An interesting discussion on transgendered men/women

I disagree to the extent that the discussion in this thread has followed avenues apart from the issue of discrimination (the ethic of transgender dating and disclosure for example).However as respects your originating post I do think the definition of discrimination is at the core of the topic you intended for discussion and your friend’s reaction to your response.

I don't think though that it is a philosophical discussion as much as a political one. If you look up the word in a dictionary you will find that it has taken on a new, additional meaning since certain discrimination became illegal. I would have to do more research to be sure, but I don't think this new meaning predates anti-discrimination laws.

Webster’s:

I have a real problem with the use of the word “fairly” in the definition,as it is major part of the definition, its meaning must be considered.

“Fair” can be defined in a way that can seem to be in keeping with the substance of the new definition of discrimination:



If we consider a classic case of illegal discrimination, refusing to sell your house to African-Americans solely, or primarily because they are black, the seller would be treating white buyers and black buyers in a way that favors white buyers. Most people would think that this is what the anti-discrimination law is all about, and so it makes sense to use “fair,” defined in this manner, in the new definition of “discrimination.”

However if I were a teacher on a bus taking a group of students to go see a movie and the group of students had a number of disabled children among it ,when the bus arrived I might insist that the able bodied children remain in their seats until all the disabled children disembarked. Unbeknownst to me, though, there were not enough tickets still available for all of the children to be able to attend the movie.

Regardless of the number of available tickets left, I treated the children in a way that favored the disabled over the able bodied. If there aren’t enough tickets for all children, then the favor provided the disabled children is even more pronounced.

This is discrimination in the conventional sense of the word. I discriminate between two groups of children based on characteristics, and I was being unfair in that I favored one group over the other in terms of my treatment of all, but is this discrimination in the modern sense of the word where wrongness is assumed?

I might argue that absent the issue of the tickets my treatment was just and proper, although not fair. I don’t think that all who consider this hypothetical would agree with me because for them fairness and justice are synonyms, and being unfair is not proper. Throw in the fact that some of the able bodied kids didn’t get to see the movie and the number of people thinking me wrong will increase.

But Webster’s has an even more troubling definition of fair:



If I am right and the modern definition discrimination is a product of anti-discrimination laws than this definition of fair makes modern discrimination dependent what is thought to be right or acceptable. This a very problematic dependency and can lead to the sort of judgment and expression of disapproval that you experienced with your friend.

Society should require only that you obey its laws, not that you agree they are right. I'm sure that most people agree that most laws are right. We don't live under a dictatorship and if most people thought that most laws were wrong, a lot of of those laws would not have been enacted or would be repealed, but I would also say that most people think that some laws are wrong. Those that share a belief that a law is wrong with a minority are not likely to see it changed, but they still have to obey it (or pay the consequences of anti-social behavior). Having to obey a law though is not the same as having to believe it is right. Everyone is capable of obeying laws they think are wrong. It may irk them to do so, it might infuriate them and it might even shame them, but they can do it. So agreeing that every law is right is not necessary for a healthy functioning society. However, coercing people into agreeing that a law is right is, I think, harmful to the health and functioning of a society, and is wrong.

It is immaterial whether or not the seller of the house agrees that it is wrong not to sell to African-American buyers. It is not even material if he doesn’t know its illegal (ignorance of the law not being a valid defense) to practice that sort of discrimination, so how it could it be material for him to agree the practice is wrong or unacceptable? It reminds me of when as a kid and didn’t want to eat lima beans. My father would tell me “You’ll eat them and you’ll like it!” Even at a very young age I knew that while he could probably find a way to make me eat them, he could never find a way to make me like them, and what difference would that make if I ate them like he wanted?

Obviously the people who draft or support certain laws would love it if everyone agreed the prohibited practice was wrong, and they may even think everyone should agree, but they are going too far if they act in any way to try and enforce agreement. What difference does it make if I don’t agree that the practice is wrong as long as I don’t engage in it? You can police people’s action but you can’t police their thought, and you should never even try to.

Obviously there are ways to attempt to enforce agreement other than through physical force or incarceration. You can attempt to shame the person, you can harass them, and you can deprive them of membership in a group. Short of brain-washing someone (if that’s even possible) though, you can’t force someone to agree with you, but the fact that it can’t be done doesn’t mean people don’t try, and with great energy and creativity.

