There's no such thing as Transexuals

Um. In what sense IS its salient?

This story…reads like one-handed typing. I don’t see the relevance of explicitly assuming that the “trans” person in the story isn’t actually trans, but play acting. As I am using the word trans, the woman in this story would not qualify; “liking to dress up as the opposite sex every once in a while, for the lols” is not the same as a sincere belief that one was born in a body that doesn’t reflect their subjective sex.

As for the other non-conforming physical examples (low appetite and tolerance for alcohol, small stature, soft-spokenness), there are a ton of cis men who meet all those criteria.

Yes, but again, most of our body things just aren’t relevant. You don’t suspect the short men you know of actually being women, so even those ludicrous indicia of body misalignment are not really gendered in the way you assume them to be in your story.

Pooping is biological. But it’s not relevant in this discussion, because pooping in a modern unisex bathroom is not a social activity.

Height does play an important role in how we perceive individuals. Women standing at 5’8" or taller would have an easier time having their height align with the average males height (5’10") therefore allowing them to pretend to be male with greater ease than say if they were was 5’2". If a short man (5’4" as in the story I mentioned above) decked himself out as a woman, it would be more likely that he would be perceived as a woman due to his short stature than a 6’0 man who decked himself out in the same manner to imitate a woman. Petite men just have an easier time lying to the masses about the nature of their gender if they so choose.
http://www.wecare4eyes.com/averageemployeeheights.htm
In the chart, Philippine males are on average the height (5’4") of many woman (world wide average 5’6") which can lend itself to a male physique being mistaken for a female physique due to similar statures in regards to the worldwide average of a female’s height. Fausexuals without their costuming and hormones are very rarely mistaken for their coveted gender. Typical fauxwomen and fauxmen are never mistaken for their coveted gender no matter what they do to conceal their true nature, people in general feel that there is things are amiss about them, off, not right. Their voice is wrong, height is wrong, musculature is wrong, facial attributes are wrong, etc.

So is ok if I walk into a ladie’s bathroom? What would be the problem?

@Carleas

You just don’t get it…moving on.

Periods, menopause, real vaginas and wombs can’t be found in men, and they have social consequences.

It’s not just smaller stature, women’s bodies make them different and generally more vulnerable in all sorts of ways, that have social implications, and they also make them more or less attractive to people with different sexual orientations.

And the same thing could be said of psychosexual traits, that even tho they’re more prevalent in one sex than another, they can be found in both sexes, so why do trans feel the need to sexualize them?
And if their perception of their psychosexuality is not based on what psychosexual traits they believe they possess, than it’s not actually based on anything, and so referring to themselves as psychosexually male or female makes about as much sense as referring to myself as psychologically pineapple or octagon.

If I’m Jack the fauxman’s boss, and I tell her to go meet some people at x, and I tell these people who’ve never met Jack to meet Jack at x, on the basis of her masculine name they’ll be looking for a male, and there’ll be more confusion than there’d be if Jack had a feminine name, like Jill.

In sexual situations or sports like MMA, a persons personality is less and their physique more relevant, so why do faxumen and fauxwomen still insist on being referred to as their coveted sex in these situations?

I’m not defending the idea of gendered bathrooms, so I want to plant a flag there.

But where bathrooms are gendered, the difference between a man who presents as a man and identifies as a man going into a women’s room, and a biological man who presents as a woman and identifies as a woman going into a women’s room, is that in the former case, the person is openly transgressing the social norm and it’s reasonable to worry that they will transgress other norms of bathroom etiquette. It’s the difference between someone going into the bathroom thinking “this bathroom is for me and people like me”, and someone going into the bathroom thinking, “this bathroom explicitly excludes me and I’m going in anyway.”

Communication is a two way street. Help me understand. Your story does not contain a trans character. What am I missing.

I don’t know the period, menopause, vagina, or womb situation of almost any woman I interact with. In almost all social situations, none of that matters.

