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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some of the wide-eyed responses here are just wild. If you can read at an 8th grade level or name all the Kardashians, you sure as hell have the mental capacity to comprehend gender identity.

To pretend otherwise is just willful ignorance.[/quote]

The people on this thread asking questions are not people who give a fig about the Kardashians.

The truth is most of this gender stuff makes little sense. You are born with a biological sex.  It is based on your chromosomes.  What does it mean to be a man or a woman beyond that?  What does it mean to say you know you are a different gender than what your chromosomes indicate?  Separate from biological sex most ways we define gender are a bunch of made up bullshit that varies from culture to culture. People who pretend this is cut and dried are full of it.  [/quote]

The way I see it is that everything else in nature is a spectrum and we are now realizing that gender and sexuality are also on a spectrum.  [/quote]

Gender expression is on a spectrum.  Sex is binary in human beings.  [/quote]

That's generally true, but not always. There are many variations. There are people born with three chromosomes -XXY. There was a TED Talk by a woman who presents as a woman and was born with a vagina, but she has XY chromosomes. If people exist outside of the binary, then by definition, there is not a binary.[/quote]

Those are disorders of sexual development - genetic mutations.   Some people are born missing limbs.  That doesn’t change the fact that human beings have two arms and two legs.   That is not a spectrum.  [/quote]

Exactly. As for “assigned at birth,” this makes it sound like doctors arbitrarily pick someone’s gender. No, they don’t assign a “gender” at all. They observe the newborn’s biological sex and record it.  The push for this new language denies science & facts. We can be respectful of all types of people without doing that.

Regarding the “deadname” article— that stance is ridiculous. Continuing to call someone by a name they don’t prefer is rude. But mentioning what someone used to be called for informational purposes should be a non-issue. People change their names for all sorts of reasons— marriage, divorce, adoption, Prince, etc. I’ve never heard any of these other groups get upset about the mere mention of their former name. [/quote]

I was the one explaining "assigned at birth" last night and I want you to back up a little bit. No one is "blaming" doctors or even parents for assuming gender. I did it with my own kids and - so far - I'm right. What I'm trying to explain is that trans folks have told us that the verbiage we used to use - "a man trapped in a woman's body", "he used to be a she", etc - don't fit with their experience. In other words, a trans man will say he was always trans, even if he presented as female as a kid because everyone assumed that was true. Instead, he was assigned female and realized as he got older that that wasn't correct.

There are probably people who know more about this than me, but I think some of this is probably rooted in verbiage around gay people as well. Homophobes were up our ass about being gay as being a choice we could simply un-make, and that caused us a lot of grief over a couple of decades. Hence, the "born this way" argument (see Lady Gaga, et al.). I think this translated to the trans community a bit in that ensuring the language that is used follows the experiences that people have.

Again: being assigned a gender at birth is fine, but some people realize that gender doesn't fit. They don't think they've "changed" but that the gender that was assigned due to genitals doesn't match their lived experience. So this is the verbiage that the trans community uses that best fits.
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