Societal norms and demands for change will always clash, and there will always be an overlap as people learn to change their thinking, language and expectations. What frustrates me is when people who on the surface preach tolerance and not offending anyone are so quick to judge and call people names for disagreeing with them, or for falling even slightly behind in the change of expectations.

It's all a bit hypocritical.

First step to acceptance is understanding the motivations and reasons for human behavior, and accepting human flaws. This goes for both transgender facebook users and 40-something straight dudes who are having a hard time adjusting to new paradigms.

Most women have XX chromosomes; not all. Most people with XX chromosomes are women; not all.

Then you have a great deal to learn about what is respectful and what is not.

Then your perception is incorrect. It is, after all, rather an odd notion that you could possibly "perceive" another person's gender better than that person does. And anyway, how often do you perceive someone's genitals? You will never see the genitals of the vast majority of the people you meet, so you read their gender according to other things - figure, voice, clothing, behaviour and so on. You have no idea what genitals those people have or had. It is not at all unlikely that you have at some point in your life met someone whom it never occurred to you to read as anything other than male but who had a vagina, or as female but who had a penis.

See my previous paragraph. Unless you've seen them naked, how can you possibly tell? In the vast majority of cases, a person's genitals have nothing to do with your perception of them. You are being influenced rather by your ideas and assumptions about what genitals people have and what they mean.

If someone identifies as a woman, she is a woman. If someone identifies as a man, he is a man. If someone identifies as genderqueer, ey is genderqueer. If someone asks to be referred to with the pronoun "she" or "he" or "they" or whatever, that should be good enough for you. You don't speculate or ask questions about the genitals of the most people you encounter in your life or challenge their gender presentation based on what they may or may not have between their legs. If you start doing so when you encounter someone who you have reason to believe doesn't conform to our society's conventional norms about gender and sex, that is discriminatory, oppressive and just plain rude.

Who are they, then? The ones who break into your house and replace all your jackets with ones in colours that clash with your shirts? Please. There is nothing "militant" about wanting an end to oppression.

You are officially the worst person in this thread. Do you even know anything about fascism aside from "Hitler didn't like the Jews, gays and gypsies"? Do you even know what the term genocide means? Do you know how the government systematically and with high efficiency and bureaucratic precision rounded up and killed its own citizens? I have not seen a single person in this thread advocate discrimination against anyone, let alone systematical killing.

Here is the thing: gender is sex. If it wasn't, why limit it just 50 categories? Why not a hundred? Two hundred? Any number? Why not just declare any "gender" possible? Because when everything is a gender, then nothing is; a category only makes sense if there is a limited number, and the more categories you have, the more meaningless it becomes. So either stick to the clearest line (sex) or throw the entire notion out of the window and let people enter whatever the f' they want.

It is entirely possible to accept people in society and all that stuff without having to bow down to every stupid idea and claim. So you're a man who likes to live like a woman? OK, whatever, who cares, now stop shoving it in my face. Just because one isn't a transophile doesn't make one a transophobe.
No, they are the ones who lobby politicians and media into inserting gay content in everything. Why is there a sudden outburst of gay characters in American TV series? Why is Western propaganda portraying Russia as a state of horrible homophiles with evil anti-gay laws when there are no such laws? Why is the Olympic committee now encouraging athletes to wear rainbow patterns, even though displaying any signs of ideological movements is forbidden? Why are there Pride Parades in cities, but no other sexual-context parades?

Make no mistake, interest group lobbying is very real, not just for LGBTs. Your attitude is very naive.

You are not understanding the notion very well.

Not that I say that you care, but I'm surprised by how little a clue on what they talk about the most vocal people on a such a subject can have.

Wait did that sound a bit yoda ?

I explained above why any other notion of gender is pointless. It's the same problem when defining words like "art". What is "art"? No one has really given a definition, because once you draw the line you have all sorts of things that aren't "art" anymore, so you keep broadening the definition until it becomes meaningless. So either just draw a clear line or throw any notion out of the window. Arguing anything else is just wasting everyones time.

