All about Serafina (Split)

[Serafina]

If so then the "trans" can be happily applied before male or female depending.

Uuh...what?
Oh, you are saying that trans is a category just like male and female, despite me just saying that it is NOT - at best, it is a qualifier.

Nor are you likely educated in endocrinology at all, you can hardly make YOUR statement.

Given that i have done quite a lot of research into endocrinology out of obvious personal interest, yes, i AM somewhat educated.
Obviously not enough to treat others, but good enough to judge such simple things.

I never claimed it did, however accuracy and the whole truth is the thing.

Again, why should anyone care about my genetic makeup?
Why should anyone have the RIGHT to know my genetic makeup?

Changes due to artificial hormone treatment is not natural.

Ah, conveniently ignoring that you just committed a fallacy. Nice going there.

Wrong, a exam would allow any trained person to know the differance.

Actually, no. A normal gynecologic exam reveals no differences - of course, looking for reproductive organs does.
Point being, again, unless you are doing medical testing, there is no visible difference.

Perhaps but that can also be somewhat attributed to the artificial hormones you are taking.

Appeal to nature again.

You mean pointing out the truth about what you essentialy are without surgery and artificial hormone treatment?.

Aah, THE TRUTH again.
Again, by your logic, it is always the right thing to tell THE TRUTH, regardless of the consequences. According to you, ignoring a disabled persons disability (until it actually matters) is wrong.

The whole truth is not bigotry or fallacy it is mearly accuracy, you are essentially forcing your body to have female characteristics and demanding that ppl ignore the fact you are doing so and see you as somebody who has not needed to.

Just like WILBA, you always try to deny that a transwoman is female like every other female. You constantly focus on things where you can say "see? NOT female".
In other words, you are a bigot who tries to portray transwomen as male.

[Serafina]

Sorry, maybe I'm not making my point very well. By say referring to "her" as a "him" your just being a dick but your not harming someone other then hurting their feelings. If you voted to say deny them marriage or that proposed law in one of the US states to keep their birth sex on their drivers license, thats far more harmful.

And really, unless your a complete and utter arsehole (like maybe a fundamentalist Christian), who is going to be insulting a transsexual to their face in public?

I do not understand any of that sorry.

To clarify i am happy for anybody to marry anybody else no matter what.

It's really simple, Kor:

He is saying that actively voting against transsexual rights is more harmful than treating her as male, which is arguably true.
He is also saying that no decent person would insult a transsexual person in public, like you and WILBA have and are doing it here.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Which he has not shown. Just because an argument carries emotional weight doesn't mean it's right.

Arguments require evidence and logical processes. Here, examine in context from which arose your complaint:

Declaring that "ppl should think the way i want them to or im a sad bunny" is quite possably the weakest argument you have but you continue to focus on it, as such i will continue to dismiss it.

Maybe i should try some deep and meaningful /sarcasm as i hear that is a fine and high brow debate tool.

"Look at me, my debating conduct is superior".
Unfortunately, results count. You are not making an actual argument right now, instead you are creating a large ad hominem "she is emotional, hence she is wrong".

To say simply "because I said so" is to fail

Kor states precisely that your argument is an emotional appeal and invalid on those grounds. Yes, in that pairwise exchange, his conduct was superior; he's making a perfectly fine argumentative play in questioning your arguments and asking why he should listen to it if it's mostly just an emotional appeal. Your claim of ad hominem is flatly incorrect (if he were dismissing your conclusions, it would be argumentum ad logicam - but still not ad hominem), and the sarcasm won't convince anybody who doesn't agree with you.

Sarcasm is generally not especially persuasive.

WILBA himself said that

His name is not "WILBA." It is "Who is like God Arbour," which has often been abbreviated as W.I.L.G.A. by other posters for convenience, because the full thing is quite a mouthful. Nor is it "bigot," for that matter. At this point you're pretty clearly calling him names, and that needs to stop if you want to have a civil conversation. Or convince him of anything.

Since Wilba is actually a female name, my sense of irony is tickled here. You're calling him a woman's name. How did this whole episode start again? Right.

If you're addressing someone directly, I recommend you use their name, a second person pronoun, or don't call them anything at all.

-for him, a transwoman is always a man, regardless of transition

This he has stated:

Yes, a man stays a man and a woman stays a woman. Gender reassignment does not change that. Gender has nothing to do with sex.

-men should never be allowed into womens facilities
And yes, those two statements were connected in his posts.

I see, in his summary position here, this:

And where there is sex segregation already (e.g. changing rooms for man and changing rooms for woman, prison or hospital wards for man and prison or hospital wards for woman etc.) a transsexual has to adhere to the same rules all other members of this sex have to adhere to.

I do not say that because I personally would have a problem with e.g. a man in a woman changing room and shower. I have no problem with what we Germans are calling FKK (Freikörperkultur). I even think that FKK is a good way to have a better touch with reality. There is an unrealistic stereotype of what constitutes beauty and the ideal body type as portrayed by the media, fashion and entertainment industries. This results, as many scientific researches are showing, in many girls and meanwhile even boys who are not satisfied with their bodies and than are developing eating disorders or are spending all their time in a fitness centre to become as perfect. As other scientific researches are showing, are these unrealistic expectations meanwhile even affecting the criteria for partner selection of many people. The appearance of someone becomes more and more important and personal qualities more and more unimportant. Other studies are showing that it is unhealthy for the sexual development of kids (teens) to be able nowadays to have access to porn in internet. That too results in totally unrealistic expectations (not only regarding the size of penises and breasts) and an unhealthy attitude regarding love, intimacy and sex.

Your presentation of his position seems a little lacking. You're describing as an ardent segregationist someone who is OK with FKK, and links to an article saying:

Behind the FKK movement stood, at least in Germany, an attitude to life, according to which the naked body is no reason for shame. The nudity of FKK should not involve sexuality. In this light, the need to be nude in the shower or sauna does not belong with Freikörperkultur, since it's practically necessary. FKK'ler put here nudity with prior group consensus, and therefore demanded no reserved zones, such as separate beaches or club areas.

While he has indeed stated that he thinks that a transwoman is a man and would not be allowed into women-only zones such as prisons, hospitals, et cetera on that basis, he seems to be describing what is to him a natural consequence of sexual segregationism, a deplorable reality, rather than offering a prescription of what should be - citing a movement that wishes to dispense entirely with separate changing rooms.

And should you enter a female-only locker room while not being convincingly female enough to the women therein, you may indeed find yourself in social trouble in many places. You certainly are not very well representing what he believes ought to be the case, although you may well be capturing what he believes to be the social and legal reality.

