Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't chimerism in humans a kind of a mixture of both sexes, with the signs being anything from "hitchhiker's thumb" in one hand and a "normal" in the other, to ambiguous genitalia? IMO it is one of the cases where nature had problems along the way, something I have mentioned in earlier posts. I would think that with chimerism exact terminology is more important than ever, and the 5-way thing GA offered a couple of posts back wouldn't make explaining chimerism easier at all. Not sure it would even be relevant, tbh.
In your posts
here and
here you simplify it as people being "born to" one gender or the other - either that or something "psychologically" went wrong. But you don't account for the possibility that one's feeling of self-identification might be the first indication of an abnormality.
Here you say your problem is with giving people special treatment,
here you say it's because it takes a conscious effort, but
here you say you don't hate groups, you hate individuals. So, what, you won't expend conscious effort on special treatment unless it's special hatred?
But seriously, my problem was with the bits later on when you started saying that trans people were trying to shove pronouns down your throat and you refused to redefine what a man and a woman were. That hundreds of years of evolutionary science backed up your position, and that intentions (who's intentions? Mother nature's? God's?) were what defined the result. I don't think calling people herms, merms and ferms is the answer either, but - what are you worried about? That somebody like GA would flipflop and want to be called a male one day, a female the next, male the next, and back to female again? I get that that would be ridiculous, but since a transition is a once-off, I don't see the big deal.
I fail to see why chimerism is relevant here. If I've read up correctly on the subject, transgenderism is not about chimerism at all. There aren't any detectable signs, nothing like an erring chromosome, no ambiguous genitalia, nothing like that.
How many of the people exploring transgenderism have actually had their sex chromosomes tested? Has GA? I don't think people should have to provide genetic test results before asking people to refer to them by their identified gender. Besides, even that wouldn't account for
cases of XX males and XY females. True, there are cases where there's no obvious physiological basis. But I don't see any good reason not to accept a person's self-identification. In ten years, if Kayleigh had fully transitioned and was using a female identity everywhere, would you still insist on clinging to your first impression and calling her a male because she was unable to have a baby?
What pronouns are used for chimeras? As I understand, the majority of chimeras go through life without ever realising what they are. The pronoun used is the one defined at birth, I should think. As for the cases where it's not clear, I don't know. I'm interested in finding out.
I don't know a set of official rules. The Intersex Society of North America recommends that a baby be given a gender assignment at birth, whichever is more likely, but no corrective surgery. They don't recommend that a child be raised as a "third gender", but to give them honest and accurate information about their condition, so that when they're old enough, they can decide which gender they want to be.
With GA, it wasn't just a first impression. Far from it.
Have you considered how difficult it is to change social conditioning that's been instilled since birth? Of course GA used to exhibit masculine traits, and now as Kayleigh she is working to reprogram her brain to overcome the training and act in a way more aligned with her natural self. If you're having difficulty revising your mental concept, that task is exponentially more difficult from the inside. Not something to be undertaken on a whim, and an ongoing process.
It's not my paradigm. It's a set of definitions that are handy and necessary for explaining human biology (including chimerism, btw). If science was to arrive at a conclusion where they could reasonably show the likelihood and necessity of some other system than binarism in human biology, I would certainly listen and perhaps change my stance. As things stand, I haven't seen it.
Here is an excellent article about transgender and intersex treatment done in the name of social normalization. It violates patients' medical rights, including lying and withholding critical information from patients and their parents, and doing unnecessary surgery on functioning sexual organs before a patient is old enough to consent. The reasoning is that it's in people's best interests to be forced to conform to the binary system, but the suicide rates of patients say otherwise.
Not directly related, but for curiosity's sake,
here is an article about a woman who needed a kidney transplant and the results of the tissue-matching test told her she was not the mother of two of her biological sons. It took them ten years to figure it out - the binary system was not a heck of a lot of help.
I fail to see how changing the terminology that is essentially a biological reality to accommodate for a social minority can ever be a good idea. IMO, adding to it is better from a scientific point of view.
It's not a biological reality.
Here is a list of the frequency of various intersex conditions. If you don't want to change the terminology of "he/she" and "his/hers", are you in favor of "zie" and "zer"? (FWIW some of the trans people I know prefer those pronouns and some think they sound stupid.)
My point was made in reference to yours about hermaphrodites and raising the baby as a female after chopping off body parts. The baby would still be male but a mutilated and abused one.
I notice that you avoided labelling Mowgli, though. What would he be? Wolf or human?
Why must I simplify it to an inaccurate binary? To say he was wolf would belie the biological reality - though I would do it if I were talking to somebody who understood identity on the symbolic level, ie in a spiritual discussion (I agree with what you said in the other thread about the treatment of trans people on I2 vs the treatment of religious people). To say he was human would presuppose a lot of extra behaviors that he wouldn't have. I wouldn't do it if I were dealing with someone who would mistreat him based on sloppy thinking and false expectations.