And that is in a nutshell why the term will never get properly defined: special interest groups are not interested in solutions, they are interested in prolonging the problem and delaying the solution so they stay relevant and receive funding. By buying into their BS you are just contributing to the problem, not actually solving it. This does not apply to LGBT exclusively, it applies to any special interest group. They might have had a point when they were founded, but they will keep going and making things worse just so they don't get dissolved again.

Yeah that's what i'm saying. But i'm not in mood for giving lessons here.

The imbecile debates with french retarded illiterate protesters, plus the obscenely moronic racist tidewave in last swiss votations, have drained my patience a bit.

They better fix their mistake and change hetero males into cisgender males, maybe that will speed up the end of bookface.

Wonder what's the next one gonna be called.

Oh, heav'n forfend that there be realistic, sympathetic, non-stereotypical portrayals of gay people in popular culture!

Why exactly do you have a problem with "inserting gay content in everything"? Gay people are everywhere. It's far more bizarre and unrealistic for there not to be gay characters in the media (which, in many parts of it, there still aren't).

In other words you don't mind transgender or non-binary people existing as long as you get to ignore them, as long as they confine themselves to their own little queer communities and don't bother you, as long as they stay meek and quiet and do nothing to challenge the inaccurate stereotypes and oppressive social norms about gender and sex from which any departure makes you feel so irrationally uncomfortable. How very gracious of you, I don't think. If you dismiss people's identity as a "stupid idea and claim" and describe their having the temerity to articulate it as "shoving it in your face", then yes, you are a transphobe and a bigot. The fact that you don't want every trans person rounded up and gassed does not make you a decent person, because your attitudes are part of the culture of denial and silencing that breeds ignorance and hatred and causes trans people to be at enormously high risk of violence, murder and suicide compared to the rest of us.

So you're a person who likes to hold oppressed minorities' identities in contempt? OK, whatever, now stop shoving it in their faces. Because your "stupid ideas and claims", unlike theirs, get people killed.

You're really not helping the one which define SJWs as word twisting strawmen battlers.

EXCUSE me..? Just who are you to lecture me as you do? Do we know each other? Give it up with personal attacks about how I should perceive sexes / genders, and how I should relate / behave to / with fellow men and women, will you..?

I consider and treat men as men, women as women as I must because we are opposites, completely, radically different as males and females, gendered, sexual beings. Allowing or expecting, encouraging a boy to act and to be "girly" out of the blue is the real disrespect here, I am not and will not be guilty of this. If a person I get to know is transgender, I respect him / her without an ounce of discrimination, and according to his / her situation, I socialize with him / her for being either a male, or a female. How they so chose, but it must be from their legitimate request being far engaged in their sex change process and not "both at once", as I do not understand and believe it possible.

Now if I get to know whether this person is post-op, he or she is a "new", a "real" and "true" man or woman to my eyes minus the reproductive organs. If said person is not operated to a sex change yet, they still are / have their former gender to me, their feeling is not first, their body is. I will not yell and curse and doom them about it, I will keep this idea well to myself to not hurt them in any possible way.

I am male, so I consider other males from fathers to sons to brothers to friends to rivals to threats to enemies, and many in between these layers of perception. Females from one potentially being an exclusive romantic / sexual partner, to mothers to daugthers to sisters to friends to threats as well to an extent, and so on from appreciative to hostile, but their gender must be clearly set, stable or count me out.

Out, because the gender changes just about everything in terms of interpersonal relations and it is on their part, their responsibility to decide and manage their presentation to others, not mine. I do not want to live in a world and support a future where I have to worry about women being "a trap", I do not count "androgynous" or "shemale" as a valid and "new" gender identity, and I am not willing to. I care about being true to my convictions before pleasing others, be it for social sake or "political correctness".

With the exception of true intersex individuals, I will not condone and comfort people suffering indecision about their own gender in the delusion they may have about it being "both" or "in between". Even if they don't see their situation as abnormal, I do and if asked, the best I could do for them as a responsible adult would be to lead them to a psychiatric expert for help, as it is a serious gender confusion issue.

No one can live "in between" genders for too long, they will be consumed.. This much I know and so I behave.