Still, it is not quite a terrible strawman, simply a poor presentation at this point.

He also said that
-Transsexual people are neither male nor female (for which he presents no evidence)
-That they should therefore be seperated from others by creating a new social class for them
-He doesn't address the obvious problem which sex-specific rights they would have

[/quote]
Let us examine the first post of Who is like God arbour's on the topic. Surely, this will bear out your claim if any of his posts does:

If we now are saying that the feelings (to put it simple) are deciding for the gender, how can we be sure that men are men and women women or that there is such thing like a universal male social gender and a universal female social gender?
We assuming it only because that's the way we are thinking due to our language.
How can you be sure that your social gender is a universal woman social gender and not a third social gender?
Are you sure that you do not only think that your social gender is that of a woman because your thinking prevents you to think (naturally) of a third gender?
The German grammar is not able to adapt to such things. It knows only the three grammar genders masculine, feminine and the neuter.
The German language has developed that way because there are only two sexes: male and female.
And that's why in cases in which the grammar gender of an individual has to be determined, only the sex and not the social gender is deciding.
It was always that way and is ingrained in our language.

How strange, there is no actual assertion here to the existence of a third gender, only an openly posed question and the assertion that neither you nor he is able to effectively wrap your head around the notion of additional genders beyond male and female due to the German language. The unfashionableness of linguistic relativity aside, I think his sole actual assertion there - which is that neither of you are able to wrap your head around a third social gender - seems so far undisputed by you. Perhaps here?

In South Asia there are such terms already: For example in India there are people who are called hijra. These are physiological males who adopt feminine gender identity, women's clothing and other feminine gender roles – or with other words, they are what we would call transwoman. But unlike some Western transsexual women, hijras generally do not attempt to pass as women. Reportedly, few have genital modifications. Their identities have no exact match in the modern Western taxonomy of gender and sexual orientation, and challenge Western ideas of sex and gender [O].
Since the late 20th century, some hijra activists and Western non-government organizations (NGOs) have been lobbying for official recognition of the hijra as a kind of "third sex" or "third gender", as neither man nor woman.

Maybe someday the German language will have similar terms and will have developed further grammar genders respective noun classes as there are in other languages more than two or three genders respective noun classes too (Swahili for example has 18 genders) [O].

Until then in the German and English language a man, even a man with a female gender, stays a man and is addressed like a man.

Hm. More linguistic relativity. Here his new assertion is that maybe the German language will adapt to transsexuality by adding more genders.

Continuing through the complete works:

Although I argued that the language may adopt to accommodate third genders (and/or transsexuals), that accordingly terms and grammar genders may develop in the language with time, I never argued that transsexuals should be dicrimminated in any way.

Even if a third social class is created for transgenders, does this not mean that they have to be discriminated. I mean, I do not discriminate black people, Jews, women or gays either.

Here he is again not actually advocating the creation of a separate social gender (now transmuted to "class" through the intermediary of your replies to him), but simply saying it may happen. Past that, we're caught up to this thread, in which he states:

Do you know that there is a difference between considering something and advocating something?
And do you know that the outcome of a differentiation does not have to be discrimination? We are differentiating between man and woman, adults and children without having one or other group being an outcast with no legal rights. To have a third group does not have to mean that members of these group have to be outcasts with no legal rights. I think I made it more than clear inter alia here, here or here that I do not want transsexuals to be outcasts with no legal rights. I want that they have all the same rights every other person has. But as usual you are ignoring it and as long as I’m not ready to say that a male person (XY gonosomes, penis, testicles, no womb or ovaries) with a feminine gender is a woman and that a female person (XX gonosomes, womb, ovaries, no penis or testicles) with a masculine gender is a man, I’m a bigot who wants to outcast transsexuals and take them all their legal rights.


1. How could the recognition of the hijra as a third gender improves how they are treated if they are already now – according to you – outcasts with no legal rights? Wouldn’t recognition consolidate such discrimination?
2. Hirjya are not treated as men. That’s what I explained here. Their identities have no exact match in the modern Western taxonomy of gender and sexual orientation, and challenge Western ideas of sex and gender. But as usual you are ignoring it.


I think I made it more than clear inter alia here, here or here that I do not want transsexuals to be outcasts with no legal rights. I want that they have all the same rights every other person has. But as usual you are ignoring it and as long as I’m not ready to say that a male person (XY gonosomes, penis, testicles, no womb or ovaries) with a feminine gender is a woman and that a female person (XX gonosomes, womb, ovaries, no penis or testicles) with a masculine gender is a man, I’m a bigot who wants to outcast transsexuals and take them all their legal rights.

Upon review of the evidence, I find that those last particular assertions of yours to be strawmen; they don't at all capture what your opponent has actually stated. You're doing terribly at arguing; if I did not already believe it was proper address to address people by whatever gender they self-identify as, you would not have convinced me in this post. Indeed, if I were a slightly less logical person, I might have been swayed the other direction ad logicam.

There exists enough disagreement between you to have plenty to discuss without you inventing imaginary additions to his claims.

So, are you giving us a reason then?

Why, yes, I was explaining one such reason.

Oh, wait, no, sorry, my bad.

Sarcasm ill becomes you.

This is NOT a reason, since it is not a moral consideration.

Truth is generally thought to be a moral consideration, strangely enough.

Unless you honestly believe that telling the truth is always the moral thing to do, regardless of the consequences. Which is, frankly, a very primitive mindset.

A very false dichotomy. The entire range of normal beliefs falls in between the two polar extremes you've described - that truth has no bearing on morality, contrasted with it being never appropriate to tell a lie.

That said, it is hardly unusual to consider lying wrong; it is simply that sometimes, it must be balanced against a greater wrong that would be committed by admitting the truth, thus the "white lie." This is how normal people think; it is philosophers, priests, and other pompous persons who populate truth with an absolute value - whether zero or something else.

Since they considered nothing but genes and genitals, they were hardly open-minded.

Are they? I note the earlier discussion of hijra and FKK by Who is like God arbour, neither of which is about genitals or genes, but quite a bit more social in nature, and conclude this must be another strawman, though the "they" here is quite ambiguous. Perhaps you meant some other group of people disagreeing with you?

Furthermore, the whole thing boils down to a simple question (which you are conveniently ignoring):
Is there more harm than good in treating transsexual people according to their gender, for them and society?
Unless you can answer that with a big YES, then you have no moral right to forbid it.

