Hacker News Reader

I cant help but feel like if gender norms weren't so rigid and people were allowed to express themselves however they feel comfortable without being stigmatized and judged then you wouldn't have people say (imo) crazy things like "my biology is the biology of a woman regardless of whether or not doctors agree."

Funny thing, but back in the 80's, there was a kerfuffle in the LGBT community on campus where I was going to school. (I lived in a house with some prominent people in the group, including the campus president. We also deliberately chose a gay man as our house adviser.) Many militant LGBT people were basically bashing the bisexuals, calling them "fence sitters." Even going to the level of yelling at them and coming up with an ideology of denying the existence of bisexuals.

There were also a number of couples who got effectively harassed because the man was declared by the crowd to be a "self denying" gay man and the woman was similarly declared to be a "baby dyke." There was this ideology that this form of attraction wasn't "real." Isn't society butting its nose into people's love lives the problem in the first place? I say we just leave people alone and let them work it out. Everyone should be "live and let live" as much as possible. From what I've seen, this is by far the best policy.

Looking back on it all, those events were just another instance of angry teens and 20-somethings running around acting as if they knew everything there is to know about a big, complex subject. It's a big, complex subject we're all too close to and therefore biased about.

(The problem in 2019, is that the hot blazing centers of our culture create incentives for the exact opposite of the "live and let live" mentality.)

Isn't society butting its nose into people's love lives the problem in the first place?

The reason "society" -- aka other people -- does that is because our sexual choices often have impacts on other people. If you sleep around casually, wind up pregnant out of wedlock and/or with a terrible, incurable STD, this will impact other people quite substantially. If you continue to sleep around casually afterwards and don't tell your lovers of your diagnosis, you are spreading disease in an outright malicious and incredibly selfish fashion.

Etc.

Most people who want society to butt out of their sex lives also want society to rescue them when something terrible happens. If people were all "It's all good. I'll just sleep in a ditch and wait to die of AIDS. I don't need nothing, thanks! I did this to myself." you might see less pushback from society concerning what people choose to do behind closed doors.

Or, you know, if someone just wants to masturbate and not involve anyone in how they get their sexual needs met, cool. But that isn't how most people operate.

Unfortunately, most people have a fairly poor track record of thinking in earnest about how their sexual preferences, predilections and choices impact other people. In many cases, they do a poor job of thinking about how this will impact the people they are actually having sex with. They often don't think at all about others beyond that who may be impacted as well.

I am not justifying homophobia, etc. But a policy of "live and let live" is not as simple as most people perhaps wish it were.

>Isn't society butting its nose into people's love lives the problem in the first place? I say we just leave people alone and let them work it out. Everyone should be "live and let live" as much as possible. From what I've seen, this is by far the best policy.

I agree so much with this and it's always how i've tried to be. I've never really understood why people choose to make this their business. They don't have to. They really don't. It's just never made sense to me why what two other people choose to do together would be anything to do with me or why people would expend so much energy worrying about it.

There's just never seemed like a good reason to waste time and energy, judging, worrying, or even really thinking about what kind of people other people are attracted to.

100%

I often wonder if the trans-rights movement is stuck in this kind of rhetorical cul-de-sac because the gay rights movement leaned so hard on "born this way" to make its case. That made sense because it moved the discussion away from sexual morality toward fairness. No doubt necessary to win the concessions and public opinion change of the 00s-10s.

In reality it shouldn't matter how innate sexual preference or gender identity are. People should be free to identify and fuck as they please. Unfortunately some on the ultra-woke side of the trans rights movement have continued to paint themselves into the corner of "born this way" but then have to backfill their biological epistemology to fit their rhetoric.

I haven't personally heard a trans story that conflicts with "born this way", to understand what I mean you'd use the perspective that it refers to both the body and the mind that inhabits it.

If gender is innate, and not a social construct, then what does that say about gender roles and what are the implications for modern feminism? If gender is a purely social construct, gender identity is a lifestyle choice.

Both formulations are wrong, but people tend to go all in arguing one or the other. The problem is now we have the same crew that was 100% social construct arguing for 100% biological determinism and the inconsistency of worldview makes them sound ridiculous.

> "A trans woman's biology is a female biology" is just a statement I cannot agree with at all.

There's a number of ways that transgender individuals tend to have an number of biological features more typical of cisgender members of the gender of their identity than of cisgender members of their assigned-at-birth gender; there's other ways that they don't.

It's perfectly valid—and deeply accurate—to say a transwoman’s biology is a female biology, which implicitly not only rejects the idea that it is the singular female biology but also rejects the idea of such a biology. It also doesn't reject that it has aspects in common with some male biologies that might be unlike some other female biologies.

