you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]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 :)