I'm not ignoring it. I'm hoping that you will actually provide citations and quote key experts to demonstrate this. If you have done so, it has evidently passed my notice, as the casual reader of this debate. I do not doubt there is plenty of net good caused by treating transsexuals by their self-identified gender rather than by genetic assignment or genital construction, but your argumentative technique is leaving much to be desired.

Most of your argument has been from yourself with you saying that you are offended and hurt, which would be consistent with your argument boiling down to a hasty generalization based on personal experience rather than empirical data, which is precisely the sort of thing that Kor seems to be complaining about when he talks about how emotional you're being.

In order to address that, you need to move beyond the personal. Indeed, you are best advised to move beyond the simple case of the transgendered themselves and how much they are harmed or helped by such addresses. There are wonderful arguments out there that explain why treating transgendered individuals according to their self-identified gender is a cornerstone to a foundation that can uplift and improve the rest of society, even individuals who don't appear to have any personal interest in the issue.

Actually, that displays ignorance, since transsexual people are already widely allowed to use the facilities of their gender.

I am afraid that you're the one displaying ignorance here. Not everywhere is so enlightened as Germany. For example, Texas legally absolutely refuses to recognize transgendering of any kind. Even if you have had SRS, you don't count as having changed genders in the eyes of the Texas law. I'm afraid I'm not ignorant here; I'm simply familiar with a slightly wider reality, one in which the world can be considered a fairly unfriendly place to those who don't fit neatly into little boxes.

What is de facto permitted everywhere is that if you can pass, you won't get into trouble. If, however, you enter a female-only zone while being perceived by the women in there as male, you risk getting into trouble - anything from getting a series of dirty looks to having to explain to the police that you're not some perv. The case de jure will vary by jurisdiction along with the legal treatment of what counts as an altered social gender.

Intersexuality is another important reason to have more elaborate considerations and see gender barriers as less fixed.

While Intersexuality and Transsexuality are related, mixing the issues is a big red herring.

It's not mixing the issues as much as introducing what may appear to be a technical point: Sex assignment surgery, under the heading of "clarification," is actually performed on very young infants shortly after birth. I'm not intending to have intersexuality and transexuality considered as being the same thing, but it is marginally relevant to the discussion of when genital surgery can and is performed. I'm anticipating where discussion may flow in the near future if it hasn't already.

The narrative you have surrounded transgendering with is one which needs to address intersexuality to answer a couple of natural questions that arise out of it.

You've stated that transsexuality is the result of having a female brain in a male body:

There is very strong evidence that transsexuality is simply a female brain in a male body and vice versa.

You have also stated this is a difference which is expressed before birth - pre-natal development:

Yes i can, since there is clear indication that transsexuals have a pre-birth difference (likely genetic) that influences the reception of hormones.

From this, we could derive a logical extension: If being transgendered as an adult is the inevitable result of some arrangement of the brain occurring during development in birth, that difference in arrangement may be detected. We don't do detailed brain-maps of infants, of course, but let's explore the hypothetical. Kor asked about fixing the brain - a tricky task, fiddling with the brain - and I will ask you instead about fixing the body.

If we could detect female brains in male bodies, why not "fix" them immediately? In principle, understanding, of course, that it's currently a politically untenable position to take and that parents generally don't want to see their newborns getting surgery.

The treatment of intersex individuals over the years provides an interesting frame of reference with which to view this question. The majority of intersex folks who were assigned at birth from ambiguous genitals lived their normal everyday lives, in many cases not learning that at birth, a doctor somewhere squinted at an ambiguous set of baby genitals and decided to turn this one into a male and this one into a female, an assignment not made based on genetics or brain structure, but by what was surgically easy to do and in no small part by the whim of the doctor.

Many intersexuals find out about their status later in life if at all - either because, in the case of reassigned genitals, it was kept hushed up, or because their intersexual nature is not something visible on the outside (e.g., internal testicles).

If anything, intersex people outnumber transgendered ones. While it is not unknown for someone who was assigned one sex at birth to transition to the other, it would appear that the majority of intersex individuals don't clamor for social, legal, or physical reassignment, despite having been given a gender by coinflip at birth, or a gender assigned based on external appearance that doesn't match with their internal biology or genetics.

So if transsexuality is as simple as having a somewhat more feminine or masculine brain in the wrong body, and intersex people outnumber transsexual people (with many able to remain ignorant of their own biology) how come most intersexuals aren't transsexuals? This leads us to another point: Both male and female brains vary quite wildly. What we think of as the differences between a male brain and female brain are in fact statistical tendencies, rather than laws. From what I understand, given a pickled brain to dissect, we would have fairly poor performance in guessing the sex of its owner - there is in many ways more variation within each sex than between the sexes.

I'm afraid that there is very little simple about social gender and sexuality. I would expect that, were we able to perform a large number of infant brain transplants/body modifications to test the theory using McCoy's magic wand, we would find that implanting male brains in female infants and vice versa, while creating a fair number of transgendered individuals, will not result in a 100% rate of transsexuality. I would expect that a large number of brains are close enough to male and close enough to female so as to adapt quite well to either case. I would also expect that it also makes a very large difference what kind of society you raise those children in; different cultures vary the type and strictness of gender roles. Thailand, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, Germany, and Texas may give very different results due to cultural contexts surrounding gender roles - not to mention the cultural contexts surrounding transsexuality itself.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

Uuh...what?
Oh, you are saying that trans is a category just like male and female, despite me just saying that it is NOT - at best, it is a qualifier.

Exactly a accurate qualifier.

Given that i have done quite a lot of research into endocrinology out of obvious personal interest, yes, i AM somewhat educated.
Obviously not enough to treat others, but good enough to judge such simple things.

Oversimplify more likely and you have shown over and over again your insistance towads ignoring facts that are inconvienient.

As such il consider you unqualified unless you can provide conclusive proof.

Ah, conveniently ignoring that you just committed a fallacy. Nice going there.

Your decicion to try and force others to ignore or dismiss it is the fallacy.

Appeal to nature again.

A statment of fact.

Aah, THE TRUTH again.
Again, by your logic, it is always the right thing to tell THE TRUTH, regardless of the consequences.

I am not saying that at all, however you are trying to force others to ignore it.

Just like WILBA, you always try to deny that a transwoman is female like every other female. You constantly focus on things where you can say "see? NOT female".
In other words, you are a bigot who tries to portray transwomen as male.

If i am going to be technical about it YOU are a transwoman, my wife is a ciswoman i do not see either of you as a male. You are forcing a black and white perspective and using the result of somebody not fully agreeing with you to call them a bigot.