I am somewhat open to what you're saying here. I think perhaps what could be needed is a decoupling of the idea of a woman and the reality of the female sex. My friend Alice is a woman. She also has a penis, testes, and prostate. I don't think that the presence of those organs makes her less of a woman however I couldn't argue that biological she is female. She doesn't even make that argument. She had a testicular cancer scare two years ago that gave us the opportunity to have this very discussion. I apologize if my point of view on this is I'll informed or offensive. It's hard to talk about.

There was an npr story a while back about a person who was touted as being the first woman gondolier in Italy. It turns out that this person thought of themselves as a man, and so never liked the attention he was getting as the first "woman" gondolier. The story convinced me that there are people out there with the body of one sex, but the brain of the other. I really think this person has the brain wiring/chemistry of a man but the body of a woman.

I heard that story as well. It was fascinating. Despite knowing many transgender people that story did more for my understanding of a trans person's experience than almost anything else. As you said. It really seems like a case of a brain in the "wrong" body.

> my biology is the biology of a woman regardless of whether or not doctors agree

> The idea that her biology is that of a person born with two X chromosomes and a vagina is a little ridiculous to me

Well, there's a logical resolution here. The biology of women contains cis female biology as well as trans female biology. No contradiction between these two points.

The point of making distinctions is because those distinctions are useful to us. Which distinctions we make are up to our discretion. Not only does our understanding inform the distinctions we make, the distinctions we make inform our understanding.

Here's an example. Our culture is obsessed with elaborate social structures based on genitals, isn't that weird? If those cultural practices are rooted in biology, and we want cultural recognition of trans women, then we are saying that trans women have the biology of women. No logical problem here.

Medically, it is arguable that trans women have female biology. That's not saying trans women have the same biology as cis women. Indeed, some trans women need to see a gynecologist, even. Both cis and trans women can take drugs to correct hormonal imbalances. I know a cis women who needs to take spironolactone for high testosterone just like many trans women need to; a family friend was on HRT for menopausal symptoms, estradiol, which many trans women take too. I would not be _at all_ surprised if there were a trans woman and a cis woman on the same exact hormone therapy. So not only can we make the category of "female biology" wider in a medical setting without making a logical mistake (subcategories: trans female biology, cis female biology), there really is overlap between the medical needs of trans women and cis women.

This is not frivolous. Trans women get a serious amount of discrimination and contempt from many medical providers because of this cultural and medical intransigence against them. This change of distinctions has an important consequence to the quality of life of many women, and, in the long term, all of us.

> "A trans woman's biology is a female biology" is just a statement I cannot agree with at all.

It creates real problems and exacerbates existing ones. In finance, you need to predict a person's likely spending, longevity, income, etc. to plan investments, insurance, etc.

The best data is from longitudinal (tracking individuals over time) post-retirement surveys. These take decades to run, and you need a large body of people committed to consistently doing lengthy surveys each year. Hopefully we'll get additional research to show where we can safely match trans persons into the larger surveys.

The issue is, if you dogmatically make claims about someone's biology, you could be right by chance, but everyone providing these services is ethically (fiduciarily) bound to have a justifiable reason for the advice they give to customers.

Some predictions don't seem like they'd be wrong; a trans person is likely to behave the way you'd expect for, e.g., spending on clothing and similar consumer goods. (Though that's pure conjecture.)

But there are critical numbers like lifespan that have big effects on your investment strategy, and men and women differ by 7 years. (Err that a person lives longer and they lose out on growth. Err the other way, and they're overly exposed to risk.)

I suspect many firms will just say, "you have very specific health needs and need to consult a doctor." But that's the industry standard, "our advice is to figure it out yourself," cop out, technically ethical but useless.

> But there are critical numbers like lifespan that have big effects on your investment strategy, and men and women differ by 7 years.

Unless this is for investments made by your parents at birth, the difference is smaller; life expectancy at birth differs a lot by gender, but by early adulthood it's narrowed a lot because very early death is more common in males. I think it's about 3 years for current 20 year olds.

What do you consider the more relevant biology for who a person is? The genitals or the brain?

It depends. If we're talking about someone's "sex" then I'd say their gentials. If we're talking about their gender then I think it could quite easily mean to be how they personally identify.

>I think it could quite easily mean to be how they personally identify.

From this statement, I think you'd agree that gender is a far more important aspect of personal identity than sex is.

Sure!

If I'm completely honest I am quite happy for people to identify however they like. I have no preference or agenda whatsoever. It's not something I give a huge amount of thought to really.