Edit : @ydobemos please, forgive me for my agressive approach.. I usually welcome rational, constructive criticism and don't mind being quoted line by line to stand corrected on my failures, but with this topic being sensible for personal reasons, and your actual lack of genuine arguments to adress me, it got me upset, sorry! >.<

No. But this much you believe, fundamentally enough to never question it. Leave "knowledge" to actual curiosity, investigation, study, or first hand experience.

What are you implying, that I can't "really" speak unless I, myself am a transgender person..? And how do you know if I speak from my experience, or that I am speculating / assuming in the dark? What I've endured and been through myself to state that one line, here and now..? Right, you don't know and can't know unless I tell you. And even if I do tell more about my motives and myself, the choice to trust me on my word or dismiss me as just another hater full of shit is still up to you.

Actually, I believe many homosexual persons taking the opposite gender role to satisfy their partner as a habit to risk transgendering, as a consequence and mean to stop transgressing their own gender identity and to become "new", "legitimate" partners..

Life is about our choices and their consequences shaping it, and ourselves.. Who to trust and side with is the real deal. A truth I've learned and verify each time is that we are damn fragiles and heavily depend on each other as human beings.. That we possess nothing but our memories, our dreams, our thoughts, our beliefs, our words, our convictions, the most of all our decisions to get involved or not with something or someone, to take action in one way or another, as inanimate objects are just that and living beings can't be possessed.

Color me jealous, but "deciding" to stay in the middle and not decide, not chosing your sexuality or even gender by self-identifying as "bisexual" or "shemale" to get and be "the best of both worlds" is not a viable option for ethical reasons one should know, namely a God complex. Indeed, not "chosing" your own gender while your sex / body is "normally" a given is a highway to hell without proper psychiatric help, to avoid harmful behaviors and the limit is at involving others!

Just consider today's phenomenon of "shemales" in the sex industry, you will find the most of them are coming from or living in poor countries, selling their bodies in order to survive and afford their hormones treatment and surgery, endangering themselves from prostitution to suicide.. They can either enjoy or endure this for a while but as they stop being too young and desirable, they are getting thrown under the bus!

That's why the "official" transgendering process and operation are usually accompanied with monitored psychiatric care sessions for the patient to a complete sex change, and it also highlights the heavy responsibility doctors are facing and assuming with real hermaphrodites cases, to chose one or the other sex for the patient.

True hermaphroditism being seen as a disease, is it discriminatory..? I think not, first because it is not a clearly cut out "new gender" with ALWAYS working reproductive organs of both genders in one individual and second, cases are really exceptional and what must be done is taken care of by licensed professionals of medical healthcare in the best interest of the person affected, it happening at their birth should avoid them problematic consequences later on, justifying the surgery.

Also, true hermaphroditism is different from being transgender, they are not equal or even comparable, one is a birth situation while the other is a choice.. The "normal" way is that we are and have two distinct and complementary sexes / genders on the natural, biological level and our practical purposes as human persons and it makes the norm, the normality for the indisputable reason of it being the overwhelming prevalence, up to 98% no less!

That's all I am saying and stating here, in line with my convictions and notion of caring for others as much as humanly possible.

Because I am more knowledgable than you, because you say idioties, because you clearly don't understand the notions you are using, and because your first hand experience says nothing about the first hand experience of others. Your gender may be an obvious, sex-coherent thing to you, this doesn't imply that it is for other people, and that you're entitled to decide they are simply insane. This says more about you than about them - on several levels.

What does it even mean?

Actually, no, your politically correct class was wrong. Brace yourselves, people (or just scroll to the next post), this is going to be TL;DR.

Words don't have strict definitions outside of math. Words are pointers to clusters of things: you look at a cluster you want to talk about, fund a word for it, say it to another person, and that person matches the word with another cluster that hopefully resembles yours.

Humans have all sorts of measurable physical characteristics. And it happens that the values of these characteristics tend to cluster in two clouds of increased probability density. Group A tends to have XX chromosomes, a shorter height, ovaries, a vagina, no facial hair, no tendency to baldness, less body hair, emphazised mammaries, etc. Group B tends to be higher, go bald with age, have XY chromosomes, testicles, a penis, facial hair, more body hair, and a flat chest. People saw these naturally occurring clusters and decided, hey, let's invent words for them.