Behaving so is not doing yourself or your cause any favors.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

It's really simple, Kor:

He is saying that actively voting against transsexual rights is more harmful than treating her as male, which is arguably true.

I would support the basic human rights of anybody no matter what.

He is also saying that no decent person would insult a transsexual person in public, like you and WILBA have and are doing it here.

LIAR.

The only time i insulted you was after i got sick of your constant abuse and i stopped as soon as you did.

[The Dude]

Sorry, maybe I'm not making my point very well. By say referring to "her" as a "him" your just being a dick but your not harming someone other then hurting their feelings. If you voted to say deny them marriage or that proposed law in one of the US states to keep their birth sex on their drivers license, thats far more harmful.

And really, unless your a complete and utter arsehole (like maybe a fundamentalist Christian), who is going to be insulting a transsexual to their face in public?

I do not understand any of that sorry.

To clarify i am happy for anybody to marry anybody else no matter what.

My apologies, sometimes I have trouble getting things out.

Looks like Sera got it though.

[Serafina]

@JMS

Kor states precisely that your argument is an emotional appeal and invalid on those grounds.

Except that my argument was not based on it. I would advise you to read my actual posts.

Since Wilba is actually a female name, my sense of irony is tickled here. You're calling him a woman's name. How did this whole episode start again? Right.

Actually, it stands for "Who is like bigot arbour". I was no aware that that was an actual name - indeed, the usual name sites AND google reveal no such name.
But of course, you argue against name-calling but not against bigotry. QED.

This he has stated:

Yes, a man stays a man and a woman stays a woman. Gender reassignment does not change that. Gender has nothing to do with sex.

There you go - he is advocating that ones sex is not changed, even tough the outward signs are changed. This therefore fails to give any reason why one should continue to uphold sex segregation based solely on ones genetic makeup.
Hence, every statement where he states that transwomen should be kept out of female facilities is unjustified bigotry.

Your presentation of his position seems a little lacking. You're describing as an ardent segregationist someone who is OK with FKK, and links to an article saying:

FKK is basically nudity.
Just because someone is ok with nudity he can still be a bigot. I already said that as well, apparently you are not reading my posts carefully.

While he has indeed stated that he thinks that a transwoman is a man and would not be allowed into women-only zones such as prisons, hospitals, et cetera on that basis, he seems to be describing what is to him a natural consequence of sexual segregationism, a deplorable reality, rather than offering a prescription of what should be - citing a movement that wishes to dispense entirely with separate changing rooms.

It is NOT, since he has no basis for it (as demonstrated above).

How strange, there is no actual assertion here to the existence of a third gender, only an openly posed question and the assertion that neither you nor he is able to effectively wrap your head around the notion of additional genders beyond male and female due to the German language. The unfashionableness of linguistic relativity aside, I think his sole actual assertion there - which is that neither of you are able to wrap your head around a third social gender - seems so far undisputed by you. Perhaps here?

"Let's find a post where he doesn't say something, and therefore conclude that he never said it". Yeah, right.
He advocated third-gender segregation later on. Why is it segregation? Because he creates an artificial distinction (such as race) to seperate transsexual people from cissexual people. A textbook case of segregation.

If you are looking for examples, see where he advocates creating like a system comparable to the Hijra. Which he never successfully refuted.

Indeed, if I were a slightly less logical person, I might have been swayed the other direction ad logicam.

So you admit that you are incapable of giving the matter your own thoughts, and purely base your opinion based on what other people say?

Truth is generally thought to be a moral consideration, strangely enough.

Truth is only a moral value to to the consequences of lying.
In this case, it is not only not a lie, but speaking "the truth" is harmful.

That said, it is hardly unusual to consider lying wrong; it is simply that sometimes, it must be balanced against a greater wrong that would be committed by admitting the truth, thus the "white lie." This is how normal people think; it is philosophers, priests, and other pompous persons who populate truth with an absolute value - whether zero or something else.

A "white lie" (if it was indeed a lie) is exactly what i am advocating. WILGA, however, doesn't - he wants to state "the truth" regardless of consequences.

Are they? I note the earlier discussion of hijra and FKK by Who is like God arbour, neither of which is about genitals or genes, but quite a bit more social in nature, and conclude this must be another strawman, though the "they" here is quite ambiguous. Perhaps you meant some other group of people disagreeing with you?

FKK has NOTHING to do with gender or transsexuality, it was a pure red herring.
That you are unable to recognize that is quite telling.

I'm not ignoring it. I'm hoping that you will actually provide citations and quote key experts to demonstrate this. If you have done so, it has evidently passed my notice, as the casual reader of this debate. I do not doubt there is plenty of net good caused by treating transsexuals by their self-identified gender rather than by genetic assignment or genital construction, but your argumentative technique is leaving much to be desired.

I demonstrated that back in my exchange of evidence with Kor.

Most of your argument has been from yourself with you saying that you are offended and hurt, which would be consistent with your argument boiling down to a hasty generalization based on personal experience rather than empirical data, which is precisely the sort of thing that Kor seems to be complaining about when he talks about how emotional you're being.

Given that i know a large number of transsexuals who think alike in that regard, this is hardly a hasty generalization.

In order to address that, you need to move beyond the personal. Indeed, you are best advised to move beyond the simple case of the transgendered themselves and how much they are harmed or helped by such addresses. There are wonderful arguments out there that explain why treating transgendered individuals according to their self-identified gender is a cornerstone to a foundation that can uplift and improve the rest of society, even individuals who don't appear to have any personal interest in the issue.

Ah, so you want me to go into the nifty-willy nebulous territory instead of discussing concrete actions. Nice one.

I am afraid that you're the one displaying ignorance here. Not everywhere is so enlightened as Germany. For example, Texas legally absolutely refuses to recognize transgendering of any kind. Even if you have had SRS, you don't count as having changed genders in the eyes of the Texas law. I'm afraid I'm not ignorant here; I'm simply familiar with a slightly wider reality, one in which the world can be considered a fairly unfriendly place to those who don't fit neatly into little boxes.

Since both WILGA and i am from Germany, it can be taken as the standard. Given that i know transsexual people in the USA and other parts of the world, i am hardly ignorant of that as well.
WILGA is advocating reverting these rights.

It's not mixing the issues as much as introducing what may appear to be a technical point: Sex assignment surgery, under the heading of "clarification," is actually performed on very young infants shortly after birth. I'm not intending to have intersexuality and transexuality considered as being the same thing, but it is marginally relevant to the discussion of when genital surgery can and is performed. I'm anticipating where discussion may flow in the near future if it hasn't already.

