CXRAndy
Guru
The arguments go round and round and round. I told you I would take the piss, because it's comical arguing
Gender again. Sorry!
- Thread starter theclaud
- Start date
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The arguments go round and round and round. I told you I would take the piss, because it's comical arguing
bobzmyunkle
Senior Member
AndyRM
Elder Goth
They only do that because whenever anything new is brought up, it inevitably gets brought back to certain viewpoints.
Personally I've learned a fair bit about how others feel on certain aspects of gender and sexuality. I don't always agree but at least I try and think about alternative viewpoints rather than just chucking out insults or taking the piss.
icowden
Legendary Member
Only with respect to Salmon.
icowden
Legendary Member
Good news from Scotland:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67613441
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67613441
(Unless you are a frothing Tory, in which case apparently it doesn't go far enough).
dutchguylivingintheuk
Über Member
I'm sorry to leave you with that impression, i almost never i'm angry or shouting, and if i am i'm not posting on an forum.
I never advocated for excluding people where it isn't nessacary. Just came back to the point made in this topic multiple times that the IOC not without reason came back from it's earlier decision to allow transgender athletes to compete amongst females as if they where exactly the same.
I understand that if you are born in the wrong body you would want to be exactly the same but in sports it's now always the case. If you don't exclude the transgender minority you exclude women from ever having a serious change. but is unfair to either group, but i think it's more fair to not exclude biological women, to be honest.
i don't fish either, think i would fal asleep waiting for the fish to bite.
sounds like that sport allows an system to ensure and level playing field despite certain (biological) disadvantages. But clearly not all sports have that possibility.
icowden
Legendary Member
No-one is born in the wrong body. You are born with the body you have. You may or may not be comfortable with that. I find this phrase particularly unhelpful.
Bromptonaut
Rohan Man
- Location
- Bugbrooke, Northants
If its unhelpful to you then tough sheet.
It's not you who is Gender Incongruent and those who are can choose their own way to express themselves.
monkers
Legendary Member
Nobody is 'born in the wrong body' as far as I'm concerned. There is no system that creates brains and bodies separately and then muddles up the process of allocating brains to bodies.
Trans people used to use this as a way of trying to explain to others how it feels. These days that description of how it feels to have gender incongruence gets thrown back at those who say it. There is some growing belief among scientists that the brain is sexed in embryonic development. I urge caution on belief of this to both sides of the argument - the science isn't quite there to be fully convincing either way. Although there may be insufficient to say that it is absolute, there is sufficient doubt to say that it may be true.
I won't pretend to have the knowledge to any depth at all. It may be presumptuous of me, but I rather doubt that anybody in the thread has that kind of expertise. Simply put, it has been observed that averagely that part of the male brain where matters to do with sex etc are held is twice the size of the female brain. It has been found that the brains of trans women are commensurate in size in this area with female brains, making their self-knowledge that their brain feels female. What the mechanism is that creates this difference I have no idea. This is a question that will need much more research, in a world with so many questions marked as 'first world questions', my guess the research will have to wait.
I suffer from rather chronic tinnitus, have done for about 40 years, it can be quite debilitating. These days, there are those days when it becomes so loud that I am unable to hear the speech of others. The scientists now say that the noise is a looped system, generated in the brain and then heard by a different part of the brain as if it is incoming noise through the ears. There is no known cure. I have always believed from my experience of tinnitus that this is how it works, and have always said so. To get by I have to attempt to lip sync.
When I have explained this to the trans folk who have visited my house over the years, you see a kind of eureka moment as they understand how tinnitus kind of models their own experience of gender incongruence. It feels like a kind of loop system where gender identity is generated by the brain and then interpretated by a different part of the brain as an incongruence.
We are all aware that the brain can be tricked into interpreting incoming signals in a false ways; there are optical illusions, and audio effects too such as the Doppler effect.
I believe it would be the case that people would not understand how it feels to have tinnitus if it wasn't for the fact that they experience 'ringing in the ears' themselves from time to time.
For people who want to understand what it must feel like for a trans person to experience gender incongruence, then the analogy is there before them, it is a permanent noise generated by the brain that only they can hear. Understanding tinnitus gives congruent people a window into the world of what it must be like to be a trans person. A person like me with chronic tinnitus will say that it permanently pervades each waking hour. Trans people find ways to comfort their condition in different ways, and they should be free to do so. The allegation that they present as they do as a disguise to access places where they can harm others is a complete mischaracterisation of who they are, and an extreme detriment to their wellbeing.
Note to Aurora. I know that you willfully will not understand, so please spare the screen ink, I'm no longer interested in anything you have to say.
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monkers
Legendary Member
You OK hun?
