whateverknight asked:the people who try to "scientifically" (aka bigotedly) define trans people as someone who absolutely has dysphoria and giving more "concrete" (aka arbitrary) qualifiers for "what it means to be trans" are obviously not people who understand that trans people already have to deal with that to a mind-boggling degree. i have a feeling that anon was baiting you, and if they were, then they can go back to trying to define fetuses as people, or something else ludicrous.
fauxboy-deactivated20180609 answered:I can understand the link between trans identities and dysphoria, but it’s when people start bringing chromosomes and “science” into it that makes me uncomfortable.
They just don’t really understand.
and here is something that endlessly perplexes me
and keep in mind while reading this that my gender is pretty fluid
do we even know what trans is?
the common way to explain it is that the brain is “wrong”, or the body is “wrong”, or they just don’t “match”. what does that mean?
clearly the body has a sex: it has some set of sex chromosomes, modulo chimerism and androgen insensitivity and myriad other things that might interfere with their expression. but ultimately the human body has one of two sexes it’s trying to be, and some spectrum of expressions of those.
so what does it mean for those to not match the brain? the brain doesn’t have a sex. i mean, sure, it has sex chromosomes too, but they don’t seem to directly affect the brain’s development all that much. (probably. maybe. we don’t seem to know. sex hormones certainly have an impact on behavior, but as far as i can tell, the direct impact of sex chromosomes on neurological development is fairly minor.)
even if the brain did have a sex, how could it end up different from the one precribed by chromosomes, when the rest of the body is not?
so now we have “gender”, hence the rise of “transgender” over “transsexual”, and i don’t know what that is either. what does it mean to mentally be/feel “male” or “female” if they’re things that only matter for reproduction?
does it mean feeling the same way the associated sex hormones make us feel? i assume not since “i’m male because i’m aggressive” is not a thing i have heard
what, then? liking pink? liking sports? but those are the things we’re pretty sure are cultural so that can’t be it either, right? most transpeople i know aren’t exactly falling all over themselves to be stereotypes of their respective genders anyway, so that doesn’t make sense
we have this constantly-expanding vocabulary of labels, some of which i identify with, but i can’t explain why they exist or even what they are
and why does it happen so strongly and so (relatively) frequently with sex but not so much with anything else? transpeople are common enough that there are starting to be laws protecting them now, but there’s not really such a thing as being “transrace”, even though that’s similar in some ways: races have overt genetic and cultural distinctions too
it’s so bizarre that this is a thing that happens, and even the people it happens to can’t agree on what it even is
the only thing i can possibly guess is that we caused it by taking gender roles so seriously. culture has an unbelievably strong effect on us individually. so strong that it’s easier to change a body than a mind? i could believe that.