/townhall/ - Townhall

>>14502
You can't silence me.

It's complicated.  He'll, we're still arguing over whether gender exists.  Transgendered people tend to be the ones who think so.  A lot of other people aren't too concerned, suggesting it's a social construct because they don't know what it's like to feel gender.  It can be correlated with autism, which itself is a complicated (but logical) connection.  Being transgendered definitely provokes trauma, and a lot of that trauma may come before an individual has declared, or even realized, their gender issues.

I think there's a lot of reasons you might believe gender exists, and I think there's a lot of reasons you might transition.  And that makes it hard to define any relationships between gender and trauma or neurodiversity.  The perceived association with the two may even just be that it's a culture more open to talking about it, whereas other people may be suppressing their issues.  Impossible to draw conclusions at this time.

>>14505
When you say gender, are you speaking biologically? Because there is in fact a biological difference between male and female.

>>14500
Mental illness is correlated with negative life events, broadly speaking.

So, victims of child abuse are more likely to have various mental illnesses. Combat veterans are more likely to have various mental illnesses. Those who've survived tough physical struggles with diseases that nearly killed them, such as certain things that attack your heart and/or your lungs, are more likely to have various mental illnesses.

I would expect this broad trend to be true of basically any group of human beings subject to arbitrary harm from others while they were young due to really shitty personal luck.

American social culture tends to be extremely horrible about anyone with any difficulties in life whatsoever in terms of their physical and mental health, which is why former President Trump told his own nephew that disabled people shouldn't be allowed to exist and we should all be euthanized in Trump's opinion.

>>14507

No, that's normally referred to as sex these days, I think.  The terms used to be interchangeable, but not so much anymore.

>>14507
Biological sex is a scientific concept based on differences in anatomy and other factors, usually looking all the way down to how individual cells work even. Gender identity is a social construct that's dependent on the time, place, etc that one lives in.

Having XY chromosomes will usually make one grow a penis. It will not make one less intelligent than otherwise. Or make one more intelligent. Or enhance one's musical ability. Or hurt one's musical ability. And so on.

The popular American belief that having a penis will necessarily make you better or worse studying at a technical college, better or worse serving in a sympathy orchestra, better or worse programming a computer, and so on is a viewpoint based on sociological norms and not objective science.

>>14512
>It will not make one less intelligent than otherwise.
Men and women are wired for different forms of intelligence and I'm tired of people pretending that isn't true.

>>14513
Suppose I have three jars, each with ten gumballs in them.

Somebody else has an identical set-up.

I then take four gumballs out of the initial jar and evenly distribute them into the latter two.

Is the statement "My jars are, collectively, more full and have more than your jars." true or false?

>>14514
Except human intelligence, or most animal intelligence for that matter can't be simplified to simply "Hah, gumballs go burrrrr!"

Most people I know have some sort of mental illness, whether they are trans or not.

>>14515
Biological sex affects different aspects of the general framework of what is called "intelligence", just as they affect other physical traits such as hair length, hair color, eye color, hair curliness, height, weight, lung strength, heart strength, susceptibility to blood clots, and so on.

This is a much more intellectually nuanced conversation relating to everything from epigenetics to the history of sampling bias in certain U.S. national surveys, and to what extent being XY rather than XX affects a particular physical trait will depend on a lot of factors that work in tandem.

I know that people like you just want to go "having a penis makes you smarter in every way than you would be without a penis" as an ironclad generalization, but life is just not that fucking simplistic.

>>14517
I don't think you really know what you're talking about, but okay.

>>14518
*sighs loudly*

>>14519
You have no idea what I really think, and it falls downs to more than just simply "penis = intelligence." However the X and Y chromosomes actually shape the brain developed and the rate it developes. If you're going to sit here and tell me brain shape and size doesn't affect the way a person thinks eg: between male and female, then you are smoking a fat bowl of crack. Your genetics, as well as the x and y chromosome determine everything from your bone structure to your natural inclinations for things like aggression, depression, and skittish tendencies to intelligence. Genetics are the same reason animals like dogs have so many diverse breeds that are the same species, yet vastly different. Granted, there is a hand with human intervention in the form of selective breeding; it is another display that life can drastically look and behave different despite being the same category of species. The only difference is that humans are pretty much the only animal on the planet that can learn to act despite these inclinations.

So yes, in a way, penis does = intelligence to a degree.

>>14512
>better or worse serving in a sympathy orchestra

Heard you weren't feeling well, so I sent you a sympathy orchestra.

>>14520

Its all correlations, right?  And that why it gets hazy.  If you measure averages or peaks and valleys in the statistics of characteristics based on chromosomes then you'll find trends.  But there's also a lot of overlap I development still.  The tallest XY is larger than the tallest XX.  But the tallest XX is still well above the average XY.

