground and playing with my Tonka trucks. The toy kitchen and stove we had were my favorite play-set, but I abhorred dolls. I loved to play at war and shoot fake guns at things, but I also loved to draw... and I almost never drew scenes of violence that are so stereotypically male. I don't think, at the time, that anyone would have thought I was anything other than a normal, well adjusted little boy. Looking back, I felt very comfortable with myself, and I liked myself as a person. I was popular, personable, and exceptionally extroverted. Sadly, my 3rd grade year, that all changed. I was 8 or so, (perhaps 9, I've never had a firm grasp of my early age in my memories) and over the course of that year, I began to discover that something was wrong with me. Playing with the other boys was... not enjoyable, and I felt left out and isolated. I felt much more comfortable with the girls, but I knew I didn't fit in with them, either. I became very introverted, and retained only a few friends, even though I was in a class with the same 25 or so children through all of elementary school. This change, in and of itself, was probably not a terrible one. However, this year is the first year I remember being truly depressed. I had always been a serious underachiever, but now I started to tell myself every night that I was a failure, that no one liked me, and that the world would be a better place without my presence sullying it. I became suicidal, and often thought about ways in which I could kill myself. No one was ever allowed to know about these feelings of despair, and o
Why do the databases need to know the gender to start with?
Maybe it would be better if no database (that isn't explicitly there to identify you) had that information.
It would probably do wonders to gender equality too. Certainly salary databases, tax databases,
residential databases wouldn't need gender.
Maybe not even insurance databases. And they would be more interested in your original gender,
alternatively hormone levels, anyway. (Any studies on that?)
Surely medical databases should have a lot more information about you than just gender, anyway.
I presume you'll be fine with the doctors refusing to help you when you get struck down with some rare form tropical disease then? A problem being suffered by a minority is still a problem.
Somewhere I feel that analogy fails, it is more like "the artist formerly known as Prince" who decided an unpronounceable symbol would be his new stage name - for contract reasons. Imagine he'd asked that all government databases also would identify him the same way, his driver's license, his social security card, every form of public registry should now support this symbol. Or that everywhere there is a male and female restroom there should also be various options for crossdressers, transgenders, ladyboys and whatnot other combinations that exist somewhere between or outside the traditional genders. Or that stairs with no elevator should be generally outlawed because it's discriminatory to wheel chair users. Having one doctor trying to treat your rare disease is very different from trying to make world revolve around a few people with special needs.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't get too angry at the world for largely sticking to an either/or idea of gender; that's inconvenient but still understandable. I just wish the gender field could be made optional more often, along with that dreaded form of address field. It's a little more difficult than a change address because there can be a long "homeless" or "I live here, but my mail still goes there" period - although I can't say I've run into any real trouble because of the mismatch (but then I've yet to "fly while trans").
They could have gone with just 419 and 421 and leave out the box number altogether. There are even places that have NO house number and that often is a problem as well.
The trouble with creating new numbers is that you'd disrupt everyone else, imagine you'd want to add a new number 5 then old 5 would become 7, 7 become 9, 9 become 11 all the way up to 419 becoming 421 and beyond. Generally here in Norway if you build say a huge block instead of several small buildings you get multiple numbers like 13-17, if you build say three houses on a lot that used to have one they become 13A, 13B and 13C. Which is also open-ended (my current workplace has buildings B-H, A is demolished and doesn't exist anymore) while 419 1/2, what do you do if you build another house? 419 1/4? 419 3/4? It's a poor system just asking for a situation it can't handle.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just adding a "T" binary flag to the data would be too simple, right?
We covered this situation in our Human Computer Interaction module back in my undergrad in 1997. From a data(base) storage point of view, the solution is two have two fields, sex (as in phenotype -- male genitalia vs female genitalia vs both) and gender (as in identity concept -- I think of myself as male/female/Intersex/other). These two fields cover male, female, transgender, intersex, and hermaphrodite. What this doesn't solve is the problems of discrimination and lack of familiarity with dealing with changes in these fields on the part of the humans who capture and alter the information, although that's a little ridiculous too. I am a straight male, as in I look male and I consider myself male, and I've been incorrectly captured in a database as female once. Probably a typo. I know a couple of other people to whom this has happened. Fixing it was as simple as phoning up and saying, "err, guys, I'm a guy". I realise this is less of an issue than having a driver's license stating you are male, and then appearing female, but it's not necessarily an information systems problem.
I think you've reacted a bit harshly, and certainly with a high degree of ego, to the GP. My reading of the post chain doesn't actually accuse you of being a troll, but points out how someone might draw that conclusion in haste. Perhaps you should slow down a tad and engage that self-touted ability to think on your own before replying again.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Then you are a genetic abnormality, and I would not classify them as male _or_ female technically (you'd still be nice to them etc of course).
Decades from now genealogists will be pulling their hair out because will be practically impossible to determine lineage. While that may sound trivial, how do you track genetic disease when the genetics are obscured by sex change operations, artificial insemination, records that don't accurately record biological parents, etc?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
FRANCIS: Why are you always on about women, Stan?
STAN: I want to be one.
REG: What?
STAN: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me 'Loretta'.
REG: What?!
LORETTA: It's my right as a man.
JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
LORETTA: I want to have babies.
REG: You want to have babies?!
LORETTA: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
REG: But... you can't have babies.
LORETTA: Don't you oppress me.
REG: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!
LORETTA: crying
JUDITH: Here! I-- I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the right to have babies.
FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.
REG: What's the point?
FRANCIS: What?
REG: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Yes, added functionality, that's the answer. What could go wrong?
Worst case scenario, a bored/drunk/disenchanted DBA goes through randomly changing sex on thousands of patients.
Hospital sells info to advertisers who begin sending Kotex, Viagra, Douche, Aftate spam to entirely the wrong people.
Hijinx ensue, Jim Carrey stars in the "made for television" version, a league of transgendered lawyers sue for defamation and trademark violations, dogs sleeping with cats, cats sleeping with mice, it'll be anarchy! And YOU, you want software with added functionality, Haven't been paying attention to Microsoft over the years, have you?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Hang on. Does that mean you see being female as a disability? I think most of us have progressed beyond "women are inherently inferior" already but apparently there are still a couple people with a phallocentric world view around even on Slashdot.
Alternatively you are defining the worth of a human being exclusively through their ability to reproduce, which would mean that you see sexual reassignment surgery (or any form of sterilization) as equivalent to throwing one's life away. In this case I must still disagree; not having children is a perfectly valid choice and may indeed be a good one given how overcrowded the planet is getting.
Or, of course, the idea of someone changing their gender just bugs you, in which case I must inform you that "I just don't like the $MINORITY" is not a valid foundation for social policy.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Many customer record databases don't seem to allot more than ten characters to given name or surname, with some stopping at eight or nine which make even less sense. How many people are actually named "Christophe", "Stephani", "Angeliqu", "Elizabet", "Gwendol"? Not nearly as many as get mail that way. It's been an issue for a long time, and now you're expecting databases to be updated for gender changes?
Try telling a utility company sometime that you un-duplexed a building and you need service to the whole building under one address some time. They'll typically ask which address you want the bill delivered to and which one gets the service or something equally asinine.
I guess you could say " the hermaphrodites can just go fuck themselves", and be correct, politically and morally. Wanna be Secretary of State? The last dude resigned.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
gender changes or input mistakes
Statistically, I'm fairly confident that I will never come across a transgender person that needs to change there gender in a database of any application I manage. Input mistakes? All the freaking time. Bringing transgender issues into this throws a bunch of unneeded emotions into the fairly straight forward argument that you should be able to correct the mistakes of pions doing the data entry.
Equating the lack of a penis with that of a functioning spinal cord is kinda messed up, don't you think?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I am not trying to start a politically correct argument or be pro or anti transgender. I think we should back up and look at the bigger problem.
The issue here is the age of many of these databases, with only minor updates occuring over the years. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these databases dated back to the 70s, written in COBOL, living on an System/360 or 370 (or a newer system - 390 or zSeries or something else - with the database just ported over from the 360 and 370 days. Possibly the database was then "ported" over to a server based enviornemnt, but the cores database and information attached was still in place). At the time those databases were written, you were either male or female, or lived in shame. Not sure when sex reassignment surgery began, but you hear stories now of people who were born hemephrodite, and their parents had the surgery performed on them as infants or toddlers.
it probably did not even occure to the database designers to include an option for for changing Gender or for including possibly a third option.
The question should be 1) why has the older systems not been overhauled and 2) where they have been, why is the option no longer there. For systems that have been overhauled, if someone is maintaining the code, you have to ask how hard it would be for someone to go into the code and make that a changable field.
At that point, though, it probably changes from a technical issue to a political / sociological issue. I am not going to guess on the political issue, because I don't follow it, and making an assumption would be stupid (I know, I just made an assumption about the above. Rather, I don't want to get into the political issues to avoid flames and troll baiting). As for the sociological issues, even with media attention lately on transgender issues, we are still a society that breaks things down into male and female. Transgender stories still shock many people (although it is starting to become more understood and accepted - at least in some places).
I am not trying to get into an issue of if it is right or wrong, whether it needs to be changed or not. I am saying that the lack of options in databases shouldn't really come as a surprise.
I've seen a number of posts that paint transgenderism in the same vein as plastic surgeries and other such modifications to self born out of insecurity and dislike of one's appearance. This is a very fundamental misunderstanding of the transgender condition.
You're conflating dissonance with dissatisfaction. They can go hand-in-hand, but you need to realize that they are still two very discrete concepts.
To put it more plainly, body dysmorphia (dissatisfaction with one's appearance) and gender dysphoria (dissonance with the gendered aspects of one's body and social perception) are not the same. The former being so common in our society makes it easy to assume the latter is inexorably tied to it: virtually everyone in our society considers some parts of their bodies flawed or undesirable, and trans people are no exception; in fact, their gender dysphoria is often exponentially amplified by this, especially with trans women, who (if entering gender transition to female after puberty) have the misfortune of nearly irreversible virilization (facial hair, masculine features, etc), which is considered almost universally "unattractive" as far as social expectations for women go. So, it is no surprise that insecurity would result. Our culture is fairly vicious about standards of beauty for females as indicative of their worth to others-- how many overweight, 'plain-looking' women do you see represented as successful (or even just respectable) in television or movies, verses overweight, plain-looking men? Or perhaps just think about the rate of eating disorders among women, many of whom are fairly conventionally attractive to begin with (though not to themselves, given judgmental cultural pressures).
