[FUlibs]

So you're a guy who likes dressing up like a girl. Ok, acceptable. Now stop lying and calling yourself a girl. You're not.

Edit: Fuck you downvoters. Yes, I know it's socially unacceptable to question someone's "identity". I don't care. That identity is a lie. He's a woman because he likes women's clothing just like I'm black because I love me some fried chicken.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

This is the internet, I can call myself a girl if I want to. If other people don't want to, that's their problem.

Also, you clearly don't know anything about trans people if you think it's as simple as "dressing up like a girl".

[camus]

The only question is what are you legally? if you are legally a man then you are a man no matter what you think you are. If you are a woman , then likewise.

[jholman]

Legal gender is is totally not the only question. Why would you hit the comment button, just to say something so obviously wrong?

There's not one legal question, but many. If you live in a jurisdiction with different rights by sex-or-gender, which rights do you get? If you live in a jurisdiction with legal heterosexual marriage but illegal homosexual marriage, who may you marry? If you represent yourself as (fe)male to someone who cares, are you committing fraud? When contracts legally discriminate between genders (e.g. maybe scholarships for one gender only?), do you get to choose which gender you are for those contracts?

There're medical questions: if sex is a useful predictor of therapeutic effectiveness, what should you be telling your doctor? What should E.R. techs do? What if _gender_ is a useful predictor of therapeutic effectiveness? (Consider difficult cases like this: someone who is XY but was gender-reassigned in infancy to female (it has happened!), and raised female, and believes emself female.... which pathologies will follow male distributions, which will follow female, which will be something else?)

There're public-space social questions: which washrooms can you enter, which changerooms? (mutatis mutandis for other gendered public spaces). Can you attend girls-night-out? (Some friends-of-friends do a ladies night that includes transwomen; when I've met them, I'm inclined to think of them as dudes. How limited of me.)

And then, arguably most important, there're private social questions. We've already mostly worked out (at least in the left-leaning parts of the West) that neither sex nor gender determines who you want to have sex with, and that's probably fine (I personally think it's 100% fine!), but baby that's just the tip of the complicated iceberg. What do you do if you have an Adam's apple, and big hands, but you also have breasts, and you want to find people to discuss bra-sizing with?

tl;dr: gender and sex are complicated, and there are 2 defaults that seem to mostly-work for maybe 80%-95% of the population, and then a few more semi-defaults that work for maybe 80%-95% of those left, and then a few more defaults that work for maybe 90% of those left, and so on. And this shit matters to people, seriously. Don't be a dumbass by saying "oh it's as simple as X".

[camus]

you are entitled to your opinion like blah blah ... what's make my opinion wrong and yours right ? yes legal gender is the question. If you tell me you are a woman but in fact your are legally a man , you are lying to me , period.

Are you this website owner ? so in the name of whom are you saying i should not hit the comment button ? who do you think you are ?

[jlgreco]

If Ahmadinejad decrees that there are no gay people in Iran, does that make it so? If Kim Jung Un went craz(ier) and said that all North Koreans are men, would that make it so? If (when) I become galactic emperor and (for my own amusement) declare that henceforth camus's legal status will be "bird", would that make it so?

Laws are what we make them, they do not influence the nature of reality.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I'd rather not discuss my legal gender.

However, that doesn't state your gender definitively. Intersexed folks exist, people who were mistakenly mis-assigned gender by their genitals exist, and you can change your legal gender, at least where I live.

[jlgreco]

> if you are legally a man then you are a man no matter what you think you are.

Do you mean "legally a man", or "medically a man"? It is trivial to conceive of legal systems that fly in the face of what is plainly reality. The law can, and at various times and places has been, written by bigots and/or the uninformed. Who cares how it classifies things?

As for "medically a man", while it is possible to be "medically a man" or "medically a woman", for any reasonable definition of "medically", there are more than those two options.

[camus]

What does "medically a man" means ? I mean one undergoes a re-assignement because one wants to change its legal status right ? now in my home country however (France) , I dont think there is a third option , but you can legally change your sex. And that's fine.

[jlgreco]

I'm not a doctor, nor do I really do any sort of gender studies research as a hobby, so I do not know what "medically" would mean in this context. What I do know is that "legally" is basically worthless.

[darshan]

That's the only question in a legal context; it's not clear why that would be the only question (or one at all) in social contexts.

Your comment seems to suggest that you don't realize that one's legal gender status can and often does follow one's gender identity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_transsexualism

[yaddayadda]

There are multiple legal documents that can be used to establish sex or gender. What happens when a person's driver's license is in one sex and their passport in a different sex? Better yet, what happens when the person has an "X" as their passport gender?

[noonespecial]

Sometimes I forget how fierce trolling can be. HN actually has very little of it so this really stands out. I'd have blown right past it on reddit but here I accidentally read it like a real comment. Kind of like absent-mindedly eating that last shriveled and nasty grape in the bunch while preoccupied.

[jlgreco]

Why did you create a new account to post this shit? At least have the common decency to own up to your own bigotry.

[yaddayadda]

Biological sex is many things, chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, and the effects of these. If any of these don't match, is the person a guy or a girl? Even among these, there is ambiguity. I have a friend who - no joking - was born with both a vagina and penis. According to you, is my friend a guy or a girl? There were Olympic athletes who had vaginas and no penis but XY chromosomes, are they guys or girls? There is at least one study that showed transgender women (regardless of transition status) had traditionally female brains, so why should a penis at birth be more important then the person's brain?

[jlgreco]

I understand how people could be not aware of this (most children's books don't cover the subject after all) and I can understand why it might make some people uncomfortable (although it does not make me uncomfortable, unfamilar things of can make people uncomfortable. I get that.)

What I, for the life of me, cannot understand is why someone, after being informed of it, would reject the notion entirely. Where does that come from? How does someone ascribe so much importance to the concept of a gender/sex binary? Just imagine if people reacted the same to the concept of political ideologies neither republican nor democrat... I cannot fathom it, nor any reason for it.

[yaddayadda]

I think some of it is background, some of it is knowledge, some of it is time to acclimate to new knowledge, and some is Cognitive Inflexibility (https://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/why-conservative-f... and http://mprcenter.org/blog/2008/11/06/media-framing-conservat... ).

[s_baby]

A) It's pretty clear the brains of transgendered are physiologically different.

B) People who have an emotional response to sexuality and gender are usually the ones who have repressed issues regarding their sexuality and gender identity. It's a touchy situation. On one hand I want to call you out for being a bigot on the other I feel sympathetic and wish you the best.

[Fargren]

Gender and sex are two different things. If she identifies with the female gender, well then she has every right to be called a girl.

[FUlibs]

Gender is made-up. There is only sex.

[darshan]

Huh, after your other hateful comments, I'm surprised that it's almost like you get it, here.

If you differentiate between biological sex and gender as social construct (what you call "made-up"), what is your objection to someone having a "made-up" gender identity that is different from the more common gender identity of others born with their same sex?