Saying there's a difference in tendencies is correct, but the most important part, by far, is still the individual.

>Is there a correlation?
Yes. You try not being mentally ill when you wake up every morning in a body you detest. You try not being mentally ill when there are people seriously and unironically debating your right to exist in government.

>are mentally ill people inclined to transition because they are mentally vulnerable and easily influenced that it might improve their lives?
No. If you're comfortable in your own body, no matter how dissatisfied you are with other things, then there's no reason or inclination to jump through the ten thousand hoops it takes to transition and pass as the opposite sex. And that's putting aside the sheer amount of vitriol you're going to get hurled at you from the right-wing, and (if you're transfem) the fact that sexism still exists and women generally have it harder in society than men.

Only around 1% of transpeople in Europe regret transitioning. Most people who detransition do it because of social pressure, for example their families being stupid and hateful about it, and often times it's temporary. This number would be a whole lot higher if people without any sort of gender dysphoria were using it as a sort of hail-Mary to try to solve their problems.

Gender dysphoria is already classified as a mental illnesses. Cause it is.

In psychiatry and clinical psychology, the word dysphoria is defined as a mood state characterized by profound feelings of unease and dissatisfaction. Gender dysphoria is characterized by a sense of uneaze and dissatisfaction with one's own body and usually also one's own intuitive self perception. That, in turn can lead to a lot of psychological distress.

For me it feels like my body is counter-intuitive to me in terms of it's sex, both in form and function, as if I'm not supposed to be male somehow. It's kind of like the feeling of trying to write with one's other hand, it doesn't feel natural to me. I can usually ignore it in most situations, except the obvious situations when I can't, like when I need to use the restroom, take a shower, or have sex. I also struggle with a lot of maternity jealousy, I experience a deeply primal drive to have babies but do not have the necessary parts for it.

In many ways the counter-intuitiveness of my body is not physically painful, but it is quite uncomfortable when that counter-intuitiveness is brought to the forefront of my attention, kind of a feeling of uncanniness, and similar to the feeling of discomfort one might feel if, say, a small, round pebble was stuck in your shoe and you could feel it under your toes painlessly, but still feel bothered by it, all while not being able to remove one's shoe. The unfulfillable drives are also a source of deep existential dissatisfaction; I sometimes feel the yearning to the point of grief or mourning, unable to do anything but wait through waves of those feelings, which can often be triggered when I interact with pregnant women.

Both.the awkward counter-intuitiveness and the unfulfillable yearning contribute(d) to undermining my mental health for all my adult life so far. The former being a kind of nerve-wracking feeling that absolutely contributes to my struggles with anxiety disorders, and the later has certainly contributed to my struggles with suicidal depression in the past.

And all that's before anything about how transphobia and the awareness of the higher likelihood of being a victim of violence has always contribute to my paranoia.

That one led me to stay deeply closeted about it and to do nothing about it till just before my 31st birthday when I finally came out about it all.

The thing that is contributing to reducing the gender dysphoria (though not entirely eliminating it) is the hormone replacement therapy.

>>14521
Correct.

>>14522
Also correct.

>>14523
Correct as well.

>>14520

I don't think you understand genetics as well as you think you do, or statistics.

Chromosomes come in pairs (typically) with mostly the same genetic information on each Chromosome of each pair, including the pair of X chromosomes that females have. That logically implies everyone has all the genes for a female body, regardless whether or not they are XX or XY. If you're karyotype is XY, you could hypothetically make a clone of yourself that has an XX karyotype by taking two of your cells, taking the X chromosome from the first cell, and replacing the Y chromosome from the second cell with it, and grow a clone from the second cell and you'd have a female version of yourself without needing any new genetic information from anyone else. Every male has all the genes necessary to be female.

The Y chromosome works like a switch, it doesn't contain any genes for any physical traits outside the testicles, and even then it's mostly a container for the function of sperm production within the testicles, but not the testicles themselves. It's also a container for a gene biologist label as the SRY gene (Sex Determinate region of the Y chromosome), whose primary function is two switch off key genes on the X chromosome for ovaries, that then cause testicles to form instead. That means XX females have almost all the genes necessary for a male body.

Basically this means that at a genetic level everyone has most all the genes needed to be either male or female, and it really boils down to if you have the genetic key to unlock the genes for testicles.

This is why sometimes XX women can grow facial hair if their hormones are imbalanced and XY men can develop breast tissue. It also why deliberately changing the balance of one's own hormones using HRT can cause breast tissue growth in transgender women despite being XY and can change the voice and bone structure of the face and body of transgender men, as well as cause a lot of body hair growth, the hormones trigger the expression of genes for specific secondary sex characteristics.