Telling someone they are guilty of discrimination is one way, and the way that I would argue your friend tried to employ. Unfortunately the modern definition of discrimination allows people like your friend to be almost right when they employ the technique because of the word “fair” being in the definition.

The modern popular definition is based on a legal definition. I can’t blame Webster’s or other publishers for including it. If a word takes on a new popular meaning, they’re going to include it in the definition, but it took on this new popular meaning because of people like your friend who wish to expand the legal definition.

The law very is very definitely limited to certain acts of discrimination, and discrimination against certain groups of people. Your friend and like-minded individuals want to broaden its use beyond the limitations incorporated in the law.

While I would still have a problem with it, it would be less troubling if their goal was to expand it to include all practices and all groups; at least that would be fair. However they have no intent of being that all inclusive, they want to select which groups are protected not only by the law but by their view of morality and they want to determine which practices are forbidden or required to make sure there is agreement on what is thought to be right or acceptable.

Therefore your friend decided, irrespective of whether or not transgendered women are a protected class that they should be and are worthy of the protection of her morality (she might not think, though, that heterosexual men, Christians, Republicans, or any number of other groups deserve morality’s protection, and probably because whatever groups she decided to exclude, in her mind, doesn’t behave morally themselves.)

Then she decided that you don’t have a right to the opinion you expressed and that it cannot be thought to be right or acceptable. She knows she can’t force you to date a transgendered woman, and this is a hypothetical anyway, but she can pass judgment on it and sentence you to the shame of being some who discriminates.

Despite the way I’ve portrayed her to prove my point about the troubling nature of the modern definition; I don’t think that she, necessarily, is some PC dominatrix trying to take control of how you think. She could be, but I don’t know her and so can’t say. She’s plays a role in the story you’ve told us and it is that role and the people who play it every day that concern me more than your specific friend.

Circling back though, these definitions of discrimination don’t have a philosophical component unless you are including ideology and political view under the heading of philosophy.

The conventional definitions that, I believe, pre-date the introduction of anti-discrimination laws are:



These function very clearly and very well and require no consideration of philosophy. When it comes to discriminating between people, the first of the two may require a slight modification to:



I’m sure that the people who I consider to be abusers of the term discrimination believe that they are simply championing what is right. To some extent it is their very desire to display, for all to see, their perceived moral superiority over those who discriminate that drives their abuse. Regardless, there is an arrogance and need to control othesr at play here that is at the very least irritating and can move on through offensive to dangerous.

I think you're over analyzing the issue, ethics is a category of philosophy, and I believe the ideology of positive discrimination (i.e I may prefer wearing Jordans as opposed to wearing Reebok) and negative discrimination (I believe in showing preference of black people over white people) ethics, being the will of knowing right from wrong is the core of many philosophical inquiries and I see subjects as this not any different. Now, you've said quite a bit so I will not go word for word, sentence, for sentence, nor paragraph for paragraph to respond. Moving along.....

With respect to the latter portions of your post you said:

"Therefore your friend decided, irrespective of whether or not transgendered women are a protected class that they should be and are worthy of the protection of her morality (she might not think, though, that heterosexual men, Christians, Republicans, or any number of other groups deserve morality’s protection, and probably because whatever groups she decided to exclude, in her mind, doesn’t behave morally themselves.)

This hits the nail on the head, which I firmly believe is what a lot of people think regarding those who believe as she.

are you ever out in public?

i'd put the number of botched copies of the species at around 99%, of course that includes any number of indicators above and beyond gender

That's certainly possible, but the whole politically correct modus operendi, from the just plain silly to the sanctimonious coercion of "intolerance", really chaps my ass, and while you certainly seem to get the gist of what I am arguing , others pretty clearly don't.

I just have this deep seated urge to teach and enlighten.

I agree with many here that people's choice of mate is their business.
I agree with people who understand transwomen as really women. That didn't happen right away for me but I get it now. Maybe when you are my age you will too, having the ability to overview all the societal changes and many people's talking about themselves.

I am not scolding, I'm just talking. I don't care who you pick to live with for a month or forever. Love happens.

And maybe if I'm fortunate enough to be your age, I'll probably think the same way as I do now. Your notion of age bringing wisdom is misguided. I believe Aristotle once said "the wises one is the man who claims to know nothing." The ever changing world is very fluid and I cannot claim something as knowledgeable fact, simply cause I lived longer. Just as you cannot convince an Aryan White Supremacist a Japanese person is a human being.

