I saw it. But I'm busy, and only had time for a couple responses, and focused on people I was having an existing back and forth with. It also didn't seem like that interesting of a question. But ok, I can address it.

I'll answer descriptively. It seems that people simply do treat these things differently, rightly or wrong. That is, there are many trans people out there that for whatever reason of nature or nurture seem to completely genuinely believe they are a different gender than they were assigned at birth. I have no reason not to believe them. For age, there is endlessly cultural momentum about living and acting in ways not aligned with your age (young people trying to be mature, old people trying to live young, etc), but I don't observe the same type of large group of people genuinely believing they are a different age, and that is ok too. One can guess at the reason for this discrepancy (perhaps it is that age is super simple and quantitative while gender is a very complex rather socially constructed concept, perhaps it is that it is easy to act a different in your like outlook or whatever, who knows) but I don't think it matters. Trans people exist. We should respect that.

What do you say to those who are concerned kids' bodies are being mutilated to advance this trans agenda? Even if it is rarely happening, it is surely dangerous enough to warrant push back right. Asking for a friend

thanks, good answer

i don't think anyone is denying they exist, that they genuinely believe in it, nor that do i think many people really have much of a problem with them doing it

i think the issue is over the perception of respect, i have absolutely no issue with trans people, they can do whatever they like, i'll even call them their preferred pronouns etc

but i don't think i should be bullied into putting my own pronouns on my business card/email/twitter in order to make their situation appear normal

i'm color blind, far more people are colorblind than trans, I still can't play half the games or read any maps or infographics because the world does not adapt around me to make it more inclusive for me and it's actually a super easy solution as there are known color schemes which don't cause conflict

there are far more of me than there are trans people and I can't read half the subway maps of various cities I visit despite that it'd be super easy for them to make them color blind friendly

it's annoying, but it's not out of disrespect

yes, a lot of trans people are disrespected, but me not not wanting to date a trans nor wanting to put he/him on my linkedin in isn't out of disrespect anymore than the graphics person who printed the subway maps

i can be respectful to trans people while also being open in my belief that I think that they are avoiding dealing with the root issues and instead treating the symptoms

we used to think that lobotomies were incredible and cutting edge science, the Kennedy's genuinely loved and cared for their daughter and lobotomized her because according to the science at the time that was the optimal solution to her issues - it wasn't and is now looked at as a horrific thing parents would do because they are pure monsters

i think we can all agree, no matter your feelings on the issue, that a lot of cutting edge psychology has since been walked back and looked upon with shame and there's a non zero chance in 20 years we'll be looking back at this time and thinking how insane it was to give out hormone therapy and surgery to enable people who are mentally unwell much like we did with lobotomies

But this logic doesn't work if you look at sex by chromosomes, which is pretty simple and quantitative; the equivalent of counting the years for age. If someone has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, they are a human male. I don't think any trans men genuinely believe they have a Y chromosome. What they do believe is they feel like someone who has XY chromosomes does (even though it's impossible for them to know this anyway). In the same way, someone who is 60 years old may feel like he is 40 years old. Or a white woman who grew up in a black neighborhood, married a black man, and gave birth to children with dark skin, may feel like she is black, despite not appearing so (or sometimes, even appearing black because of her style choices).

I believe the only reason there are more transexual people than transracial or transage (?) people is because it is becoming more acceptable and getting so much publicity. I am absolutely certain that if it were considered acceptable to be treated as the age one actually feels, there would be many more people changing their accepted age than there are who want to correct their gender.

No, no we can't agree to that. The comparison is horrible. This is a word salad comparing transgender people to lobotomy victims. This same type of psychobabble was used to not "enable" gay and lesbian "perverts" just 10 years ago.

chillrob, tell me more about this imaginary world where everyone either has xy or xx chromosomes and everyone with xx chromosomes is female and everyone with xy chromosomes is male.
And tell me more about how this imaginary world where there is sex but not gender even functions.

If liberals were in charge we would just accept that these kids are female as they have considered themselves their whole lives.



But thanks to the reasonable conservative responses to changing norms,
states are passing laws to examine and keep track of all women's menstrual cycles all throughout their childhood, we would be able to detect that these two children have xy chromosomes and are thus male.

History will not look back kindly on individuals who abused innocent and confused children to forward their own ideological agenda.

No it's not.
It's the world we live in.

Bill nails it

Rickroll that is a LOT of tangents stemming from the age vs gender question.

