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Yes, it is just their claim to support who they are, but since we have no scientific way to prove that they are not telling the truth, we have no reason to think that they would lie about it, they are causing no harm, maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt. Are you old enough to remember the grief that left-handed people were given in school?  There was and still is no way to scentifically measure whether a person is right or left handed, so we let people be who they say they are.  Seems like a good policy to me.  Why not?





Would that it was so easy, Doc.  We have found 9 patterns, we never suspected to find that many and we don't know how many others there are. The thing to bear in mind is that the chromosome patterns are not indicative of gender any more than blood type.  The fact that the two are the most common may be incidental.  Science has found so many crossovers between men and women that it is becoming more and more clear that gender is a spectrum and not black and white.  The fact that we have trouble quantifying this is due more to our poor imaging equipment than a lack of suggestive evidence.  Currently only a brain autopsy will allow us to see the differences in the bed nucleus--and since this requires the death of the person we have very few volunteers.  Why would it matter how many of these people there are?  Albinos and hemophiliacs are rare but real, and scarcity should not be used to discriminate against people, should it?


As the hatred and persecution of intersexed, transsexual, and differently gendered people is reduced we are finding more of them as they come out of hiding.  Bi-gendered or two-spirit people (according to the Native Americans), people who feel that they have no gender, all genders, or some combination are being discovered and we have no scientific way to detect a person's internal sense of their own gender except to ask them.  Why is this a problem?  Why can't we just let these people be who they are?


Do you remember when job applications had just two boxes for race?  They had a BLACK or a WHITE classification, now we have 8-10 boxes and an OTHER box.  I think that's the direction that science is taking us with gender just as they did with race.  We had to confront the prejudice of a racial binary concept and now we are going to have to confront the prejudice of a sexual binary concept.


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