Trans-Offendered

You know what used to NEVER happen in America?  

This:

You’re out on the town, on the prowl, on the pull, drinking, dancing, hunting… And then you see HER. And she sees you. She tunes out the rest of the universe for you. She draws your attention in, and you’re riveted. Shared drinks, laughs, loud small-talk over the music, leaving together, my place or yours, start to get frisky, turns out she’s a guy.

Now so far the above was at least historically possible.

Here's the new part:

[NOTE: MAJOR UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE]

You: “YOU’RE A MAN?????”

Him: “No! I’m a woman! I identify as a woman, I just haven’t had the operation yet!”

You: “YOU’RE A MAN????”

Him: “Don't tell me you're transphobic! How narrow-minded of you!”

You: “But you ACTUALLY ARE a man! I mean, believe me, I know what I saw, and you really ARE!”

Him: “HATER!”

You flee, and of course soon thereafter you’re hounded on social media as a #transphobic #bigotted #neanderthal #jerk.

According to noted author and mysterious blogfather Frank J. Flemming, "My current understanding is that it’s only okay to conform to female gender stereotypes if you were born a man."

What in the 9th Circle of Hades has happened to our country???

Before we delve into that though, I need to say a few words about the Durian fruit, native to Sri Lanka. Bear with me, this will eventually make sense.

Quoting from HERE and addressing the Culinary Portrait of the Durian:

“Various authors have described the smell of the durian by the following phrases: abominable; a mixture of old cheese and onions, flavored with turpentine; rotting fish; unwashed socks; a city dump on a hot summer’s day; an unbearable stench; rotten onions with Limburger cheese and low-tide seaweed; French custard passed through a sewer pipe; like sitting on the toilet eating your favorite ice cream; like eating pudding in an outhouse....  It has been said that “no other food smells so bad or tastes so good as the durian,” delectable and detestable at the same time.”

I don’t have statistics to back this up, but at a guess I’d hazard that most Americans have never tried the durian.  I certainly haven’t!  I’m afraid to! And just to put that into perspective, I’m more than happy to eat those really cheap “beef and green chili” burritos from 7-11.

Now imagine you had the following discussion with a woman named “A-ko” (not the protagonist from the classic anime movie “Project A-ko” - and it should be noted before you click on that link that while I'm not aware of its actual rating I'm fairly certain it's NOT "G" - but someone who shares her name since it basically means “Girl A”), a stranger whom you’ve run into at random at a Sunday morning hotel brunch.

You (noticing she’s returning for seconds of a suspicious-looking possibly-Jell-O-based dessert): “Excuse me, but if you don’t mind, what is that and is it any good?”

A-ko: “I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s wonderful and it takes just like the durian fruit.”

You (being smarter than the average rube and at least knowledgeable of the fruit’s existence): “Wow. I’ve never actually tried durian before, but I’ve certainly heard of it…”

A-ko: “I’ve never tried it either, but I’m certain this tastes JUST EXACTLY LIKE IT.”

You pause for a moment, trying to work out the illogic of that statement, and wondering if the next words out of your mouth risk turning this brief exchange into an unwanted confrontation, but it’s Sunday morning, and your brain isn’t fully engaged, so your mouth just soldiers on regardless.

You: “Uh... How could you know that this tastes exactly like something you’ve never tasted before-…“

And it's even worse than you suspected – far worse in fact. Ms. A-ko launches into a profanity-laced stream of invective, declaring to all within earshot that you’re obviously racist against all Asians and you should just go continue stuffing yourself with hot dogs until you explode, you idiot American you.

As you back slowly away from the buffet line, you’d be forgiven for thinking “I know I’m not supposed to judge people, and I’ve certainly never walked in this lady’s shoes and don’t know what’s brought her to this point in life, but nevertheless I feel comfortable committing to the following diagnosis:  SHE. IS. COMPLETELY. CRAZY.”

Welcome to the exact same "logic" (ha!) employed by those who insist that transgendered "women" are "real women".

Because no, no they're not.

I have noticed that such people are immune to facts and logic, but since I myself subscribe to the logical fallacy* of "hope springs eternal", I'm still going to give this a shot. Strap in!

Domains of Knowledge

You can divide up this thing we call "knowledge" several different ways. 

Some people insist there are two types of knowledge; "Tacit" and "Explicit".

Others say there are three types; Personal, Procedural, and Propositional.