As for my background: I am a transsexual man (meaning I was perceived as-- or was, depending on your choice of definition-- female during my childhood); I won't hide that bias.
While I won't claim to be an all-out leading expert on transgenderism, I've worked closely with some that are, due to having worked on research about the topic during my studies at Yale. My experience with it is fairly extensive, both in an academic (and yes, having studied oppositional and supportive sides) and personal way.
To get back to addressing the point that was being asserted, I'll relate my experience with the difference between these similar concepts.
To be dissonant with the gendered aspects of oneself, as stated previously, does not necessarily mean that one is dissatisfied with one's appearance, or that change is sought for the sake of improving that. For example, in myself, while I certainly experienced insecurity with my appearance when I was younger, this was not at all true by the time I finally came to terms with and acknowledged the gender issues I had continually pushed down out of fear; in fact, having resolved those insecurities had been, in my mind, a prerequisite to even allowing myself to humor the possibility of gendered distress having been anything more than a misinterpreted symptom of a different insecurity (from a misogynistic culture? from a culture critical of appearance? something else?). In fact, I wanted desperately for it to have been one of those things-- I spent countless months of soul-searching and written self-analysis on each possibility hoping to uncover that it was, in fact, just some kind of misplaced dissatisfaction with my body on some aspect of attractiveness, or just some kind of bitterness with mistreatment of women in society, even some consequence of some sort of abuse (that I can't recall, given that I have not actually experienced that), etc, etc. I wanted that, because it would have been so much simpler, easier, more understandable. To have a deep and intractable dissonance with the sex and gendered characteristics of one's body is terrifying, largely because there is no way to address it-- or even really acknowledge it-- that is even remotely socially acceptable. Even without any relation to sexuality (having existed since my earliest memories as a toddler, as
it doesn't seem to be a reliable cure for the distress
Actually, it is very reliable. It's got the best success rate of any treatment in psychiatry, which is one of the main reasons that they're considering de-listing gender dysphoria as a mental illness in the new version of the DSM : If there's a single treatment which is near 100% effective, and which removes the need for further psychiatric assistance, then it's an acute medical problem and not a mental illness. Mental illness usually implies that there's ongoing life-long problems associated with it, which will require continued treatment.
Try to understand... there's a handful of doctors in the world who are licensed to perform gender reassignment surgery, and between them, there's maybe 100-200 people every week who have the surgery, and many more who don't bother to go through with the surgery either because they can't afford it, or because simply living as their identified gender and taking HRT is good enough. While it's a vanishingly small percentage compared against the world's 7 billion population, the 1 or 2 every several years who claims it was a mistake to go through with the surgery is a vanishingly small percentage of the people who transition. Meanwhile, there's a near 50% suicide rate among transgendered people who don't have treatment, and the rate among those who do have treatment is less than the national average. The reason you don't hear about it is that most trans folk just want to get on with their lives, and are not attention-seeking publicity whores. It's actually very rare to find somebody who's willing to publicly out themselves and try to do something about educating the masses.
Further, the state of the art is really good. You could be dealing with transfolk on a daily basis and not know about it: a surprisingly large number of male-to-female transgendered people are able to slip under the radar, as it were, and never need to disclose their past to anybody other than their doctor (and, depending on their ethics, their lovers). As for female-to-male transgenders, it's even easier for them to go unnoticed because the hormones cause voice deepening, muscle growth, and facial hair. For them, it's near 100% that are able to go "stealth".
It's a fair point... but you are not in the majority with your approach to life. The world would be a better place if more people viewed the "other" the way you do.
Then again, it's probably also got something to do with geography... I'm in Canada, and while Canada isn't anywhere near as bad as the US, it's still not as forward-thinking and liberal-minded as Europe or Australia on subjects like this.
What do you think decides which way that feeling points?
I don't know. It's probably a combination of outside societal pressures, and internal pressures as well, but I don't think I'm qualified to explain what those pressures are. All I know is that I come into contact with trans people on a regular basis and am good friends with many of them (I do community outreach through the local LGBT center), and every single one of them has always considered themselves to be their identified gender, not their physical sex.
I'm open to suggestions. It certainly is nasty in there.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I know that you're posting AC so you probably won't see my reply, but here goes...
I see one big, important distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality in your example. Homosexuality doesn't require a third-party to participate to make you what you into what your feelings tell you that you should be. Someone who has sexual attraction to those of the same gender is a homosexual whether or not they ever fulfill their attractions. By contrast, it requires active participation to have gender reassignment surgery to "correct" the external body appearance and genitalia.
Let me just correct you right now.
Your argument is that homosexuality is an internal choice. You do not need someone else to recognize you as a homosexual, to be homosexual. It is entirely internal.
Your second argument appears to be that Transgenderism requires an external force -- that transgendered people require a second party to perform a surgery upon them to be transgendered.
This is incorrect. What you are describing is a process some transgendered people go through called "Transitioning." It is not something that is taken lightly (not "deciding one day to chop their dick off" as one particularly vile comment upstream said) -- but rather the result of years of therapy. I don't know the rate of transgendered people who do go through transitioning, but it's certainly not 100%.
Much like a Homosexual person "just knows" they are homosexual, a transgendered person "just knows" they are in the wrong body, that they are the wrong gender. They do not need recognition of this fact from an outside source for it to be true.
Actually there are far more intersex people than transgender. And many transgender people are in fact intersex people who suffered forced sex assignment surgery as an infant.
? Did you really intend to ignore those who freely choose sex assignment as adults???
I feel that the minor adjustments that we need to make to accommodate these people pale in comparison...
Especially when you consider that there are physical/genetic abnormalities for which we must already be prepared to make these adjustments.
Denying these adjustments to people based on some evaluation would be rather like having wheelchair ramps, and denying their use to people who are walking on crutches.
Surely a 1 character text field could cover all the types
M & F for the 'traditional' genders
B = bisexual G = Gay L = Lesbian
T = Transexual (was F, now M )
t = transexual (was M now F )
N for none (neutered?)
R = Robot
I didn't even mention those. I am just saying that there are a lot of individuals who get marked as transgender today, but who got assigned the wrong gender as an infant, usually through forced sex assignment (surgery).
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
My External looks don't match my internal ones, I've always been a 6'8" Athletically gifted black man *on the inside* , im stuck in this 5'10" uncoordinated white guys body.
What you say is true in some cases, but I think is an over-generalization in this case. In this case, I think it is a matter of designers not maintaining an awareness of the full domain that gender encompasses. It's something that may be difficult to go back and correct, but not something that's difficult to deal with if you maintain an awareness of it from the start, which is exactly why this kind of issue needs to be brought to our attention.
As an example, imagine the issue of assigning serial numbers to items you produce. Assume some companies like to assign serial numbers when they ship items, but others like to assign serial numbers to items the moment they come out of the manufacturing process. Having to support both these methods is significantly more difficult (requires more resources) to design and implement than choosing one and allowing its assumptions to ripple through the system (I know because I've done this). You can make assumptions about whether you need to track serial numbers for everything that happens with an item in inventory if you know which route you have taken.
In this example case you have elements of each decision that exclude functionality of the other. If you choose to have serial numbers assigned only at delivery, you may have to introduce extra logic to compare how many items in inventory have serial numbers versus how many exist total and ensure the number of serial numbers don't exceed the overall quantity, but still allow zero or more of the items in inventory to have serial numbers (if you accept returns of defective products after they are delivered). Whereas if you assign serial numbers for all transactions as soon as the item enters inventory, you can assume that the number of serial numbers should always equal the inventory quantity (simpler math and validation process), but then you have to support entry of serial numbers on many more transactions. And if you want to support both methods, you have to deal with both sets of complexity, plus the added complexity of identifying which system is active plus the possible complexity of allowing switching between the systems. So this is a good example of how identifying an average or common case would significantly simplify software design and implementation.
But on the question of gender, I don't think the similar complexities apply in most cases. Most systems treat gender as a simple reference field of little integral consequence to the rest of the data. All the software designer has to plan for, in most cases, is what the valid values are and whether it can be changed. Sure, if you want to support the writing of a salutation ("Mr." vs. "Ms.") in automated letter writing software based on gender, you may have an issue, but:
1) I suspect that letter writing software is not a majority of gender-aware software out there;
2) If the salutation is important to you, you should be storing the salutation separately anyway instead of basing it on gender;
3) The complexities introduced even in this case are trivial if you have an awareness of and plan for them (it's not hard to include an extra field for salutation or to use a first name instead if you don't have a salutation field);
4) Supporting a third gender option like "U" in which the salutation uses the full name instead of a generated salutation is not mutually exclusive with any of the standard gender functionality. (A system that supports "U" doesn't cause the handling of data without "U" values to become more complex.)
Similarly, the question of whether to allow updates to gender after it is assigned seems to be more of a design oversight than a true issue of software complexity. There are usually many other fields in the same area that *can* be updated, and if you know ahead of time that Gender is one of these, it's not hard to allow.
That covers the technical aspect, but the issue also has procedural impacts - requiring documentation for proof of gender, for example. Why do we require documentation to allow a gender change? It's all part o
Long... But well written and very interesting.
What do corner cases have to do with the size of a database?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I apologize and do not set out to offend anyone. But changing the appearance of gender does not equal changing gender in my mind. A man that has his genitals altered and breasts installed and dresses as a woman is still a man in my mind. It is similar to a cross dresser in a way. A man who dresses as a woman will still be jailed with men. A man that has breast implants will be jailed with men as well. I wonder how jails are handling folks who have had penises or vaginas altered as well.
Well, you are just ignorant then. That person that you thought of as a man never was a man, she just had the wrong parts installed, and an operation will fix that as good as we can do it.
Ok I'm going to start this off easy
1: Gender Identity is a SELF identity. People should not have a gender identity forced on them that is not the one they use.