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monkers
Legendary Member
I didn't quite hear that, did you say that those with tinnitus are likely to be trans?
CXRAndy ... the being whose name convinces us he is half man half bicycle, and who asks us to consider his words just as the sergeant who knows about such matters as splitting the atom ...
“Did you ever discover or hear tell of the atomic theory?” the sergeant inquired.
“No,” I answered.
He leaned his mouth confidentially over to my ear. “Would it surprise you to be told,” he said darkly, “that the atomic theory is at work in this parish?”
“It would indeed.”
“It is doing untold destruction,” he continued, “the half of the people are suffering from it; it is worse than the smallpox.”
He walked on, looking worried and preoccupied, as if what he was examining in his head was unpleasant in a very intricate way.
“The atomic theory,” I sallied, “is a thing that is not clear to me at all.”
“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory.
Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”
“It would surprise me unconditionally,” I said.
“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than halfway now.”
“Halfway to where?”
“Halfway to being a bicycle himself,” said the sergeant.
“Your talk,” I said, “is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
“Did you never study atomics when you were a lad?” asked the sergeant, giving me a look of great inquiry and surprise.
“No,” I answered.
“That is a very serious defalcation,” he said, “but all the same I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself, and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?”
“Yes.”
“They are lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone.”
“Now take a sheep,” the sergeant said. “What is a sheep, only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?”
“That would be bound to make the beast dizzy,” I observed, “especially if the whirling was going on inside the head as well.”
The sergeant gave me a look which I am sure he himself would describe as one of non-possum [I can’t] and noli-me-tangere [don’t touch me].
“That remark is what may well be called buncombe,” he said sharply, “because the nerve strings and the sheep’s head itself are whirling into the same bargain, and you can cancel out one whirl against the other, and there you are—like simplifying a division sum when you have fives above and below the bar.”
“To say the truth, I did not think of that,” I said.
“Atomics is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra, but you would want to take it by degrees, because you might spend the whole night proving a bit of it with rulers and cosines and similar other instruments and then at the windup not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened, you would have to go back over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole thing properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hurting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in bed.”
“Very true,” I said.
“Consecutively and consequentially,” he continued, “you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself and so is your fob pocket and the tail of your shirt and the instrument you use for taking the leavings out of the crook of your hollow tooth. Do you happen to know what takes place when you strike a bar of iron with a good coal hammer or with a blunt instrument?”
“What?”
“When the wallop falls, the atoms are bashed away down to the bottom of the bar and compressed and crowded there like eggs under a good clucker. After a while in the course of time they swim around and get back at last to where they were. But if you keep hitting the bar long enough and hard enough they do not get a chance to do this, and what happens then?”
“That is a hard question.”
“Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you persevere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer, and the other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar.” “That is well-known,” I agreed.
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.
I let go a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture.
“And you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half human, almost half man, half partaking of humanity.’
CONTRIBUTOR
Flann O’Brien
From The Third Policeman. Born Brian Ó Nualláin in Ireland in 1911, the author published his novels—among them At Swim-Two-Birds and The Hard Life—using the pseudonym Flann O’Brien and his newspaper column for the Irish Times, which ran for twenty-six years, using the pseudonym Myles nag Copaleen. He also served in the Irish civil service from 1935 to 1953. O’Brien died of a heart attack in 1966. The Third Policeman, the novel he had completed in 1940 but could not get published, appeared posthumously.
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newfhouse
pleb
Just as a point of order, the Doppler effect is real, not illusory. Yanny or Laurel might be a better example.
I'm broadly in agreement with the rest of your post.
monkers
Legendary Member
Thank you, and I agree on Doppler. It is not an illusion, but can be used to create illusion, which is why I called it 'an effect'. I think I probably still somewhere have a Hifi demonstration CD which is useful for assessing the width of stereo soundstage across a pair of speakers, it uses passing traffic and emergency vehicle sirens etc. I used to be more into these things years ago before tinnitus became so bad.
I hadn't heard of 'yanny or laurel'. Interesting - thanks.
icowden
Legendary Member
An excellent explainer and I thank you for it. It does help many of us to understand where different points of view come from.
I think where the dissonance comes in is that as well as the people you describe, there is also a cadre of the male sex who enjoy dressing up in women's clothes as a fetish and using this to gain access to women's spaces by claiming that they are women - whether that's lesbian groups or whatever. We then have the secondary issues around ensuring that things like sport remain fair.
I think it's the secondary group that most people are concerned with. That and ensuring that people in the primary group of "truly trans" really are trans and not just young autistic adults seeking to fit in, or young adults confused about their identity. Hence the concerns around ensuring safeguarding and that medications or surgical interventions are not offered to people too soon.