Adherents of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy say "shut up you morons, there's really FOUR types; Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, and Meta-Cognitive", before they go nuts listing a whole lot of sub-types which I'm not going to bother transcribing here.

The take-away I think important here is that the kind of personal knowledge that fosters recognition is pretty much always experiential.  There may be concrete fact-based object-oriented** exceptions, like you might recognize a type of airplane you've never seen before provided you'd heard or read a detailed-enough description, and understood it, which would likely require you to have been previously exposed to at least some other sort of airplane. 

But "experience" is an iron-clad requirement for recognition when it comes to feelings, be they physical or emotional.  For example, you can only hazard a guess what a "broken heart" feels like (and you'd be wrong) until you've had one, and you can't "really know" what a burn feels like until you've been burned.

Domains of Reason

As with "knowledge itself", several types of reasoning are generally recognized. The "big two" are "Deductive reasoning" and "Inductive reasoning", but following close behind are "Abductive reasoning", "Reductive reasoning", and finally the giant gold-medal bull-moose Sasquatch of the intellectual arts: "Fallacious reasoning"***.  To whit: 

• Deductive: What is absolutely true?
• Inductive: What is observably true?
• Abductive: What is most likely true?
• Reductive: What is untrue?
• Fallacious: What do you think (or to be honest, "feel") is true?

Think back to that tweet above:  She said "trans women are WOMEN. just because they were not born a woman does not make them any less of one". (And yes, she's since blocked me. Too bad!)

Let's address "Knowledge".  No man has "Tacit" experiential knowledge of what it is like to BE a woman because he has never BEEN and (arguably, which is what we're doing here) cannot BE one, so it would be difficult for my kind tweeter above to be more wrong.  

Speaking of personal experience, I've repeatedly observed that it's a Leftist stock-in-trade to try to redefine terms to advance their agenda, but as long as we dig our heels in and insist that the word "woman" actually has an "XX and not-XY" biological meaning, then in the strictest and most easily definable and defendable sense, you don't get to include "men who really really think they're women or just want to be women or whatever you damn hater" as part of the gender.

She's factually wrong, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it was "fallacious reasoning" that led her to be wrong.

Feelings aren't facts

A man may convince himself that he "knows" he's "really a woman inside", and that he "feels like a woman", etc. But (getting back to how a durian tastes and how much a burn hurts) that's just self-deception. 

How the heck could he possibly know how a woman feels?  How can he confidently state that he feels like one? He honestly factually can't.

Gender Differences

The differences between men and women go far beyond primary and secondary sexual characteristics. It's not all just genitals, breasts, and beards.

Male and female brain structures and functions are not identical, ergo it is impossible for a man to truly "think like a woman". People get fooled by things like "similar trains of thought", which do indeed happen, but if she says "Hey let's grab Italian for dinner" and you think "that's what I was going to say", then perhaps a better explanation than "thinking like a woman" is that this wasn't particularly a gender-originating thought.

Male and female hormone levels are not identical (en excelsis!), and if you aren't aware that hormone levels STRONGLY affect "feelings", like in a profoundly deterministic sense, then, well, please be aware that they do - so now you know!  Guess what? Hormone therapy won't change this. 

Hormone therapy may affect an approximate closer alignment between male and female hormone levels (a broad-brush imitation of what in reality is a precisely controlled biological process), but it is the very biological differences between the genders which make such treatments necessary for "trans-women".  

In other words, if a "trans-woman" was "REALLY" a woman, hormone therapy either wouldn't be necessary at all, or (because actual women also sometimes need them) their body's reaction to the treatments would be identical to a woman's (which it's not), especially and specifically in terms of negative-feedback regulation mechanisms and in the production of ancillary hormones.

But enough about the drugs! You know what also affects your emotions?  Your visceral responses, namely in your gut. This includes but is not limited to the blush/blanch response in your stomach and intestines, and hey - it should come as no surprise to say that men and women have "slightly different" internal organs, to say the least.

#Duh

Men are chromosomally XY, women are XX, and barring some percentage-wise insignificant population of Klinefelter syndrome sufferers or the rare South American (the Continent, not the Southern States of the USA) familial-linked specific-enzyme-deficient "girls who turn into boys at puberty", everyone you're ever likely to meet is going to be simply male or female.  

This doesn't mean they might not also be mentally ill.