In fact, did you know all fetuses first form a female physiology?  After conception, the fetus forms a female reproductive system, with the only difference between males and females at that point in development being that the male fetuses have testes where the females have ovaries. If Testicles are present, they start pumping out male hormones that trigger the reproductive system to transform to a male one. Every part of the male reproductive system is an analog to every part of the female system. Hell, the reason scrotums have seams is because the scrotum begins as the labia minora, but seals shut when it becomes the scrotum.

Given that no genes that code for the brain are found on the Y chromosome, that would imply that if there are genes for male typical or female typical brains, they aren't exclusive to either sex and their expression is a matter of other conditions beyond just the presence of the Y chromosome

>>14525
I don't think you understand what was actually being said. Everything you just typed doesn't actually contradict what I wrote. As for women with excessive facial hair, ect, ect.. well, nature makes biological mistakes all of the time

thread is bait, post ponies

>>14527
Please respect the sanctity of my thread

>>14525
This is correct, in addition.

>>14529
Stating how X and Y chromosomes work with a text wall doesn't change the fact that X and Y chromosomes along with genetics shapes everything in the human body from hard and soft tissues.

Again, if you're all trying to suggest that brain shape and size doesn't affect intelligence then you are all delusional.

A transgendered person who was born a male will never have a female brain and vice versa. I don't know why that is being treated as controversial or wrong. It's a fact of life.

>>14530
>Again, if you're all trying to suggest that brain shape and size doesn't affect intelligence then you are all delusional.
>A transgendered person who was born a male will never have a female brain and vice versa.

Assuming any of that is true, which is an argument with a lot to be desired, is it really relevant to anything anyone is saying?  Or even the topic of your own thread?

>>14531
>>14530
Actually, the moment you accept there is a male and a female brain is a moment where you make an argument that transgenders exist and are legit.
Our bodies aren't perfect and people are born with issues all the time.
So there's plenty of opportunity where a person is born as XX but their brain is developped more as a male brain.

>>14526

It does though.

Genes aren't the sole determinant of one's physiology. Genetic expression is essentially a chemical reaction, subject to environmental factors. Just because one has a Y chromosome doesn't mean one's physiology will always be homogenously male all over one's body. That's why intersex people exist. In fact it's why physical androgyny even happens at all, as well as atypical sexuality and atypical gender identity and gender dysphoria.

And beyond that, that's how all genes work, they're chemicals that react to other chemicals, and how they react depends on what other chemicals they react to in the environment they exist in. This is why knowing one's specific genes can only indicate probabilities, possiblies and potentials rather than certainties. There is, in fact, no 'versus' between nature and nurture, it's more like nature via nurture. Life forms are like songs, nature being the instrument and nurture being the player. Or you could say nature is an algorithm and nurture is the input to that algorithm with life forms being the output.

>>14530
>Again, if you're all trying to suggest that brain shape and size doesn't affect intelligence then you are all delusional.

I think it's delusional to think intelligence is just one trait. It's not. There are many types of intelligence that one person can have, many types on mental skills. Conflating them down to a single number is essentially useless.

And brain function can't be correlated to shape and size alone, in fact the behavior and health of braincells is more indicative of intelligence, as well as how they form neural networks in the brain, which is, again, a product of nurture given that braincells form networks as part of the process of learning.

>A transgendered person who was born a male will never have a female brain and vice versa. I don't know why that is being treated as controversial or wrong. It's a fact of life.

There is barely any difference between the typical male brain and typical female brain beyond those regions that have to do with regulating bodyily processes, which make sense given the fact there are two different sets of reproductive organs. The female brain really only differs from the male brain in that it regulates fertility cycles.

I personally don't think of myself as having a 'female brain' cause I think my brain is mostly like other people's brains. I believe parts of my brain expects the rest of my body to be female.

>>14532

>Our bodies aren't perfect and people are born with issues all the time.

'Perfect' is a value judgement that doesn't exist outside of a concious mind to judge against a standard.

Variations in physical traits can at best be said to have instrumental value at best, but not an absolute value.  The value of any trait is in how you perpetuates the propogation of a species as determined by the ecosystem the species occupies. Whether ot not genetic variation can cause issues for an organism is not actually all that relevant to if it's advantageous, sometimes advantageous come with some disadvantages, kind of like how having diabetes can provide survival advantageous for organisms in arctic or ice age conditions (hypothetically the reason diabetes is as common as it is in humans).  And sometimes advantageous traits come with side effects that may or may not be disadvantages or are just neutral inconsequential trait like men having nipples, a side effect of how human sexual differentiation in utero, they serve no survival advantage for human but persist because they don't hinder survival either.

>>14534
Again, I don't think you understand what was being said.