Surgery on intersexual children is NOT comparable to sex reassignment surgery, it is by far cruder.

The narrative you have surrounded transgendering with is one which needs to address intersexuality to answer a couple of natural questions that arise out of it.

Actually, no, it does not have to be answered, since intersexuality applies to differences in outward appearance, while transsexuality does not.

From this, we could derive a logical extension: If being transgendered as an adult is the inevitable result of some arrangement of the brain occurring during development in birth, that difference in arrangement may be detected. We don't do detailed brain-maps of infants, of course, but let's explore the hypothetical. Kor asked about fixing the brain - a tricky task, fiddling with the brain - and I will ask you instead about fixing the body.

At best, you could say that transsexuality is a special form of intersexuality.

If we could detect female brains in male bodies, why not "fix" them immediately? In principle, understanding, of course, that it's currently a politically untenable position to take and that parents generally don't want to see their newborns getting surgery.

I advocated preventing transsexuality.
Kor was arguing for the forcible (else, no other treatment) change of an adults personality, that such an alteration would be DESIRABLE! That is a completely different issue altogether and frankly incredibly monstrous - that he think that everything would fall into place because it was based "on an error" is also childish.

The treatment of intersex individuals over the years provides an interesting frame of reference with which to view this question. The majority of intersex folks who were assigned at birth from ambiguous genitals lived their normal everyday lives, in many cases not learning that at birth, a doctor somewhere squinted at an ambiguous set of baby genitals and decided to turn this one into a male and this one into a female, an assignment not made based on genetics or brain structure, but by what was surgically easy to do and in no small part by the whim of the doctor.

I demand that you source your claim that most intersexual people never notice anything strange about themselves.

If anything, intersex people outnumber transgendered ones. While it is not unknown for someone who was assigned one sex at birth to transition to the other, it would appear that the majority of intersex individuals don't clamor for social, legal, or physical reassignment, despite having been given a gender by coinflip at birth, or a gender assigned based on external appearance that doesn't match with their internal biology or genetics.

Actually it is not done by coinflip, female is the default that is assigned.
And again, i demand evidence for your assertion.

So if transsexuality is as simple as having a somewhat more feminine or masculine brain in the wrong body, and intersex people outnumber transsexual people (with many able to remain ignorant of their own biology) how come most intersexuals aren't transsexuals? This leads us to another point: Both male and female brains vary quite wildly. What we think of as the differences between a male brain and female brain are in fact statistical tendencies, rather than laws. From what I understand, given a pickled brain to dissect, we would have fairly poor performance in guessing the sex of its owner - there is in many ways more variation within each sex than between the sexes.

You are now ignoring a wide range of evidence and studies about transsexuality, most of which i discussed extensively with Kor.

I'm afraid that there is very little simple about social gender and sexuality. I would expect that, were we able to perform a large number of infant brain transplants/body modifications to test the theory using McCoy's magic wand, we would find that implanting male brains in female infants and vice versa, while creating a fair number of transgendered individuals, will not result in a 100% rate of transsexuality.

Pure, baseless speculation without a shred of evidence.

I would expect that a large number of brains are close enough to male and close enough to female so as to adapt quite well to either case.

Which does nothing for your attempt to disprove transsexuality.

I would also expect that it also makes a very large difference what kind of society you raise those children in; different cultures vary the type and strictness of gender roles. Thailand, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, Germany, and Texas may give very different results due to cultural contexts surrounding gender roles - not to mention the cultural contexts surrounding transsexuality itself.

More baseless speculation.


If you actually want to join this debate, read the damn thread and dig out some evidence. So far, you have done neither - the first by your own admission, the latter because you posted or linked none.


Edit:
Oh, and it is quite telling that you think that WILGA is the better debater here, despite his numerous demonstrated lies and falsehoods.

Edit 2:
Perhaps you should consider what a debater actually addresses and whether he uses evidence to do so or not, rather than the outward appearance of his post.
WILGA has been harping on a single point since we started:
"XYZ defines you as male, hence you are male".
He only considered the question whether that sould lead to male treatment&address with:
"You can not see gender, hence i must address you as male".
This is of course obviously wrong, since gender is generally expressed.
He never actually considered the moral implications of doing so (shrugging it off by declaring that his part was the whole truth) or anything but biological science.
Indeed, he only switched to biology since his semantic argument was falling apart at the seams.
Overall, that has been his argument and conduct, while i have covered biology, psychology, sociology, morality, language and gender theory.

[Serafina]

The only time i insulted you was after i got sick of your constant abuse and i stopped as soon as you did.

Granted, you have been stopping it.

But since you did it, this is THE TRUTH, and harping on the truth is never wrong no matter what changes or what the consequences are. Hence, i am free to declate that you have been insulting me as often as i want, wherever i want, to whomever i want.

Yes, that was a cheap trick, mostly aimed at WILGA, for that, i apologize to Kor.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Except that my argument was not based on it.

Invalidating the antecedent would mean his argument was wrong, but the logic of the argumentative form itself is valid, and I can see where he's coming from.

You? Were accusing him of ad hominem argument, when he was closest to (and still not reaching) ad logicam argument. Not impressed.

Actually, it stands for "Who is like bigot arbour".

Which would be as inappropriate a mangling as his personal favourite, "Darth Wrong," which I have warned him for on several occasions. I will call people out for deliberate mangling of other peoples' names in insulting ways, and I figured you were doing it deliberately.

So don't, please. Name-calling isn't conducive to polite discussion. That's another reason I'm unimpressed. You're spending a lot of energy talking about your opponents and making a show out of it rather than doing the very difficult job of trying to convince someone to change their mind over the internet.

There you go - he is advocating that ones sex is not changed, even tough the outward signs are changed. This therefore fails to give any reason why one should continue to uphold sex segregation based solely on ones genetic makeup. Hence, every statement where he states that transwomen should be kept out of female facilities is unjustified bigotry.

I will fix your argument for you, since you seem to be talking around it. You're jumping straight from "BUT HE'S SAYING X Y Z W ... SO A B C D E F G!" without explaining the least bit of intermediate cause or evincing apparent understanding thereof.

If sexual identity is solely a question of genetic identity, then the cause of modesty is ill-served by segregating based on "actual" sex, as some such individuals would appear instead to be then a man in the female locker room or a woman in the male locker room and therefore provoke the presumed consternation therein.

