This change does not affect me, but I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.
"I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male"
Exactly! And that's why changes like this are so important. I, like you, don't want to be pressured into referring to someone by a gender identity which does not match their reality.
So it's ok if we burst your bubble about some of your illusions? E.g., that you understand what you're talking about? Or that you are the one person granted divine right to determine who is "really" a male?
Your personal relationship to gender is very simple. Yay, good for you. But there are people whose relationships are more complex. I promise that they have thought about gender 100x more than you have, and it is you that have the illusions here.
How do I know? Well, I started out with those same illusions and then actually talked to people who changed gender or who just don't fit well in a gender-binary framework. I learned a lot. If you're willing to set aside your arrogance on this, you could do the same.
Except, of course, when he talked about gender identity, the transgender "agenda", how he refers to the gender of other people, and his construction of what somebody "really" is.
Thanks, I'm already familiar. (I'm not clear that you are, though, so unless you start being more explicit about your point, I'm done after this.) When he talks about how he refers to people, then we're already in the land of gender. Biological sex is something he can't directly perceive. He is basically saying that he wants to act as if gender is always exactly equivalent to biological sex. His post is basically arguing for a simplistic and essentialist notion of gender. Thus his opposition to the transgender "agenda".
This user quite clearly refers to people in regards to their sex, rather than their gender. You're making the mistake of assuming that he cares about gender, when sex is what he uses for his classification of male or female.
If he is classifying them as male and female and treating them as such, then both parts involve gender.
The first half involves judging people by appearance; unless he's running DNA tests, ultrasounds, and fondling everybody he meets before he uses a pronoun, then he his judging at least partly by how they present. That's gender.
The latter half, how he treats people based on his gender-presentation-mediated perceptions of sex, is pure gender, because there we're entirely out of the realm of biology and clearly into the social side of gender roles.
I understand why he (and apparently you) would like it to be simpler. It's more convenient for him if everybody goes around hiding the complexity for him so he doesn't have to have a more accurate view of the world. But it's bunk. Pretending that it's "just" sex he's talking about is part of the way he hides, presumably also from himself, that it's bunk.
The reality is that biological sex isn't a simple binary flag, its a complex of different biological and physiological elements that usually align in one of two common configurations, but, nonetheless, there's very large number of individuals where the biological elements associated with sex don't line up in one of those two ways. Surprisingly enough, for a lot of transgender people, they are in the group where the external genitalia doesn't align in the usual way with other biological features the way that is typical of sex.
So, even from the "biology is the only real thing that legitimate justifies gender identity" perspective -- a perspective that I personally find ludicrous but which is nonetheless common among people who whine about a "transgender agenda" and assert that gender identity is somehow invalid when it doesn't line up with biology -- even from that narrow-minded perspective transgender people (or a very significant share of them, at any rate) have a legitimate claim to a distinct gender identity.
The illusions about sex and gender are yours, not theirs.
It may be worth considering how much discomfort you feel when referring to a trans person by the gender identity they prefer, versus the discomfort they feel being referred to by the gender you prefer for them. I can just about guarantee you that the latter trumps the former by a long shot.
That just doesn't make any sense. Their gender identity is theirs to decide, not yours. You don't know what's going on in their mind, and it probably doesn't affect you in the slightest either way, so why not err on the side of tolerance and support?
I think the problem is that your definition of male and female do not match someone else's definitions. The presence of lack of dangly bits has remarkably little to do with what gender someone associates with (not even counting the fact that a person can have both sets of genitalia or neither).
For example, what gender would you assign to someone who was born with both sets of genitalia, and had the choice made by their parents to remove the vagina? She may choose to identify as female because that's how her brain (and possibly breasts) evolved, regardless of the choice her parents made for her as a baby.
I don't think you get to decide what 'other people's illusions' are. If somebody wishes to be called 'her', even if, purely biological, somebody is a 'him', and it makes that someone happy, why would you care?
> I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.
Sex is biological, gender is a label people choose to identify with. How could it be an illusion? Would you prefer to inspect their genitalia before using pronouns? Men could always label themselves as female if they want anyway, now they simply have more options.
How do you decide 'if he really is a male'? 'Transgender agenda'? 'Other people's illusions'? I suspect you are uninformed on the intricacies of gender, and I recommend educating yourself on the subject.
Unless you intend to go around feeling up people's crotches -- which, even setting aside the absurdity, is an incomplete solution -- it's probably a lot simpler to just call people what they want to be called.
Do you also refuse to use nicknames because they're different from their legal names? What about Internet handles?
So you are the authority on everyone's gender? I don't think that anyone should have to justify their gender. What is the other part of the "transgender agenda"? Take over the world?
