'Transgender biological men': Sherrod Brown’s Ohio ad signals the danger of Dems hesitating on trans rights
The ad is the second one from a Democratic candidate in a swing state responding to an onslaught of anti-trans advertising.
The ad is the second one from a Democratic candidate in a swing state responding to an onslaught of anti-trans advertising.
I love in Ohio and all repub ads only talk about illegal immigrants and trans people. That's all they have, with a sprinkling of late term partial birth abortions.
I am frankly shocked that the trans stuff apparently works, well enough to be a main thrust of an ad campaign. Like I fully get there's a subset of Americans who are not comfortable with the concept, dislike trans people, think it's immoral or whatever. But it's such a big deal to you that we need a particular political party in charge so they can ban stuff? I just can't relate to that. But it's common enough that they run these ads, it's either firing up true believers or actually converting people. Somehow.
As opposed to transgender mechanical men.
Praise the Omnissiah!
Where do daleks and Cyber-men fit in?
You belong to us.
You will be like us.
Daleks are clearly "transgender mechanical enbys"
FROM THE MOMENT ...
This language reinforces the narrative that transgender women are “biological men,”
What narrative? This is mostly true, and only untrue in cases of transgender women who are intersex AFAIK.
It's the framing of trans women as "biological men" as opposed to just calling them trans women. It gives ground to the right as trying to frame us trans folk as fakers as opposed to showing us as who we are, trans men and women.
I mean that's exactly what trans means, so they're just being redundant and perpetuating this weird fear mongering. Honestly some of them are just stupid, others seem to know a lot of constituents are stupid and appeal to it while knowingly preventing funding for education so future voters AREN'T stupid
The framing being a fact check on a GOP claim, that a Dem is now being disparaged for including in their ad, that dispells the misinformation.
Lefties hurting themselves in their confusion is just classic.
The problem is that "biological man/woman" is a nonsense pseudoscientific term. There's multiple forms of sex determination: chromosomal, hormonal, and phenotypical, for example. And none of them necessarily reflect gender, which is about how the brain develops.
Chromosomal sex is what most people think of when they use terms like "biological man/woman" but the chromosomes themselves aren't nearly as important as the SRY gene which, if present and active, triggers an embryo to develop hormonally and phenotypically male sex characters and male gender. But the SRY gene isn't always where it's supposed to be or working how it's supposed to work, which can cause mismatches between sexual development and gender.
And that's only one known potential cause due somebody to be transgender. There are more that we know of, and probably more that we don't know of.
So yeah, "biological male/female" is a gross oversimplification to the point of being straight up bullshit.
This is spot on. At best, they could substitute “genotypic man/woman,” but “biological” is nonsense. It’s really only used to imply that gender identity is not biological, but of course it is.
I think the more important question is “why is that relevant?”
I don’t introduce myself with random facts about my past. “Hi, I once kissed a man on a dare”. That’s not relevant.
and the inclusion of a fact check stating it is “false” that Sherrod Brown “voted to let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.”
It was relevant to the ad to clarify the politicians voting record and counter misinformation being spread by their opponent.
This is very simple and I'm concerned that so many are completely incapable of
AFAIK
lol, turns out that's not very far
Reality disagrees with you lol
I mean, this is supposed to be where the distinction between sex and gender comes up. So it'd be incorrect to say trans women are men, but correct (I guess) to say they're male. I don't know, I might be behind the times.
A lot of the distinction of sex and gender gets muddied because as scientific evidence mounted about how blurry the lines between the sexes actually were "gender" ( not as we understand it in a modern queer context) started out as a construct that played fast and loose with phenotype and form to create a scientific construct of sex. It's in part why gender is sometimes a synonym for sex because it was aiming to preserve a biological binary which was really falling apart.
However philosophy looked at that construct and elaborated on what they were seeing and realizing that we draw arbitrary cultural lines around these things so "gender performativity" theory tends to group gender as something you do.
However gender performativity theory doesn't really cover what trans people experience. Basically, a lot of gender dysphoria is actually closer to the original use of gender. It involves people reacting to their physical bodies sex characteristics not falling in line with a sort of internal compulsion...so for a severely compressed example if I feel like everytime I am reminded through language that I do not conform to the physical features typical of the male phenotype I feel depressed, anxious and like essentially life has denied me something essential to me then I can backwards engineer that series of reactions to "I am a man / male"... Man might be a cultural category but the lack of the cultural category isn't what is upsetting, it's the social construct of woman drawing attention to the real problem of existing in my own body.
So where this gets culturally sticky is if someone insisting I am "female" it really is no different then misgendering. What's often culturally happening is they are just trying to do it in a pseudo scientific way which is why people will call you out on it.... Here's where it gets complicated. Trans people are a group of people who are lay masters with personal experience of the malleable nature of physical sex and the science of sex. Since the people often trying to categorize us as "male and female" alone are not actually giving any kind of scientific specificity it's not actually correct in a scientific biology based context so when we say you are wrong we usually don't mean it on a strictly metaphysical axis. We mean, * that's not how science uses those words*.
If I have been on testosterone a while and a couple of surgeries / or if I never went through a feminizing puberty at all I am going to fit more aspects of the male phenotype than female. I might have female chromasomal make up... but chromasomal makeup is only one facet of sex. If you wanted to be actually scientifically correct in regard to the "biological sex" of a trans person then you are going to have to take us on as individuals and that answer is going to be a lot more complicated than just rendering it down to "male" or "female". From a strictly taxonomic perspective a lot of us have become intersex. We biologically fit a category that is beyond the male/ female binary... We just did so as a matter of using technology to achieve that end.
OK, so you recognize intersex people. Good. Let's start there. So we can have people who appear like men or women who actually have the genitals of the opposite (or both), right? OK, so what caused that development? Usually it's related to chromosomes, but that isn't actually the cause. The thing that creates the differentiation is what hormones they have. The chromosomes usually are what controls their output though, so it's correlated.
OK, so we recognize that hormones are the thing that actually causes this. What happens when we artificially control what hormones are in the body? Does it matter what could have happened if we subvert that and control it manually? Which part is biologically deciding their gender? Isn't it the thing actually being expressed? If that's the case, then aren't they biologically women?
There's more to biology than you learned in your high school bio class (that you probably failed). "Basic biology" is, as the name implies, basic and not a full understanding. Anyone appealing to "basic biology" is admitting they don't actually understand any more than that.
(Just FYI so you can know where I'm coming from, I'm a cisgendered straight white man. This doesn't effect me directly, so I'm not arguing from self preservation. This shouldn't matter, but some people would probably discount the opinions of trans people as "arguing from emotion" or some bullshit just to ignore them.)
If that's the case, then aren't they biologically women?
Biologically male or female would be more correct as gender is a social construct. Also the term is referring to their original status pre-hormonal or other gender affirming care so no.
that you probably failed
Sorry to disappoint you but I have never failed a subject and have completed higher education.
”basic biology”
You’re the only person here who has used that term.