The Toaster

[terrence]

Yes women have vaginas, they were born with them, just as men have penises that they were born with. just because someone has an operation to alter their appearance, doesnt make them truly the opposite sex. they are still and always will be what they were born, regardless of how you change their appearance. therefore to say otherwise is lying. the operation doesnt give a man a true vagina, nor does it give a woman a true penis. its just plastic surgery, and it does not create a whole new gender for a person.

[DEEJ85]

It all depends how you Identify or distinguish between the sexes.

Kame seems to attribute it only to the physical anatomy of the person as the definition for gender.

Others would go deeper then just the physical aspects. Scientifically the underlining aspect that distinguishes a man from a woman, is that men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes. If we were going by strict scientific definitions then one cannot switch sexes.

Maybe we should distinguish between sex (the biological distinction) and gender (the cultural or social distinction)


I don't see why people don't just live with the body they got in the first place.

[Kamehameha34]

The legal definition of a woman is a person with a vagina. Birth has nothing to do with it.

[Kamehameha34]

And once again - you have the right to ask. Transexuals shouldn't be made to wear ID cards for your convenience.

[terrence]

im not asking for them to wear id cards, im simply saying that in all realistic aspects, a person with a sexchange is lying BECAUSE as deej85 has pointed out - in all realistic views, a surgery does not produce a total sex change, nor is it a natural occurance, so, with this in mind, a person who undergoes such a surgery is not TRULY the opposite sex, they just appear to be the opposite sex. As far as "legal" goes, your comparing the basis of a gender on a seriously flawed legal system! Saying a penis or vagina dictates sex makes about as much sense as seatbelt laws!

[Jack]

The legal definition of a woman is a person with a vagina. Birth has nothing to do with it.

Style Weekly : Richmond's alternative for news, arts, culture and opinion

As courts grapple with same-sex marriage laws, a new twist emerges: How do you define man and woman? After suffering from a seemingly minor foot injury, a series of operations and blood clots tragically ended Jonathan Littleton’s life in 1996. Aggrieved, Littleton’s widow, Christie Lee, blamed the doctors and filed a medical malpractice lawsuit.But a Texas court threw out the lawsuit. Because Christie Lee Littleton was born a man — she had a sex-change operation when she was 27 — the court ruled that the marriage was invalid and that she had no legal ground to sue as a spouse. Twenty years earlier a court in New Jersey settled a similar case the opposite way: The wife had been born a man but underwent hormone therapy and various surgeries to live as a woman. After she and her husband split up, she sued for spousal support. The husband argued that because his wife was born a man, the marriage wasn’t legal and he owed her nothing. The court ruled that for the purpose of marriage, she was a woman and the husband was forced to pay spousal support. How courts define gender is garnering attention in legal circles while states consider new laws banning same-sex marriage. In November, Virginia voters will vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as “a union between one man and one woman.” But how does the law determine who is a man and who is a woman? For years, judges across the country have wrestled with the question of how to define gender. Rulings have been inconsistent across the states, but most courts tend to rule in line with the Texas court: Gender is fixed at birth, and sex-change operations, or sex-reassignment surgeries, do not change a person’s legal gender. So if Texas says someone’s sex cannot change, does that mean Christie Lee Littleton can only marry women? That scenario would look a lot like same-sex marriage. What would that mean in a state such as Mississippi, where 86 percent of voters supported a gay-marriage ban? And what happens if Littleton, legally a man in Texas, remarries a woman and moves to a state that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, but has court precedent that recognizes changes of gender through surgery? Marriage cases are particularly emotional examples, but such rulings can have broad implications for the legal system. “There’s huge stuff at stake in these seemingly quirky little cases,” says Anne Coughlin, a gender law specialist at the University of Virginia. “It’s possible that somebody for the purposes of marriage [gets classified] one way, but for the purposes of prison characterized another way.” Federal law puts prisoners who have had sex changes under the same roof as prisoners of their postoperative sex — a man who becomes a woman through surgery is put into the women’s prison. But transgendered prisoners who haven’t undergone a sex-change operation are placed with people of their natural-born gender — a man living as a woman is put into the men’s prison. Prison isn’t the only place impacted by the legalities of gender. The LPGA professional women’s golf tour requires participants to be females at birth, but its European counterpart has allowed a Danish transgender golfer to play. Contestants for Miss USA must be natural-born women. Females have two X chromosomes and no Y. Males have one X and one Y. What about people born with Klinefelter syndrome, who have two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome? Deputy attorney general David Johnson says that as the commonwealth is concerned, sex is defined by what’s on your birth certificate. Virginia state law allows transgender individuals to change the sex designation on their birth certificates if they provide evidence that sexual reassignment surgery has taken place.

[Kamehameha34]

Everything you just said is an opinion. Legally, you have no leg to stand on.

If you can't tell if the person you take to bed was a woman or a man at birth, then sex change operations do change genders "in all realistic aspects".

If they don't tell you what they were born as, then they're not lying. You're neglecting to ask.

[Kamehameha34]

Quote by: Isherwood Style Weekly : Richmond's alternative for news, arts, culture and opinion

When a male-female transexual goes to jail, is it an all-female or all-male jail?

[terrence]

your still not getting it. your views on realism are skewed when you throw the term "legal" into this. Think about it, "legally" people could be sold as property, and "legally" an illegal immigrant can be deported after killing someone while drinking and driving, instead of suffering the consequences. So although something may be "legal" it doesnt make it right. It also doesnt make it the truth. I sir, am only interested in the truth!

[Kamehameha34]

No, you're only interested in your own opinion.

Why start a thread in a debate forum if you were going to restrict people from posting references? Should we all bow before your subjective views?

[terrence]

Where do you get than im saying you cant post references? I never restricted anything, you just cant prove to me that basing gender on a legal system makes any sense at all. You cannot prove to me that a person with a penis and an XX chromosome is a REAL man! Nothing is real about that! Its a mask, a charade, and since in REALITY XX=female and XY=male, then to say that a person who has a penis, but has XX chromosome, then it is a lie.

Another way to look at it is like this, in your aspect, if I threw down a glass bottle, and shattered it purposefully - you would say that gravity brought the bottle down, and the impact shattered it. However, the truth would be that I threw the bottle and thats what caused the break.

[Kamehameha34]

Everything you just said is an opinion. You've made no move to substantiate it with references.

[terrence]

where do you get that its an opinion??? SCIENCE has proven that female=xx and male=xy? how do you need anything more definitive than that?

You referenced the legal system, and well the legal system is far from being logical. I reference science and reality.