It is quite weird how no one is concerned if a trans man is a man. I can only imagine it is a sexual attraction hang up. Which is especially suspect when it's a person in a monogamous relationship asking these questions because it literally should never matter.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
288 points (93.6% liked)
Murdered by Words
2283 readers
252 users here now
Responses that completely destroy the original argument in a way that leaves little to no room for reply - a targeted, well-placed response to another person, organization, or group of people.
The following things are not grounds for murder:
- Personal appearance ("You're fat", "You're ugly")
- Posts with little-to-no context
- Posts based on a grammar/spelling error
- Dick jokes, "Yo mama", "No, you" type responses and other low effort insults
- "Your values are bad" without any logcal or factual ways of showing that they are wrong ("I believe in capitalism" - "Well, then you must be evil" or "Fuck you you ignorant asshole")
Rules:
- Be civil and remember the human. No name calling or insults. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone else.
- Discussion is encouraged but arguments are not. Don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguments sake.
- No bigotry of any kind.
- Censor the person info of anyone not in the public eye.
- If you break the rules you’ll get one warning before you’re banned.
- Enjoy the community in the light hearted way it’s intended.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's patriarchy also. It's seen as "normal" to want to be a man; who wouldn't want to be a regular person? But if someone wants to be a woman, they're essentially breaking the system since who would want to be a lesser thing??!
Ever been to an event where the line for the women's restroom is so long they start using the men's?
Men care much less about who use their designated areas. Those types of arguments usually fall under obvious sexism e.g. women must go to the [with]drawing room after dinner.
TERFs certainly exist but you don't hear much about TERMs.
Whenever there's a big line, I'll remind the people in line of this. We don't care. Internalized sexism keeps them stuck in line
I’m pretty sure no trans would either.
No trans what?
That's the point.
I really want to ask a christian if god has a penis, and if so, why? And if god does not have a penis, does that mean he is not a man? Why?
They'll deflect with a mysterious ways garbage retort. Like playing chess with a pigeon.
They’ll come up with some nonsense about god being above all that shit, and then when you press, they’ll say you wouldn’t understand.
A featherless biped?
Funny enough a chicken with feathers plucked also works this time. They would have to find a rooster instead.
TIL: I'm a woman.
Dang this knowledge would have made that gender crisis I had in high school so much simpler...
What changes?
Their pronouns.
Not necessarily I suppose. Technically nothing wrong with a trans woman who uses he/him pronouns exclusively, though it would be quite strange
Here's the thing: there's a real answer to that question.
What makes a trans woman a woman is her brain has developed as a woman's brain. This development is set in progress while still in utero, and can become apparent as the relevant parts of the brain develop later. This is why many tabs people report realizing they were the opposite gender between the ages of 3 and 8.
Here are a number of studies that show the biological reality of transgender people. It’s important to note that although some of these studies suggest causation (ie, HOW a person is born transgender) we can’t know if there’s more than one cause, and therefore using any one test to see if somebody is “biologically trans” is impossible.
Sex vs Gender and the role of the SRY gene specifically (as opposed to the Y chromosome generally) in the development of each, as well as the possible role of AR (androgen receptor) gene https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6505576/
A correlation is found between AR allele repeat length and a person being transgender https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3402034/
The brains of trans people more closely resemble those of their chosen gender identity than their natal sex https://www.ese-hormones.org/media/1506/transgender-brains-are-more-like-their-desired-gender-from-an-early-age.pdf
A trans person's brain more closely resembles their chosen gender as demonstrated by their brain's response to olfactory stimulation with androstadienone https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2014.00060/full
Estrogen signaling pathways identified which tell the brain to develop as one gender or the other, as well as mechanisms by which physical development can happen in one way while brain development can happen in the other https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53500-y
Cornell University summarizes 72 studies regarding the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being (with links to all 72 studies) https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/
TL;DR evolution made them a woman, but fucked up along the way, leaving them miserable.
Nature is one cruel mistress, isn't she?
Which is why climate change is not such a bad thing. Humans have a chance to redeem themselves, the rest of life does not.
Isn't that a pretty dangerous argument?
I don't see any difference between male and female ability in regards to intelligence.
Saying that their brain develops differently seems like an invitation to the argument, that women aren't mentally able to do the stuff men do.
And I'm a cis-male - but I want to have every individual to live free regarding to their own will.
What do I care what you do in your bedroom and with whom or how anyone there identifies?
Propaganda for "traditional" baby-bearing systems are usually fascist and prepare for war, because they need more people to die at the front.
How can anybody be interested what I'm fucking doing with myself or my partner?
It's just my/our personal thing and it should be of no one's interest.
Else, where do we stop?
Should we make anal sex illegal, because we need babys?