Now specific people don't necessarily match every single distinguishing characteristic of a cluster, or even have "either" variant from each group where the variants are not [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_(set_theory)]complementary[/url]: some people are born with a nonstandard set of chromosomes, no genitalia, both sets of genitalia, one teste and one ovary, etc.

Which means there's no mathematical definition of "biological sex" (penis = male, vagina = female) the way there's a mathematical definition of complementary sets.

A particular society, being faced with the reality of comprising all those randomized people, may regulate the differences in various ways. For example:
- the stronger hairy group shall be known as Men, hunt, farm, make war, and marry Women;
- the weaker smooth group shall be known as Women, work at home, cook, raise children, and marry Men;
- whoever is strong and hairy but does not want to be a Man can announce herself a Woman and should do what other Women do, including marry Men;
- whoever is weak and smooth but does not want to be a Woman can announce themselves to be a Militant Lesbian Feminazi. They should do when Men do but can marry only other Militant Lesbian Feminazis.
- everyone else should be Fed To Lions.

Our ("Western") society tends to recognize two genders, which is to say, it has different expectations and makes different demands of people of different genders, and this recognition extends far beyond even the most extreme demands of gender equality proponents. These expectations and demands are continuously reinforced by everything in society from law to language to pop culture.

When a child is born, people look at it and assign it a gender based on its external genitalia (because it's the single most prominent characteristic a child possesses). Usually, things work out relatively fine: the child with a vagina grows up to have curves, tits, falls in love with a dude, etc.
Other times, it doesn't:
- She might want to marry a woman, and her society doesn't allow* her to. This is a gay rights issue.
- She might want to read, drive, wear pants, and learn to be a java programmer (just kidding**, no one wants to be a java programmer), and her society doesn't allow* her to. (Or a man might be saddled for life with being a legal father of a child a woman tricked him into conceiving, or denied adoption because "a babby needs a wimmin'z nurture!!!1!") This is the basic issue of gender equality.
- The child, without any outside interference, might grow up to have the characteristic "male" narrow hips, flat chest, body hair, facial hair, deep voice, and baldness. Whether something should be done about it is up to the person and/or parents (also: more data is needed) but you have to agree it's not typical.
* "allow" doesn't just mean a legal ban; it can also include other types of arbitrary social disapproval of a constructive choice.
** in-joke
- And finally, the child might decide, "Yes, I know women have the same professional opportunities across all social strata and can marry any consenting adult they please, but I feel like a dude."

All those issues go under the larger umbrella of gender rights / 117th Wave Feminism, both because they have to do with gender and because the opposition tends to trot out the same (bullshit) arguments. I get them. Whom I don't get are the nominal progressives who claim to support gender rights and yet stop short of supporting trans rights. If you think women should be equal or are already equal, and thus a transwoman is not shirking any "natural" responsibilities / disrespecting the "natural" rights of a dick-owner, and a transman is not cheating his way out of the kitchen into the privileged caste, what other objections can you have?

I actually know of one persistent objection, and I'm going to kick it right in the utility function. Specifically, people say hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery damage one's health and thus shouldn't be performed. The second clause is bullshit, because being constantly misgendered already damages one's health like you wouldn't believe. No one wants to be trans. (It's true that some people don't really need hormones and surgery, they are just super confused and super essentialist to the point that they don't know they can wear pants and have functioning brains while also being women, and given how our culture obsesses over true wuv, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a not-insignificant share of people want an operation just to match the sexual orientation of their true wuv. But the job of a doctor is not to figure out how to prevent the patient from having reassignment, it's to find out if the patient knows what they actually want. )

Still, more people being happy with whatever healthy genitals they have (this includes men looking for penis enlargement) is better than more surgery. And the way to ensure it is to stop obsessing over people's genitals. People are whatever gender they say they are, and presenting one's nether regions for certification is not mandatory. And no one is going to hold it against you or cry fursecution if you initially address people as whoever they most seem likely to be given known cultural expectations. Looks like a typical man? Say "sir". Looks like a typical woman? Say "ma'am". Unsure? Ask, and try to get it right next time. You're much more likely to offend a hetero cis person with accidental misgendering than any minority, because there are way more of them and they aren't necessarily consciously aware of cultural expectations.