Leaving aside the genuine difficulties and struggles of those who experience some kind of gender dysphoria.
I would like to consider the theoretical and political position of present day transgender rights, and those who speak out against 'transexism'.
It seems to me there are a few question-begging steps in the theory put forward.
1. Neurological biology trumps reproductive biology
- A first major assertion is that there is a biological source for gender dysphoria. And this neurological grounding should therefore be determinant in someone's gender.
- It seems that a possible 'question begging' happens here: that neurology trumps reproductive biology. That priority is not inherently obvious, but rather needs to be established.
- Underlying it, I suppose, is the assumption that psychological experience is more powerful and determinative of well being than physical genitalia.
- Maybe that is so. But maybe it is not. After all reproductive biology produces all sorts of experiential (and even neurological) experiences in life, as well as being a significant factor in human experience and relationships across a lifetime.
- Either way, it seems to me as a layman that this it is not conclusively and obviously the case that 'feeling' or 'brain chemistry' trumps reproductive biology.
2. Gender fluidity of the transgender should determine how we see gender of the 'cisgender'
- It is true that some feel discomfort or distress with their biological sex. They identify more with the opposite sex and so wish to change their identifying gender to the gender normally applied of the opposite sex.
- But it does not follow from this that the gender thus adopted actually matches the gender of those of the opposite sex.
- In other words, does a biological man who becomes a trasngeder woman actually end up with the same gender as a biological woman who identifies as a woman? Or are 'transgender womanhood' and 'cisgender womanhood' actually two separate genders
- That's where the '51 Facebook Genders' might actually be a very helpful thing. Except that it strikes me that the term 'cisgender' might seem to relativise the matching of sex and gender, rather than making it foundational and primary (see next point).
- Nor does it follow therefore gender for those whose gender matches that of their biological sex (so-called 'cisgender') is equally fluid or self-identified.
- In other words the unusual cases of gender dysphoria (or congential intersex conditions) do not establish anything about the fixity or fluidity of all gender as such... simply that there are some 'fuzzy edges' to the boundaries of gender.
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But these are very much musings of an amateur... I'd be keen to hear from others if I have misunderestood something.
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