2: There is more than just Male and Female. Other identities might include: Intersex, bi-gender, and a-gender. Transgender is not a gender identity in and of itself.
And on to the more technical points
3: When designing systems do not consider gender to be a fixed field for a person. And for that matter remember that names are not fixed either. Also keep in mind that a persons REAL name and their legal name might not be the same
4: In the parts of the system that allow for the update of other personal information, allow for name and gender to be changed.
and on the business process side
5: don't make the requirements for changing a gender marker too restrictive. And especially do NOT require proof of surgery before making a change.
And now I will state for the record that I AM transgender. Documentation changes are one of the biggest hurdles that we face. BTW slashdot will not allow for changing user names, i would like to keep my 5 digit it, but move away from my old masculine sounding username.
This isn't a gender issue, this isn't a gender-politics website. This is a technical issue, this is a technical website.
The problem isn't "people are being mistreated!". The problem is: information architects incorrectly assumed something about an object in the database would never change. Full stop.
It could be gender. It could be height. It could be hair colour. It could be a fingerprint. It could be any number of things that doesn't change from day-to-day for the population of one culture. It could be whether a book in a library's collection is hardcover or paperback. It could be whether a vehicle in a taxicab fleet is diesel, petrol or natural gas. These are properties that don't change from day to day, but they can change, and it's incorrect to assume they never will.
This is a data architecture problem, not a call-out of prejudices.
if your son came up to you and told you he didnt "feel" like a person who was mobile, and wanted to break his own back and or neck and become a quadriplegic, you would support him right? because thats what he "feels" he is right? cutting off your own cock is totally normal, no one thinks its wrong to chop off your cock with a knife at all....
I don't know whether you are just stupid or pretend to be...
There are two gender states that are both considered "normal": Male and female. Usually these states agree with the body of a person, sometimes they don't. Changing the body to make it agree with the perceived gender of the person isn't hurting the body. Being unable to move is not considered "normal". That's the difference.
uhhh no, thats not what i said at all. This has nothing to do with liking or not liking anyone, i dont care what they do. but plain and simple what I AM sick of is everyone trying to push what they see as normal onto the rest of the world. If it makes you happy to cut off your dick (or attach one for you people who take everything as sexist even if its not there) so be it, but that does not mean it is normal, it does not mean that you should force everyone to agree with you. I notice you ignored the question I had posed and in turn decided to try and put words in my mouth. so once again, would yo support your son (or daughter....) if they wanted to become a quadriplegic because thats who they "felt" they are??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
having surgery to turn you from X into Y is not normal though. some people want us to believe that it is but it is not normal.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"You don't give a damn and you'll be damned because it's quite literally not your problem? The "lady" doth protest too much, methinks."
I did not protest AT ALL. As I clearly wrote, I don't care one way or another what gender they want to write down.
My only point was that the problem described in this thread is self-created, and I don't have an obligation to help them feel less uncomfortable with it.
No, they just use AC sockpuppet accounts to harass people they don't like for some reason, and expect nobody to notice.
It does have an impact on database design: it means like virtually every other temporally bounded property you have to account for the fact that a) it changes and b ) the coding scheme will evolve over time to accommodate increasing gradations.
I mean seriously. Do you even realize how much of a FUCKING HYPOCRITE you are, to pose as an AC and then accuse others of "posing" as somebody else?
You may identify with a different gender, but that doesn't change you gender and more then Identifying with a black person makes you black.
This is sloppy 70s pop psychiatry run amok.
To be clear: I don't care if you identify with another gender, I don't car if you want to dress, talk, and hang out with a different gender. DO so, have fun. I would be right their trying to stop anyone who would prevent you from doing those things.
Regardless of chemicals you take, or surgeries you under go; your gender does not change.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hey, it's Elledan from #hardocp!
I think the problem with how this is addressed (or lack thereof) is society has a tendency to lump everything into a single pile. As a result, general consensus *seems* to be that everyone dealing with gender issues is simply making a choice by whim and deserves the conflict and hassle of their self-serving and surely flippant-toward-society choices.
I don't think it's a case of willfully dismissing these issues. I think it's a case of people simply generally not understanding and not being presented with enough information to really understand. I've known colleagues and friends-of-friends who have dealt with these things and it really opened my eyes. Far from "selfish and flippant", a lot of people are born with both genitals and doctors and parents make a quick determination of what gender to assign to their child (sometimes with surgery to make it permanent), only for the child to grow into an adult that is absolutely the *OTHER* gender on the inside. That is, in every way but externally, they are the "opposite" gender. I can not even imagine what dealing with that must be like. Then there are those who were simply born one gender but they know in their heads that they are the other. Apparently there is precedence in nature for this occurring. However, we generally just think "what's in your underwear is what you are" and it is as simple as that.
Ultimately, I don't really understand why we care -- aside from affording people sympathy for what they have to deal with. If someone feels they are one thing to the point that they need to have i surgically corrected/affirmed and/or they ned to have it identified legally . . . how in any way does that impact anyone else? Is everyone just irrationally afraid that if they "tolerate" other people's personal decisions that some day they're going to end up dating someone of one apparent gender that *used* to be another? Is it really that primitive and selfish or . . .?
"Jane Q. Public" is anonymous just like an AC"
You're a moron.
Jane Q. Public has been my Slashdot handle for many years now. It is an IDENTIFIABLE, consistent account. As you already know. AC is nothing of the sort. AC is used by people who are either (A) occasional visitors to the site, or (B) people who "pose" as an AC sockpuppet because they don't have the guts to own up to their comments.
Therefore, Jane Q. Public is not "anonymous". There is a regular account and a definite persona behind it. AC is no way similar.
Further, you STILL haven't posted any evidence that what you claim is true. Even after doing this at least several times in recent memory, you ball-less posterchild for Dunning-Kruger.
I am just saying that there are a lot of individuals who get marked as transgender today, but who got assigned the wrong gender as an infant, usually through forced sex assignment (surgery).
Ah, OK. I did not get that you were relating two things to each other, as opposed to just listing two independent sources of gender confusion.
Well, nature and reproduction would tend to disagree with your statement.
However, if someone is either of indeterminate or both genders or is not the gender on the outside which they inherently know themselves to be on the inside (I know some might assert this is a mental health issue, but I don't know how you prove or disprove that), I don't see how them rectifying that so that they can continue on with their life should bother anyone else.
That said, I'm sure there are also potentially valid reasons for retaining the "born" or "inherent biological" gender of a person, even after changing it as far as legality and identification. If we could move beyond the vile attitude against people in this situation, then retaining in some form in some place that single bit of information wouldn't be such an issue.
Yes, that's a great argument. Magical thinking people held them in special regard. Ancient people did a lot of stupid shit.
Native American Culture is dead. has been dead for 60 years. This trying to hang onto what are ancestors did while using rifles, driving cars, and running casinos is a laughable abuse of ones own culture. All cultures die eventually, the question is do you want you kids and their kids to continue to live in squalor, or move on?
Frankly, a lot of people I talk to seem more interested n their option of culture surviving then their own children's welfare.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Geekoids law: /. approaches 100% if you have to click on the 'Read the rest of this comment...' link
The odds someone is wrong on
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Exactly this.
With our understanding of many mental illnesses and with the overwhelming consistency of having one set of genitals and naturally identifying as that same gender, I can see why we have this bias and why we so readily dismiss the abnormality. It seems easier to conclude that these are mental issues and, therefore, the mind should be addressed instead of catering to mental illness with such drastic physical/legal alterations.
However, if nature can get minds wrong, it can certainly get bodies wrong -- which means just as much weight must be given to the possibility that what someone feels they are is legitimate as what they appear to be.
This also raises conflicts. How in the hell can we possibly determine when we should be caring for a mental problem and when we shouldn't, so that the person can just make the change and move on with their life?
"... and posing as a woman on the internet while minimizing the struggles of transgendered people is hypocritical."
Why do you say I'm "posing" as a woman? (You needn't answer that because despite the fact that you're posing as AC, I know who you are, we've been over this before, and you don't have the balls to actually try present what you think is evidence because it will show who you are.)
But more to the point of the actual topic at hand: I DID NOT "minimize" anybody's struggles. I simply stated that it's their struggle, not mine.
if your son came up to you and told you he didnt "feel" like a person who was mobile, and wanted to break his own back and or neck and become a quadriplegic, you would support him right?
Of course not. Your analogy is irrelevant, ignorant and moronic. And since other commenters have dealt with the content of it well, I want to ask what the hell your response had to do with my comment.
cutting off your own cock is totally normal
Wait, no one (as far as I'm aware) has said anything is normal, and I can't really understand why you think that has anything to do with this discussion. I think we can all agree that transgenderism of any form is not normal or else we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. What difference does it make whether it's normal? Are you conflating "normal" and "correct"?
Those poor 0.0000001%. It's so tough for them.
Are you trying to tell me there's only 6 transgender people in the world?
lol, Math'ed.
BlueMonk's corollary:
Those resorting to Geekoids law as evidence that something is likely wrong have done so as a result of being unable to find anything specifically wrong, or as a result of a desire to participate in a discussion without expending any effort.
If "Jane Q. Public" weren't anonymous, you'd have shared your real name like many here do.
You still don't get it. Not that I'm surprised.
My account name is what it is. It has been what it is for years. Not only do I have no reason to change it (you certainly aren't "a reason"), but I also have perfectly legitimate reasons to keep using it. And those reasons are none of your goddamned business.
Even so, I make my opinions known, and they are associated with the name. I don't try to hide behind AC.
But again, more to the point: using a pseudonym online (yes, obviously it's a pseudonym regardless of whether you think I'm a man or woman), and keeping it for years, is socially acceptable and has a long and respected history.
Transgenderism, for better or worse, is also becoming more socially acceptable.
Online sock puppetry, on the other hand, is not socially acceptable behavior. It is universally condemned, for good reasons. And all you're doing here is acting like a billboard, illustrating those reasons. But again, I am not terribly surprised that you don't seem to understand that.
"Again, many brave women have demonstrated that balls != courage. If you're actually a woman, it's odd that I have to repeatedly explain this to you."
