Bigots will claim trans people are delusional or lying and that it's impossible for us to do what we do and then insist upon leveraging the entire apparatus of state violence to prevent this supposedly impossible thing from ever happening again.
You know, the same thing they did and still do to gay people.
@gwynnion Yeah... And it's not just about not understanding biology beyond primary school. They, whether willfully or through ignorance, fundamentally don't understand how science works.
They want to reason about things from first principals because that's what they can understand. (They don't but they think they do.) They've found an argument that gets to the conclusions they already wanted and there they stop.
That's fundamentally not how science works. Yes, it's lovely when we can build up complete enough working knowledge (model) of a system in order to be able to reason things out like that. Often we can't. In particular, we can't for basically anything in biology. It's just too damn complex.
So what do we do? We ask questions, gather data, and do statistics in the hopes of answering some of those questions. Even if we don't have the first principals we can often get really solid answers to a well-formed question. Eventually, we hope that the answers to those questions add up to a model that we can use to reason things out. Ultimately, though, the data is ultimate. It doesn't matter how good your first principals argument is, if the data and statistics say it's junk, it's junk. Go find a new argument.
With that understanding... what does science actually know about gender? Well, we know very little about how gender works in our brains at a biochemical level. We understand hormones and anatomy fairly well. Genetics... Not nearly as well as people think. That doesn't mean trans people's experiences aren't real, just that we don't know how it all maps to brain chemistry. GCs love to latch onto this hole in our scientific understanding as if it proves something. It doesn't. It just means there's something we don't understand yet.
Back to that thing I said about asking questions... Even though we don't have a complete working model of the brain chemistry of gender, there are two things we know with striking clarity:
Transgender experiences are real and substantially different from cisgender experiences. There are specific experiential markers that trans people have and cis people never do.
For transgender people, access to transition, both social and medical, substantially improves their quality of life. There are more studies on this than I can count at this point using several different metrics for "quality of life".
That's what we know. We may not know everything there is to know about gender but we know those two things. But that second thing is precisely what GCs can't handle. People tweaking with gender freaks them the hell out. So they deny the data. They deny the things we do know with 99.9% certainty and instead rush back to their crappy first principals arguments to try and prove that their fear of the icky people is rational.
It's not. Rational people follow the data.
@faithisleaping Reasoning from first principles has a certain Aristotelian cachet among supposedly smart people but it's purely "garbage in, garbage out." You can argue your way to anything like that, which is what they do.
But yeah, an argument I often make is it doesn't MATTER how trans identities work, any more than it matters where homosexuality comes from. We have tons of evidence of what improves trans people's quality of life and that's all that matters.
@gwynnion Yup. That's literally all that matters.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if we understood how gender works at a brain chemistry level. I'd love it if we understood why one hormone leaves your brain in a fog while the other brings out the sunshine.
But we don't understand that yet so we go with what we know and what we know is that transition makes trans people's lives better.
Nowhere Girl
Faith, Purple haired feminist 🧋 
