<p>That the best you have? I think Itach reads wailing for dummies. I really don’t have anything to add to this debate, it isn’t going anywhere.</p>
<p>After talking with Biograd via PMs, I’m pretty sure he’s only interested in learning what’s ‘wrong’ with us.</p>
<p>Basically, this is not a productive area of discussion.</p>
<p>^Yeah, I had a feeling. If you look at his previous posts he makes it extremely clear he’s a homophobic bigoted ■■■■■, how he’s even here still is beyond me. I could have sworn he was going to get banned after the stuff earlier in the month.</p>
<p>guys, we are more informed than BioGrad is. stay calm, don’t feed the ■■■■■■. act like you’ve won the argument, cuz, you have.</p>
<p>Guys, don’t feed the ■■■■■■.</p>
<p>p.s glad to see my “good ol’ transphobia” remark is a tag.</p>
<p>I see that someone changed “political correct???” to “moderators assemble!” I approve.</p>
<p>itach, USC and I aren’t the same person, but i won’t waste time trying to persuade you otherwise because you can’t un-convince the truly convinced. Believe what you want. </p>
<p>Look, I have a problem with the fact that you can’t seem to state your opinion without shouting, condescension and name calling. even if you were on my side I would think you were a disrespectful person (even though I imagine you fancy yourself a “fighter” or something of that sort for shouting down everyone who dares to disagree with you). </p>
<p>My opinion is simple and can be laid out in a few simple points, without all the histrionics, rudness and almost obsessive ranting that you’ve injected into this thread: </p>
<p>1) The desire to switch genders is not a situation that necessitates medical attention
2) I’ll concede that the bit about “fatal” was not based on something I know to be true. however, obviously, NOT biologically altering one’s body is generally a safer option than subjecting your body to hormone therapy, miscellaneous -ectomies, etc
3) trans therapy completely goes against the feel-good maxim of “be proud of who you are.” So, if I’m gay (which according to you is biologically determined) and i really really want to be straight, why don’t i just go get a brain transplant?
4) gender is socially constructed to the extent that girls aren’t biologically drawn to the color pink, boys aren’t naturally drawn to play with toy trucks, and so on. it is not socially constructed to the extent that the two genders are differentiated by varying levels of estrogen/testosterone. if I’m born a male then left to my own devices I will develop male characteristics and the only way for me to interrupt this is to disrupt my body’s normal production of hormones.
5) moreover, it’s cosmetic. I may feel like i was born someone who should have a more well-defined nose but i’m not going to go out and get a rhinoplasty because of it. </p>
<p>In closing i want to say that since I obviously don’t understand the situation, i don’t mean to offend or sound bitter. it’s just that people’s treatment of this as an urgent medical necessity - and moreover the condemnation of those of us who disagree with their necessity as “bigots” and “transphobes” (which, by the way, are complete debate-stoppers - it’s practically the LGBT version of Godwin’s Rule) - is frustrating and difficult for me to comprehend.</p>
<p>
Thanks. They really do need to assemble. This has just become a pointless fight. And it became one on the first damn page.</p>
<p>^I wish they would, someone needs to shut anti, USC (and cormy) the heck up. Of course I’m still pretty sure two of them are the same person, I have no way of proving that. </p>
<p>@Anti - it’s 11:30 at night, I have a Spanish test in the morning, I’m sick, and I’m sleepy. I really don’t feel like taking apart the riddiculousness of your post. Do me a favor just this once and kindly police yourself, mmkay? Show that level of aptitude and critical thinking that got you into college, I’ve laid out the proof about why you’re wrong in the last 8 pages. I’m not going to lay it out again. You’ve lost, you know you’ve lost, you know your position is untenable, do us all a favor and stop ■■■■■■■■ LGBT topics. </p>
<p>I don’t know where you went all day while I was debating USC but I find it incredibly funny that you come back not long after a criticism of you two being the same person - right after he denied it. Assuming you ‘were’ the same person, that might be construed as shifting between the accounts when one of them “Looks too bad” - and since I’ve put the smack on USC pretty hard today, how convienient that you now come back to debate again which would force me to repeat everything. </p>
<p>Case in point: Nobody cares about your opinion when it comes to the rights of other people, your opinion is worth less than the diarrhea I squirted out this morning. Opinions mean nothing when we’re dealing with rights. When we deal with rights, we deal in facts and the scientifically supportable, not opinions. Get it? Emphiricial evidence.</p>
