Re: Born this way

The Julius Caesar thing does suggest you regard the desire of trans people to be treated as members of the gender they identify with as based in delusion. We can't be accommodating the delusions of all the mentally disturbed among us. We can reasonably demand (you seem to be saying) that they instead accommodate themselves to objective reality. Trans, however, is an objective reality. There have always and everywhere been people who do not identify with the gender assigned them at birth. The universe of persons who conform to the conventions applicable to females has always and everywhere included some biological males, and cultures can and do develop ways of accommodating this. If this is an expression of normal human diversity, treating it as delusive or as a mental disturbance is unnecessarily intolerant. The other interesting thing about the Julius Caesar example is that it suggests treating Caesar as an emperor conformed to objective reality, while treating you as an emperor wouldn't. But were people who treated Caesar as emperor recognizing some objective fact about Caesar? Wouldn't it be as accurate, or more accurate, to say he was emperor only because the society he lived in agreed to treat him as emperor? We have no reason to treat you as emperor (though we do sometimes humor even the most outright delusions to keep the social peace). On the contrary, trans people are a distinct community whose suffering and marginalization cries out for remedy, in much the same way as our own situation as BLs or MAPs. We have good reason to treat transgirls as girls, whether we believe categories like "girl" and "emperor" exist in an objective reality outside of social convention or whether we suspect that, in large part, social convention is what constitutes such categories. hugzu ;-p