Thus, to support on one hand a genetic basis for sexual segregation while citing modesty, or shame, as the motivation for segregating sexes in locker rooms is inconsistent. The former cuts at cross purposes to the purpose of the segregation in the first place.

FKK is basically nudity.

The naturist lifestyle, yes. Not relevant to the generic accusation of bigotry, but relevant to the specific accusation that relies on him being in favor of the sexual segregation that underlies the social difficulty which he is addressing.

"Let's find a post where he doesn't say something, and therefore conclude that he never said it".

I did a full-post display based on a keyworded text search. If he ever endorsed such a thing, you're going to need to link to it, because he did not do so in any post that I saw, and I looked for that.

So you admit that you are incapable of giving the matter your own thoughts, and purely base your opinion based on what other people say?

Quite the contrary. I refuse to be swayed in spite of your apparent incompetence in arguing what is, for all intents and purposes, my side of the argument.

Truth is only a moral value to to the consequences of lying.

A strict utilitarian, then, are you?

A "white lie" (if it was indeed a lie) is exactly what i am advocating. WILGA, however, doesn't - he wants to state "the truth" regardless of consequences.

Precisely. And if you want him to change that, you're going to need to convince him that his reasoning is unsound, not that your feelings are hurt. That tactic has gotten you nowhere with him.

FKK has NOTHING to do with gender or transsexuality,

But everything to do with locker rooms and nudity.

it was a pure red herring.

Not at all.

That you are unable to recognize that is quite telling.

There's an old saw about the English spelling of the word "assume" that I will not repeat here, for it would be most unbecoming of me to be rude.

I demonstrated that back in my exchange of evidence with Kor.

Then you already have the links on hand! Don't feel shy about repeating citations in later posts. If you're arguing with many people in a long strung-out thread, it will help you if you have a citation density like unto a Wikipedia article.

If this is your main argument - and I do believe it is central to your argument - then you should have shown dozens of sources by now, since you've been arguing about this for some sixty-odd posts.

Given that i know a large number of transsexuals who think alike in that regard, this is hardly a hasty generalization.

And he knows that? And he has reason to believe it is a representative cross-section, across ages, sexes, and cultures? Convince. There is no overkill when it comes to presenting empirical evidence.

Ah, so you want me to go into the nifty-willy nebulous territory instead of discussing concrete actions.

I want you to think big and talk big, rather than sounding small and petty.

The more I read of the argument between yourself and Who is like God arbour, the less well it reflects on either of you.

Since both WILGA and i am from Germany, it can be taken as the standard.

And do you think everybody on the board is? It can be taken as the standard for a private discussion between you two, but I prefer to think big. Earth is fairly small, but it'll do in a pinch.

Surgery on intersexual children is NOT comparable to sex reassignment surgery, it is by far cruder.

Really? I should think that it would be quite a bit more obvious then.

Actually, no, it does not have to be answered, since intersexuality applies to differences in outward appearance, while transsexuality does not.

See myth #1.

At best, you could say that transsexuality is a special form of intersexuality.

That would actually be a very good description of the narrative you've outlined. Nicely put.

I advocated preventing transsexuality.

I wouldn't do so, myself.

I demand that you source your claim that most intersexual people never notice anything strange about themselves.

Never? I think most "normally sexed" people notice something strange about themselves. I don't think that most of them notice nothing strange about themselves. Certainly, that is the goal of assignment surgery carried out shortly after birth - hush it all up. Myth #2 addresses the fact that people do discover late in life that they are, in fact, intersex. A majority? I'm not sure, and I don't think, reading the papers, that the experts are quite sure of what percentage of intersexuals are running around not quite aware that inside, their bodies test the boundary.

About 1 in 100 people test the borders of gender identity by nature. About .1% are assigned gender at birth (cited frequencies vary widely, there are apparently record-keeping issues). This is essentially a coinflip (it's weighted female, but a coinflip nonetheless when we do conditional probabilities). If a majority of those landing on the "wrong" side complained, that would be about 0.025% of the general population. Certainly with the number of self-identified transsexuals in the US estimated at around .1% by the APA (with substantially lower figures cited in the text for diagnoses).

We expect that if an intersexual who was born with ambiguous genitals and clarified to the "wrong" gender based on their actual brain design realizes it, then they would be classed as transsexual, in which case a large fraction - perhaps one in four - self-identified transsexuals would be intersexual.

Actually it is not done by coinflip, female is the default that is assigned.

See myth #3. But the fact that more are decided female than male doesn't actually matter if we do conditional probabilities, since the general prevalence of transsexuality doesn't differ significantly between the sexes. As you noted earlier.

You are now ignoring a wide range of evidence and studies about transsexuality, most of which i discussed extensively with Kor.

No, I'm not. I'm pointing something out to you: You've read a few studies, taken a few courses in psychology, and come to the conclusion it's something really simple. This is the result of ignoring the fact of statistical noise and the gross gritty work of real psychology in a world where not even identical twins have the same sexuality.

We haven't, to my knowledge, yet had a good twin study on transsexuality.

It's like saying that men are better at spatial reasoning. Sure, on average a man will outperform a woman on spatial reasoning, but there's far more variation within each sexes than between them. It's hardly unusual to pick out a man and a woman and see the man get shown up on a spatial reasoning test.

Oh, sure. Have some light reading on the topic. Actually, here's a concise summary from one of the leading experts on his particular pet theory:

"According to this new theory, a person (whether male or female) has a particular ‘brain type’. There are 3 common brain types: For some individuals, empathizing is stronger than systemizing. This is called a brain of type E, but we can also call it the female brain, because more females than males show this profile. For other individuals, systemizing is stronger than empathizing. This is called a brain of type S, but we can also call it the male brain, because more males than females show this profile. Yet other individuals are equally strong in their systemizing and empathizing. This is called the ‘balanced brain’, or a brain of type B."

There are no small number of type E brain males and no small number of type S females - simply fewer - and a number of type B of both male and female varieties.

Pure, baseless speculation without a shred of evidence.

None but a good general understanding of psychology (I generally agree with what Bailey is cited as saying in the above article, that just about anything psychologists care about tends to be in the general neighbourhood of fifty percent genetic by basis) and a reasonable understanding of human biology.

If I had McCoy's magic wand, I would have other things to do than conduct unethical experiments on large groups of children.