Fuck all this shitheads trying to influence everybodies lives, just because everyone should live the same life as they do
Ok, got maybe a bit of topic, but I'm a bit picky, when it comes to differences between male and female brain development - and in the end capacity
I don’t see any difference between male and female ability in regards to intelligence. Saying that their brain develops differently seems like an invitation to the argument, that women aren’t mentally able to do the stuff men do.
Pretty much every group of people will have slight differences in pretty much every area, if you look closely enough. So it make sense that the most divisive biological things we have as a species (like biological sex) are going to yield some differences.
I don’t see any difference between male and female ability in regards to intelligence. Saying that their brain develops differently seems like an invitation to the argument, that women aren’t mentally able to do the stuff men do.
This is a pretty slippery-slope-ish argument. Brains have plenty of differences that don't have anything to do with general intelligence. There's a lot going on in there.
It's not just general intelligence that people discriminate on. For example it might be decided that emotional intelligence is what's important, and that therefore one gender must be superior because they have more. It could be aggression or resilience. There are lots of reasons why people think that men or women are better besides general intelligence. So saying that there are any biological differences becomes something that either misandry or misogyny can exploit.
I'm not super familiar with what specific aspects of the brain are different between men and women, but the fact remains that there are differences at least in the manner in which the brain processes certain input related to sex & gender, as well as the cortical homunculus (which I suspect is probably the area of greatest contrast and even that's pretty minimal).
Science has also looked at the question about difference in ability and found that there's no statistically difference in the brain's ability between men and women. So no, this isn't a dangerous question that's going to lead to a slippery slope of claiming that women are less able than men. That claim was already being made and has already been investigated and debunked.
The brain differences are extremely minor and as far as I understand it, the brain differences aren't exclusive either.
This is a study I read a while back. I just skimmed it because I don't have time to reread it right now, but it looks at brains as a mosiac instead of being on a continuum.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763420306540
But just to be sure that i understand you correctly: you say its complicated, but you have no way to tell what a woman is, beyond (honest) self description?
Short version: There's no way to define "woman" using so-called "objective facts" such that you include all cisgender women while excluding all transgender women.
This is actually a general problem with strict definitions. See also the sandwich question. Definitions are in reality built more on consensus than rigor.
The whole man/woman categorization is a social construct trying to simplify something incredibly complex. Sometimes the simplification works better (with typical cisgender people) and sometimes it really doesn't describe the underlying complexities well (with transgender/intersex/etc).
No, I'm saying that the lack of any particular medical criteria can't be used to invalidate anybody who genuinely identifies as transgender.
I don't think this response effectively rebuts his comment
That's probably because I wasn't writing a rebuttal per se, but a clarification. The distinction is important because, although he's incorrect to say that we have no means of identifying if somebody is a women besides them honestly self identifying, we also don't know if we have found all the different means by which a person may legitimately be considered a women. We can positively ID a person as a certain gender, but we can't negatively ID them as not a certain gender.
So I guess the direct answer to the question about if we can identify a woman outside of a person self identifying is "sometimes". Certainly, allowing people to self identify is easier than forcing them to take a bunch of tests and MRI scans only to get results ranging from a "yes" to "maybe"
We can positively ID a person as a certain gender, but we can’t negatively ID them as not a certain gender.
This is the part I'm confused by. Positively identifying someone as one gender identity negatively identifies them as other gender identities. If you can identify someone as, for example, a woman, you also by definition have a way to negatively identify them as a man. So I don't think we have a definite way to positively or negatively identify someone.
Ah, I think I see where the confusion is.
The "positive" or "negative" identification is in relation to what the person claims. So if a person claims to be a woman, we can use science to determine either "yes this person is definitely a woman" or "maybe this person is a woman." What we can't do is say "no this person definitely isn't a woman" because it's possible there is some factor we haven't identified or discovered yet which would validate their identity.
Edit to add: actually, I can think of ONE test to prove that somebody who says they're a woman but isn't: gender transition to the gender they claim to identify as. Cisgender people usually get severe gender dysphoria if they attempt gender transition. I would consider that proof positive that they aren't the gender they claim to be. However, subjecting somebody to such an experiment without fully informing them if the risks and/or against their will is massively unethical which, imo, disqualifies it for the purposes of this conversation. But technically it's an option.
Don't people refer to this as "transmedicalism" or "truscum"? In addition, why do many transgender people act more similarly to their agab? (Eg, some trans women act like men, some trans men act like women)
No, transmedicalism is the belief that somebody isn't actually trans unless they meet certain medical criteria. I'm saying the opposite: that the lack of any particular medical criteria can't be used to invalidate somebody being trans.
As for your second question, how a person behaves is a matter of nurture more than nature, but it's also deeply engrained from a very early age. Even those trans people who put the effort in to overcoming this socialization can have old habits they struggle to get rid of.
That's interesting
yes, but I won't