<p>Ipso Facto: Neil Patrick Harris riding a unicorn, your argument is invalid.</p>
<p>okay ya whatever bro. </p>
<p>No one asked you to even respond to my post so don’t take that tone with me. you know, you COULD be the bigger man for once and just respectfully walk away from the debate, but you wouldn’t be able to one-up me then with your clever one-liners about diarrhea and Neil Patrick Harris, would you?</p>
<p>I would never ask you to “shut the heck up” but it’s clear you’re too buried in ideology to regard human decency, but whatever, the original point of the thread is lost and we must agree to disagree. really, It’s a shame that I’m not allowed to express my opinion on a forum like this. i can accept being called a bigot, but being told outright that i should just shut up because i “know” i’m wrong shows a lot about who you really are as a person. Why get on the internet or even leave your house in the morning for that matter if you’re so unwilling to listen to other people that it causes you stress and anger? </p>
<p>(also, friendly advice, if you’re trying to have a debate with someone, don’t try to cow the other side into submission by insisting that you’ve already won. it just makes you like like a jerk - well, that among many other things.)</p>
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</p>
<p>I refer you to the copy of Derailin’ For Dummies posted about 1-2 pages ago. I’ve been the bigger man for 50 posts. Even when I respond nastily it’s almost always with factual statements and evidence, it’s only the last 5 posts or so that I’ve degenerated into…frankly… not giving a <a href=“mailto:d@mn”>d@mn</a>. </p>
<p>Human decency? You expect me to treat someone who believes my love is false, wrong, that I’m defective and need to be cured with decency? Let me explain something: I’m not unwilling to listen to other people - but I refuse to sit here and listen to someone spout lies and let them get away with it. You’re lying about LGBTs every time you open your mouth - Rox is right and I’m not going to convince you of that. But I can convince everyone else around you not to listen to you by providing the scientific evidence and shooting down every argument you make.</p>
<p>Itachirumon, we should totally hang out.</p>
<p>We totally should, you gonna end up at UCSD this Fall? We’ll buy matching ■■■■■-slayer outfits.</p>
<p>@ antipacifist: Okay, let me try to explain this in more neutral terms. Unfortunately, I’m not the best with words, but hopefully you’ll understand us a little bit more.</p>
<p>Firstly, keep in mind that we are marginalized people who have to deal with this **** every day in real life, in some way, shape, or form by virtue of being marginalized. By the time we get around to “explaining” ourselves to you or USC or anyone else, remember that we have already done this countless times, both in real life and on the internet. We have to constantly legitimize ourselves, we have to constantly explain our existence, and our patience is wearing thin. We’re not obligated to educate you on matters that can be researched over the internet if you only put in the effort to educate yourself. Neither are we obligated to “be polite” about it, because we have been polite before - and it doesn’t work in most cases. Not only that, but if you are giving politeness the priority over content, then you’re not someone who’s going to ever be convinced by anything we say. (TWO PLUS FIVE EQUALS MOTHER****ING SEVEN! = Two plus five equals seven. The content is the same, the tone is different.)</p>
<p>Secondly, we don’t have the luxury of “walking away from this debate”. The fact that you assume that we do shows how little you understand about our situation. You have the luxury of walking away; all you have to do is close the window and turn off the computer, and voila, that’s it. You don’t have to think about it anymore if you don’t want to. You have that privilege, because you are not LGBTQ. It’s just something that you don’t have to worry about; that’s what privilege means.</p>
<p>But that’s not how it works for us. We have to deal with this every day for the rest of our lives until society deems that we are “acceptable” enough so that we are no longer considered “abnormal”. We can’t walk away from this, because whenever we go out, whenever we interact with others, we are exposing ourselves to potential ridicule and danger from others who might not as tolerant as you - and I’m not being sarcastic here, because I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt; I’m assuming you are a good person at heart who would not rape, beat, or otherwise assault an LGBTQ person on the streets simply because that person is LGBTQ. But unless we give up our identity and who we are, this is what we have to deal with, day in and day out, and there is no escaping it until people finally see as us people and not as “broken” freakshows who need to be fixed in ways that don’t really need fixing.</p>