Gender roles aren't simple. There are a bunch of different things tied together in one package, and most people don't fit their roles perfectly. I've watched research like this for a while. There's a lot more on homosexuality than transsexuality, but it goes in patterns. Every so often someone publishes a paper showing something interesting. It's a small piece of a complicated puzzle of human behaviour, but the newspapers will try to make it sound like we've suddenly discovered some singular true cause.

There's usually a confluence of events of some kind, a whole long list of influences. Some may be necessary, but it's doubtful that any one simple cause will be sufficient to explain anything as complex as transsexuality. I could be wrong, but I would be amazed. There are probably at least a half dozen relevant factors, including several genes and several environmental factors, some of which might just even be social in origin. You never quite know.

Which does nothing for your attempt to disprove transsexuality.

Since I don't doubt the existence of transsexuality, it would be a very bad thing if I did manage to disprove it.

More baseless speculation.

Actually, since the rates of apparent transsexuality vary wildly in those countries, it's hardly baseless. Iran, for example, carries out a surprisingly large number of sex reassignment surgeries. Go read about it if you're curious.

What it is to be a woman in Nigeria is not the same thing as what it is to be a woman in Germany. And then Singapore has a culture of its own relating to men who become women, for good or ill, as I think we may have already mentioned at some point.

[Serafina]

Invalidating the antecedent would mean his argument was wrong, but the logic of the argumentative form itself is valid, and I can see where he's coming from.

Are you even reading what i was writing?
My argument is NOT based on an appeal to emotion - therefore, it is NOT invalidated unless you can show that the actual foundation is wrong.

Which would be as inappropriate a mangling as his personal favourite, "Darth Wrong," which I have warned him for on several occasions. I will call people out for deliberate mangling of other peoples' names in insulting ways, and I figured you were doing it deliberately.

So don't, please. Name-calling isn't conducive to polite discussion. That's another reason I'm unimpressed. You're spending a lot of energy talking about your opponents and making a show out of it rather than doing the very difficult job of trying to convince someone to change their mind over the internet.

Yes, i have been namecalling him. He has constantly been insulting me.
So I'll call it even, tough you probably think that namecalling is worse than bigotry.

I will fix your argument for you, since you seem to be talking around it. You're jumping straight from "BUT HE'S SAYING X Y Z W ... SO A B C D E F G!" without explaining the least bit of intermediate cause or evincing apparent understanding thereof.

If sexual identity is solely a question of genetic identity, then the cause of modesty is ill-served by segregating based on "actual" sex, as some such individuals would appear instead to be then a man in the female locker room or a woman in the male locker room and therefore provoke the presumed consternation therein.

Thus, to support on one hand a genetic basis for sexual segregation while citing modesty, or shame, as the motivation for segregating sexes in locker rooms is inconsistent. The former cuts at cross purposes to the purpose of the segregation in the first place.

Since i explained it earlier, doing so again would have been needless repetition.
You did not say anything i did not already say.

The naturist lifestyle, yes. Not relevant to the generic accusation of bigotry, but relevant to the specific accusation that relies on him being in favor of the sexual segregation that underlies the social difficulty which he is addressing.

If anything, it invalidates his own arguments of genitalia etc. being offensive.
Since he bases his bigotry on things like genetics, this hardly invalidates the accusation.

I did a full-post display based on a keyworded text search. If he ever endorsed such a thing, you're going to need to link to it, because he did not do so in any post that I saw, and I looked for that.

So he did not use the word. Big deal, bigots rarely say things straight-forward.
I explained where he did it - if you can search for keywords, you can search for them as well.

A strict utilitarian, then, are you?

Quite. I do not reject other moral systems, but i judge them according to my own.
His moral system fails the test completely and is not even consistent with itself.

Precisely. And if you want him to change that, you're going to need to convince him that his reasoning is unsound, not that your feelings are hurt. That tactic has gotten you nowhere with him.

I am not out to convince WILGA. In my eyes, he has shown himself to be a bigot.
"Know your audience" - a basic principle of rhetorics.
"Know which audience to avoid" is an extrapolation of that - and bigots rarely listen to reason.
Instead, i am targeting the non-bigoted audience and want to show that WILGAS arguments are wrong and bigoted.

But everything to do with locker rooms and nudity.

Yes, but then he does not stand with his own beliefs - bringing them up would then be a red herring.

Not at all.

See above.

Then you already have the links on hand! Don't feel shy about repeating citations in later posts. If you're arguing with many people in a long strung-out thread, it will help you if you have a citation density like unto a Wikipedia article.

A secondary source about the consequences of untreated transsexuality and the resulting necessity of doing so.
The International Standards of Care themselves note that, for most transsexuals, the only possible relief comes from being fully accepted as a woman.

If this is your main argument - and I do believe it is central to your argument - then you should have shown dozens of sources by now, since you've been arguing about this for some sixty-odd posts.

You realize that many psychological studies are only partially or not at all accessible?
Sometimes, you just can't find online sources, and my textbooks are in german.

And he knows that? And he has reason to believe it is a representative cross-section, across ages, sexes, and cultures? Convince. There is no overkill when it comes to presenting empirical evidence.

He does not know the opposite, yet stated that this only applies to me.
Again, see above.

I want you to think big and talk big, rather than sounding small and petty.

Why? So that i miss the actual point?
I know people who do that - you start a discussion about the merit of homosexuals adopting, and you end up with a general conversation about human rights or something.

And do you think everybody on the board is? It can be taken as the standard for a private discussion between you two, but I prefer to think big. Earth is fairly small, but it'll do in a pinch.

In any case, it serves a purpose as an example:
Those are the standards i am advocating, and those WILGA wants abolished.

Really? I should think that it would be quite a bit more obvious then.

It is often solely done with the concern of removing the offending part, as well as creating an optical counterpart. Nerves are often severed etc.

See myth #1.

Yes, i should have said physical problems. My bad.

That would actually be a very good description of the narrative you've outlined. Nicely put.

IIRC, i have actually done so earlier. Might be wrong tough.

I wouldn't do so, myself.

Why not?
Transsexuality is nothing desirable. It's not terribly bad either - but if we can prevent it from occuring without damage, then there is nothing wrong with that.

Never? I think most "normally sexed" people notice something strange about themselves.

You know what i am talking about, quit nitpicking semantics.

I don't think that most of them notice nothing strange about themselves. Certainly, that is the goal of assignment surgery carried out shortly after birth - hush it all up. Myth #2 addresses the fact that people do discover late in life that they are, in fact, intersex. A majority? I'm not sure, and I don't think, reading the papers, that the experts are quite sure of what percentage of intersexuals are running around not quite aware that inside, their bodies test the boundary.

