As the name of my blog implies, being a libertarian, ordinarily I am of the mind to tolerate anything which does not materially affect me. However, such a simplistic statement would preclude principles important to uphold which don't affect me at all, for example, preventing child abuse (because I have not been a child for several decades). And this is a hint as to one of the points of this post, that although I struggle with the fact that I want the best life for as many people as possible, we have to be extremely careful when it comes to children.
First, I know the following will be offensive to a certain segment of the general population, but biology can't be ignored. With some rare, maybe even extremely rare, exceptions, people with XX chromosomes are female and XY are male. To be clear, this has extremely close to nothing to do with how people perceive themselves, and by extension, how they wish others to perceive them. A fairly large proportion of people are perfectly happy with their biological gender. But some others figure they'd be better off leading a life following the norms of the opposite gender. To me, this is a construct of society, how people want to be treated by others. Seems this would be driven by that person's life experiences, and their observations of how society interacts with members of some gender (whether the same as their biological gender or their desired gender).
Because intersex people generally speaking are rare, and as a large majority of society are just fine with their biological gender, most of these latter people are conditioned (mostly by society) to think of gender in binary terms, male and female. It's also ingrained into them that it's undesireable to be/behave like the other gender. Anyone who does is shunned by them as anathema to their lifetime of experience of this conditioning (for lack of anything better to call it). Our society typically has some tolerances for atypical behaviors, but it's not particularly broad. For example, most people do not take too kindly to males in dresses, except for maybe certain circumstances: comedy/theatre/TV (e.g. Corporal/Sergeant Klinger on "M*A*S*H", or Kip/Buffy and Henry/Hildegard on "Bosom Buddies"), Halloween, cosplay, drag shows, etc.
So in order to be (vastly) more acceptable to society, society sort of by implication demads that at least the external appearance be that of a person's desired gender through sexual reassignment surgery. Present society sort of demands that if one wants to follow the behavioral norms of being what's generally considered female, you must not have a penis, or if male, you must not have prominent breasts for example. But an unfortunate consequence of biology stipulates that if treatment to this end is started earlier in life, that is to say, before puberty, the results are typically better. So of late, there are some physicians who will perform penectomies or double mastectomies on children, and prescribe hormone replacement therapies or puberty blockers.
The heart of the issue is that this is permanent, as in, cannot really be reversed. Although at this time I do not have statistics to back the following opinion, I imagine quite a few of these folks have feelings of wanting to transition, maybe even quite deeply held feelings, but the majority of them "grow out of it." I am a personal example of this. At one time, I identified more with my three sisters rather than my brother. But it didn't last. With a few exceptions, I am quite happy to be male. (As an example, one of those exceptions is that I think it's generally expected that men approach women, and it's less acceptable for women to pursue men. Although this is changing somewhat over time, it's still mainly the case. Call it personal experience, I find it extremely difficult to be in that role.)
Although a bit perverse, I have to believe a certain amount of these supposed cases of transgenderism stem from parents who, for whatever reasons, did not get their hoped birth outcomes, that is to say, they really wanted a girl but they got a boy instead (or vice-versa). So they may subtley or not so subtley suggest to their boy that it would be better if they were a girl. I (think I) get it, even some elementary schools are teaching kids about transgenderism, I (think) in the name of teaching tolerance (which is GENERALLY good). And parents might take the slightest agreement by the child as a sign that they should help them achieve what they want (and by "they" I mean both the child and the parents). The child will naturally want to please their parents, so will be very inclined to go along with this. To be clear, I think this is PROBABLY rare, but not totally unheard of.
Again, I think it is somewhat normal for some girls to want to be like boys (we even have the term "tomboys" for them) and some boys to be girls for a while, but either through personal choice or societal steering, almost all come to peace with living their lives as their biological gender. I will again point to the permanence of SRS when I make the statement that SRS on children is child abuse. There are any number of things we do not allow minors to do, nor allow to be done to minors. As one very (il)legal example, no minor may be tattooed in New York State. I think SRS on minors most certainly should be one of these prohibitions. It is a very permanent solution to something which, for the vast majority of people, is temporary. I will however have to concede that if we only allow adults to transition, the results are poorer. But at least once one reaches the age of majority, one can be thought as having enough life experience to make such decisions with so far-reaching and permanent consequences.
