I am all about Freedom for everyone, I say live and let live.
But playing devils advocate, lets see what the other side is saying....
People say that we live in a postmodern age that has rejected metaphysics. That’s not quite true.
www.heritage.org
I'll respond to this as if you are merely mislead and actually asking in good faith and a desire to understand, and from an intellectually honest place, even though I don't have much supporting evidence to believe that. Maybe slightly more than other conservatives here I guess. The article is replete with proof that the writer deliberately misunderstands the distinction between sex and gender.
From the article:
"The phrase “sex assigned at birth” is now favored because it makes room for “gender identity” as the real basis of a person’s sex."
No. Its because gender identity is the basis of a person's gender, while sex is biological, hence the name. Sex assigned at birth also has utility because some people are born intersex and often doctors will pick the sex traits they think are dominant and try to do surgery to remove the others to make the individual conform to the binary. This isn't to say that all trans people are born intersex, though it wouldn't surprise me if many were. If our bodies can be born somewhere in between the binary of male and female, is it really so hard to believe that some people's gender identity would fall on a spectrum as well? In any case, the very existence of intersex people proves the Christian claim from the Bible that God created us all male or female to be wrong. I could go into the religious angle to all this but I'll try to stay on politics, although the two are often related.
“From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.”
Never have I ever heard a trans person or a trans activist make this claim, and I am steeped in what you'd call trans ideology, including recent "up to date" stuff.
"Now, activists claim that gender identity is destiny, while biological sex is the social construct."
Again, I have only heard that gender is the construct, not sex. If someone calling themselves a trans activist claims otherwise, I think they'd be at odds with the vast majority of trans people and trans activists. My suspicion is that this is either a misrepresentation of that particular trans activists beliefs, or that it was cherry picked to deliberately strawman the opposition and their beliefs.
"These notions about sex and gender are now being taught to young children."
How young and where? Citation needed.
"The second characteristic is “gender expression,” which is “the way you present gender, through your actions, dress, and demeanor.”"
Correct
"While activists claim that the possibilities for gender identity are rather expansive—man, woman, both, neither—they also insist that gender identity is innate, or established at a very young age, and thereafter immutable."
Wrong, innate does not necessarily translate to immutable. It could change or shift over time while remaining innate. As a person's understanding of what gender meanes and represents, so too could their understanding of their gender shift. Society's construct of what it means to "be a man" or what is manly behavior has shifted with time and cuture, which is why we say it is a construct.
"On the one hand, they claim that the real self is something other than the physical body, in a new form of Gnostic dualism, yet at the same time they embrace a materialist philosophy in which only the material world exists. They say that gender is purely a social construct, while asserting that a person can be “trapped” in the wrong gender."
Yeah your personality and what makes you you is not physical, yet we are our bodies and Brains. when they expire so too does our personality and any other non-physical attribute which defined the individual. Seems obvious. Yeah gender is a construct, and people feel trapped when their biological sex is not what they feel their gender is, because historically and presently much of society demands that people behave in ways that correspond with their sex in terms of gender expression, where one sex always expresses as the typically associated gender.
"They promote a radical expressive individualism in which people are free to do whatever they want and define the truth however they wish, yet they try ruthlessly to enforce acceptance of transgender ideology."
Gender is a construct and largely arbitrary, so yeah people can express however thay want. This has nothing to do with defining truth however they want. I'm still not sure what exactly conservatives think trans ideology entails so whether or not we want to "force" it on anyone, I couldn't say. Ruthless? Like pointing guns at people and killing them when they don't agree? Guess I'll just write that off as persecution complex flavor text
"If gender is a social construct, how can gender identity be innate and immutable?"
Because innate just means not consciously chosen, and that doesn't mean it's immutable, as previously mentioned
"How can one’s identity with respect to a social construct be determined by biology in the womb?"
It isn't
"How can one’s identity be unchangeable (immutable) with respect to an ever-changing social construct?"
It can't and isn't
"The challenge for activists is to offer a plausible definition of gender and gender identity that is independent of bodily sex."
