When two worldviews collide.

RocksInMyHead said:

I think that biology is more complicated than just "male" and "female" - while most people fit nicely into one of those two boxes, not everyone does. There's also some level of disconnect between biological sex (i.e. the parts you're born with) and gender (how you perceive yourself).

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You'd say biology is instrumental in determining "what" you are and how you "feel" about yourself?

Confused-by-christianity said:

You'd say biology is instrumental in determining "what" you are and how you "feel" about yourself?

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Ultimately, everything that happens within our bodies boils down to biology (or biochemistry) on some level. Your physical characteristics, your thoughts, your feelings, they're all determined by some combination of genetics and biochemical reactions - that's just a property of being a living creature.

RocksInMyHead said:

Ultimately, everything that happens within our bodies boils down to biology (or biochemistry) on some level. Your physical characteristics, your thoughts, your feelings, they're all determined by some combination of genetics and biochemical reactions - that's just a property of being a living creature.

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How do you think the spirit is attached to "the body" ?? if at all??

Confused-by-christianity said:

How do you think the spirit is attached to "the body" ?? if at all??

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Not a clue. It's not something measurable - it just "is".

RocksInMyHead said:

Not a clue. It's not something measurable - it just "is".

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Do you think there is a male / masculine spirit and a female / feminine one that god assigns us??

Confused-by-christianity said:

Do you think there is a male / masculine spirit and a female / feminine one that god assigns us??

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Possibly - like I said, "spirit" isn't something that can be measured.

RocksInMyHead said:

Possibly - like I said, "spirit" isn't something that can be measured.

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Im not sure if anyone is currently able to hit the nail on the head in explaining this stuff.

Anyone else got any good ideas???

Confused-by-christianity said:

How do you think the spirit is attached to "the body" ?? if at all??

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Usually orally, then it is broken down by the liver.

ralliann said:

Cute aside, that does not speak to my question.

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Not my fault.

I have a question for you.

Have you cut off your right hand and dug out your right eye yet?

Hans Blaster said:

Usually orally, then it is broken down by the liver.

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ha

Ironic - since some people really think being wasted is mystical ;-)

Robban said:

Not my fault.

I have a question for you.

Have you cut off your right hand and dug out your right eye yet?

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Have I. You be the judge.

ralliann said:

Have I. You be the judge.

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No thanks.

Robban said:

No thanks.

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Okie dokie. I think we have all expressed our views and no need to keep beating the horse. It is is dead for me.

ralliann said:

Okie dokie. I think we have all expressed our views and no need to keep beating the horse. It is is dead for me.

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Likewise here.

Paidiske said:

It's only a delusion if, in fact, brains are not affected by sex development. If brains are so affected (and every indication is that they are), then it's not a delusion that it's possible for brain and body to not match. So the issue is not that they're "struggling with reality," so much as that their reality is more complex than yours or mine.

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As I've pointed out there are no studies that prove that. You are guessing at something they have not been able to show as true. It's a delusion to think you are the opposite sex when reality and biology say different.

Paidiske said:

I was speaking of the people I care for in real life. None of whom are teenagers, and none of whom transitioned as teenagers. The average age of medical transition, for the record, is in one's thirties.

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I'm mainly concerned about teens. And by the way studies show that transitioning as an adult don't help much either. That's because they still struggle with who they are. That realize the medical treatments didn't fix the problems.

But teens are the target here and countries who formerly accepted the affirmative care model have backed off.
One of the main public relations strategies of “gender-affirming care” advocates is to deny that the model of treatment being used in American clinics differs in any significant way with the one now used in European clinics. Over the past two years, and following systematic reviews of evidence, health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. have agreed that no evidence exists that the benefits of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones outweigh the risks. All three countries have since imposed measures to reduce drastically the accessibility of these drugs to teenagers.

You keep mentioning brain studies.
Proponents of the affirmative model tend to believe that it has a strong neurological component. No evidence supports this. Studies on brain structure and functioning are notoriously inconclusive, mainly because they cannot control for homosexuality or for the effects of synthetic hormone use and gender-role change on the brain.

Moreover with the large uptick girls identifying we have seen no prepubescent dysphoria, and high rates of other mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, and autism. Yet with the affirming care model then are medically transitioned anyway.

Are you talking surgeries only or are you including drug treatments? Because drug treatments are medical treatments. Yes in the past mist transitioners may have been in their 30s. But as I have pointed out that is changing. Teens trans claims are exploding. And with the affirmative car model they are quickly put on transitioning drugs which are not reversible. This creates a pathway to full transition. With desistance rates at 80% this is inexcusable. Because once put on drugs they are now on the train they can't get off.

According to the Medicare Database when looking at the studies for trans medical care and medical transitioning they said this.

There were conflicting (inconsistent) study results – of the best designed studies, some reported benefits while others reported harms. The quality and strength of evidence were low due to the mostly observational study designs with no comparison groups, potential confounding and small sample sizes. Many studies that reported positive outcomes were exploratory type studies (case-series and case-control) with no confirmatory follow-up. Due in part to the generally younger and healthier study participants, the generalizability of the studies to the Medicare population is also unclear. Additional research is needed.