No primary sources then? Just asking.
Either way, conceded.

About 1 in 100 people test the borders of gender identity by nature. About .1% are assigned gender at birth (cited frequencies vary widely, there are apparently record-keeping issues). This is essentially a coinflip (it's weighted female, but a coinflip nonetheless when we do conditional probabilities). If a majority of those landing on the "wrong" side complained, that would be about 0.025% of the general population. Certainly with the number of self-identified transsexuals in the US estimated at around .1% by the APA (with substantially lower figures cited in the text for diagnoses).

Actually, transsexuality and intersexuality are, right now, mutually exclusive from a medical POV - i know at least one transwomen whose TS-diagnosis was reversed after genetic testing revealed her IS-status. In fact, such testing is standard for all transsexual people as soon as they start their hormone treatment (at least in Germany).

We expect that if an intersexual who was born with ambiguous genitals and clarified to the "wrong" gender based on their actual brain design realizes it, then they would be classed as transsexual, in which case a large fraction - perhaps one in four - self-identified transsexuals would be intersexual.

See above. They are mutually exclusive, hence wrongly classified transsexual people who are actually intersex do not show up in transsexuality statistics.

See myth #3. But the fact that more are decided female than male doesn't actually matter if we do conditional probabilities, since the general prevalence of transsexuality doesn't differ significantly between the sexes.

It is definitely weighted, which is what i stated.

No, I'm not. I'm pointing something out to you: You've read a few studies, taken a few courses in psychology, and come to the conclusion it's something really simple. This is the result of ignoring the fact of statistical noise and the gross gritty work of real psychology in a world where not even identical twins have the same sexuality.

Actually, identical twins tend to have the same sexuality.
To quote from a relatively recent study:

Overall, the environment shared by twins (including familial and societal attitudes) explained 0-17% of the choice of sexual partner, genetic factors 18-39% and the unique environment 61-66%. The individual's unique environment includes, for example, circumstances during pregnancy and childbirth, physical and psychological trauma (e.g., accidents, violence, and disease), peer groups, and sexual experiences. [...] In men, genetic effects explained .34–.39 of the variance, the shared environment .00, and the individual-specific environment .61–.66 of the variance. Corresponding estimates among women were .18–.19 for genetic factors, .16–.17 for shared environmental, and .64–.66 for unique environmental factors.

This clearly shows that there is a major genetic component.

Also, note that you do not NEED twin studies to confirm a biological basis and that none of my evidence relied on them.
Most of the accusations of the article are WRONG - the effects have been repeated, i listed studies as recent as 2009.

I agree that the evidence is not yet conclusive, but as with homosexuality, it is quite likely that a major biological factor exists.

The brain types you listed might be interesting, but they tell us nothing about what determines gender idenity, it is certainly NOT nurture (with the possible exception of extremely early childhood) - there have been studies that attempted to show otherwise, they failed.

In other words, you will need more conclusive evidence than that to disprove the half-dozen studies i posted that suggest otherwise.

None but a good general understanding of psychology (I generally agree with what Bailey is cited as saying in the above article, that just about anything psychologists care about tends to be in the general neighbourhood of fifty percent genetic by basis) and a reasonable understanding of human biology.

At that frees you from sourcing your claims how?

Gender roles aren't simple. There are a bunch of different things tied together in one package, and most people don't fit their roles perfectly. I've watched research like this for a while. There's a lot more on homosexuality than transsexuality, but it goes in patterns. Every so often someone publishes a paper showing something interesting. It's a small piece of a complicated puzzle of human behaviour, but the newspapers will try to make it sound like we've suddenly discovered some singular true cause.

Never disputed that, stated so myself.

There's usually a confluence of events of some kind, a whole long list of influences. Some may be necessary, but it's doubtful that any one simple cause will be sufficient to explain anything as complex as transsexuality. I could be wrong, but I would be amazed. There are probably at least a half dozen relevant factors, including several genes and several environmental factors, some of which might just even be social in origin. You never quite know.

I never claimed that transsexuality was solely caused by genetics or hormonal influence - this would indeed be unlikely given the very strong difference in it's expression.

Actually, since the rates of apparent transsexuality vary wildly in those countries, it's hardly baseless. Iran, for example, carries out a surprisingly large number of sex reassignment surgeries. Go read about it if you're curious.

The number is so high because it is one of the few ways for homosexual people to escape execution. Hardly a good example.
Yes, the numbers vary. Most of that is probably due to a difference in cultural tolerance for it.

What it is to be a woman in Nigeria is not the same thing as what it is to be a woman in Germany. And then Singapore has a culture of its own relating to men who become women, for good or ill, as I think we may have already mentioned at some point.

Of course there are differences.
But there are also similarities, you can't just ignore the.



And now i have to ask:
What is your actual argument?
In either case, WILGAS argument falls flat and you've done nothing to change that.

[Khas]

Big deal, bigots rarely say things straight-forward.

Actually, they're some of the most straightforward people out there. When have the Nazi party or the Ku Klux Klan ever been anything BUT straightforward in saying what they think?

(Just using those two groups as examples, I know that there are PLENTY of other bigoted groups out there.)

[Serafina]

Big deal, bigots rarely say things straight-forward.

Actually, they're some of the most straightforward people out there. When have the Nazi party or the Ku Klux Klan ever been anything BUT straightforward in saying what they think?

(Just using those two groups as examples, I know that there are PLENTY of other bigoted groups out there.)

Bigots like him them.
Straight-forward bigots are the most obvious, but there more than just those. And the others will rarely come out straight-forward with their actual intent.

Actually, the bigots that are not straight-forward are the worst ones - the classical example is the "Nazi in a Suit" - he is educated, well-mannered, can talk politically correct - but he is no less bigoted.

[Khas]

Eh, you have a point. It's just that a good chunk of the people who live where I do are rednecks, and not exactly subtle.

[Mr. Oragahn]

There's enough transsexuals on this planet to build a nation of transsexuals. If ultimately you can't make the rest of the planet adopt your opinion, building your own nation with people who think like you and are like you would possibly be one of the best ways to protect yourselves and live under your own laws.

[Mr. Oragahn]

It would be simpler if Serafina could stick to the SWvST part, or any SF/fantasy vs, notably see you prove the claims you made in the early posts of the "phasers drill in 19 seconds" thread, now that you're here and you think you're right. Notably the claims about how you "have already established numbers for both sides, backed up by a wealth of evidence."
You're supposed to back up your arguments so we'll see if you can actually do that, now that you're here.