Poll: Have you ever had your sex chromosomes directly examined?

[torzath]

A male will always be a male, even if he cuts his genitals off. When you can actually turn a fully functional male into a fully functional female (or visa versa) you MIGHT start to have some argument, but you do not with the cosmetic changes we do.

I know you're most likely not speaking literally, but hardly anything is cut off. With MtFs, we are really close to that goal, only lacking fertility (FtMs aren't so lucky, but we are getting there). Trust me, if the surgeon was skilled, you couldn't tell the difference unless you're trying to bang her uterus or something equally ridiculous. We don't generally define manhood or womanhood by fertility, so why does it matter with transfolk?

 

[Xanadu84]

Here's the fact that is tripping you up. Having a y chromosomes is STRONGLY correlated with having a penis, masculine traits, and the feeling that your male. Yes, someone may not have been tested, but if you are in an elevator with 1 other person, and when you turn your back to them a sharp, stabbing pain starts in your shoulder, and when you turn back you see that person holding a bloody knife, you assume they stabbed you. Even if you didn't see it, and even though its possible a ninjas jumped through the maitenence hatch, stabbed you, and shoved the bloody knife into the strangers hand before leaping away, you can safely infer a much simpler chain of causality. To consider otherwise is academic at best. Those genes tend to manifest in noticeable ways. That's their job. The prospect of an individual who is completely and unambiguously male, with no traits or feeling inconsistent with maleness, who is Xx, is so remote its not really useful to consider. Unless you have evidence to the contrary.

 

[Hoplon]

So far I don't seem to be able to get the correct point across.
Feel free to read what I've tried to say previously, but until I can figure out a better way of putting it, I'll forgo trying to explain the reasons for this poll.

The results are quite interesting regardless though.

I'll get back to you on this when I can explain the issue a bit better.

Your talking about the difference between genetic sexual identity and brain sexual identity.

Genetic identity only describes sexual organ morphology, recent studies have noticed that sexual preference shows up in brain structure, homosexuals showing similarities to the heterosexual members of the opposite sex (as in gay men have certain brain structures very similar to hetro women) and so it is predicted that the trans people will have others that are even more similar brain structures.

What combination of genetic and birth circumstance produces this is still totally unknown how ever, though it is almost certain that both play a factor.

 

[Do4600]

When it comes to almost anything other than human beings, a sufficient amount of modification is generally considered to change one thing into something else.

You'd pretty much never endorse the idea that the leather in a couch is still a cow, or that the bricks in your walls are still mud.

This is true, but the leather is made of cow and the bricks are made of mud, we're talking about men being made from women and women being made from men and the objectives of making bricks and leather is totally different than changing the outward appearance of somebody to appear to be a different sex. Bricks and leather are made to serve a utilitarian purpose, and they are made for physical characteristics and appearance. A brick always denotes a brick no matter how ornately it's made or appears.

If a woman gets surgery to look like a man she's still a woman that had surgery to look like a man.

As I said above, under most circumstances this would be sufficient cause. The question is not if surgery can turn a woman into a man, but how much surgery it takes to turn a woman into a man.

If appearance is all that is required to turn a woman into a man you are right. However, appearance is not necessarily truth or reality, if a woman appears to be a man it doesn't make it so, just as a magician who saws a woman in half isn't truthfully sawing a woman in half, it's a deception. While a magician represents a bemusing suspension of disbelief in something we know is impossible, a transsexual is purposefully hiding the truth in the same way that removing wrinkles from your face is a purposeful deception to change the outward content of your character and necessarily a manipulation of the outlook of the people around you.

I don't accept physical appearance by itself to be a quantity that decides objective reality. The genetic test is not needed. It's a question of whether it's acceptable to deceive people with a modified physical reality.

Why wouldn't it be? We do it all the time. Pretty much everything human beings have ever gotten their hands on is subject to being artificially modified.

Look around you. How much of that hasn't been modified from it's original state?
Why would the human body be an exception to this?

And once you accept the notion that turning one thing into another is in fact commonplace in reality (objective or otherwise), the question merely becomes how much effort you have to make for one thing to become another.

Objects are not people, they have no relative self image or relation to society, they bear no responsibility for their incidental actions, if a brick "lies" to me I blame it's creator, if a person lies to me I blame the person. Structurally changing a person's appearance to appear to be another sex does not make them that other sex in the same way that grafting a chicken costume to somebodies skin doesn't make that person a chicken. Tattoos and piercings represent the same quality that the magician represents, a suspension of disbelief in the physical form, we know it's not natural but a sex change operation is meant to be impossible to distinguish from a natural form.

In the end this is going to be you telling me that when a woman gets surgery to appear to be a man, she is then a man; and me telling you that that appearance doesn't dictate a true philosophical essence and will remain an outward expression of in inward delusion.

 

[torzath]

I've never yet met a M:F where I couldn't tell by the face and hands alone. While I haven't closely examined genitals, it is my understanding from pictures and articles that the fake clit/lips and fake vagina do not look or function like the real thing.

