Help me understand how CAIS is not a problem for us?

submitted by whoamiwhowhowhowho from self.GenderCritical

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[–]whoamiwhowhowhowho[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Do they?

In my experience, yes, but it's interesting to hear that some don't! Thanks, I'll have to look into that further.

I would say, as a tentative definition, that a phenotype is an evolved body type that develops according to an organism’s internal logic. Seeking a medically created female body as an adult has a very different social significance to being born and growing up female.

Could be, but what's stopping someone else from defining it differently?

A very androgynous-looking male child who is treated as a girl from toddlerhood, who goes on blockers early, who goes on to take estrogen, who has SRS early, and who passes well might not experience much male socialization. I fully realize that would be an extreme minority case, but thinking about a scenario like that and knowing I'd still consider that person a boy/man leads me to realize that I (like you, if I'm understanding correctly) differentiate between a female-appearing body that developed naturally and one that was acquired through some sort of intervention, and I apparently make that differentiation no matter what the social circumstances surrounding that person are. I suppose when it comes down to it, I'm trying to find out if there's a good argument out there for why characteristics that developed naturally are fundamentally different (and more important to the reality of who/what someone is) from characteristics that one wouldn't have acquired without intervention, rather than distinguishing between them because of their effects (e.g. different socialization).

Sorry for that word dump. I'm having a hard time processing my own thoughts about this but didn't want to keep putting off responding.

[–]Spikygrasspod 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Could be, but what's stopping someone else from defining it differently?

Of course we can define things differently, but terms should be useful, in that they have power to explain and predict real phenomena. I'd be open to other definitions if they're useful and sensible.

Sorry for that word dump. I'm having a hard time processing my own thoughts about this but didn't want to keep putting off responding.

Nothing to apologise for, I've seen longer sentences :D

A boy who was treated as a girl from an early age and medically altered early on would indeed be a very unusual case, and we might have social reasons to treat them as though they were a woman. But I think the reason that we treat naturally developed features and acquired features differently is that we know perfectly well that nature creates an entire, incredibly complex being when it creates an animal. Our physiological differences from men are profound, ranging from the life alteringly significant ability to conceive, gestate and deliver babies, to the dozens of miniscule differences in a wide range of things like immune function, metabolism, susceptibility to disease, joint laxity etc etc. And not just our physical features but our motivations, desires, and thoughts are shaped by the kind of animals we are, and by our evolutionarily determined reproductive roles and strategies. Nature creates a masterpiece of detail every time it creates an animal, and it's the history of our evolution and development that give us our essential nature. We sometimes pretend this isn't so--we pretend that we are intellectual beings of our own invention, but that just isn't true. Anyway, adding prosthetic breasts is, in my opinion, more analogous to putting on a headband with cat ears than it is to growing breasts in puberty. It's a flesh costume, one that doesn't change the type of animal underneath. In fact it merely reflects the type underneath, since being a trans woman with a desire to mimic femaleness is necessarily an exclusively male experience.

Also sorry if that was messy or incoherent. Very tired :)