<p>Anyways, I hope that lets you approach it from another angle. If it doesn’t, well, I don’t know what else to say. Don’t beat up LGBTQ people in the streets? Leave us alone? I don’t know, man.</p>
<p>I don’t fully agree with antipacifist but I do think he has a right to speak. </p>
<p>in all honesty, I don’t have an urgently life-threatening need for surgery. I strongly desire it, and I do have a pressing need for acceptance, and hormones would really really help. I’m also a biochemist, so I know hormones are rather cheap to mass-produce with the right expression vectors. If tax money can be used for some operation that will save a child’s life, let it go to that. I incline to the girly side of androgyny – had I been born a girl I would have been rather tomboyish (and I dated a tomboyish girl with a 2390 SAT once). </p>
<p>but being transgendered is a complex of things, and might have divergent causes. I know some people who really hate having male sexual organs or a vagina, but I am not quite there yet. I feel that I should have been born a girl and I was robbed somehow by biological dice, and I do suffer from depression and dysphoria, and occasionally feel strong irrational needs to end my existence – but I think I could control that with counseling and understanding friends (or lovers?). I’m a scientific person. I’m open to alternatives. Until I get rich or something.</p>
<p>I guess what also pains me currently is that I’m dating this girl, and she’s being incredibly understanding and she’s the reason why I’ve stopped hooking up like mad (with both girls and guys), searching for emotional reassurance. </p>
<p>She thinks like a guy (which is what attracted me to her) but is open-minded, smart, pretty and kinky (she likes strap ons?) and attracted to femininely-built asian guys, but in terms of sexual attraction she probably likes the way I am now best. She frequently tells me I am gorgeous. But if I complete the transition (which would take years) the sexual attraction would probably fade. I was always the diehard romantic, and I thought people entered into LTRs expecting them to last forever until something goes wrong, but there’s something that really tugs at me about being in a wonderful LTR that you know can only be finite.</p>
<p>(I also now understand how my mother felt.)</p>
<p>Hey, Fullofpop, that isn’t true at all. What is it with you people an getting so offended?</p>
<p>I said I am interested in learning how people realize they are gay in the first place, and was interested to see to what degree biological and environmental factors played a role.</p>
<p>I was interested in learning about the environmental factors from the LGBT point of view because I have had my own experiences that make me wonder if exposure to LGBT people early on plays a role in a child forming an opinion of himself.</p>
<p>I was interested in this point of discussion because of some real life experiences I have had. One is the case of a couple boys I knew growing up. They were not quite the masculine bunch, not really masculine at all really. They were into girls tv shows, like Barbie and Princess type stuff. Their whole behavior was a bit well… odd… but they were raised in a conservative household, and weren’t even aware that people were LGBT. As a result of never hearing of LGBT, they never associated themselves with that group, but I have no doubt they would have if they knew about the LGBT culture. They were just that… different from other boys, and would have been branded gay in any other environment. They grew up, and are perfectly and happily hetero sexual now. </p>
<p>I know a few other people who have similar stories to the one above, and have experiences of my own growing up, enough to lead me to believe that environmental factors play a role in kids identifying with LGBT early on, but I wanted to see how my perception of these cases related to cases where similar kids were raised in households where LGBT was known about and even encouraged. </p>
<p>I just wanted to see if my perception of the issue of environmental factors was correct based on my own real life experiences.</p>
<p>Find the support groups for your issue. That will give you a good start on all kinds of resources as well as a lot of information and support from those who well know these issues.</p>
<p>
Branded gay? The fact that they are not attracted to males means they are not gay. One does not have to be into football, wrestling, and monster trucks to be heterosexual, and the fact that you would assume they are gay based on the kinds of toys they played with shows your own ignorance. Is a female who enjoys hunting and sports automatically a lesbian? Of course not.</p>