>I think it's delusional to think intelligence is just one trait. It's not. There are many types of intelligence that one person can have, many types on mental skills. Conflating them down to a single number is essentially useless.

I already said that there are different types of intelligence. Read nigga read.

>>14535
There is a consensus of what is and isn't normal; a consensus that is important for doctors to determine sex. When like 99% of males and females have the same identifying traits that are determined to identify sex then they're there for a reason.

A woman growing a beard is not normal. A male born with breasts is not normal.

It's not a difficult concept.

>There is barely any difference between the typical male brain and typical female brain beyond those regions that have to do with regulating bodyily processes, which make sense given the fact there are two different sets of reproductive organs. The female brain really only differs from the male brain in that it regulates fertility cycles.

Either you are ignorant or delusional. Those 'little differences' are huge. There are certain drugs that affect women differently because their brain is producing different amounts of substances pumping through such. Not to mention the actual shape, amount of wrinkles and folds, size, ect, ect can literally change how you recall past events and process information.

>>14537

I don't think 'normal' implies what you think it does. Of course intersex and queer people aren't normal, but they are still real and occur naturally. It's generally normal for people to be cisgender, heterosexual and have unambiguous reproductive organs, but those aren't absolute rules, they're general rules that have naturally occurring exceptions.

Similarly, people don't normally come from Wyoming, most people are born outside Wyoming, but there are plenty who are and make up about 0.00625% of the entire human population, people from Wyoming are natural and real.

And no, shape and size or 'number of wrinkles' don't indicate much about anyone's brain, those are superficial surface details about someone's brain. You can't see the differences between a brain of someone with say ... bipolar disorder, and someone who doesn't have it, the differences only become apparent under a microscope, or under an fMRI because bipolar disorder is a condition of brain chemistry and only becomes apparent when examining brain cells and brain activity. The primary medication for bipolar disorder is lithium and what it effects is the electrical conductivity of individual brain cells.

Also

>>14536
>I already said that there are different typ

You're using some sort of rotating IP or vpn aren't you? On /townhall/ you're assigned a pseudonym tied to your IP, if you're using a proxy like a VPN, then you're given a different pseudonym each time you post here after using it, so I can't tell what you said in this thread unless you post more than a few sentences.

I'd like to point out that having a psychological obsession over the people around you looking and dressing "normal", according to your preconceptions, to the point that you physically threaten or even actually assault friends, family, co-workers, etc due to how you're "normal" and they're not "normal"... is actually a documented sign of mental illness tightly associated with a lot of anxiety and depression type issues.

Most people do not lose sleep and feel physical tingles of phantom pain, say, over their family members doing things such as using silverware in a way that isn't "normal" enough for them.

I'm speaking out of direct experience here given that these exact symptoms of obsessive-x-compulsive disorders (what you can can call "a fixation on normality") pop up on my biological mother's side of the family, particularly in terms of the women.

Few things are more toxic and abusive in adult relationships, whether boyfriend-x-girlfriend, mother-x-daughter, sister-x-sister, or whatever else, than creating an artificial pedestal of being "normal" and you bathing you as well as others in all this self-hating negativity over not being "normal".

>>14540
> https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obsessive-compulsive-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20354432

"Obsessions often have themes, such as:

- Fear of contamination or dirt.
- Doubting and having a hard time dealing with uncertainty.
- Needing things to be orderly and balanced.
- Aggressive or horrific thoughts about losing control and harming yourself or others.
- Unwanted thoughts, including aggression, or sexual or religious subjects."

"As with obsessions, compulsions usually have themes, such as:

- Washing and cleaning.
- Checking.
- Counting.
- Ordering.
- Following a strict routine.
- Demanding reassurance."

>>14541

That's a bit hyperbolic.

Sure, a fear or disgust for abnormality is certainly associated with anxiety but not to the extremes of OCD. The fear of abnormalities is an extention of the intolerance for uncertainty. The fear of exceptions is rooted in fear of unreliability of one's assumptions when assessing reality, and an intolerance for the cognitive complexity of general rules over the simplicity of absolute rules.

>>14545
The rule-of-thumb test between mental illness and regular moods works well here, like I think it does basically everywhere.

<"Does your psychological fear of [X] prevent you from happily living your life otherwise?">

Finding spiders gross isn't a problem. Being pathologically incapable of driving a car because you once had a spider crawl on you while you were starting a car years ago is a problem. Thinking that cats are weird isn't a problem. Getting so paralyzed with anxiety about cats that you can't visit a sibling's apartment complex because cats constantly walk around the parking lot is a problem. And so on.

If a fixation on "I must make everything... normal... at all costs" directly keeps you from actually going through a day's plans, then that's an issue.

>>14547
I find you gross.