Ok. Are you bullied? I put pronouns in the rather long signature of one of my professional accounts. This account is for my work mentoring and training graduate students to become teachers, and a bunch of my graduate students use different pronouns, so I'm doing it because I'm bullied, but because in a mentorship role I'd really hope everyone felt comfortable sharing who they are and seeing me as someone who is welcoming and accepting. I don't put pronouns in my business card, other professional email, personal email, or twitter. Maybe one day I will, but I certainly don't feel bullied.

Sure, this is a good comparison. I do some accessibility work in my job and generally advise professors to develop instructional materials that are friendly to visually impaired people. This includes both using colour-palets known to be friendly to colour-blind people as well as things like using headers and alt tags for screen readers. As professors interact with many students I think this is a small, low-stakes accomodation we can do to be more inclusive.

So I guess I think that a few minimal things to help trans people is pretty similar to a few minimal things to help colour-blind people and we should probably do both.

Did anybody say you were being disrespectful for not wanting to date a trans person? I don't really get where these anxieties are coming from.

Ok? We can only ever use the best science of the time, even if in the future it is proven poor. What is weird is this is you seem to be suggesting that you believe current best medical practices like hormone therapy to support gender dysphoria patients is going to be in that same category, but ok, on what evidence?

I think it requires a good amount of naivety to label people as mature or not mature based on their age. In your post you imply that combining the words ''young'' and ''mature'' would result in an oxymoron, which is probably as inocent as thinking that gender dysphoria isn't real.

Have there ever been transage people? There have been transgender people for thousands of years.

That's not an "inconsistency". Women are comparing themselves to other women, not to drag queens. Drag queen performances are an art form for fun and not meant to be how people normally dress and behave.
It's not like something where drag queens are trying and failing; in their day to day lives they can dress much differently. This is almost like saying it's weird that people don't criticize people for dressing like hobos in a broadway musical about homelessness.

Yes I am bullied. I've been directly told by recruiters that not putting pronouns on my resume will put me at a strong disadvantage over those that do. Granted this is in the world of tech/apps and is an incredibly woke industry on the whole. There's a massive amount of social pressure to do this and those who won't are implicitly viewed as hateful bigots by some.


I think you missed my point here, while i agree that we can all do minimal things such as calling them by their preferred pronouns, the entire point of bringing up being color blind and how simple it is to accommodate (but never is) was about perceived respect - you mentioned respect in your answer, as if we were being disrespectful (otherwise, why introduce respect in the first place) and I'm countering that it's not about respect.

Like with trans, there's a lot of basic things people could do to make lives of color blind people much easier - they aren't done, yet oddly you don't see colorblind people thinking it's due to the world hating us and they are actively trying to disrepect and put us down - it's not personal at all, it's wholly out of site out of mind

I'm happy to be respectful and call them by their chosen pronouns, etc. I've stated in the past that I've spent extensive time in Asia where trans are far more common, I had trans friends and legit will seek out the trans people I see at bars to talk to because they're nearly always 10x more interesting people to talk to. I don't in a million years consider myself bigoted nor hateful towards them.

But I think it's absurd for me to be expected to put my pronouns on professional documents just so the <1% of trans people don't feel like they are indeed <1% of the population and it's normal for everyone to be like that. And then when I don't want to do that, people say I'm bigoted. People say I'm transphobic. People say I'm disrespectful. It's not at all. Just a catch phrase for "comply or else we'll try to convince the world you're a bad person"

Look at that idiot, dozens of times he's made claims that people were being hateful and transphobic and because the default setting is to comply out of fear of being labeled a bad person we're now on our 4th iteration of this thread.

Do you not recall how much flak I received for pointing out that tranny is not a slur but rather a widely used term and places like Southeast Asia where it's very commonplace and they have trans people in powerful government positions etc etc they all use the word tranny freely. Nope, cause some westerners decided they don't like the term it's now not allowed and all the actual trans people who do use term apparently don't matter.

