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Originally Posted by spaceman Bryce
One thing uke said that was quite poignant was that we should believe transgender people. You wouldn't trivialize transgender and intersex peoples experience ( it's like wearing glasses!) if you believed them.
I know because a lot of people basically don't even believe in lesbians or gays. That's part of the idea behind conversion therapy; people who are attracted to the same sex are not really attracted to the same sex, they are just unwell.
Everyone is better off (me, my friends, everyone) by me being openly gay. but especially me. The same thing is true of the 1%-2% of people who are transgender, they are more mentally healthy if they are allowed to be themselves.
But you don't really believe they are transgender because you don't understand it. If you did, you'd see the monstrous evil that is occurring right now, and wouldn't trivialize it.
Most people here believe that the vast majority of gays and lesbians are attracted to the same sex based at least to a large extent on nature, or inherent genetic disposition, as opposed to nurture, or environmental factors. Generally, I believe that those who don't think that gays and lesbians are in fact attracted to the opposite sex, and are just unwell, as you put it, are likely to concede the possibility they are truly homosexual if you limit that to the realm of nurture, or environmental factors. They just don't think there is a genetic basis to it, a large subset of those people likely attributing that conviction to the idea that homosexuals are made by God, who doesn't have it in mind to make them that way, just as with everybody else.
Uke recently, at least by my interpretation, seemed to concede the possibility that in some cases transgender people might be transgender because of nurture factors. That basis for belief might not pass the threshold of acceptability required for gays and lesbians by their community or any of their advocates, seeing as believing in nature as a influential factor in their sexual orientation is a sort of mandatory criterion. Therefore, from a strictly logical perspective at least, I can't say that your comparison of believing transgender people with believing gays and lesbians is apt without touching upon such a discrepancy, when referencing Uke's advice.
The possibility of nurture being nearly exclusively the basis for a transgender person's gender certainly lends some merit to the concerns of people who might object to medically imposed physical alterations, seeing as nurture aspects are obviously going to be more malleable than nature ones, whereas with gay conversion therapy, concerns over homosexuality don't have that credibility if you think that homosexuality is almost exclusively nature based.
Generally, I think that many transgender(noun) advocates will dance around nature/nurture contemplation or discussion, since the possibility of exclusively nurture based forces gives merit to the possibility of a transgender person renouncing transgender identity basically any time going forward under the right circumstances. Note that that doesn't necessarily mean that they couldn't have been a gender in opposition to that consistent with their assigned sex nearly their entire lives, since I don't see why nurture based transgender identity couldn't have been formed very early on.