Well, you have repeatedly called trans women "men"
I really don't bear you any ill will and I consider you a good person.
Oh, there is definitely something wrong with me. No one would accuse me of being a well-adjusted totally normal person.
I find your inability to think outside of your own positioning to be crippling. You come across as educated, but you lack any of the qualities that a truly educated person has and you seem completely unwilling to understand another person's position or even state them correctly, or the ability to entertain them as a possibility in opposition to your own.
It's sad really because it's an emotional handicap that causes you not to think clearly. The fact that you are ultimately driven by emotion in your thinking is why you always end up thinking that other people are driven by emotion too. It's a projection on your part and a lack of intellectual rigor where you actually deal with a person's positions rather than castigating where they are coming from.
I never said I deny the phenomenon that is described as gender by certain scholars. I just think that their entire schema is ill thought out and is dependent on ridiculous and stupid stereotypes and false limitations that themselves fall apart under scrutiny. I think overall the way the schema is being presented to the public is limiting and damaging rather than helpful. Not only to trans people or gay people, but also to heterosexual people who I think by and large desperately need a more broad paradigm of expression within their sex and are harmed by it.
In particular, I find that defining a person based on their gender is deeply harmful. We should be looking for less labels but at the same time offering people more knowledge and range of potential traits and behaviors. We should see none of this as fixed, but instead see all of this as casting lines out for truth in the ultimate discovery process of who and what we really are.... Accepting and applying labels by people that are barely conscious and have done almost no inner work at all is harmful to the process of self-discovery as anyone who's done any work on that level can a test to.
I think this limitation harms marriages most especially because it gets at the very nature of what men and women are allowed to be in our culture and gets to the expectations that each gender has of the other and the pressures and unnecessary limitations that produces in a person when they have to stifle who they are in order to be accepted in the current paradigm. It turns people into pretend actors instead of authentic human beings.
The notion that there is a range of behavior allowable for men and women is completely acceptable to me. How to describe that? What language to use? What the best framework is for navigating the phenomenon is what is up for dispute in my mind.
Ultimately, we are not talking about trans and gender. We're talking about what it means to be human, what it means to be male and what it means to be female. And I do not think that the current paradigm is thinking very deeply about this at all and is using childish stereotypes in its definitions and diagnostics. It all seems very amateurish to me.
I alluded to all of this in short form, but apparently you didn't listen or read it before you replied.
This is what I mean about the discourse in the states on this topic... It's pathetic. You can get more thoughtful discourse from blue collar workers in Europe than you can from educated people in the states. When I started looking into this phenomenon three or so years ago, mainly because of sherdog threads posted about it. I didn't find a lot of helpful discourse from the states, but I found all kinds of podcasts and especially panels with scholars on them from varying perspectives from Europe. And it's not that I found a monolith of agreement, but at least I found healthy intellectual discourse.