Yes, this has happened here at 2p2, since the trans threads get wiped regularly it'll be tough to pull up evidence. But yeah, apparently if you don't want to date a trans person you're now an *******. I think I also caught flak in the online dating thread as well when I mentioned finding it confusing that bumble/tinder treated trans like cisgender people and how it was really weird that I could filter out men who identified as men but wasn't able to filter out men wearing sundresses - this is really confusing as it's the penis at issue not the clothing they wear, i'm not going "oh the horror this woman is wearing jeans instead of a dress, so gross, let's go find anything wearing a dress"

just so absurd that they do that, and of course it goes back to the fear of being labeled a bigot for not going along with the ruse and pretending that there's no difference between a woman and a trans woman for dating

You don't remember when Ginuwine was labeled transphobic for refusing to be sexually assaulted on reality tv - this is your country isn't it? his career was hurt because of this


i am not stating anything definitive, just pointing out that there's a non zero chance that we'll look at the people doing this as monsters in 20 years

more importantly, and this is something I do feel definitively about, it's treating the symptoms and not the disease, instead of exploring the underlying issues causing this, we're just placating it and that is wrong

'Transage' is unfortunately a thing, in that there are grown men who claim to identify as little girls. There's one in, quelle surprise, a Scottish prison, Daniel 'Sophie' Eastwood, and he's allowed to make female prison officers (because of course he's in a women's unit, as he has been since 2018) change his diapers and provide him with dummies and pureed baby food. He is a murderer, aged 36, and is now two years beyond the minimum term of 15 years set by the trial judge in his case, but has no prospect of parole because of his persistent violence and manipulative conduct.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-new...t-who-26675614

And no, there haven't been 'transgender people for thousands of years.' Gender identity is a fantasy, of very recent coinage, and derives from post-modern queer theory. Gender dysphoria, a recognised mental disorder, is a different matter, but that is subject to social contagion (what used to be more rightly called mass hysteria) and is clearly not innate, as gender-identity ideology pretends.

That is the actual existing world, I'm afraid, where even the vanishingly small percentage of persons with DSDs (Differences of Sexual Development due to chromosomal disorders) are in all cases identifiably either men or women. Humans, like all mammals, are a sexually dimorphic species. That is why all humans ever born have had two, always two and only two parents, one of each sex, male and female. There is no third gamete (only sperm and egg), there is no third sex, there is no ambiguity in the matter at all.

that is funny lol


"if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2050!"

that guy should be in a mental institution. And you put him in a womens prison! I cant believe this is happening in the UK. you guys are crazy.

It seems like societies have either effectively had transgender people (people functioning as the opposite sex)-- or gay people-- but perhaps not both. But that's something I'd be interested in learning more about.

Being pressured to put pronouns on a business card seems like the mildest kind of bullying I've ever heard. And how much business do you actually lose not being sufficiently woke?

This is some authoritarian trash. Gametes only defines sex over a species population as a whole. It has little to do with the sex of an individual. There are many factors that make up an individuals sex. like chromosomes. activated or non expressed genes.hormones.

That also doesn't contradict what I said. My statement is proven by the existence of xxy chromosome people alone.Many other examples! But you were so eager to denigrate the individual by making an authoritarian argument that you made a straw man argument. What I said is the real world. What you said is a fantasy by someone afraid of individual rights.

rickroll, no one thinks it's bigoted to have a genital preference. No one is saying you are bigoted for having a genital preference and not wanting to date a woman with a penis. I have a genital preference. If anyone is saying you're bigoted for preferring vaginas over penises they're wrong.

I 100% agree, the issue is people are trying to be inclusive to the point where they pretend like a trans woman is no different from a non-trans one and therefore not wanting to date one makes you a transphobic bigot.

See that clip I posted. This was from a reality show. You can see how everyone is trying to be respectful and properly choose their words. Ginuwine got labeled as transphobic for stating he wouldn't date a trans woman and even caught flak for dodging when the trans person tried to kiss him. He's sitting down cuddled up on the couch having a kind and respectful conversation with the person, yet suddenly he's hitler because he doesn't want to stick his penis in her as well.



it's just pure madness

uke means well, I genuinely think he has the best intentions, but there's been a lot of cobra effects where we're now pressured to pretend like a trans woman doesn't have penis and/or the problem is with me if I don't want to date a woman with a penis - this is the crux of the issue and why so many people think this entire thing is getting out of hand

like I said earlier, you can't filter out trans woman from the dating apps. I can filter out gay men, but not trans woman. As far as I'm concerned regarding sexual or life partners, there is no difference. They still lack a uterus so I can't have children with her and chances are she's hangin' dong

Yet the dating sites will gladly discriminate against the gay men and allow me to filter them out but are terrified of doing that for trans women because we're all supposed to pretend that there is no difference and they are one and the same and that is just pure madness.

Just because people who think asserting their gender or sexuality as an essence of their being are concerned about being called by certain pronouns doesn't make it a priority or a necessity for the rest of us.

Personally, I think representing your hetero or homosexuality or even marital status on a business card or in a opening salvo in a business context isn't appropriate. (That could change once you are in front of your target audience.)