Cisgender - the new teen insult

[FannyCann]

Cisgender is just so boring. I feel so sorry for teen girls these days, my youngest DD is 18 and they both seem to have just been ahead of this breaking wave. What a social minefield these young children are having to pick their way through all the while being indoctrinated from above. It's interesting the mother notes that her daughter has received very little information in her PHSE lessons on how to have a heterosexual relationship.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6952453/Why-teenage-girl-picked-NOT-gay-trans.html

I think a third gender is really the only reasonable way forward. Of course AGPs and TWAW folx would fight that tooth and nail...

One of the things that really bothers me about all this trans nonsense is that at its heart is body dysphoria. This idea that if you're trans then you've been born into the wrong body. And that part of the whole trans thing is to alter and, in many cases, mutilate your body when there is nothing physically wrong with it.

Particularly horrifying is the idea that DC, who are still growing and having got a fully developed brain yet and who are going through the turmoil of puberty, are being allowed, even encouraged, to stop the development of their adult body and mind with drugs. How can that be allowed to happen? It's like something out of a horror film.

It's a different issue when fully grown adults are making those decisions and akin to tattoos, piercings, face lifts and other body modifications, but to allow DC to make those decisions and for 2,500 DC, some as young as three-years-old to be referred to a gender clinic, suggests that a total madness has taken hold in this country and that people are being brain-washed by individuals online who have a very specific and dangerous agenda.

I guess my point is all the Catholic women I know are gender-crtical because our theology
But can you be certain it is because of the theology? (Maybe it is and you've come to that conclusion based on theology, but maybe it is co-incidental to your faith and the result of applying commonsense )

All the atheists I know are gender-critical. I think it is because they're intelligent thinking people, not because they're atheists.

*"Religion is all about faith, accepting what you are told, what you believe to be true without any evidence. "

This is just factually untrue.*

Religion may not be *all" about faith. But it is surely an intrinsic part of religious belief? A belief in whatever god it is, and in whatever form of afterlife is promised can only be based on faith, given the lack of evidence of the existence of either.

Failed utterly in bolding there - sorry!

*@Goosefoot@
My point about unity of body/soul being irrelevant is/was that given your sex is revealed by your body/an innate part of your body, the soul aspect doesn't matter. People will disagree about whether a soul exists, but if the starting point is that no-one disagrees that you're born a body then the sex of that body is enough to determine the sex of the person. (Of course trans ideologists don't accept that your body and sex are one and the same and therein lies the madness).

"My point about unity of body/soul being irrelevant is/was that given your sex is revealed by your body/an innate part of your body, the soul aspect doesn't matter. People will disagree about whether a soul exists, but if the starting point is that no-one disagrees that you're born a body then the sex of that body is enough to determine the sex of the person. (Of course trans ideologists don't accept that your body and sex are one and the same and therein lies the madness)."

I think what you are saying here is the logical materialist position. And the thing is, it's functionally almost identical to the Catholic one, because the soul in traditional Christianity is not this random ghost thing fond in people. It's the pattern that underlies all the physical world - in living things, it's called a soul. From that standpoint, what you would say would be absolutely true, it actually is just a matter of observation of the physical reality. Materialism in its own way believes there is a pattern as well, if there wasn't, you couldn't have science and the kinds of observations and generalisations it makes.
Those aren't the only possible perspectives though. A lot of people, I sometimes think the majority, have a sort of undeveloped gnosticism, where they think of the soul or personality or even of the brain itself as separate and the body as a sort of container for the brain, and the latter is the thing that makes you who you really are. It's usually a very vague set of beliefs that people may not be totally aware they hold. There are a lot of things in our culture that support this too - even something like the idea of brain-death, people tend to interpret it through that lens. Talk about taking brains and putting them in computers or robots comes from that perspective. Sometimes find feminist talk about male and female brain strikes me that way, as missing the point.

Lots of Catholics are regular sorts of people who don't think much about theology, but Catholicism does explicitly refute that kind of mind/body, or even mind/brain separation if they bother to learn about it at all or listen in the pew on a Sunday. Sometimes I think this can leave them in a stronger position than people who don't think they have a set of beliefs, but have this underlying mind/body duality. So I do think practically it makes a difference what people understand as their own belief system about material reality.

"Religion may not be *all" about faith. But it is surely an intrinsic part of religious belief? A belief in whatever god it is, and in whatever form of afterlife is promised can only be based on faith, given the lack of evidence of the existence of either."

So, no, I would say that is not the case. You are assuming that strong empiricism is the only rational way to see the world, and that's not the case - there are lots of other ways of thinking that have just as good a claim to rationality. I would even say that strong empiricism is difficult to defend philosophically, and this is something people who study epistemology, how we know things, are well aware of.

Anyway, in many religions you know god (or whatever they call it) through reason. Or sometimes, mystical experience, which is a direct experience of it. You can of course also believe because you think other people know, much the way many people do with regard to scientific knowledge. Faith, in the Christian tradition, is not so much about belief, it's about trust.

Of course trans ideologists don't accept that your body and sex are one and the same and therein lies the madness

Eastern religions do not believe that body and soul are one and the same. Hinduism, Buddhism and other religions in India and further east see the body as a mere vessel, a thing we live in, and not what we are; to be honoured and kept healthy (see Yoga for example) but not who we are. And |Hindus and Buddhists are not mad or stupid by any means.

Both Hindus and Buddhists believe in reincarnation, that is, the spirit moves on to a different body to reap the karma or resolve issues from the last life, growing in insight until final liberation, or moksha, or samadhi.

This would actually explain why small children might declare I AM a girl/boy with such force. Hindus or Buddhist would say it is a residual memory, a latent impression in the mind derived from the last life, in which they were that sex.