Hitler considered the Japs to be human.

I deleted a post, if anyone wonders. It was la basura.

The annoying thing is that I tend to agree with you - I take that point.

I hope you don't count on thinking forever as you do now.

We go through so much.

A lot of us learned that news.

The fact you refer to them as "Japs" proves Aristotle's point.

Age can bring wisdom and it should, but there's no guarantee that it will. Some ignorant young jackasses just become old ignorant jackasses...wearing depends.

The advantage older people have over the young is that they been alive longer and usually have seen not only more things, but the repetition of the same things. A young person can certainly pack a lot of new things into a few years and see more than someone three times their age, but repetition isn't likely to be there. Just as every time you re-read a very good book and find something new that you missed before, the same thing holds true with experiences.

The more experiences you have the more perspective you can gain, and again, while a young person can have a lot of experience, there are some that they can't have without aging. They’re not likely to have children and watch them grow. They're not likely to have had as many triumphs and disasters. They're not as likely to have as much experience with death as someone older than them. Sure, some kids see more death than I will see in my lifetime, but, at least in America, that's rare, and for such kids the deaths they see will likely be due to violence, and that's a different experience than the deaths of almost everyone you knew who was older than you; and coming to grips with the realization that these folks who were psychologically, although never actually, a buffer between you and death, are gone, and you're next in line. The experience of having friends and relatives roughly your own age begin to die off, people who shared your sense of invulnerability and then begin to demonstrate what a blessed conceit it was. The experience of having a child die, which destroys some people, that can strain to breaking your faith in anything and everything.

But it's not just about experiencing the big stuff. The small stuff seen over and over again tells you a lot about human nature and builds and reinforces an understanding of how people think, what motivates them, what scares them and what they are capable of.

I have no idea how young you are, I'm just assuming based on your response to osso that you're younger than me, but I know that when I was young I drove me nuts when people told me that I would "change my tune" when I got older. They were right about somethings and they wrong about others. Wisdom doesn’t

I know that when I was young I seemed to be more motivated by ideals than I am now. I'm still motivated by ideals but over time I've been able to take a better look at both the ones I completely bought and the ones I rejected out of hand. The ideals that motivate me now are not all different from the ones that motivated me when I was younger, but there are less of them. They are less epic but more firmly held.

But wisdom doesn't come with age the way aching joints and liver spots do. Your body naturally breaks down, but your consciousness doesn't naturally rise and expand. It only comes if you keep thinking about the things you see, you hear, you experience, keep turning them over and over in your thoughts, trying to figure out what they mean. You actively acquire wisdom, it isn't something like dust that just inexorably settles on you with each passing day.

You also need the opportunity to polish your thoughts and while this can be done on your own, alone with them like a Taoist monk in a mountain cave, I, at least, find that the best way is to communicate with people, to talk to them about important things. And while it's crucial to listen to what they say, it is also very important to listen to what you are saying as well.

Another means I've longed used to polish my thoughts is to keep a journal. When I put my thoughts on paper, I can better critique them. They stand still and let me consider them rather than flying out of mouth and beyond real consideration, during a bull session or a "deep" conversation. Keeping a journal for a long period of time also provides a way me to see what I thought, when I actually thought it, and doesn't permit my memory to cast them in false light, good or bad. To be honest, it's sometimes painful to read what I wrote decades ago, and more than once I've found it so wincingly embarrassing that I shut the book and did something mindless like watching TV or playing a video game so I could avoid thinking about it. But it's good to see whether or not the things you were so sure or passionate about have held up. And it's funny, but I can tell when it's cynicism rather than anything like wisdom that led me down a different path, and that's good too.

There's a good chance you will feel pretty much the same about this topic 40 years from now as you do now, but you never know. The me of 40 years ago would be surprised how he turned out over four decades, and I'm pretty sure if I was asked back then if I would feel the same way about certain subjects forty years down the road, I would have confidently answered yes. That me would have been right about somethings but wrong about others; others that are pretty fundamental to a world view. That's something else that can come from aging: the experience of making small and large changes in the way you view the world. If there is wisdom to be derived from that experience I would think that it is that one should never be entirely adamant about anything. You never know when new experiences will change your perspective.

I'm also pretty sure that I am writing things in my journal now that will make me wince 20 years from now. Not as many, but certainly a few.