They've been trying to do this but conservative don't care to try to listen or understand. When a conservative tells someone who they know to have a penis to "man up" or "act like a man" they come close to understanding that gender has associated expected behaviors and attitudes, which vary by culture and across time. They're arbitrary to a large extent.
"Is there a gender binary or not?"
There is a binary with a spectrum in between, just as light is a spectrum but scientists still refer to things "red shifting" or "blue shifting"
"Somehow, it both does and does not exist, according to transgender activists. If the categories of “man” and “woman” are objective enough that people can identify as, and be
, men and women, how can gender also be a spectrum, where people can identify as, and be, both, or neither, or somewhere in between?"
This is like saying that "yellow" and "blue" are objective enough to identify, then being surprised by the existence of green or teal or chartreuse and the slight variation with which people will ascribe certain blends in that range to be more blue or yellow.
"What does it even mean to have an internal sense of gender? What does gender feel like? What meaning can we give to the concept of sex or gender—and thus what internal “sense” can we have of gender—apart from having a body of a particular sex?"
Great question and one I'd encourage conservatives to reflect on the next time they tell someone that theyre acting like a girl or tell someone to man up.
"The challenge for the transgender activist is to explain what these feelings are like, and how someone could know if he or she “feels like” the opposite sex, or neither, or both."
All too easy. Simply ask a large selection of cis people what it feels like to be a man or woman. Then if someone describes having feelings more aligned with, say, women, even though they are biologically male, then that's how they know.
"Why should feeling like a man—whatever that means—make someone a man?"
Because in terms of gender, it does. Never have I heard any trans person or activist claim that someone's gender identity determines their biological sex.
"Our feelings don’t determine our age or our height. And few people buy into Rachel Dolezal’s claim to identify as a black woman, since she is clearly not."
Age and height, sure. However, what it means to be a black woman has cultural implications so yes I could see someone who is not black identifying as such especially if they were raised in that cuture, like adopted etc. Also, black people could be born albino or have vitiligo, would that make them unreasonable to identify as black? Here too I think even that person would acknowledge the distinction between culture and race insofar as race has biological distinctions, which genetically speaking, are insignificant.
"Of course, a transgender activist could reply that an “identity” is, by definition, just an inner sense of self. But if that’s the case, gender identity is merely a disclosure of how one feels. Saying that someone is transgender, then, says only that the person has feelings that he or she is the opposite sex."
More or less correct although it's a bit more than just "feeling"
"If gender identity is self-created, why must other people accept it as reality? If we should be free to choose our own gender reality, why can some people impose their idea of reality on others just because they identify as transgender?"
genders are a social construct that predated the individual who feels and identifies with them. People should accept it as reality because there is no utility in trying to force someone to act like a gender that they do not identify with, apart from trying to make ourselves feel more comfortable since we would rather not try to understand something that is unintuitve to us and that we do not sympathize with (and here I speak from experience, having been a former conservative, Christian fundamentalist and homophobe including the belief that gay people should be executed) the reality is it is conservatives who want to force their view that trans people are degenerate, defective, ect on everyone because they think their arbitrary and constructed notions of gender are timeless and Immutable and maybe even mandated by their god.
"the claims of transgender activists are confusing because they are philosophically incoherent. Activists rely on contradictory claims as needed to advance their position"
That's particularly rich coming from the same people who claim that being born with a vagina makes you a woman, then when they find out an Olympic boxer was born with one, move the goal post and claim that it's chromosomes that determine sex, (ignoring that there is no evidence that she has xy chromosomes apart from a Russian claim because they were sore lasers and ignoring that determining chromosomes was impossible throughout most of history, yet people still seemed to know what gender and sex thay were. Also, there are chromosome abnormalities, not everyone has the normal (and by normal here I mean most commonly occuring) configuration) conservatives will move the goal post as much as they need to continue to not have to understand and retain their prejudice.
"That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths."
Sorry, who are the ones denying biology in nature again? The Christian dogma says we were all born male and female, yet the existence of intersex people disproves this. It also says the animals are male and female, again, easily falsified by a rudimentary knowledge of even a few animal species.
"While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas"
No, you.
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