And yet there is a persistence to affirmative care including medical transitioning. With kids this is particularly dangerous.

Paidiske said:

Oh, and while we're on the subject of what's really going on, the average time involved in transition is nearly five years. None of this 20-minute consultation and then you're in the operating theatre. It takes literally nearly five years to work through all of this, if that's even what the patient chooses to do.

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No it's not. There is no standard on this. Here's an article of undercover work done to show what's happening.

‘Mature Enough’: Undercover Video Reveals Docs Routinely Approve Puberty Blockers for Kids as Young as Eight

Whistleblower at trans care center exposes 'appalling' practices inside gender-affirming hospital for kids

Whistleblower at Texas gender clinic exposes horror of 'transitioning' children - LifeSite

And there are more stories of this including what's gone on in Seattle.
There is another undercover video that exposes this stuff where a man calls a clinic and after 20 minutes video cosultation gets a,letter from them approving gender transformation with a dysphoria diagnosis. A this for the insurance company so he can get his drugs and surgeries paid for.

So your denial of what's going on is untrue.

Yes treatment can take years to finalize. It's lifelong. People are not getting 5 years of mental therapy before undergoing medical transitioning.

Confused-by-christianity said:

You know what - I have always - and still do have trouble between "objective" and "subjective".

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"Subjective" is basically when whatever is being described is influenced by our based on feelings, opinions, tastes, etc. "Objective" is when whatever is being described is not based on those things, but instead based on something (generally something independently observable/confirmable) that does not change according to feelings, opinions, tastes, etc. A basic example of something subjective would be the taste of food -- for some people, 'fancy' French food is the greatest cuisine in the world, while for others it's disgusting and overhyped. There is no objective criteria by which a particular cuisine can be shown to be 'better' or 'worse' than another. An example of something objective would be the Pythagorean Theorem, which is used to describe the relationship between the three sides of a right triangle. The theorem works the same regardless of where you are in the world, how you feel about triangles, whether or not you care for math as a subject, etc.

Confused-by-christianity said:

I understand and believe that there is an objective reality (absolute truth) - I just am never satisfied I am understanding it correctly.
In fact - my whole studylife and drive for growth assumes that my grasp on the "objective" (absolute truth) is incomplete.

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Sure, but maybe it would help to remember that everyone's understanding is incomplete -- "for now we see through a glass, darkly", as St. Paul reminded the Corinthians. Nobody has a complete picture of everything, and nobody's going to. And this isn't just a religious or specifically Christian idea, either. In the secular sciences, the idea of having a complete picture is always shifting because we don't necessarily know what we don't know. The idea of having "completed" science doesn't even really make sense.

Confused-by-christianity said:

I guess I would have always said I am male and I also feel like something inside is a "man". So I guess I'd describe myself as having a gender identity - but I guess some people think there is no gender identity?? You are either male or female and there is nothing on the "inside" that is manly or womanly. So you are only your biology?? Which means once you lose your body, you're not a man anymore??? I had always assumed even after I lost my body I'd still know I'm a "man" because something in me has the "spiritual frequency" (I made that term up haha) of masculine / male / manly ??

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Maybe? Now you're describing how it feels for you (your subjective experience! ), so sure...if that's how you conceive of things, then who is anyone to tell you otherwise?

I don't think the most common objection to trans that you find here on CF is that the people who identify that way are describing their subjective experiences or feelings incorrectly (that wouldn't even make sense, once you know what 'subjective' means), but rather that subjective feelings or experiences don't determine objective reality (i.e., whether you 'feel' this way or that, you actually 'are' whatever it is you are, as determined by your biology). I may be unknowingly misrepresenting that, though, so I would welcome correction from any of the people here who regularly post about this issue (as I don't, and when I do post about it, I try to focus on theology and anthropology more than biology).

Confused-by-christianity said:

I would have thought that there is something happening within a person that they know they are manly or womanly - perhaps a spiritual person might find that easier to believe???

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I'd like to think I'm a spiritual person, but I don't ever really know what people mean when they say that they 'feel' like a man or a woman. I've found that when I've asked people what that means, there's generally a lot of talk about how they don't fit gender stereotypes, which is fine, but I don't see what that has to do with feelings. As I've written before concerning this issue, my physical body tells me that I am a man, and I don't spontaneously grow a pair of ovaries whenever I cook something or do anything else that would be defined by some as 'feminine' (i.e., domestic) work. Given this, so far I fail to see how this idea of 'male' and 'female' feelings isn't primarily a language game rooted in some oddly sexist assumptions and stereotypes.

Confused-by-christianity said:

It's not immediately controvercial to me for someone to say they feel something on the inside isn't harmonising with their biology.

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I totally agree, at this level. The question is what is or is not appropriate to do to deal with whatever disharmony they may be feeling.