Aren’t you sexualizing them?

I agree that transsexuality raises interesting questions about gender more broadly. Recognizing transsexuals seems to undermine blank-slate philosophies of the social equality of the sexes. A transwoman asking to be treated as a woman implicitly demands that women be treated differently.

If anything, the difference in confusion will be marginal. A transman who presents as male is generally well within the distribution of male traits.

As I’ve acknowledged, this is a real but distinct problem. I expect that transsexuals don’t think of themselves as having one sex in social contexts and a different sex in others, but as having one coherent sexual identity that they expect to carry with them into any context they enter. I think that’s something of a conceptual failure, but an understanding given the way our culture conceptualizes sex and gender, and the limits of how our language constrains expression of those concepts.

For the purpose of this discussion, let’s stipulate that s-sex means social sex, and b-sex means biological sex. With that distinction, it’s seems trivially easy to understand how someone could be s-female and b-male, and that there would be no tension in doing so. Then we could discuss whether s-sex or b-sex is more important in a given context. In a doctor’s office, b-sex is likely to dominate. In a business setting, s-sex would dominate (to the extent even that is relevant). For gift-giving, s-sex. For MMA? B-sex seems more important. For mental competitions, like chess or math olympics, maybe s-sex is dominant.

The point being, there are multiple distinct and distinguishable concepts tied up in sex that don’t have a necessary relationship with one another, and one or the other may be more salient in a given situation. There’s no tension or deception in understanding the world that way, and in many contexts our predictions about behavior, i.e. the “effectiveness” of our beliefs, will be better when we treat them separately.

You don’t think girls should have their own bathroom?

God help you son. Nobody else can.

I do not wish to ignore reality, Carleas. A male body means male. Whether they think this or that is not really my problem and they can be left to their own devises as long as they do not infringe on the nature of reality. If fauxsexuals wish to be socially delusional, have at it, but don’t expect me or the rest of a sane society to participate in your delusions willingly or unknowingly because honesty escapes you.

I’m not strongly committed to it, no. Co-ed bathrooms exist and don’t seem to pose any problems in practice. The separation seems to be a holdover from a time when men and women were more segregated generally, and cultures more prudish about the human body than ours is (or should be). Segregated bathrooms aren’t a human universal in all cultures and at all times. No part of human freedom or well-being requires gender segregated pooping areas.

I’m so glad. And since we’ve seen in this threat that the reality is that some men have bodies, brains, and behavior that place them closer to women on the distribution of traits, and we know that the reality is that we don’t have access to information about a lot of traits, our reality-based conclusion should be that we often can’t do better than letting people tell us themselves which cluster of traits is best for modeling them as social beings.

Prudish means asexual. To ignore the sexuality of a naked or half naked body or a girl when she’s retouching her make-up, the vulnerability of that moment, that’s prudish.

If a girl walks in and I’m using a urinal and she doesn’t think about my dick, that’s prudish.

Maybe you are for the sexualization of bathrooms? Maybe no means yes, maybe girls want no privacy ever, to constantly be exposed to the sexuality of men.

Heck, come to think of it, I myself would like to go to the bathroom and not be seen by a girl.

Imagine I go on a date and the girl gets up to go to the bathroom. Suddenly the tea or whatever gets to me and I urgently have to take a piss. I go to the bathroom and hear her farting and such.

Maybe I’m an advanced guy, maybe it doesn’t bother me. Do you not think it bothers her? That I heard her taking an explosive shit?

These are trivialities. Say I’m a girl and I walk into the bathroom to cry a little, I’m overwhelmed. I expect the comforting company of my fellow womenfolk. A guy who acts like a girl is there, trying to fit into the situation.

It’s just all kinds of fucked up, Carleas. What if a guy who is a creep, of which there are many, walks in as your daughter wlalks in. Maybe shoots her a glance. Normally she could just ignore him, walk away. But a bathroom is a pretty vulnerable place. This wouldn’t bother you?