It's a common American figure of speech, and you know it. I'm not going to apologize or make excuses for using a common figure of speech. How about "fuck you"? Do you think I mean that literally, too? You really are a moron.
Now you're JUST trolling, nothing more. Of course you probably were from the beginning.
And then you wonder why I do not respect your opinions. What a joke.
I'm left handed. Now, before you say "poor baby" this used to be a real handicap. It does hurt to be called gauche, or even sinister. When I was in school teachers would bind your hand or rap your knuckles with a ruler if you tried to write with your left hand, and we're 11% of the population.
You're odd and society does not like odd. In the media people of your type are over represented and children see you more as "normal'. In a few years I see quotas for LBGT just as there are for African-Americans. So just stay away from razors and sleeping pills, your time is coming.
Mentally disturbed? I think not. I've met Sophie Wilson who is about the most level-headed person I have met. If you don't know who she is, she designed the ARM instruction set (and still is in processor design today), recognised as one of the best instruction set architectures around. But she was born as Roger Wilson.
If you're really that spiteful towards intelligent people who have contributed more to society in a week than you probably have in your entire lifetime, then go do without anything with an ARM CPU inside of it.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Sorry, which gender is someone with XXY chromosones? How is someone born with both sets of genitalia suffering from dementia?
Sorry that the world doesn't fit into your limited binary gender divide, so lets skip political correctness and call you the idiot you clearly are.
Hi there :)
I think it's more horrible that we think it's necessary to assign a gender (which is something very personal) to everyone, going so far as to physically alter our own infants and children to make them fit our ideas. This kind of forced surgery are Nazi-like practices.
I'm sure that if we can reach the stage where we allow our children to grow up to decide for themselves which gender they want to be instead of imposing one on them, the rest will take care of itself as well.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Maybe we should have 3 sexes... Man, Woman, and Uman. Him, Her, Hum.
Men have no mental or physical conditions that make them unable to impregnate women.
Women have no mental or physical conditions that make them unable to be impregnated by men.
Umen have mental or physical conditions that make them reproductively unviable.
Gender, as distinct from Sex, can just go the fuck away. How vain do you have to be to think other people are supposed to care about what you've "declared" your gender to be?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Those are valid questions and seem to be quality questions. However, I'm an EE. I don't have answers to those questions.
I woke up with 21 replies to my messages. I went to bed with Slashdot not wanting me to type any more (saying I had used the resource too many times). I am not the wizard! I do not know. ;)
Hmm... Now I have Ozzy running through my head. Stupid ear worm! "Don't ask me, I don't know!" *grins*
I really don't know but you do raise valid points. I suspect that it will be done via the genes themselves (as those are sure to carry through) and will not necessarily be tracked by gender? There is likely to be some confusion and those people may not get the treatment they need because of it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
But don't you find the 20-odd nanosecond lifetime a bit restricting? You must have a hell of a training budget!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
No, no I don't think I was harsh at all. No more matter-of-fact than I always am which may be taken as harsh but text doesn't convey that very well. I'm not, by nature, a harsh person nor am I one who's ego is such that I must be right. I'm not interested in trolling and don't bother to say things to get a reply. I say what I mean, I mean what I say. If this seems harsh then I am unsure of what you need but I don't think you'll get those needs met by me. I am not intentionally harsh or anything but I could see why people would think so. Much of my "tone" comes from trying to avoid ambiguity because people have the tendency to attempt to argue and I'd rather avoid that entirely by saying exactly what I mean, only what I mean, in an articulate and clear manner. I try, I am not always successful.
I am here to learn. I am here to communicate with like-minded folk about subjects we find interesting. I am actually the guy who is able and willing to admit he's wrong. (Strangely this just happened recently, it got some kudos from folks as it is a rarity around here. See the telegraph thread if you're curious.) So, no, I'm not trolling nor am I ever trolling. Being accused, or having it hinted at, doesn't make me angry but it does mean that I'll reply. If that reply too seems harsh then, well, trust me when I say it is tempered and not intentionally harsh - you'll know when being abrasive is my goal.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Holy shit! I was left handed but my teacher forced me to use my right hand to write (way back in kindergarten) and so I've used my right hand since but there was no beating or knuckle wrapping involved.
Now to read the entirety of the giant text above. :)
Yes, yes I'll read it all. *sighs* I woke up to a million and three replies. LOL It's all good though, it will occupy my afternoon.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I made no such suggestion. That's a distortion of my words, and that's just dishonest. I am done here. Goodbye troll.
Uhhh..dude? Yeah guess what MRI scans of their brains show? The "X trapped in Y body" turns out to be a VERY apt description as you can mix their brain scans in with the gender they ID with and no doc will be able to tell them apart from those born that gender, whereas you put their scans in with their own sex its not even close.
At the end of the day it is simply biology,for one reason or another the hormones during the first trimester don't match up and there ya go. Trying to label it a "mental health issue" is frankly offensive and would be no different than saying you need a shrink because you are not gay.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Not to mention there are several examples in nature where only the alpha breeds and the rest do not, would he likewise say nature is suicidal?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I saw the length of your post before I read it and promised myself that I would read it, in its entirety, to be sure that I grasped it all before I made any replies. I'm glad that I did and I'm equally glad that you took the time and effort to author it. I am not qualified to speak a great deal about much of anything that you said and that is unfortunate because I feel compelled to speak on some of those topics.
It is unfortunate that you will end up living your life in fear or, well, living a good portion of it in fear as you go through the transition. As this becomes more socially acceptable and as it becomes more "normal" I think the judgement and threats will ease up. It will take time and, on your end, it will take courage. If, for no other reason, you feel compelled to suicide then you'd be wasting what courage you've already used up. That would be unfortunate but, and again I am not qualified to speak on this subject, it would be understandable.
See, from my own views I hold that the highest form of freedom a person can have is control over their own body. I hold too, obviously, that the highest form of liberty one can have is a government and society that endorses those freedoms however, such is not the case. To be clear and to avoid confusion I'll share an oft quoted statement that I make concerning the difference between freedom and liberty.
I am free to kill you.
I am not at liberty to do so.
Therein lies the difference and the difference is large. People seem inclined to either not know the difference, assume the words mean the same, or simply don't appear to know what liberty is.
I say that because, frankly, I support your right to end your life. If the struggle is overwhelming and is too much for you and you wish to do so then, by all means, I'd not judge you because of it. Please, please, do not take that as advocating your suicide or suggesting that you do so. It is simply me stating that, in my humble opinion, you should be at liberty to do so and there should be easy, socially acceptable, effective, and "safe" means to accomplish the task. Again, please don't think I'm advocating your suicide. I'm actually hoping that you take it as a sign that you needn't do so but also to know that I understand the ideation and support your right to do so.
As I was reading I was wondering how much comfort and sense of pride you may have had from posting this under your real username? I was curious about how that would have impacted you. I figured it would be difficult to do so and that it was not necessarily a good idea for some very obvious and unfortunate reasons. You did attach an email address, I'd be aware that such could potentially be tied to your account if you use it elsewhere or have it tied to any public-facing information. It, obviously, isn't something I'll be looking into but there are pathetic folks who might.
I don't have much in my personal life that I can compare to your experiences. I'm mixed racially and that has been the cause of problems a number of times but I've always been able to just knock 'em in the teeth and resolve that when words or deeds weren't enough to get people to judge me for who I am. I've questioned that (being mixed racially), I've been angry with my parents, I've been uncomfortable in my own skin, and I've hated who I am but I've always been able to kick that to the curb and continue life as I had before.
Well, maybe not... I'm a druggie. I use illicit drugs to make my life more enjoyable. I do so in a responsible manner and commit no additional crimes other than purchasing, possessing, and transporting. I'm a social outcast among the normal folks if they find out about it. Yet, really, I don't think I'm in a minority group because of it. It seems that many folks use though a huge part of that is confirmation bias as, of course, the people I associate with are often like-minded folk. I guess you could call them a support group but I don't think we qualify as such. This grouping is, unlike yours, one of my own choosing. It i
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That doesn't change the author's point. They are valid concerns and your post is certainly interesting but it doesn't change their point nor my response to it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Ah! I see... No, sorry - I'm not advocating either. It just seems drastic to do gender reassignment surgeries (and the inherent health risks) with all the many things that can (and do) go wrong in hospitals. I feel that it should be up to the person who's getting reassigned and their physician but it seems far more invasive than counseling or therapy.
I can see, though, where it may be healthier to reassign the body instead of attempting to cure it with some sort of psychotherapy drug. Those drugs have some nasty side effects and can do some long term damage. We really don't understand the brain well at all. What's scary is, if you read some of those drugs - in the doctor's information, they clearly state that they don't know how they work! That, by itself, is scary so I can certainly see where you're coming from.
Let me again state that it seems more invasive (this is a physical thing) to alter the body to such a drastic degree for what is essentially a mental health issue. Unfortunately, I think the "cure" is at the societal level where we'll need to convince people to stop being ignorant and allow them to fill whatever roll they feel they're most suited for. Ideally one would not need to feel obligated to change their gender if they could just live life representing themselves as who they are without regards to the contents of their genital region.
Does that make more sense?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Hahahahahahaha! Well, that lets me off the hook then.
Have a not so nice day, troll.
What is unfortunate is that when using the term "mental illness" it automatically brings with it a stigma in so many people's views. They don't get nearly the same reaction when they mention something like diabetic. It isn't as if this is something they chose to have, it's straight up horrifying from my understanding. Nobody wakes up and says, "Well, today I'm going to take on the threats, the violence, the bigotry, and declare myself as having a gender disorder for the attention." (Well, if they do they have other more pressing mental health needs that should be attended to.)