Confused-by-christianity said:

By this point - I'm lost.
I have no idea how stuff works haha
I don't think anyone is really hitting the nail on the head in this subject - not yet.

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Haha. Yeah. That's completely fair. It is a complex topic, and I am on the outside looking in. What I meant to say in this part of my post, though (just to hopefully clarify), is that while we are often told that "gender is a spectrum", it seems to me like in reality it is treated as though it is binary, since these subjective feelings are reported against a backdrop of a kind of idealized femininity or masculinity -- that's why you get people saying "I feel like a man", or "I feel like a woman", or even "I don't feel like I comfortable fit into either" (i.e., "I'm not 100% on either side"), but not "My femininity is a 3 out of 10, while my masculinity is 8 out of 10", or something comparable to that. Since I was replying to the comparison between the sensation of pain and the 'feeling' of gender, I wanted to compare it to the kind of scale that doctors actually use to measure a patient's subjective report of pain, which is most definitely not binary (it's not just "I'm in pain" or "I'm not in pain"). I don't think the presence of the 'third option' of being neither really changes gender from being a binary, either, because even if many people may feel like that sometimes, the entire reason why the space "in-between" the two poles of masculine and feminine exists is because there's no more accurate way to measure it. So you're either feeling like a man, or feeling like a woman, or feeling like neither, but even feeling like neither requires that you at least implicitly recognize that the sort of 'target' that you're 'missing', if I can put it that way, is one or the other. Nobody's in the middle by virtue of there actually being some "third gender" between the two, but rather because they don't feel they measure up to either of the two in the ways that they would need to to be able to comfortable say "I am a man", or "I am a woman." If those weren't the two genders that there indisputably are, then it wouldn't make sense to say "I feel like a man" or "I feel like a woman." You have to have those as categories in your mind first, and having a third 'catch-all' category for everything that doesn't fit the other two doesn't make it isn't own thing any more than repeatedly crashing a plane means that you've invented a new form of airplane travel.

TL; DR: Failing to measure up to something (whether or not that measure is fair or accurate or realistic or whatever; that's a separate conversation), or 'perform' that thing satisfactorily, doesn't mean that you've actually succeeded, but just in some new way that now everyone needs to recognize and add to their own mental lexicons, especially if what we're talking about is based on subjective feelings like 'feeling like a man/woman', and you're the one who has decided that you don't fit. I think that's the reason for a lot of the somewhat visceral and sometimes downright nasty backlash against the concept of 'trans' identities among some people: it presupposes that because other people are having subjective thoughts in their own heads about themselves and their experiences, the outside world needs to make them a priority and change the way that it speaks, operates, and believes going forward. This is, to some, a mighty big 'ask', and seems to fly in the face of the earlier apologia for other parts of the LGBTQ community, like the "We just want to be left alone to live our lives" refrain that was often repeated in the debate over gay marriage in the USA in recent years. Being left alone and being made the central players in every major political decision of the last 5-10 years (as some people would no doubt argue that trans people are, though I would point out that it's often because various bills targeting trans-identifying people have been written and approved of in more politically and socially conservative areas of the United States) are not the same thing.

But again, I'm trying to summarize what I think people who aren't me might be thinking, based on what I've seen argued on this messageboard, so I'm likely at least somewhat off on some of this (maybe considerably so). Personally for me, the question of anthropology (i.e., what it means to be a person) is paramount, not whether or not trans people are 'in your face' about it or whatever. Even a person who lives in a way that you could never live yourself is still a person, and deserving of respect and a recognition of their basic human dignity. (I live in very liberal California and I guess I've just been lucky to dodge all the drag shows, elementary school lessons teaching kids that they're all LGBT, or whatever else frequently gets reported here as going on in this country, particularly in 'leftist elite' dens of depravity like my state. Strange, that.)

Paidiske said:

The extreme Christian/traditional/conservative positions held by some now, would be unrecognisable to mainstream Christians of times past

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They are certainly trying to conserve something that was common in the past - that's why they are called conservatives.

rjs330 said:

First of all no one is suggesting that we tell them to get real, it's all in their head so snap out of it. Where on earth did you get that idea?

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You have constantly said that this is not real. That it's just a delusion,. And that there's only two genders so they are living some fantasy. Your arguments along those lines are everywhere in threads like this. Where can we find an example of this? Oh, look. Actually in this post where in regard to an almost identical situation with depression you say:

rjs330 said:

But treatment does come with therapy which includes therapy helping them cope with the unreality of their delusions.

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It's not 'unreal'. Plus just a few posts upstream you said this:

'It's a delusion to think you are the opposite sex when reality and biology say different.'

QED. Seems that you'll not understand this however many times so many people try to explain this to you.

rjs330 said:

I'm happy to provide resources to others. I won't bother with you anymore. There's no point.

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Quite right. No point in you posting links to organisations such as the ones you have presented. They only weaken your position. Good idea. But you still seem determined to scrape any barrel to dig up anyone who comes close to supporting your position. See next post...