I'm sure every year they are improving on the cosmetic surgery, but they are still males with mutilated bodies to look more female.

I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. I'll call them female to their face because that is polite, but they are not female.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery1.html
There you go, four pages of transwomen that look completely or really darn close to cis. I'd post a similar gallery for the NSFW bits, but I don't think the mods would like that and I'm on a school computer.

And don't tell me that's how it is. We're just going to have to agree to disagree here. You can say they are mutilated males all you want, they are female.

And yes, I realize you can turn that statement around easily, that's why I said agree to disagree.

 

[Kat Humphries]

While a magician represents a bemusing suspension of disbelief in something we know is impossible, a transsexual is purposefully hiding the truth in the same way that removing wrinkles from your face is a purposeful deception to change the outward content of your character and necessarily a manipulation of the outlook of the people around you.

Although I'm sure you don't mean it this way I am just going to clarify that transsexuals do not change outward sex to appease others, or to lie to them. If someone chooses to change sex it is because they are personally uncomfortable being the sex that they are. Some people hit puberty and their body develops to be a gender they are not, beyond the point of just "I consider myself male/female" it goes beyond that to a real disconnect in the brain which can cause them to have major issues with self image. Not to say some aren't just consider themselves opposite gender and get changed

I've never yet met a M:F where I couldn't tell by the face and hands alone. While I haven't closely examined genitals, it is my understanding from pictures and articles that the fake clit/lips and fake vagina do not look or function like the real thing.

This. Is ridiculous. Facial structure, if removed from knowing if someone is female or male is HIGHLY unrepresentative. Hands also have no standing, being not at all changed by sex (they are relative to whole body size, men tend to be larger) neither is wrist thickness.
I myself, being female, have very masculine features in both my face and hands. My heatures are angular and wrists are thick. (I was once told in art class to thin my wrists in a drawing when we were practising drawing out own hands, to make them look more feminine. They were proportionally exactly the same as my wrists D
Face definition is genetically inherited, and somewhat effected by hormones yes, but male to female and female to male both take hormones before most of the surgeries, and this causes many changes themselves. Bone structure is unlikely to change much, but it is not at all an identifier.
Sensations / function will never be identical of course, because they use the nerves and tissue from the original sex organs to make the new. Cosmetically though results are quite good.

 

[dvd_72]

Physically, I am male, and that physical characteristic is completely decided by my genes. While I may not have gotten my genes checked, I can be quite certain of my physical sex due to the parts I have.

Does that define the entirety of my sexuality? Good grief no. My sexual identity is likely due to a whole range of factors many of which I wouldn't even consider, though I do believe the bits you are born with have a large influence.

All things considered I am male. A heterosexual male at that. This may not be anything special, as most people who are "genetically" men are also heterosexual. Does that make what I am inherently right or wrong? No. It's just what I am. What I will admit is that I am less certain as to exactly -how- heterosexual I am. I can intellectually acknowledge that it is a sliding scale, but I have trouble shaking my more basic understanding of discreet levels of sexuality (A-sexual, heterosexual, bi-sexual, and homosexual). While this may cause me to "Indistinctly" have to affirm my stance it does not mean I find the idea of homosexuality inherently disgusting.

Has that answered your questions OP?

 

[jklinders]

Never been tested. Largely irrelevant. I lack any of the abnormalities associated with with an abnormal genotype and have the fully functioning attributes of a male. While it is vaguely possible that this is incorrect, since I lack any reason to assume otherwise I will claim to be a perfectly normal/average XY setup.



However this is really not what you seem to be driving at. I really don't know what you are driving at so I will just sideline myself. In times past, when there was doubt about which gender a newborn was the doctor would decide for the parent and baby one way or the other and tel the parents to raise said child a boy or usually girl and make whatever surgical or medicinal adjustments needed to fit that profile. In these cases the criminal incompetence of the doctors involved led to a lifelong of confusion and difficulty fitting in for a person who had their sex chosen for them incorrectly. I do not know if this happens as much now as in the past but I would hope that it is far less common to simply "lop it off and hope for the best" now than in the past.

I lack any statistics on how many transgenders there are that were gender assigned by a doctor in this way vs those who were genetically and physically normal but feeling in their hearts that they were born the sex. You know what though? It's none of my goddamn business. Who am I to say who these folks are? This is between the transgenders, their medical practitioners and if the transgendered person wants, their families.

I may have missed the point because none of the above has anything to do with the poll question, which to me is a completely different issue from transgenderism.

 

[squeekenator]

Perhaps a better question to ask would be this: if you (assuming you're male) did, for whatever reason, get your chromosomes examined and discovered that you were actually genetically female, would you decide that clearly you are and always will be a woman and that anyone who claims you're a man is an idiot? Or would you decide that you've been a man your entire life, you look like a man, think like a man, feel like a man, and that a simple accident of chromosomes doesn't change any of that?

 

[Saladfork]

Yes, I actually looked at my own chromosomes as part of a biology experiment in University.

Genetically male.