Look, I maybe should have been nicer to you (and apologies in advance for what follows) but that thread was so poorly thought out I can't do anything with it. It wasn't a basis for debate or understanding, it was distilled idiocy written down in a stream of conciousness style that made any point (as awful as it may have been) impossible to understand.
I've tried about ten times now to write this sentence, trying to just to do a surface explanation of where your "thinking" goes off the deep end. But that post is the goddamm Mariana Trench of conflating concepts and ideas so I'm not sure I can explain how you're misusing terminology and misunderstanding concepts because I'm not sure you understand them at even the basic level.
Also I'm way too tired and need to hit the bed, so bafflement and frustration is the best I can do right now.
I will leave you with a tip for the future though; writing "I'm not intending any disrespect or insult to transgender people" doesn't magically negate the part of your post where you write "a transgender person transitioning to male is "appropriating" maleness without actually being male".
If you're genuinely interested in not insulting transgender people, don't fucking insult them. Even if it is for an idiotic argument I can't tell if you're genuinely making or if it is some dumb "devil'd advocate"/hypothetical.
Thank you for your response.
I think you're right that the stream-of-consciousness style wasn't a good choice. Considering how many people were confused or didn't get my original intent makes that exceedingly clear. If nothing else, I've learned that in topics as heated and delicate as this that it's best to spend the extra time making sure everything is as clear as possible.
My intent for the post was to try and understand the concept of appropriation and how (if at all) it tied into gender identity. I'd seen some arguments that said as much and though I don't agree with them, I wanted to dig deeper.
On a personal note, I recently spoke with someone in my family, who is very much a conservative, and who fully buys into the whole "any dude could go into the girl's bathroom, look out for our daughters" stuff. I had a kind of bitter argument with him, and he couldn't grasp why I was in favor of transgender people using the restroom they feel best applies to them, and I was digging at him to try and get the real underlying cause of his negative feelings on the matter.
I wanted to know what led to the subconscious gut feeling that makes him (and others like him) respond so viscerally against the concept. I want an understanding of it, in order to better understand people in general, and also learn how to talk to them in a way that can hopefully change their minds. I want to know what the fear or the uneasiness is about. When people were talking about Rachel Dolezal and her ridiculous situation in the thread before mine, it made me remember some girls back in college who were becoming pretty hardcore feminists that said transgender women were oppressive and "appropriating womanhood." It seemed as ridiculous to me as it does now. But the connection was made, and I began to wonder: "Is it that some cisgender people feel like their gender identity is being 'appropriated' by transgender people? Like they're "cheating" at this whole gender thing?"
Now, naturally that's an opinion largely borne out of ignorance because, as many pointed out, transgender people have it as tough as it gets. But ignorance is often a foundation of hate, and this particular type of ignorance could be the foundation of this particular hate.
On that note, the full quote from what you quoted was "I suppose the argument here would be that a transgender person transitioning to male is "appropriating" maleness without actually being male." The beginning of the sentence was meant to suggest what that argument would potentially be, not that it was what I personally felt. But I definitely did not make that clear enough, so it's on me. And I wasn't making that argument in a devil's advocate way -- I'm literally trying to understand this nebulous "hate" that I can't personally comprehend. I felt like, if I could understand what was driving this hate and what the ignorance was deep down, it could be addressed more effectively, not only with my dad but with people in general. If people's deep down "fear" is that their own personal gender identity is somehow under attack, how can we address that? Maybe we can't, but that seems fatalistic.
I really, really, really hope I explained myself better here. You guys don't owe me a response of course, but I wanted to do what I could to make amends because honestly that whole blowup was weighing on me a lot today, and I felt terrible that people might have felt I was attacking them personally, when that was the last thing I intended.
Perhaps serendipitously, I read the US' case against North Carolina and it spells out the issue really well in the "Gender Identity and its Relationship to Sex" section:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2827915/NC-DOJComplaint.pdf
I may end up linking that to family and friends when the issue comes up. It's very clear and straightforward
Again, I love you all and keep being you. Thanks for hearing me out, and again I deeply, deeply apologize if I hurt or offended anyone here. I'll try my best to do better in the future.