Wake up man. For the sake of your women. Lying to yourself is not more important than the integrity of little girls.

Maybe you’re at a work meeting, and you and your same-sex employer both go to the bathroom and, whoops, you’ve got the shits! How embarrassing! Maybe you and your friends are out on the town and two of you use the bathroom at the same time, but you’re camera shy at the urinal. Oh noes!

There are cultures where nudity is not always sexualized. There are cultures where defecation isn’t considered a sexual act. There are cultures that already have coed bathrooms and it’s fine.

Bad things can happen in the bathroom, sure. And if I could flip a switch and change all gendered bathrooms to coed bathrooms I wouldn’t. But I also don’t have a problem with a cultural trend that leads to coed bathrooms, that isn’t in and of itself a bad thing given the right cultural environment (and such cultural environments are extant). Moreover, I don’t think coed bathrooms should be designed in the same way that single-sex bathrooms are. In the same way that we’ve moved away from group showers in single-sex locker rooms, coed bathrooms are likely not to include urinals next to the sink. The coed bathrooms I’ve used had toilet stalls with real walls and doors opening into a common sink area, and they weren’t a problem and it didn’t feel weird to pass women on the way in or wash my hands next to them on the way out.

But this is all besides the point. In a world with single sex bathrooms, we need to figure out what to do with people who present as a member of a given sex until they take off their pants or are subjected to a genetic screen. A transman in a women’s bathroom is going to make people just as uncomfortable as a cis man would. Those people should use the bathroom that makes them comfortable, because it’s very likely to be the bathroom that minimizes discomfort for everyone else.

@Carleas

It does, I said her clothing, personality and interests were mostly masculine.
I emphasized her physical sex, because it was more relevant to the point I was making, that physical sex matters in social situations.

You know the vagina and womb of almost every women you meet, and that alone affects how you feel about and interact with them.

Faxumen, like women and unlike real men, tend to be moodier, because of things like periods and menopause, and this moodiness comes up in social situations, making your interactions with them different than your interactions with real men, whether you’re able to infer they’re having their period or going through menopause, or not.

If you’re a heterosexual man or lesbian, transmen who haven’t had sex reassignment surgery or consumed steroids are going to be attractive to you, and if they have, they’re going to be attractive to, some, or a few heterosexual women and gay men, and so in this way their physical sex is relevant in social situations.

And if you’re having relations with a transman, wombs, vaginas and so on would become even more relevant, so by your reasoning, one could especially meaningfully refer to and think of a transman as essentially a woman in sexual and romantic situations, or in social situations with potential for sex and romance.

I am sexualizing them, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
What’s wrong is only sexualizing psychological traits and not physical traits, which’s what you were doing.
either we sexualize both or we sexualize neither, only sexualizing psychological traits plays into your narrative that we should only consider their psychology in determining their sex outside the doctors office.

It varies.

It doesn’t make much sense to refer to and fundamentally think of a person as being one sex in some situations and another in other situations, it’s cognitively and linguistically dissonant, and it’s not something cis or trans people in fact do, it’d be a consequence of something you suggest we do.
We should refer to a persons sex as what it overall is in its totality, and transmen with androgynous brains/minds and feminine bodies, are overall female.

@Carleas

Men are obviously more likely to sexually prey on women than women are in restrooms, and since transmen are psychosexually somewhere in between men and women, and physiosexually men, they’re probably more likely to prey on women than women are in restrooms as well.