I can respect what you said which was well said, but I think Oss's views were indirectly insinuating that my views regarding my ideas about transgenders as the result of age. It's an unfair assessment seeing how none us know each other outside the forum. Not only have my personal feelings have been continuously discounted, but so has my points. It's like folks here telling me:

"Oh you're too young you don't know anything, wait til you get my age."

It's disheartening that in my own thread my experiences have been discounted, as if its some diatribe of an ignorant kid. At 32 years old I find it rather insulting.

So would I. (find it insulting I mean)

Yeah, I would have found it insulting as well, but being condescending to those younger than you is something else and other than wisdom, that can come with age.

Not everyone has been discounting your personal feelings, your experiences, or your points, but that sort of over generalization is to be expected from you kids.

Take it as a left-handed compliment when folks express the opinion that once you mature you will think differently. They are likely to be working from an assumption that their view is correct and can't possibly be wrong so your taking a different position means you are wrong. It could be because your a bigoted, intolerant bastard or just some nice kid who hasn't figure it all out yet but shows enough promise that we can be confident he will.

At 32 you're almost three decades younger than me, but I would hardly consider you a kid, so when you don't agree with me I think it's just because you are ignorant.

But I don't even talk like that to people younger than me. That's like me throwing my university education around to a bunch of dropouts telling them "see I know more than you I WENT TO COLLEGE!" I'm well past the belief that age brings wisdom as opposed to life experience. If I live on an Island for 60 years with little to no contact with the world would it be valid to say, by being 60 years old, I know about life? No. Cause that person lived on an island.

Similarly, as folks here know, I live in SoCal and so, if you're a person who lives in jersey or Canada or wherever, how can you deny my experience in Los Angeles, simply because you had a different experience whereever you live, hence is what I mean when I said my personal experiences were discounted. Ebeth and Oss, made it seem like I didn't REALLY have a valid interaction.

If you don't live in SoCal you can't talk about what I don't know here. Transsexuals are not a homogenous group so, there are cultural and regional differences that people do not account for. Although I ought to take it as a compliment I don't. I pay my bills and taxes like everyone else and when I'm 60 I hope to impart wisdom to the youth without sounding condescending.

I lived in Los Angeles something like 47 years. I miss it entirely.

I get it that I sound pedantic, and I apologize for that tone. A lot of us do that while giving opinions. Oddly, the most controlled posters can be boring to the max.

You sound, some of the time, quite brittle about being appreciated. I get that, but it seems to be your leading toe.

I'm sure you don't and I hope you will too.

In the meantime, don't take what a couple of anonymous members write in this forum too personally. It seems you did the same as respects your friend.

As for osso and eh beth, my experience is that they're usually pretty reasonable individuals. They've both irritated me in the past but I'm more than sure I've done the same to them. Neither, though, considers agreeing with someone a sign of weakness, and it usually takes real provocation for them to go on the attack. If and when they do their comments aren't bilious or filled with lies like one or three other people I'm sure you've already run across.

In any case, (and this isn't Old Man Finn sharing what little wisdom he has with a young whipper snapper), it's helpful to keep in mind that it's sometimes difficult to judge tone in written words. I'm sure you've run across this, but I know that when I'm writing a post I sometime lose sight of it, because I know exactly the tone I want to convey and when I read what I've written it seems to me I've done a perfect job.

I figure this happens to others too and try to keep it in mind. Sometimes, I'll ask someone if they mean't to be sarcastic or insulting before I respond. If they did, they won't be shy about confirming my suspicion, but it's kept me from popping of a few times, and I need to do it more often. Having said this, there are those few people, again, who make their intent loud and clear, and you get to choose if you want to ignore them or give it back in spades. These two ladies are not among them.

I don't know how long you've been posting here now, but it seems to me your arrival is fairly recent. I hope you stick around, and if you do, over time you'll get a feel for the hot buttons of some individuals, and realize that despite a usual rational persona, some people see red when they read something that hits home with them because of personal experience or just a deep passion about a particular topic. It doesn't mean you should avoid certain topics, but it can help to explain certain reactions. And, as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with telling someone you don't appreciate what they've said or how they said it.

Now I'm fixin to get off this cracker barrel (or is it a soap box?), let my coon dog Old Blue out into the yard, and go take a nap.

Gracias, not kidding.

said as someone who has talked with you for years, sometimes big bad from my part

But you lived here 47 years ago! L.A has changed. The dynamics have changed, hell since the 80's things have changed.