Transgender politics and social issues

[thesoretoothsayer]

Yes, transgenderism is not only tolerated in Iran but actively encouraged.
So progressive.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29832690

[David]

Nobody's pretending that Iran is a socially progressive country. The point is that it's much better to be transgender than gay there, and that the society will be much more tolerant of trans people than gay people – as that article quite vividly demonstrates.

[thesoretoothsayer]

Context matters.
If you're tolerant of transgenderism because you see gender reassignment as a way to "fix" homosexuals then perhaps you're not really that tolerant of transgenderism.

[thesoretoothsayer]

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/26/mom-dresses-six-year-old-son-girl-threatens-dad-losing-son-disagreeing/

One side of the story but interesting nonetheless.
One parent is committing child abuse but which one?

[David]

[thesoretoothsayer]

Why does me putting islam's supposed tolerance of transgenderism into context upset you?
Don't you think it's relevant to know that this tolerance is based upon the Iranian regime seeing transgenderism as a "cure" for homosexuality?

[David]

The article is interesting and certainly relevant in terms of a broader discussion of LGBTI rights in Iran, but my response relates to your accompanying sarcastic commentary, which implied that I was arguing something I wasn't (and something that was, in fact, not at all relevant to the immediate point of discussion or thread as a whole).

In any case, your justification a couple of posts above is illogical:

[Pi]

....ok,,
so is this offensive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c

pointing out someone cant have babies due to lack of biological equipment is no ones fault ; not even conservatives, or is reality just symbolic?

[David]

Look, I love Monty Python, but it’s a scene that’s pretty directly making fun of transgender people (and it’s not just hypersensitive “snowflakes” who recognise that; read the YouTube comments), and has probably aged pretty badly as a result. I’m sure plenty of people would find it offensive. That doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to find it funny. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://disruptingdinnerparties.com/2014/08/13/let-stan-be-loretta-monty-python-gender/

[Pi]

^
I find it funnier now more than ever..
but lets unpack this a bit , is it reasonable to offer transgender people IVF just as a gesture of our collective virtue and solidarity?

even if they cant have babies

and i'm not trying to oppress anyone.

but; what if the pythons got together and did another skit 50 years down the track offering Stan a box for the fetus to gestate in.......it just gets funnier .... even if I feel bad for laughing.

[David]

The things we find funny often relate directly to our own life experience or lack thereof. When I was 18 and had my first car, I briefly thought it would be really funny (in a pitch-black kind of way) if I put a “dead baby on board” sign in the back window. While I never went through with it, it only occurred to me a few years later that a lot of people woud not have seen the funny side of this at all, and that it was not entirely impossible that I might, say, come back to find my windows smashed in a carpark one day. I also realised that it wasn’t just uptight puritans who might find that offensive, but that it might be genuinely upsetting for women who had actually endured miscarriages or lost children in other ways. I hadn’t experienced that and neither had anyone close to me, so it just didn’t occur to me that it might have that effect.

Now, the Monty Python scene might not quite be as tasteless as that, but I still can imagine transgender people who’ve endured years of abuse and people mocking and dismissing their identities watching it totally stone-faced – not “offended” (such an overused term) because they’re uptight prigs, but genuinely upset by being, for the hundredth time, the butt of the joke. (And let’s be careful not to make monolithic presumptions about social groups; I’m sure some trans people find that scene sidesplittingly funny.) But of course to a group of British male comedians in 1979 and the vast majority of their audience, transgender people were freaks and punchlines in their own right. And to people who aren’t trans today, aren’t friends or family members of anyone who is and aren’t overly politically engaged in those issues, the scene probably still generates easy laughs.

What do we do with that reality? I think a bit of common sense and nuance never hurts. Personally, I’ve never believed in banning humour because some people find it offensive. There are few jokes worth making that don’t have the capacity to upset somebody, and I think it’s important that even tasteless and dumb offensive humour be protected from censorship. There is a space for pitch-black humour of even the kind that my insensitive 18-year-old self dreamed up. But by the same token, let’s have a little empathy for people (particularly those from minorities and other relatively voiceless groups) who can’t laugh because the joke is, literally, on them.

What that means is that there’s a time and place for some jokes – like, for instance, a dark joke shared between friends, compared with a bumper sticker on a car that everyone can see whether they like it or not – and an ability to acknowledge that a thing we find funny might genuinely hurt someone else’s feelings; and that, while it’s okay to still find it funny, it’s probably worth keeping in mind how it might affect others. That latter realisation is just basic emotional intelligence in action, I think.

[Pi]

^
I get all of that and to some degree accept it but what ever we do we can not change biological reality, and this gets to the core why we see a lot of trans suicides. One of the things that no one wants to talk about is sex change regret:
https://world.wng.org/content/sex_change_regret_silenced


We may look back on this era in 100 years time with the same view we now have of the lobotomies that took place in the 1930's.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/29/10-ways-transgender-push-mirrors-lobotomy-craze/

Doctors make jokes about lobotomy surgery all the time. The lives they destroyed were not funny yet they still laugh at the absurdity of the procedure.

[David]

I have no doubt that there are some cases of regret, but the impression I get (anecdotally, and from the cases I've read about) is that a lot of transgender people find life quite unbearable before they begin the transitioning process, and generally live much better and more stable lives after (if they live in a society that doesn't attack them, discriminate against them or generally do its best to make their lives miserable).

Certainly, a consensus seems to have emerged in the medical community around 20–30 years ago, long before transgender became a fashionable political topic (the latter of which has really only been occurring over the course of the last decade), that facilitating transition is the most effective "treatment" for gender dysphoria (the feeling of being trapped in someone else's body). And of course, as I've written about earlier in the thread, there's evidence suggesting that dysphoria is not just a "feeling" but something that can be rooted in actual physiology.

Lastly, a common misunderstanding is that gender can be understood as a pure reflection of "biological reality". I don't know if you can be bothered watching a half-hour YouTube video, but I thought this was a fairly entertaining and intellectually rigorous riposte to the arguments of Shapiro et al:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bbINLWtMKI

[Pies4shaw]

Monty Python was very, very funny, wasn’t it?

[Skids]