Then use they, it’s more appropriate than referring to them by their coveted sex.

even if you sincerely believe you’re a Muslim, if you don’t follow any of the five pillars of Islam, you won’t be accepted by most Muslims, and even I, as an atheist, wouldn’t take you seriously as a Muslim.
Maybe the way you operate, you just accept almost everything people say about themselves, but that’s not how I, and many other people operate.
People can be wrong about themselves, X can say they’re calm and cool, doesn’t mean they are, X can say they’re extroverted, doesn’t mean they are, X can say they’re a good singer or dancer, doesn’t mean they are, X can say they’re not an alcoholic, doesn’t mean they aren’t.
If I just met you, I may extend you some benefit of the doubt, but as I get to know you, if I see you have a habit of contradicting yourself, a poor sense of self/theory of mind, lack of introspective intelligence, thoughtfulness, I’m going to start identifying you irrespective of how you identify yourself.

Clearly we have been sloppy with defining our terms.

As I understand and use the term “transsexual”, it encompasses people who sincerely identify as a sex different from what I’ve been calling their “biological sex” (wiki refers to it as “assigned sex”, I’ve also seen ‘birth sex’; in the context of this discussion I think ‘chromosomal sex’ is a mutually intelligible way to express the same idea). Wiki also makes a distinction between ‘transsexual’ and ‘transgender’, where the meaning seems to be that transsexual = transgender + surgery (hat’s being a bit glib, but true enough for present purposes). In other words, a transgender person has the subjective experience of feeling like the wrong sex, and a transsexual person acts on that experience to become the sex they feel they should be.

I would call the person in your story a transvestite: she doesn’t subjectively feel that she’s a man trapped in a woman’s body, she feels like a woman. She dresses like a man on occasion “for the lols”, as you put it. But my impression is that transvestism is not understood as an acute form of gender dysphoria, but as an entirely different thing. It’s roleplaying rather than a fundamental aspect of personal identity.

So perhaps we need to refine the constituent parts in the composite concept of sex. On the one hand, there’s how one perceives oneself, and on the other how one is perceived by others. On a separate dimension, there’s one’s social and one’s biological sex. That gives four quadrants:

(
\begin{array}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
& Social & Biological \ \hline
Perception\ by\ others & 1 & 2 \ \hline
Self\unicode{x2010}perception & 3 & 4\ \hline
\end{array}
)

So, for example, a cis woman who dresses as a man will have sex M in quadrant 1 and 2 (though 2 is by inference), and sex F in quadrant 3 and 4. A transman, by contrast, will have sex M in 1, 2, and 3 (if they are post-op), but sex F in 4. If they aren’t passing, they may have sex M in 1 and 3, and F in 2 and 4. Delusion is possible, as when a transman has sex M in 4, e.g. he really expects a genetic test to show that he is a man.

My position is that these four quadrants are different facets of the composite concept of “sex”, and can have different sex valence. You say that “it doesn’t make much sense to refer to and fundamentally think of a person as being one sex in some situations and another in other situations”, you’re treating sex as a unitary concept, such that all the quadrants should always have the same sex. But that’s not what I’m arguing. Rather, I’m arguing that a person’s sex can be static in each quadrant, but that in different contexts we care more about different quadrants (e.g. doctors care more about 4 than 1).

There is no single “overall…totality” of sex in the way you’re using it.

So, returning to the story, your character is not transsexual in the sense that her quadrant 3 aligns with her quadrant 4: she feels like a woman (3), and is biologically a woman (4).

Sure, but men are also more likely to sexually prey on men than are women.

In any case, the incidence is so low that it doesn’t more harm than it prevents to force people into a bathroom contrary to their sexual identity.

I know a lot of “two-day” or “cultural” Christians, and I don’t doubt their Christianity. I don’t think being a bad Muslim is the same as not being a Muslim at all.

Yeah, but not all things I can say about myself are like religion or (as I argue) sex. As I said to Thanathots, ownership of property isn’t a matter of self-identity. Neither is being 6 feet tall. And, as I acknowledge here, people can have delusions and just be mistaken about aspects of their sexuality. But that’s not to say that all aspects of sexuality work this way. Some aspects are matters of identity, they are about subjective experience and people are local experts on their own subjective experience.

(I’m even open to the possibility that someone can be mistaken about their subjective experience, but those are necessarily very weird edge cases that basically never apply outside of a philosophy discussion.)

