You missed the second part of the sentence - 'that changing from one to the other is impossible on general principle'. As you also mention just below - even if somehow medical science would evolve much further still, you'd still say, no, a man will always be a man. Because of philosophical dogma, not because of biology.

And I do feel obliged to point out that biologically speaking, the distinction isn't 100 percent binary, all sorts of intersex variations do naturally occur so not everyone is born unambiguously man or woman. Unlike some, I do think that it's close enough to binary that in many contexts it makes sense to present it as a binary and make accommodations for the exceptions, rather than to toss the binary out entirely.

You mean basic philosophical reality. If science would reach the point that a trans woman had a fully functional uterus and female genitals, it wouldn't make any biological sense to keep saying 'no, but hang on, she's still a man!'. She might have been a man originally, but then every butterfly was also once a caterpillar, it's still a butterfly now.

To go back to our hypothetical future advanced medical science for a moment, in that situation the claim of that trans woman being, in fact, a woman, would not be 'provably false' at all - and your insistence on it being false would be a matter of faith, or philosophical principle, as much as your belief in God. Of course, we aren't in that situation yet and we might not ever be, so the biological reality of a trans woman is indeed still different from a cis woman - but, depending on how early she started the process and how far she took it, it may be as close or closer to it than to a cis man. Treating her as if she's indistinguishable from a cis woman may require a certain extent of goodwill and deliberately overlooking the imperfections of the process, sure, but that's not 'make believe' or a 'delusion'.

I've already discussed the comparison to BIID before and won't go over it again - but I will repeat something else: you are very wrong to think that physical pain or damage is automatically worse than mental pain or damage. I'd venture a guess that you have never suffered from major mental afflictions like severe depression, eating disorders, etc. yourself - but then neither have I, but I still have enough imagination and awareness to realize how devastating they can be.

You know very well why - you don't agree with it obviously, but you know it.

As I've repeatedly pointed out, parents and doctors absolutely do try to intervene, to the extent medically possible, in the height of children who are expected to become unusually tall or short - without knowing at that point how the children would actually feel about their height once they're adults. And that's at a much younger age even than puberty blockers and all that - but for the same reason, i.e. that those interventions are time sensitive and if you don't do them early enough, you either can't do them at all anymore or they at least are more difficult / have worse results. And they try to fix crooked teeth as well, though your talk about stopping teething entirely remains as silly a comparison as ever.

Since you like to understand where people are coming from and you don't seem to be aware - it seemed obvious to me in the exchange with mookie, but upon rereading, it may be obvious only to those of us who already knew - I have to tell you that Ghav is in fact a trans woman, so it's rather personal for her.

Sure. There's plenty of 65+ folks who have gotten that far in life without ever developing the capability to engage in meaningful, responsible relationships. Your former president comes to mind (actually possibly several of them...). That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have any age-based consent laws, or the age-based legal maturity, we certainly should, but still people reach maturity in various aspects of their lives at very different ages, if ever at all.

You hear it a lot because it's true. I'd be happy to give you any number of sources, though I suspect you don't really care to see them? Some of their much higher rate of physical victimization may not be a direct consequence of them being transgender, what with trans people being overrepresented among groups like homeless teenagers or sex workers who are more likely to face violence because of their living conditions / jobs - but then the reason for them being overrepresented in those groups is them being cast out by transphobic families or social circles, so indirectly their being trans is still the reason.

As for fentanyl, or the wider problem including also other kinds of addictions, I don't think it's accurate to say nobody seems to care. There's plenty of media and political attention for it - but the solutions aren't easy ones, it's much easier to debate (on either side of the debate) about what bathrooms trans women should use than to actually help bring down the fentanyl overdose rates, and you'll get a lot more media attention and better future political prospects that way as well.

For someone complaining about others insulting rather than discussing, your way of discussion is pretty insulting, I have to say... was it really so hard to make this comparison without throwing in those little digs?

Since, once again, I never said it was a perfect analogy, I see no reason to argue about this further.



Yes, it's so much to ask, and the reason why has been explained often enough that I won't bother repeating it again. Although I do want to stress again that I do have sympathy for parents or doctors who - in good faith - push back against a trans child's desire for transition because they think that desire is too sudden or the child isn't taking the decision seriously enough. But there is a world of difference between wanting to protect children from making a very serious mistake in their choice to transition, or taking it as dogma that transitioning is always a mistake per definition, and only the former one is an actually valid reason for postponing that transition.