I Honestly Don't Get Transgender

You aren't, when you post something that says "Everyone deserves freedom... but not transgenders", which is what the OP said.

If you were "just asking questions" then you'd just have asked a question. You chose instead to make statements of fact like "But being transgender is different" instead of "is it different?", and "You're talking about not accepting what you are and trying to be something else", instead of "can somebody explain to me how..." and so on.

I have no wish to judge you harshly, or for this to turn into you and I attacking one another. Perhaps you honestly meant to ask questions and gain understanding, and didn't realise the way it came across. And perhaps my reply came across overly harsh in response; if that is so, then I apologise for the misunderstanding.


Actually I wouldn't. Plenty of perfectly sane people believe in reincarnation, or any one of a number of other religious beliefs. I think those beliefs are delusional, but I don't hold every religious person to be insane.

But I take your point that people can make claims that are obviously indicative of being less than compos mentis. I don't see any reason to think that transgender people fall into this category, however.

What is so insane about the claim being made by a transgender person? What they are saying is, essentially, that they have a female mind (I'm speaking only of MtF in the way I talk about this not to exclude FtM, but for brevity and because all the TGs I've known have been MtF).

There's some evidence that they actually have "female brains". But set that aside. Their mind feels female to them, and their own bodies feel wrong because they aren't female. And yes, this is often something they have lived with for much if not all of their lives. Often they don't quite realise what is happening until later in life, because it's not really as simple as saying "Oh, I feel like a girl, I must be transgender." Rather, they go through years and years of feeling "wrong", without really knowing why that is. Once they identify the problem most of them will tell you they've felt that way since childhood.

And in passing, I find it amazing that anti-TG types will rail about how "they spent all their life male and just decided one day they were girls! Well I'm an attack helicopter because that's the same!" And yet if anybody ever dares to suggest that a male child has transgender feelings and may identify as a female, there is a cascade of "OH MY GOD THEY HAVE CONVINCED THIS BOY HE'S A GIRL HIS PARENTS ARE OBVIOUSLY PC MORONS THEY ARE ABUSING HIM!!!!" Not accusing you of that, just saying make your damn minds up, people!

So yes... they feel like their mind is female. How does this make them insane? If a man tells me he is (to use the example so beloved of the anti TG folks) an attack helicopter then he's obviously crazy.... because he doesn't have the body of an attack helicopter, obviously, and he doesn't have the mind of an attack helicopter, since attack helicopters don't have minds.

But it a man tells me he has the mind of a woman... what am I suppose to object to? Men have minds. Women have minds. The people who typically rail against transgenders are usually the same people who fall over themselves to assure us that men's minds and women's minds are fundamentally different to one another. If one accepts those things then it is clearly within the bounds of possibility that a male body could possess a female mind, isn't it?

And no, Transgender men don't believe that after surgery they have a "real" woman's body. They're painfully aware that it's cosmetic and don't claim otherwise.

So I'm not seeing the insane part of all this.