Another contemporary controversy is allowing transgendered people to be fully their chosen gender, especially with respect to competitions, mostly sports. Again, this is biology, which has absolutely nothing to do with how society treats a person, or how a person wishes to be perceived. If we were all equal, there wouldn't even be a difference in sports at all; everything would be mixed with no women's division and men's division in a sport. Those who advocate for transgender women to participate fully in living the life of their chosen gender, especially with respect to sport, seem to want to ignore this completely. Men, as a general rule, are bigger, stronger, faster, and so on; I see little point in denying this. That isn't to say that all men are stronger et al than all women, there will certainly be exceptions when comparing any particular man to some woman. But it is the very essence of these differences why we separate these into women's competitions and men's competitions. In no sports do we think of PEDs as acceptable; we must think of male hormones as a performance enhancing drug. And if as stated previously we only permit adults to make transitioning decisions, by that time it's too late, the (naturally occuring) male hormones have already given that person that biological advantage. Therefore it serves very little purpose to allow transgender women to participate in women's sports. Sorry to those who want to advocate otherwise, it's an intractable argument to think social treatment trumps biology. By the same token, if transgender men want to compete in men's sports, all the more power to them. Their chance of success, again due to biology, would however seem to be exceedingly slim.
Still, I must emphasize, gender differences are very real and in many cases is biologically determined, but hopefully will be narrowly thought of. What I mean is, being male or female is undeniably different, but the societal norms surrounding some aspects of living that gender are not immutable as their biological counterparts are. As an example, for whatever reasons, society places great importance on clothing. As mentioned above, a majority of society does not want to see men in dresses; about the closest most men come to that is a hospital gown. If he's wearing a skirt, it better be a kilt. This sort of thing does change over time, for example it used to be commonplace for men to wear tights, but now mostly only women do, except again for special circumstances; ballet comes to mind. Who knows, maybe some time in the (probably far distant) future, men in dresses will be as commonplace as seeing men in tights was.
I also have to ask as an open question, why is there an emphasis by many on gender equality? To what end would making everything equal help us? As one example I heard, somewhere around 97% of bricklayers are men. Offhand, I wouldn't think bricklaying is physically demanding, as in, it doesn't require the typically better male strength. I see no reason why we have to have strive towards 50% of bricklayers to be women. To the 3% of you who are, all the more power to you, it doesn't make any difference to me. The majority of nurses are women; there's absolutely nothing wrong with men being nurses, but I see no reason why there should be a push for that to be 50/50 either. Whether societally induced or maybe even biologically influenced, I think it more productive to celebrate the differences in the genders rather than demand equality in everything. I'm all for relaxing societal thinking on what is a man's job and what is a woman's job (I'd like to see more fellow computer engineers be women :-) ), but at the same time, I don't see any reason for a push towards total equity. That is, don't be exclusionary, except where biology clearly plays a role. I mentioned sports before as an example, but that is by consensus of the participants (clearly, because there are some mixed gender sports; volleyball and tennis doubles spring to mind).
We also must be extremely careful when it comes to standards. What I'm thinking of as an example is, we should not lower the requirements for firefighters. If there is standard that they're required to be able to carry around some benchmark weight, say in anticipation of being able to perform a rescue successfully by carrying an average someone away from a fire, we can't be lowering that number to accommodate some perception that we need more woman participants. If they can pass such strength tests, I am extremely grateful that they chose to be one. Again, statistically men are more likely to be stronger, but there's nothing to say some women can't be just as strong as some men. But let's not change the standards without some objective reason (like maybe we actually, as a societal average, become healthier and statistically weigh less).
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!