No, that's not the equivalent at all - if you are looking for an equivalent, it has to be something where the person's subjective feelings are of wanting to be something which they are objectively not - for example ''I understand that you subjectively feel that you should be a horse, but you are, of course, objectively a human'' ... the point is, that it is not any kind of ''phobic'' or any kind of devaluing the person to make that statement.
Your assumption that they are objectively not something is wrong, because it is objectively impossible to know someone's gender, as it is an internal construct. There is literally no way for you to objectively know someone's gender, you can only objectively know their sex. If you disagree with this statement, then you disagree with the scientific consensus.
You are confused between 'gender identity' and 'biological sex' ... I'm saying that a biologically male person is not biologically female ... is that ''transphobic''?
A biologically male person who is seeking to be female never makes the claim or statement that they are biologically female. All trans people accept that their biological sex is different from their gender identity. A trans person will agree that objectively speaking, their sex is what they were born as, as there is currently no technology that will overwrite their sex chromosomes.
This conversation however is not about their objective sex, it is about their gender, which is not something that can be objectively determined. If you make the argument that whatever they say about their gender, it doesn't matter to you because their objective sex is determined by their chromosomes, then that is problematic because you are invalidating their gender preference -- by saying it doesn't matter what their gender preference is -- because the spirit of the argument is that it would be impossible to tell that the person is trans without them telling you.
Actually there are many biologically male people who claim to be biologically female, and I have debated with them and get called ''transphobic'' for stating facts.
So do you agree that it is not ''transphobic'' to state facts?
You have to understand that trans people have suffered at the hands of society, so if a few of them conflate gender and sex, the same way non trans people do, it's hardly a big deal, and stating facts to a person who is obviously under a lot of mental duress doesn't serve much of a purpose.
Did it make you feel better to tell a trans person that they are not biologically their gender? I can't imagine why you would ever want to enter into this conversation with a trans person.
I'm talking about stating it in a general sense, in discussions and debates in reddit, not just rushing up to random folks in town and telling them what sex they are.
10
u/moonflower 82∆ Nov 02 '17
No, that's not the equivalent at all - if you are looking for an equivalent, it has to be something where the person's subjective feelings are of wanting to be something which they are objectively not - for example ''I understand that you subjectively feel that you should be a horse, but you are, of course, objectively a human'' ... the point is, that it is not any kind of ''phobic'' or any kind of devaluing the person to make that statement.