We make fun - mostly of the non-suffering, enabling "supporters" - but "gender dysphoria" is a real mental disorder, and I thank God above that it's not a cross I personally have to bear. It exists. It screws up people's lives, and I don't think its sufferers benefit (at least in the long run) from society pretending that it is "normal".

Why all the Outrage?

Why do supposedly caring Leftists go all venom-spitty when you push back against what amounts to a fashionable falsehood?  Why do they seem so, for lack of a better term, "threatened"?  And while we're on the topic of trans-sufferers not benefiting from pretending their affliction is normal, who does benefit?

Well... Follow the money. Follow the power. They ARE threatened!  Thus all the hostility when you disagree and refuse to play along.

Side note:  You "can't rape the willing", but you certainly still can take advantage of them.  Bruce Jenner is being used. Even if he's OK with that.

And I do mean "he".

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MAJOR UPDATE:

I had an enjoyable interexchange (part argument, part friendly discussion) with a trans-woman and he, as you might guess, had some problems with my above article.

Side note: I asked if I could quote him by name, but I didn't receive such permission, and since he is one of my mutual Twitter followers and has not blocked me, I'm going to respect that and simply leave his name blank.

I asked him to specify what exactly was wrong, and how to correct it, and though I may not have come away with all the details the one thing which really stood out to me was when he said (regarding my opening scenario): "...then don't make up a hypothetical and then claim it represents a new real phenomenon."

This is a VALID point. Upon review, I think I erred two ways: First in setting up the situation to be a "tranny surprise" (not my phrase) without poining out how rare and extremely dangerous that sort of behavior is, and second in putting the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) response to the situation into the mouth of the trans-sexual character. If I had to rewrite the story while keeping the "surprise" part, then the SJW transphobia accusations should have come from a third character hearing about the situation after-the-fact.

Before I go further I should point out that I did intend the opening story to be at least somewhat funny, and I acknowledge that some people will be offended by anything (and I'm not referring specifically to the person who called me out on this story), but also I'd like to remind everyone that "Humor is like a frog. You can dissect them both, and they die in the process." So...

Since I had intended the mockery in this post to be directed at the PC SJWs, to make the story more true to life I should have pointed out that the "tranny surprise" scenario is neither new nor common (and certainly neither approved of nor engaged in by likely the vast majority of the transexual community), and that it was specifically the over-the-top SJW response that I consider "new", and was lampooning.

However, it would probably be beyond my skills to write the opening scenario that way, and even if I pulled it off it likely wouldn't have been funny, but there you have it.  In my defense, I was trying for a reaction something along the lines most-but-not-all people will have to this likewise non-PC joke:

Stan:  Hey Bob! We're going for ice cream! Can I bring you back anything?
Bob:  Sure, thanks! Uh, single dip of vanilla for me, please.
Stan: Racist!
#ChocolateMatters

I stand by my attempt to mercilessly mock those who engage in SJW over-reactions, especially nonsensical ones, and I stand by the rest of the article as well, but I do regret that a reasonable reading of my opening vignette could very well imply that the "latest new thing" was for transexuals to pull "tranny-surprises" and then get all bent out of shape when their prospective other party doesn't react they way they wish.

That's NOT the "latest new thing" in transexual behavior, and not a "thing" at all for likely the vast majority of transexuals, so it is understandable they wouldn't want to be broadly characterized in this way.

Thank you, dear blank, for pointing out the problem in this article.  I will tread more carefully when trying to walk a line between those I desire to mock and those I do not.

SJW exploviating, however, I consider open fair game and I intend to continue using it as a basis for great derision.

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SECOND UPDATE:

I informed the person for whom I made the above update that I'd done so, but his response was that I still don't "get it", and he subsequently blocked me on Twitter.

Oh well, I tried.

While acknowledging the weakness of my opening vignette, I stand by this article.

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*In the interest of strictest accuracy, I should probably point out that "hope springs eternal" is not in fact a formally recognized logical fallacy. But it should be.

** Yes, I'm misusing this term here. Let it slide.

*** There's also Analogical reasoning, Hypothetico-deductive reasoning (a real biggie in the world of Science), Classification - which I personally wouldn't characterize as a type of reasoning since I see it as more of an end result of reasoning, but hey - what do I know? I'm more "geek" than "nerd", and Creative reasoning, but I think I've belabored the point quite enough, don't you?

If you think I'm a clueless insensitive neanderthal jerk, please tell me why in the comments section!

Also, follow me on Twitter @SantasTavern!