Comments by "Vaska Tumir" (@vaska1999) on "Institute of Economic Affairs" channel.

  1. ​​​ @Aisatsana1971  Sex and gender, as you correctly state, are two different realities. Sex is biological, while gender is cultural. In English (but not necessarily in gendered languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, Russian), the pronouns "he" and "she" refer to and denote the sex of the person we're talking about. This is one of the reasons why it's been so important for transgender activists to elide the difference between sex and gender, a rhetorical move that allows them to claim that the pronouns we use for people denote their gender. This is false. As for the claims concerning the brains of people who experience sex dysphoria (even the term gender dysphoria is misleading, a misnomer), whatever differences that may be detected at a certain stage of their lives can rightly be understood in terms of brain plasticity, i.e. they're due to their psychological and thought patterns established over time, and not to any inborn, genetic causes. If the latter were true, the brains of adolescents who experience sex dysphoria but 80% of whom grow out of it by the time they're 20, would still exhibit supposedly trans-specific, inborn morphological differences. They don't. As they move away from thinking of themselves as the sex they aren't, their brain morphology also subtly changes. All talk of sexed brains is pseudo-science at best, and political charlatanry at worst, since we know that human brains exhibit far more intra-sex variability than variability between the brains of the two sexes. Men's brains vary far more among men than they are different from women's brains, and vice versa. There are conclusive research data on this.
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  2. ​ @neilsaunders6009  Exactly. Trans activists have deliberately eluded the difference between sex and gender, displacing the biological reality, the biological given of sex entirely by the social construct of gender. In reality, there's no such thing as gender dysphoria: to the extent that it genuinely exists, there's only sex dysphoria, i.e. discomfort with one's own sexed body. Transsexuals, however, are people with very, very rare chromosomal abnormalities, which are not present in people who call themselves transgender. This is why they had to invent the term transgender for what is an attempt to change their very sex. Needless to say, the attempt is doomed to failure as we cannot change our chromosomes. At most, trans people can change their secondary sexual characteristics and this make it easier for them to pass for the sex they're impersonating. The genuine trans condition is clearly rooted in deep psychological pathologies -- a profound alienation from oneself -- and must be very distressing indeed. Many of the people who now identify as trans would have understood themselves to be homosexual or lesbian a couple of decades ago, while others classified as trans fancy themselves and get off at the thought and image of themselves as women (autogynophiles). Neither of these two groups are really trans, although they're now routinely classified as such.
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