Again, the term isn't my own and it is not I who brings the connotations of mental health issues being any different, worse, or a reason to be bothered. If you bring that baggage with you then that's your fault. I have neither time, inclination, a right, or ability to control the thoughts of others.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
One needn't be "useful" in every regard to be beneficial. The benefits are a more tranquil society, a happier society, a healthier society. Well, assuming that it is actually beneficial which is, as I mentioned, still subject to debate. Gays can't (by themselves) create a child but they can rear a child that was otherwise unwanted or likely to be given an upbringing that had a higher potential of the child becoming a drain on society instead of a benefit to society. That is one example where reproduction isn't required for something to be good for society.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I do all sorts of things I shouldn't do. The karma can take a hit (or twenty) and it is sometimes worth it to make a point. An example of people doing so would be your feeling compelled to carry on with the off-topic discussion to determine what I should and shouldn't post.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You missed the first part of my statement which is that I'm not sure if it is.
I'd say that, yes, the phantom limb would be a mental illness. However, the assumption that mental illness is any different than a physical ailment (for social acceptability) is absurd. We don't judge someone with a degenerative spinal illness, we don't judge someone with diabetes, and we don't judge people who have lost a limb. Why the hell we insist on judging people who are mentally ill is beyond me and something that we, as a society, need to fix.
Now on to your next questions... They're good ones - thanks.
I don't think one needs to assume that one is right and the other is wrong. I think that people should be allowed to fill the rolls they feel most suited for without regards to their physical gender. In other words, I don't think society should be the one pressuring people to comply with these backwards and outdated senses of self and gender. We should be past that by now but, unfortunately, we're not. I don't think someone should feel compelled to have an invasive and dangerous surgery when they could possibly live their life in the manner that makes them happy without having to resort to such drastic measures.
To the last question, I am not (by any means) an expert in the field but I have done quite a lot of reading and I have been interested in the subject for quite some time. We don't really understand the brain that well at all, my interests come in at the point of AI and we'll touch on that in a moment, but they seem to exist for a few reasons. One of the reasons is a mixed messaging system in their brain. They don't regard themselves as having the mentality that matches their physical self. Another is genetics where some damage or change was made which results in the body not matching what their genes say. Another is physical anomalies which result in people who have mixed genitalia or sometimes no genitalia at all. As for the question of why, my understanding is that there are a number of reasons that this happens from damage to genes to some chemical change that results in genes that make no sense - someone posted a list of combinations in the thread and that is interesting to think about.
Now, from my own perspective it comes as a matter of curiosity which began back when I was looking into AI and the plausibility of doing it right. Our understanding of the brain is so poor that, for example, a good number of the psychiatric drugs specifically state that they do not know why they work. We have yet to figure out the brain and I think that we're going to have to do that before we can do anything other than mimic human thinking. Mimicking human thinking is not, to me, the same as AI. For AI to be real we're going to have to actually make a brain and this is going to require a lot more study. My understanding is that there is new technology, fMRI is the technology which I speak of, and that is helping us to better map the brain. Mapping isn't going to be enough, we're still going to have to figure out the why...
Anyhow, to return to the topic at hand more directly, it is something that we just don't know yet. We can speculate and make educated guesses but we really aren't certain.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I don't bring the biases to the table. It is a mental health issue (according to the doctors at this time) but being prejudiced against mentally ill people is something you bring to the table. I can't control that. Those are your issues and your issues alone.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No but nor do you (assuming you're the GP poster) speak for them. To state that they're born that way is incorrect as it states that they're all born that way by default. Such is not true and, especially with the sensitivity of this topic, I think it is imperative to maintain clear, open, and honest language use. This will help to prevent the trolls from getting a foothold and starting to insert their silliness into the topic.
There are, unfortunately, a lot of prejudiced people on the planet. They often don't even seem to know it and some seem to even be proud of it. We can't do much about them other than to educate them. A lot of people seem to think that they'll die off and that the world will be a different place but that doesn't appear to be true. If anything it seems as though we're coming up with new and different ways to be prejudiced.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Not a lie; I simply changed my mind. Your comments are so incredibly, hilariously asshole-ish that I find reading them hard to resist.
Well, who the fuck are you guys to decide someone else's identity for them!?
There are people out there who legitimately think they are wolves in a human body, shall we start calling them wolves also?, same deal.
They can call themselves what they want, but it won't change what they are.
"I know the feeling."
Yes, I am sure you do. The similarity between your comments and masturbation has not escaped my attention.
You can argue with the doctors. There is a reason that I termed it as such, that's because it is the correct term even if you wish to ascribe your own prejudices to it. There's a reason that they make them go to a lot of therapy before they are able to undergo reassignment. There are plenty of other posts in this thread who also confirm what I've just typed out.
Anyhow, I understand your desire to be right and your desire to find offense where there is none to be found. Just because you don't like the term or wish to be prejudiced about the term doesn't mean that you're correct. I've spent a great deal of time learning, listening, and understanding. You've spent two minutes jumping to conclusions as is your typical posting fashion. Feel free to consult Google for more information. Until then you're dismissed.
I have to post AC 'cause I've replied to too many topics but this is KGIII.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
How stupid to you have to be to think vanity has anything to do with it?
Vanity is the only thing it has to do with. Most people just don't want to fucking hear about it one way or the other. We've got our own shit to deal with. It's just toweringly arrogant to think that other people are meant to give a shit.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's an issue, precisely because other people *do* make it their business. It's sort of like when people complain about "the gays" and how they won't just "mind their own business and keep it to themselves" while everyone saying that is busy trying to invade their bedroom and their private/personal lives.
I'm pretty sure most of them would quite happily see a day when nobody *does* care.
Then we would be ostracized and discriminated against that much more.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Here is one example that has been on CNN's front page for the better part of a month (as of yesterday it's off the front page)
Parents sue South Carolina for surgically making child female
That one was IS to F but IS to M is a lot more common than people think. It's said "it's easier to make a hole than a pole" but all too often when there is a micropenis or enlarged clit, they remove the female plumbing, and also very often if both are reasonably well formed the parents are often pressured by doctors and even clergy to make a decision, which is something equally as likely to be accurate if chosen by a coin toss as it is a "medical evaluation." In the case of IS children there is a 66% chance of making the wrong choice, because for us there are really three valid choices: 1. Make us female 2. Make us male 3. leave us the fuck alone. In all but the rarest of cases (such as a hypospadias being wide open revealing vital organs) the correct choice is #3 and let us make our own god damned decision when we're old enough to understand what such decisions make. To allow doctors or even parents play god and make that decision on our behalf is absolutely unforgivable.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
If you don't give a shit, then why are you putting up a fuss about it?
I hope your children turn out intersex and you make the decision for them when they are infants, and they grow up to resent your ignorant ass when they realize how you fucked their lives up.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Do we really even need a M/F identifier in most databases? It may be necessary for some medical ones, but do the medical databases, if they contain other biological information (example, bloodtype) assume that this is correct before doing a transfusion? (I'm not a doctor, Jim, perhaps one could confirm this) - My point though, is for most databases, this isn't a useful bit of information.
If you don't give a shit, then why are you putting up a fuss about it?
Well, the government just passed "gender adjustment surgery" legislation last week around here. So, now my taxes are going to be used to pay to sexually mutilate the mentally ill. I'm kind of pissed off about it, frankly. So, I come to Slashdot looking for technical news, there's an article about how rotten I am because I don't build databases to cater to the sensibilities of these mentally ill people.
Why can't you freaks just quietly live out your strange little existence without making such an annoyance of yourselves? A decade ago, I used to say "they're not causing trouble, just leave them alone". Now, all I think to myself is "they're perverting our entire society, and driving me crazy with their constant drama, will someone please just shut them the fuck up".
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I can see, though, where it may be healthier to reassign the body instead of attempting to cure it with some sort of psychotherapy drug. Those drugs have some nasty side effects and can do some long term damage. We really don't understand the brain well at all. What's scary is, if you read some of those drugs - in the doctor's information, they clearly state that they don't know how they work! That, by itself, is scary so I can certainly see where you're coming from.
Yep - that's definitely an additional very strong danger. I can't agree more that messing with neurochemistry like that is pretty risky business (and as you might guess from my sig; some aspects of psychopharmacology are kind of a hobby of mine (plug: sometime later this year, I'll update my sig with a link to a book I'll be publishing which includes a rather good chapter on neurochemistry)).
But that aside, it addresses only a part of half of my concerns about fixing the problem 'in the mind' rather than 'in the body'. That is to say, my concern that "we suck at changing personality in others". Whether it be by these drugs that we don't really understand or by psychotherapy techniques that are scarily akin to brain-washing, we tend to cause more damage than we solve in a lot of people.
The other half of my concern however I don't think you addressed - and that's my point on 'invasiveness'. Changing 'who someone is' (even if we could do it perfectly) seems far harsher than changing physical aspects. There's a lot more blood and physical pain involved in the physical changes, but ethically speaking, I'd have stronger concerns about changing people at a fundamental level to match societies preferences.
Unfortunately, I think the "cure" is at the societal level where we'll need to convince people to stop being ignorant and allow them to fill whatever roll they feel they're most suited for. Ideally one would not need to feel obligated to change their gender if they could just live life representing themselves as who they are without regards to the contents of their genital region.
Does that make more sense?
Ah, right - I see where you're coming from with this. Yes, that does make more sense to me.
I think that if we had such a society (which I doubt we could sadly), very many of the cases where people currently undergo gender reassignment surgery would not be requested. However, I also think that some people would still want it. There'd still be those who would look at their body and say to themselves, "This isn't who I'm supposed to be" regardless of how accepted and normal it is. The question is whether in such a society the surgery would remain as the best option or not. Given that the feelings of 'not being right' would likely be much more muted due to a lack of external pressures, perhaps simply skilful counselling may be sufficient to help. Or, maybe not.
But regardless, we don't have such a society, and I really don't have enough faith in humanity in general to think we could achieve such. So, given the society that we have right now, it seems to be either a case of changing the person's 'core being', or changing their body. And from these two options, changing the body seems significantly less abhorrent to me.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
It's sort of like when people complain about "the gays" and how they won't just "mind their own business and keep it to themselves"
I'm one of those people who complain.
while everyone saying that is busy trying to invade their bedroom and their private/personal lives.
Why the hell would I want to invade their bedroom? No way in hell do I ever want to watch faggots buggering each other.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
I do not argue that homosexuality is a choice. I do not think that it is a choice.