BUT and it's a strong but its the present, and the present life, that counts; memories of the past have to be forgotten, the individual soul (or whatever you want to call it) needs to move on by accepting the conditions in THIS life and learning the lessons of THIS life.

To insist on upholding residual traits of a past life, to cling to a former sexual identity, would in both these religions mean you have burdened yourself enormously and cannot grow, and added even more karmic debt to your --- soul or whatever. It's the worst thing you can do. You are supposed to learn new lessons, and the "new sex" would be part of that, even if it feels strange at first. The memory would fade after a while.

Neither of these religions believe in gender as an identity or as a reality.

I know that such "theories" might sound ridiculous to rationalists but I've heard the reincarnation argument being offered by transpeople before. It's utter nonsense to offer that as an argument for the transing of children, so if you ever hear that argument -- there's your counterargument.

All the atheists I know are gender-critical. I think it is because they're intelligent thinking people, not because they're atheists.

I have the opposite experience. I used to be on a huge forum of very intelligent people, mostly Americans. Most of them, almost all of them, are atheists, arguing for science, scoffing at anything that even hinted at religion or faith. All very liberal, Democrat voting, progressive people. Trump hating, Obama loving.

That's why it was such a shock to me when they all came out en masse with transtheories. It's them I first heard the term cis from. I remember one of them, a highly intelligent woman, going on about the science of gender and how there are so many more pairs of chromosomes than xx and XY. I heard this all in shock. I had no arguments to counter her so I stayed silent.

In fact, I would say most liberal, progressive Americans are atheists, and yet they are the ones who are so strongly pro-trans.

@Lamaha
I'm not suggesting atheists are all GC. I'm suggesting that what is relevant to rejection of trans ideology is not religious belief or atheism (or agnosticism), it is critical thinking.

*Of course trans ideologists don't accept that your body and sex are one and the same and therein lies the madness

Eastern religions do not believe that body and soul are one and the same. Hinduism, Buddhism and other religions in India and further east see the body as a mere vessel, a thing we live in, and not what we are; to be honoured and kept healthy (see Yoga for example) but not who we are. And |Hindus and Buddhists are not mad or stupid by any means. *

I'm not sure did you misread what I said? I referenced body and sex, not body and soul. So there was no inference in what I said that Hindus or Buddhist were mad or stupid for nor believing body and soul are one.

I need a crash course in using the bold function. Half the time it works. Half it doesn't. AFAIK I'm doing the same thing each time. Is there some trick or quirk that I don't know about?

You must be sure not to leave a gap, as in the two paragraphs in your last post. You need to close the gap, or else place the asterix around both paragraphs.

Thanks!

If you have text to be in bold, don't leave a space between the text, including punctuation, and the asterisk. You need to do it like this.

Also, each paragraph needs its own pair of asterisks, one at the start and one at the end. You can't bridge a paragraph break with a starting asterisk for a first paragraph and an ending asterisk for a subsequent paragraph.

mortified I spelled asterisk wrong.

@Lamaha
I have seen many worse things on the internet

Very interesting discussion. I guess part of my thought process is that within my own Catholic context are a) a theology and an anthropology of the unity of the human person b) an encouragement of reason, education and critical thinking. Therefore at the very least, my teens will be exposed to other major overarching ideas about how we see ourselves in the world.

My concern is that many younger people are operating in a vaccum of the history of ideas and are very apparently vulnerable to the ideology unlying trans and gender concepts. For a start they think it's new when clearly lots of ancient theologies and philosophies contain aspects of a concept of the separation of mind and body. It is a heresy (Gnosticism) Christianity has been grappling with from extremely early on: the idea that the body and the material world is bad and something we must "rise above" for example.

Together with this idea that gender theory is new, is an enjoyable superiority over those other crusty old stick-in-the-mud, phobics of previous generations that need reducation in the ways of gender. This somehow goes along with the idea that trans people have always been with us and that there were trans kids sitting in classrooms on the 50s 60s 70s 80s etc. I would definitely agree that there have always been individual people rebelling and uncomfortable with their gender role.

I have not formally studied philosophy but I think that's the number one way to counter so much of what ultimately can be toxic, especially for young women and girls. Being challenged to think critically and also understand how our philosophy and/or theology shapes our world and the society we create.

You can see the enjoyable freedom in being able to construct your own self by being a bit non-binary, a bit this a bit that. All those young teens obsessing on Tumblr. There is a certain power and what feels like autonomy compared to often a crushing authoritarianism in the onslaught of images of women on Instagram and snapchat. If you feel you can't be a woman like that or don't want to be a woman like that, gender ideology could seem freeing I imagine.

Unfortunately it's wrapped up in a very dangerous redefinition of literally the reality of biology.

A Catholic take

That video is nicely argued, however, he seems to think that all transgender men want their organs amputated, and that's just not true. I wish he's spoken about lady-dicks and neo-vaginas as well! About men who don't even bother to change their body, but think they're just fine as women exactly as they are -- which is the far more sinister version of the phenomenon. He has a very kind, Christian take but that's not going to work in the real world of bullying AGPs.
But thanks for the link -- it was interesting.

It was a short video for popular consumption so I'm sure he could talk at greater depth on this subject.

However to be fair, I think many people are of the assumption that transgenderism = what used to be called transexuals. In popular culture I don't think most people realise that the vast majority of MtF transgender identifying men have no intention of changing their genitalia by surgery. The theories and language used for gender identity have changed so quickly that most people are not caught up to how Stonewall for example, defines transgender. This is part of the problem, terms need to be defined as people are not talking about the same thing.