Don’t say “we” when it is you, Carleas. Gloominary has been very specific, down to earth, and in alignment with realistic perceptions of phenomena and objective reality whereas you have consistently tried to redefine the meaning of male and female, genetics, safety, imposition, honesty, belief, standards, etc.

@Carleas

Okay but she is transgender, I don’t know why you keep insisting she’s not, it’s my story, and in the story I say she identifies as a man trapped in a woman’s body.
And the real reason she dresses up as a woman is to seduce me, not for the lols like she feigns, again it’s my story.
And even if she occasionally dresses up as the same sex for the hell of it, that doesn’t necessarily mean the times she dresses up as the opposite sex are insincere, I’m telling you it’s my story, she’s being sincere.
The point of the story is a persons physical sex matters in social situations, and actually, I’ve made that point regardless of whether she’s transgender or not.

Gay men have just as much opportunity to prey on men, regardless of whether we allow transwomen to use the women’s washroom or not.

Furthermore, men are more of a threat to women than other men anyway, because the vast majority of men are straight, and men are physically capable of defending themselves from other men.

According to the way you define sexuality, in the context of washrooms, only a persons physical biology is relevant, so transwomen should be called by their chromosomal sex in washrooms, not their coveted sex.

That’s your opinion it would cause less harm, my opinion is a handful less women being sexually preyed on, is worth restricting transwomen, who are not actually women, from washrooms.

And some men will in all likelihood abuse the system by insincerely dressing up as women to spy on women.

Well that’s your opinion and perception, and you’re entitled to it, just as Christians, Muslims, scholars and others are entitled to their opinion and perception that someone who doesn’t believe Jesus is the resurrected Godman, or that someone who doesn’t believe Allah is the one and only God, is not a Christian or Muslim.

If your experience isn’t objective, if people and/or science can’t confirm, deny, experience or infer it, than it may as well not exist to people and/or science.
Your subjective experience may be you are the lord of planet Zircon, and you should be addresses as such whenever you walk into a room, but we will not be able to confirm or deny it, so we don’t owe it to you.

I feel like a car.
What quadrant do you have for me?

What do quadrants change about reproductive functions, i.e. “SEX”?

Ah, I didn’t understand that she was lying when she said she dresses as a man “for the lols”, my mistake.

In that case, your story is just not a particularly good intuition pump. You’ve posited someone who is a transman who cross-dresses as a woman, and is generally gynophilic but also sometimes acts androphilic. That’s a weird case and doesn’t tell us much about transmen generally.

My point is that “the incidence is so low that it does more harm than it prevents to force people into a bathroom contrary to their sexual identity.” The “vast majority of men” aren’t assaulting women in any context.

I think this way of thinking of religious identity is problematic. Yes, some Protestants think Catholics aren’t Christians and vice versa, but to take too hard a line here risks eliminating the idea that someone can just be a bad Christian. It collapses the idea of apostacy completely, since a Muslim apostate is just not a Muslim at all. We can do that, but it isn’t very useful in understanding reality. We should expect a bad Christian to act differently from someone who doesn’t identify as a Christian at all.

This doesn’t seem to be the case. Behavioral psychology does a bad job of predicting behavior, because it treats people as a black box and discounts their subjective experience completely. But how we subjectively interpret experiences does affect how we behave. Cognitive behavior therapy backs that up empirically, addressing psychological issues by helping people to interpret their thoughts and experiences differently. The fact that it’s effective suggests that it isn’t the case that those subjective interpretations “may as well not exist”.

Sex is more than reproductive function. Genitals don’t have necessary implications about who does the parenting. Chromosomes don’t dictate who should propose, or what color they should wear at their wedding. Certain aspects of sex are present at birth, and others are provided by the culture in which someone is raised, and differ across culture and across times and place. Those latter aspects are contingent, they don’t follow from reproductive or chromosomal sex.