What I do wonder about, is what factors lead to self-identification in the first place. We see examples of homosexuality in nature all of the time, but the only examples of species changing sex are very rare species that manage to do so when the genders are significantly out of balance. Obviously we cannot ask a non-human how they feel about their gender, and on top of that we probably don't even know if our societal structure that places such emphasis on gender roles is part of what causes such problems for people.
I do not claim to fully understand the situation, so please don't misconstrue my lack of understanding for strong judgement. As I said, I don't really know what to think, and given that it doesn't really affect me I'm inclined to not interfere with those who are going through whatever they're experiencing. I just worry about the ramifications for those who do something and then don't like it but can't go back.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Well, you have my sympathy for the struggle that you describe. I have never experienced something that strong so I cannot empathize nor will I pretend to.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would have assume precisely the opposite. Your reasoning is interesting, however my (admittedly non-PC) take is that gender dysphoria often has a grass-is-greener motivation (similar to how people fall in love with another country because the realities of life in their own are hard).
Also in the masculine/feminine spectrum of stereotypes, as defined by cultural expectations, there is plenty of crossover (gentle men etc.), and for these people it definitely is difficult to fit in. So, while you may focus on romantic options, I would think it is people romanticising the other side to a point where they wish to identify with them. The question is, can that wish invert sexual attraction? It seems unlikely.
A quick Wikipedia check suggests;
* male-to-female: 38% bisexual, 35% attracted to women, and 27% attracted to men
* female-to-male: somewhat unclear, but majority of trans men [are] attracted primarily or exclusively to women
So transgender people starting as men started as heterosexual and became homosexual. Surprisingly (for me) transgender women were the opposite.
Do you really think the editors posted this story so we'd have a long discussion on database design?
Huh. Well I was prepared to simply let your anecdotal evidence trump my late-night speculation, but the next commentor actually trotted out statistics to back you, though only for MTF:
A quick Wikipedia check [wikipedia.org] suggests;
* male-to-female: 38% bisexual, 35% attracted to women, and 27% attracted to men
* female-to-male: somewhat unclear, but majority of trans men [are] attracted primarily or exclusively to women
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No amount of wanting will change your "default" hormonal state, or give you functional sex organs from your chosen gender.
That's not relevant either. The question of "who someone is" has to be answered by a combination of physical and mental, and the existence of this condition brings up all sorts of interesting questions about how society treats gender and how absolute that is.
For a license database it is about identification. This could go one of two ways; what does the ambo see when he picks up your pieces after an accident (birth gender, most likely)? Or what does the cop see when she pulls you over for speeding (chosen gender, most likely)?
Really it is about official identification. If the goverment allows you to change your gender then you are Jane Bloggs (F) - no point in different departments recording this differently.
That is surprising, it would seem to suggest that the mechanism behind gender dissatisfaction is operating somewhat differently between the genders. Or perhaps women are just inherently more attractive [chuckle].
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I mean, seriously, that's not really useful information in 99.999% of the cases where they want you to select.
Very interesting, thank you.
Tobias?
For example, in genetical studies sex is often important information. It is also used as a quality control measure. If the recorded sex doesn't match with the results of genetical testing, it can cause a lot of trouble. There may be a "witch hunt" to check if somebody has mixed up samples or sample information and the results of whole families may have to be thrown out, if there is suspicion that there is some kind of sample/pedigree mix up. However, it is typically possible to have other values than just male or female as the sex. Typically allowed values are "unknown" and "don't want to tell you".
And there are other valid reasons for recording sex, like doing statistics where you want to do comparision between sexes. And I personally wouldn't like to receive advertisements that are targeted for women as I am unlikely to be interested in them and they just waste my time. However, I think it is good to give the option of not giving the sex, if you don't want to give it. Many people oppose saving any unneccesary personal information, including sex, to different databases, web sites etc.
YMMV on that one. It's not just Transgender, but Intersex too. Some conditions cause a natural sex change. e.g. http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Is being left-handed - something also caused by unusual neurology - a mental health issue too? If not, why not? What about cases like this - a girl with 5ARD, meaning she's undergoing a natural sex change at puberty - and desperately doesn't want it. Is that a "mental health problem"? http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aissg/2010_FamCA_237.pdf What about boys in the same situation - born looking female, naturally changing to look male later, and welcoming it. Are they "mentally ill" for wanting the change? I note that in the new ICD-11 manual, this whole syndrome is being moved out of the mental health section.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Welcome to womanhood. You were a girl who looked like a boy. Now that's changing.
It gets better too
If you want to know why you're like this - there's two papers you should read.
Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35
The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development: “How Does One Know if One is Male or Female?” M.Diamond Sex Roles (2006) 55:589–600
A theory of gender development is presented that incorporates early biological factors that organize predispositions in temperament and attitudes. With activation of these factors a person interacts in society and comes to identify as male or female. The predispositions establish preferences and aversions the growing child compares with those of others. All individuals compare themselves with others deciding who they are like (same) and with whom are they different. These experiences and interpretations can then be said to determine how one comes to identify as male or female, man or woman. In retrospect, one can say the person has a gendered brain since it is the brain that structures the individual’s basic personality; first with inherent tendencies then with interactions coming from experience.
Your reported experience before age 10 matches my own pretty closely, BTW. It's a common pattern, one shared by women with CAH.
Up until age 5, I was a child. No real concept of gender.
At 6, I went to school, and noticed something was wrong. I was dressed as a boy, I looked like a boy, but I didn't think like "other boys". I still liked toy guns, and Meccano rather than dolls, but I was different.
At 7, I knew I wasn't a boy, but didn't know what I was. I thought boys were puerile, and girls too silly and sissy. A classic Tomboy in retrospect.
At 8, I got to play hopscotch with other girls, and I felt at home. They thought like I did, they cried like I did. I still didn't see myself as more than an honourary girl though. Even if my favourite toy car was Lady Penelope's pink Rolls-Royce.
At 9, more by a process of elimination than anything else, I realised I was female. Boys could just as well have been an alien species. Girls were just like me, in feelings and values.
At 10, I was in a boys boarding school then, and I was able to make up boardgames of astounding complexity when it rained. I had my own secret garden in the nearby woods, with flowerbeds I'd planted. I could sit and read amidst the flowers, and was terribly happy. It was then I picked the name Zoe, and planned what I was going to do with my life. I wanted children, a husband, the white picket fence etc, but also to be a Rocket Scientist and to travel the world, things that Wives and Mothers Just Did Not Do in the 60's.
Even though it had been obvious since age 7 that I’d never be “svelte” or “petite”, that I’d be the g
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
So having sex listed in a database offends transgendered people, but I imagine that taking it out would offend affirmative action feminists even more. (I.e. they fear they'll lose their ability to track "fairness".) That and oh so many things critical to the economy (e.g. Market data) need important information such as this.
That and some people (such as feminists) consider their sex to be a defining and prideful aspect of their lives, probably far more so than the number of transgendered.
I'm having a hard time therefore reasoning that we should change a system that already suits its purpose because a fraction of a percent of the population finds it embarrassing. If we got rid of every little thing that might offend somebody, life would be pretty bland.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Thank you, KGIII, for bringing up as good of points as you have.
Since I am also not in the circumstances of feeling transgendered, I can only wonder - and since it seems to be an extremely sensitive topic for people I shy away from interviewing people in that state to gain a better sense of what is going on for them: what they feel, think, what their internal tensons and conflicts are... I would love to do such a study if it could bring about any better understanding for myself (and perhaps their selves).
I don't have much experience with transgendered people - the one I met a few years ago was socially/personally a jerk (an ex says that change in personality coincided with testosterone treatments), while another ftm appears to me to be quite a wonderful person, and it makes me very sad to think they will be going through with surgery to, with current medical technology, what seems to me to amount to mangling their body - especially when they've so creatively dealt with their gender conflict so far.
- looking forward to better days.
I'm baffled why anybody would mod this troll - the question of whether or not surgery is an ethical course of action is a very valid one. Thanks for posting it.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
That makes no sense. In your example, the parents DO have a physical health issue. They grew up in a war environment that had food shortages which caused them to be shorter. less food=short, in this case. Nobody is saying that is their fault, but it is a physical health issue.
A better example would be they were naturally short.
How about we have 3 boxes on the forms. Male, Female, Other. So simple, problem solved.
The third option for boolean values should, of course, be FileNotFound :)
Joking aside, I'm not convinced that people who've had so severe issues with their gender idendity that they actually changed it would be happy to be "Other".
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Thanks very much for taking the time to read and reply to my post! I especially liked the 2nd quote on the page that you linked... if seems oddly appropriate at the moment, for some reason I just can't quite put my finger on...
So in other words "na nah ne na na, science don't mean shit" is that REALLY your position? You don't like what the doctors came up with so it don't fucking count? and the reason they need years of therapy is because they have to play fucking Russian Roulette for most of their lives before then, which needless to say that much fucking stress WILL cause problems. I got to see what it was like for a guy I worked with that turned out to be gay, if his family saw him on the street they would spit on him and they wouldn't even let him go to the funeral of his grandma, saying "you or any of your faggot friends show up and we will have you hauled off".
So no shit they need therapy, if I knew that I let it slip even once that I like brunettes my entire fucking life would be destroyed? I would probably need therapy too. And maybe they keep banning your account because you keep posting shit, ever think of that? Hell I post only what I feel with no bullshit or hand holding and I am modded up most of the time, but then again everyone can see I'm just being honest, not being a condescending asshole like you. Word of advice? Nobody likes pretentious, they really don't, your holier than thou attitude is what is getting you banned, nobody can fucking stand that shit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm curious, is there a correlation between genetic sex and the ultimate gender identities of intersex people?
How would you classify XXXY, XX/XY, XXY, XX/XXY, XY/XXY and other similarly atypical chromosomal phenotypes?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It is interesting to see the path that my moderation score has taken on that post as well. There were a LOT of votes about it. Anyhow, I'll try to make this short...
I have learned the things I have learned about them because I'm open and just plain ask them. It's a long story but I'll make it short.
