Re: Is this an Autobot or Decepticon Transgender
There is conflicting scientific information out there, I am looking at the biology of the situation and not the metaphysical or psychological aspects. May I suggest that you revise your working knowledge to deal with one point at a time. Otherwise we take this to the ridiculous - if you think you are a kettle does that make you a kettle?
There's conflicting scientific information out there, including a fair amount of research showing that simple binary models aren't particularly instructive for gender. Binary gender models don't account for what experimental evidence has shown us to be true of human sexuality, and are therefore not particularly useful in that regard - and since that's how most people try to apply chromosome-based tests ("Do you have a Y chromosome?") it seems sensible to me to not try and apply it.
If you want me to call you a kettle or a teaport or anything else, I'll go along with it. It's no skin off my nose if that's how you identify and present yourself to the world, and I've got no reason to disregard your sense of identity.
"You seem to expect that transgendered people should have to wear some sort of badge to indicate that they are Not Normal - why exactly do you have an issue with them being treated by their gender identity where this differs from their birth gender?"
Telling me how I think is a bit odd, you don't know me or know how I think. I have said that honesty is the most important thing. I would want to know if my partner was transgendered / murderer / apple user / so that I can make my own decision at the time. If you build a relationship on omission then you are not been honest. By getting offended at my honesty you are showing that you are not as tolerant as you think you are. Also, I have no issue with them, if you want to call yourself a teapot then great, but it doesn't actually make you a teapot. I guess this wouldn't ever be an issue if you was honest and upfront.
That's not what you appeared to be saying, on the basis of the following statements:
"If I found out my partner was a man then I would also be angry and hurt and upset."
" No, my partner would still be a man, no matter what their outward appearance is. This is not a case of if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck."
I think it's fair to take both those statements as assertions that you are roundly rejecting any self-identification aspect of an individual's gender identity and judging them based on their birth gender. Which, when dealing with adults in the context of sexual and gender identity, is not necessarily a helpful way to proceed. From my perspective, it's akin to judging as being an incontinent screaming tantrum because that's broadly speaking how they behaved shortly after they were born ;)
Don't get me wrong - I can understand that for someone with no exposure to transgendered issues or the trans world, finding out that someone with whom they'd started a relationship was transsexual might be a shock, and might involve learning a substantial amount about worldview-broadening things. In the specific case of finding out 19 years after that relationship started, I can understand being hurt at the secrecy. (Though given what Michelle and others have said upthread about the experience that post-op transsexuals have in being accepted under their new identity, I can see how circumstances might drive someone to keep the secret to themselves - even if we're both in agreement that honesty is a better policy for avoiding future issues).
Neither of those are specific to the person being transsexual, though - they are merely examples of how people react when someone or something proves to be very different to their expectations.
What I don't understand or see as justifiable is being angry at the person for what they are, which is where I took issue with your posts (or at least how I understood them). Gender identity and sexuality are not binary absolutes (see for example Kinsey's research), so trying to use those as absolute methods for categorising people seems futile to me; quite aside from which the insistence on telling someone, after the prolonged trauma and stress involved in first identifying and coming to terms with being trans, then deciding to go for the reassignment surgery, then going through counselling and hormone therapy, then building a new life and gender identity for themselves, that they were still a man strikes me as a combination of insensitivity, lack of compassion and lack of understanding of the actual issue at hand (gender identity & sexuality). I just don't see why it's an issue to say "this person looks like one thing, and was previously another thing, and biologically is probably somewhere in between, and you know what? Who frigging cares, I'll just treat 'em like a person, same as everyone else". What's the benefit in specifically having a mental category for "Woman who used to be a man but had surgery?" as separate from "woman"? (I chose that particular transition because culturally we don't seem to have as much of a problem with the other transition - I'm not sure if there's a clear reason for that or if it's the general "women can be gender benders and that's not threatening but the second a man does it there'll be hell to pay" phenomenon again...)
I suspect we're not going to find much common ground beyond "being honest is probably the best policy" (though I'd qualify that with "Unless it means you get a load of prejudiced bellendery from idiots as a result, in which case fuck 'em").
Biting the hand that feeds IT