When I was a younger lad, quite some time ago really, I was a friend of a friend who was afflicted by some ailment (I can not recall which) and was forced to hobble along, on crutches, in a very ungainly manner. They had poor control of their legs and the crutches afforded them greater mobility than a chair would have so they used the crutches. The end result was that their walking was akin to what I imagine a drunken three legged giraffe would look like only their shape was more closely aligned with a hippo.
We were drinking, she was of age and I was not, and conversing. I'd met her a number of times through my friend and was comfortable talking with her. Anyhow, somehow we ended up on the subject of her disability and how people reacted to it. She informed me that she would rather people stare than to look away. She would rather they they eye her without abandon instead of waiting until she wasn't looking so that they could observe her. Of course, really, she'd rather they simply ask her about the disability to her face and that they be upfront about it. Quite frequently people made an effort to "ignore" her disability, to look away, to stare at her straight in the eyes, or to find other ways to avoid observing her.
She much preferred people who would ask, if they were curious, instead of ignoring or pretending it didn't exist. She would rather talk about it and educate people about her disability. She would rather be engaged and a part of the conversation so that they'd know the truth instead of them having a conversation about it in their own heads and drawing their own conclusions. She was (is, she's not dead or anything) a very bright person and this has changed my behavior and my outlook ever since.
Since then I've (and I'm not sure that I did before, I suspect I did but I don't really know as it was done without thought and I never acted in an untoward manner simply because of ones afflictions) made it a point to judge disabled people based on what they do. And yes, of course, I judge people. We all do and it is a requirement. How we react, respond, and use those judgments is a subject for another post and too much to get into here. However, and THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT BIT to take from this, I have since maintained the policy of being openly curious about the disabilities of those whom I interact with and they're far more appreciative of it with very few exceptions. It obviously isn't the first question out of my mouth when I meet new people, it is not even always a question - sometimes I'm simply not curious. It is obviously done with tact and with true appreciation and attention paid to the answers.
My first question is not, of course, "How did you end up in the chair, gimp?" I have no standard lead in questions, I don't have scripted conversations prepared for life. However, I certainly ask openly about it, observe, and generally don't make any effort to assist them physically unless they are obviously in need of assistance or have asked for it. But, as I mentioned, the most important thing to take from this conversation (for me) was that it better to ask. It was important to not ignore, not shy away, not pointedly be unobservant, nor should I be afraid of slighting them by being curious. It isn't politically correct but a person's handicap is indeed a part of them. It is a part of who they are. It makes up a good portion of why they are who they are, why they do what they do, and how they respond to the world around them. That's the truth. However, it isn't all of who they are. It doesn't define them. It doesn't make them less important (nor does it make them more important or special). It makes them human, it makes them a bit unique (just like everybody else), and it isn
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I think that if we had such a society (which I doubt we could sadly), very many of the cases where people currently undergo gender reassignment surgery would not be requested. However, I also think that some people would still want it. There'd still be those who would look at their body and say to themselves, "This isn't who I'm supposed to be" regardless of how accepted and normal it is. The question is whether in such a society the surgery would remain as the best option or not. Given that the feelings of 'not being right' would likely be much more muted due to a lack of external pressures, perhaps simply skilful counselling may be sufficient to help. Or, maybe not.
But regardless, we don't have such a society, and I really don't have enough faith in humanity in general to think we could achieve such. So, given the society that we have right now, it seems to be either a case of changing the person's 'core being', or changing their body. And from these two options, changing the body seems significantly less abhorrent to me.
I scrolled back up to add this:
Sorry for the novella, I wanted to be complete and to include everything that seemed relevant to the conversation. It shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to read it though and you seem inclined to be communicative so I'll take the time to be available to learn what you have to offer and share my own thinking.
Take, for example, this thread... I have posted nothing but supportive, fact-based, reasoned posts that have been mostly well received. I have not counted and did the whole statistics thing but seemingly the vast majority of the "attack responses" that I have had have been from those who are somehow trying to fight with me because they support gender equality too.
Erf... This may well be taken the wrong way but I guess the risk is worth it. Take, and be honest with both of us, your initial response to me. Your assumption appears (to me) to have been that I was being negative even though you had to reach to interpret what I said as being negative. Your response wasn't nearly as bad as some of the others but here I am, being completely (and the first) to be completely and totally supportive and truly concerned with this and yet people have invented, extrapolated, confused, lied, and otherwise misinterpreted my posts to have something to argue against.
Since your initial reply you appear to have realized that I am not, at all, being biased against the transgendered folk. Your initial view is that I was arguing for something when, if you recall, I was pretty clear in that I wasn't arguing anything. I even made it a point to clearly state that I wasn't arguing for anything - that I was pretty sure that because I was not subject to this that my own personal ethics may not carry any weight at all. You also brought the biases of "mental health" with you when I made every effort to ensure that my post didn't imply any negative connotations regarding mental health status as being anything more than a health problem.
Now, having said that, please be aware that that was not intended to be an attack or a slight against you. That, deep within this yet another novella, there is a purpose and a point. No, this isn't a slight against you at all nor should it be seen as such. I simply used your replies to me as my example because, well, I'm talking with you. (I need to diverge here slightly... I initially typed that out as "talking to you." My point is that I have carefully chosen my words to avoid confusion and ambiguity. I have chosen my words carefully to be inclusive, to not offend, and to be as specific as I am able to though I'm not perfect by any means. I changed it to "with you" because I'm engaging in a dialogue with you, not to you, as to you would be as if it were from a position of authority which I am not nor do I wish to be seen as attempting to be. I want open and honest dialogue and am not afraid of being incorrect nor am I afraid of learning new things.)
Where was I? Oh yeah
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You note that it is being moved out, not that it has been moved out. Until then I'll refer to it as it is. That you choose to bring your own biases into the conversation is not something I have control over. If you can read my posts and still somehow manage to conclude that I'm in any way biased then you're not nearly as bright as you'd like to pretend. A person who has lost a leg is still physically handicapped. They're not a lesser person, they're just handicapped and should be judged on their merits not on their handicap. Do, please, try to keep up and leave your biases at home. Slashdot, it may seem so at times, really isn't the place to proudly display your bigotry as though you're a peacock.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No, the science means everything. It is a mental illness. That you choose to judge on this criteria is your own issues and one which you seem to proudly display. Carry on then. Carry on... What's one more prejudiced and ignorant twit? Fortunately there are fewer and fewer of you these days, you'll die out and the world will be a better place because of it. It's cute that you try to appeal to the authority of science when, frankly, the science agrees with me. It is still currently considered a mental illness. That *is* the science. Speculations about how it will be defined in the future is not science. If you're going to appeal to the authority of science you should know the science behind it and you should actually have some sort of inkling of an idea as to what science actually is.
Additionally... If you can possibly read any sort of prejudice into my posts then you're an idiot. Well, no. You're status as an idiot is long since established. You're just continuing to display it. Proud as a peacock with drool on your shin, a shit in your pants, and a grin from ear to ear. Yeah, your mother must be proud. Maybe if you go upstairs she'll make you some pizza pockets.
Well, you got some derp on your lapel. Perhaps you should clean that up. Banning my account? Really? Wow... In fact I got a nice email today apologizing for the inconvenience and a notice that they'll be attempting to repair it. My response count was high because the vast majority of folks are capable of reading and thinking so they replied in kind and we actually had interesting dialogues. 'Tis a pity you are unable to participate. It would help if you actually stuck to words that you could define. Banning my account? Come now... Don't be silly.
Seriously, do you actually manage to eat without blinding yourself from fork stabs? No, seriously, that's something I am curious about. Go log in to your sock puppet accounts and rail against the next big outrage. Enjoy yourself. I'll even reply to you, I have time enough and you amuse me. If I could teach you to sing I could poke you and you'd sing and dance for me. Until then I'll content myself with just your dancing.
Dance for me some more my little pet monkey, dance.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That, my good sir or madam, is a brilliant point.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Oh, and regarding your signature...
I tried tripping once, for about 10 years. I decided I didn't like it, so I quit. ;)
Actually, I still imbibe once in a while, usually a couple of times a year. I find that it is maintenance for my mental health and is a good way for me to be truly introspective. I'm an older person these days, I've been doing it for years, and I tend to think that in all but a very small percentage of the populace the use of psychedelic drugs would be beneficial. The trouble is identifying that small percentage of the population before they imbibe. Other than that I think that most folks should try hallucinating at least once in their life. However, I'm quite a fan of a variety of drugs.
I meant to reply to this but it was lost in my thinking about how to reply to the remainder of your post. There is a lot of content and a lot to think about.
Anyhow, more of my thoughts on drug use are actually posted under my username at this recent (and still active) link:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/06/13/2222244/do-it-yourself-brain-stimulation-has-scientists-worried
I'm a bit verbose in that thread as well. Certain subjects are passions of mine and, at times, I'm simply verbose in other threads to avoid ambiguity and attempts to argue based on my comments being taken out of context.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You needn't have stopped. A broken record is a broken record but repeating yourself in different ways often means that you include new information each time and each revelation will be more informative and this information will help to better understand you. I don't have a lot of time at the moment so that means I'll not author another novella.
If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion? There is a site, it is http://www.fark.com/ where there are an inordinately high number of transgendered folk. I'd recommend creating some unique username and generating an account there. For their privacy sake I won't list their names but they'll likely reveal themselves and, as a whole, there's a pretty good community there. I'd recommend joining them and taking part in the conversations.
In a way the site is a bit like Slashdot, it even has a "Geek" section. It's a news aggregation site and people find the news, link it (often with a funny headline), and then some of those are posted to the front page where there is a comments section. It is a very good site and the comments are what brings me back to it. Some of the people there, the vast majority, are very good people. There are, of course, the usual trolls but they're harmless and the majority of them seem inclined to do so simply for the "art" of trolling. Some are actually pretty good at it.
Additionally the site has an ignore feature which is pretty good and beneficial. I think you may find the site interesting and I believe you'll find the site's community to be welcoming and understanding if you do out yourself. You don't even need to do that... Instead you can simply watch and you'll see that other people are managing it and that may inspire you to do so or may just give you some hope that it can be done in the future.
Either way, you have made me think about it so I felt (and feel) compelled to offer it to you as a site that you may wish to frequent. Even if it is of no benefit there's a chance to laugh, enjoy the community, and read a bunch of links to amusing stories from around the globe. They've been around for quite a while and they're a pretty decent group of people. Feel free to stop by. If you do decide to stop over let me know via email and I'll share my username over there.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Firstly: Thank you very much for the long, detailed reply. It's not appreciated by a lot of people since they seem to have the attention spans of gnats with ADHD, but I can honestly say I really enjoy getting a reply like this. Lots to think about.
I apologise if my reply isn't quite as coherent - I'm writing it while drinking my morning coffee and have to go to work in about 20 minutes.
Erf... This may well be taken the wrong way but I guess the risk is worth it. Take, and be honest with both of us, your initial response to me. Your assumption appears (to me) to have been that I was being negative even though you had to reach to interpret what I said as being negative. Your response wasn't nearly as bad as some of the others but here I am, being completely (and the first) to be completely and totally supportive and truly concerned with this and yet people have invented, extrapolated, confused, lied, and otherwise misinterpreted my posts to have something to argue against.
Since your initial reply you appear to have realized that I am not, at all, being biased against the transgendered folk. Your initial view is that I was arguing for something when, if you recall, I was pretty clear in that I wasn't arguing anything. I even made it a point to clearly state that I wasn't arguing for anything - that I was pretty sure that because I was not subject to this that my own personal ethics may not carry any weight at all. You also brought the biases of "mental health" with you when I made every effort to ensure that my post didn't imply any negative connotations regarding mental health status as being anything more than a health problem.
I definitely did misinterpret your position, but I had no assumption that you were being negative regarding mental health. My interpretation was that you understood the situation, but believed it better solved through the mental route rather than the physical. It was only after your clarification that I then understood your preference is of course for 'neither of the above', solving it socially rather than changing any aspect of the individual.
I do apologise if it sounded like I was one of the people that totally misunderstood you - I found the many other replies to you terribly shortsighted and emotion driven implying that you're 'bad' for considering it a mental health issue.
Basically, I agree completely that the social route would be best, but as I said, I don't believe it's possible and so out of the two viable options of "physical change" or "mental change", the physical seems less harmful to me for all the reasons I explained.
What's funny is that I'm a Libertarian at heart, registered Independent though. It's amazing the ignorance and biases people have. But that is SERIOUSLY a conversation for another day.
It definitely is getting off-topic, but just to answer briefly - I'm somewhere between "socialist" and "libertarian" which many people don't seem to believe should be able to exist. In short, I see the value of social benefits and taxation to provide for it (I used to live in Sydney Australia, where you pay tolls to drive anywhere useful, see homeless people all the time, and basically have privatised everything; now I live in Germany which is much more socialist by comparison and the standard of living difference is amazing - I'm more than happy to pay the high taxes I pay here because I see the benefits they provide); however I also believe the government has no right to interfere in personal matters which do not extend to the society as a whole. For example, debates regarding marriage, abortion, drugs, IP and ownership rights, etc. I'll almost always side with libertarians over socialists.
As I said, I need to go to work soon and I want to quickly reply to your other post first - if there's anything you think I've missed that you'd like me to answer, please reply again and I'll be happy to elaborate more later.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
It's off-topic, but this thread is now off the main page, so we can probably be a bit more free with it...
If you're interested, I'm currently writing a book on the subject of psychedelics. It's nearly finished (70000 words written; just a but more clean-up, editing and fact-checking to do). When it's done, I'll change my sig to be a link to it, but if you'd like, send me a private email at my username shortened to 9 characters at Google's well known email service and I'll add you to my notification list so you're reminded about it.
The title of the book is "Dropping Acid: A Beginner's Guide to the use of LSD for Self-Discovery". It's primarily intended for people interested in self-discovery as a concept that have heard that psychedelics can be used as such but aren't sure about the substance or details in general. It helps assuage some fears; but also presents other things to be careful of that the person might not have thought about. It would also of course likely be interesting to others that have used the substance and would just like another person's perspective on it.
The chapters cover a range of topics such as general effects, the psychopharmacology, history, law, three "very different" experience stories, and of course the "core" topic of self-discovery including LSD and ponderings on philosophy ("meaning of life" kind of stuff).
I'm an older person these days, I've been doing it for years, and I tend to think that in all but a very small percentage of the populace the use of psychedelic drugs would be beneficial.
I'm not a spring-chicken myself anymore either - married, daughter, house in the suburbs, nice car, responsible job and all that.
My opinion in general is that many people aren't mentally mature enough to handle it, but those who are can get a very large benefit. Of those who aren't, most will not find it a pleasant experience but it also won't be significantly harmful; so on the balance of things, I think most people should try it at least once (preferably after reading my book - 70000 words on the subject is more than I can generally just tell someone in casual conversation).
I've also taken a lot of different substances in my life. The psychedelics and the entactogens are by far those that interest me the most, but in the right circumstances, general stimulants can also be useful. I don't use anything 'regularly' unless you count between 3 and 6 trips per year to be 'regular' LSD use. For entactogens (or more specifically MDMA) it's around once a year, and other substances maybe once every two to three years.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
I didn't answer the question becaue it doesn't make any sense. Your question implies that there is no difference between a sex change and breaking one's spine, ie. you see the removal of one's ability to reproduce as equal to crippling oneself. I find that premise to be invalid and thus refuse to answer the question.
You try to steer the discussion away from the topic by using a loaded question that presupposes SRS to be morally wrong. The only reasonable thing to answer to are the semantics of your question, not its content.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
He has had a hysterectomy, has taken T / lived as a man for eight years, and only a handful of people have ever known him as "her." Here in Ohio, he changed his name easily enough, and his driver's license was easy enough to change, but it ends there.
To change federal status you need to revise your birth certificate, which is up to your state of residence. In some states you can easily change your birth certificate, not in Ohio. As I recall, in Ohio you are still required to prove you have had all of the surgical procedures (in his case, doctor's statements signing off on a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and penile reconstruction) in order to have your birth certificate gender changed. From there you can send in your birth certificate to the department of social security to be issued a new social security card and a new passport.
Alternately, you can lie to the passport people and tell them that your birth certificate has the wrong gender. You send them the copy of your state driver's license as proof, and they correct it, then you send your passport and driver's license as proof to social security, and they correct it. You'll still have the screwed up birth certificate. Thanks, Ohio.
For transgender and intersex people this is archaic. For my state, it's embarrassing. For my friend, it means that a bearded, deep-voiced, guy (in every apparent aspect) still has documentation out there stating that a well-adjusted hetero dude who is obviously a "he" -- believe me you'd never guess -- is still considered a "she."
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Definitely applicable to children's medical records. So pediatricians will still want to track gender. The other medical data based on gender is currently suspect, including dosage for anesthetic. But it seems harmless to keep track of a person's chromosomal gender in a private medical database, perhaps including all the complicated rare chromosomal anomalies. You know, information your Doctor would probably like to know, but which your tax auditor, local police officer and boss have no right to know.
Tax breaks for gender? Are you actually suggesting that this is something we need to keep around?
How about maternity and paternity claims being treated equally and with common sense? Also, a man can certainly file a maternity claim, as everyone is free to file most kinds of civil court claims in most jurisdictions. He just won't win it when it becomes obvious he is not the biological mother (duh). On the other hand if he took on a male identity after giving birth, there definitely can be a situation where such filter up front is not only unnecessary but violates basic rights.
Business systems are no longer written in COBOL, using the present tense form of the verb "written". While certainly there exists old software, it's hasn't been actively developed in several years now and is in pure maintenance mode these days. Let's try to look forward instead of backwards. And I'm definitely for making old system obsolete so they can be replaced by new systems, spurring economic growth. (oh I'm sure you can find someone who does COBOL out there. but there are a lot of crazy and unreasonable people out there. for example, I program 8-bit NES games for a hobby)
I'm arguing that the information on gender is generally irrelevant and that as individuals we should consider our gender a very personal piece of information that the vast majority of the businesses and government do not need or deserve. I think we should draw a clear line between the medical condition of a person's gender, and the cultural identity for gender. For 99.9% of people out there, it's the same. No problem, they can have the added bonus of not having to even check an M/F box except on a medical form.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I wasn't suggesting that you were linking mental illness with a choice. I think my formatting erased a chunk of the message. Cursed phone keyboard, not being set up for html!
What is was suggesting was that you are confusing mental illnesses that are due to chemistry, and those that relate to brain structure. At out current understanding if how the brain works, those two things are different. Gender identity, as we know it, relates to brain structure; those are very hard to treat. Chemistry issues are easier; on the physical side we've treated diabetes for decades with insulin. Structural differences in the brain are near impossible to treat; and the current research leads to the (not so) strange finding that MtF transgendered individuals have a brain structure more like female brains (accounting for statistical variation, of course). That same is true for FtM individuals.
So, if we can't go poking in people's brains to change the structure, and GRS&HRT work, why shouldn't people be allowed to be happy?
Do, please, try to keep up and leave your biases at home. Slashdot, it may seem so at times, really isn't the place to proudly display your bigotry as though you're a peacock.
Interesting. I ask you some discomfiting questions, you interpret that as bigotry.
Please try answering them instead? Or you may give others the wrong impression.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
One question I've always had (which may be answerable as there seem a number of TG/TS persons on slashdot) is, how does one form relationships after changing gender? I could definitely see some perils to announcing one's status while looking (attracting those ranging from creepy to curious) but I'd imagine that meeting somebody and not revealing it until later would not go over well in many situations either.
Dating as a straight born-male is hard enough, and from discussions with friends it's harder in many ways to meet people if you're not straight. How does one find a relationship if you've changed visual gender (especially in smaller cities)?
You can bet that some silly bastard somewhere made it part of the primary key.
I remember[1] someone telling me that social security numbers in Spain or Belgium or somewhere[2] indirectly worked like that, in that it was represented by the evenosity/odditude of the Nth digit. But maybe he was winding me up.
[1][2] not very well obviously.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
XYY are, I believe, usually referred to as "Australians".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Last time I looked, worker ants haven't died out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My 2c: anyone who has those earlobe expanders - the ones that look like tarpaulin grommets - is a twat of the first order.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."