Responding to Richard Dawkins on Transsexuals, Plus, and the Question of the Fairness of Their Participation in Natural Female Competitive Muscle-Power Sports
Something to churn inside one's head.
(Richard Dawkins@RichardDawkins: In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.)
As he is an evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins is posing a sociobiological question of contemporary sociopolitical relevance from a scientifically analytical vantage point. The objective circumstance is that since all of the cells in the bodies of biological females are DNA-chromosomally XX and those in the bodies of biological males are DNA-chromosomally XY thereby, whichever gender an individual identifies with and conforms to in gender- or sex-typing roles socially and behaviorally, even if they undergo gender-change surgery and ongoing biochemical medical treatment to change their genitalia and secondary sex traits, as well as to maintain the latter, chromosomally and in their genetically underlying autonomous, automatic biochemistry and physiology, they are and permanently remain their biologically basic cellular, so-to-say innate, born gender or genetic sex. In other words, this means that biologically they irrevocably remain their default, genetic sex, although they may prefer to be, say or imagine they are and identify with and copy in gender role or sex-typing, socially and behaviorally, the opposite sex.
Dawkins is not saying or suggesting that theirs are sociopsychologically illegitimate or mentally disordered gender identities but that, indicatively by his comparison, they are as questionably, or more so, objectively real biological genders than is real the adopted pheno-racial identity an individual of DNA-pheno-race X who identifies with and poses as a member of DNA-pheno-race Y, which, and in which pheno-race itself, may be less genetically strictly demarcated than the genders and which was benignly adopted by the white woman cited in Dawkin's Socratic, exemplifying question. However, chromosomally there are more than the XX (female) and XY (male) genders in the human species. But these two chromosomal gender types are overwhelmingly the predominant genders of the population of the human species and overwhelmingly the genders to which transsexuals belong. The chromosomal exceptions gender types are rare.
During the years of now, in April of 2021, 80-year-old Richard Dawkin's university education and career primetime, clinically, transvestism and transsexualism, except for cases of rare genetic, in-utero or congenital alternative physical sex conditions or anomalies, were classified as abnormal mental-emotional or psychological disorders of chronic delusional thinking and related behavior -- GID, gender identity disorder, now gender dysphoria. Conventionally, or in society at large around the world, transvestites and transsexuals were then referred to as opposite-sex impersonators, imitaters or masqueraders primarily of socially gender-assigned attire-fashion, hair, makeup/cosmetics and adornment body styling and body-expression-and-language (walk, vocal, facial and arm-and-hand gesturing) differences between and characteristic of the normative, dichotomous male versus female physical genders.
Importantly, two of these differences are that male bodies on a collective basis naturally produce and sustain higher levels of the hormone testosterone, the physical power hormone (also termed the male hormone, Testosterone — What It Does And Doesn't Do - Harvard Health), and have naturally greater baseline muscle mass (read the graphs near the end of the report for a straightforward, fast grasp of evidence results: Skeletal muscle mass and distribution in 468 men and women aged 18–88 yr | Journal of Applied Physiology), endowing greater baseline physical strength, than females on a collective basis, advantaging males collectively in athletics, or muscle sports, over females collectively as well as the tier of top-performing male athletes over that of the top-performing female athletes in competitive muscle-power sports. This advantage would translate to a same advantage collectively for genetic-male tranvestite and transgender athletes, identifying as females, over natural, genetic female who are athletes, who are not genetic females surgically and chemically modified to have a male body structure and hormonal identity. Regardless of whether this assertion is contradicted by some pediatricians, the totality of the biological science on the physical genders and athletics, as well as military tests on physical performance and school and professional sports performance record-keeping on athletic performance, unanimously reveal the foregoing is the indisputable clinical and observable fact as regards muscle-power sports. Transvestites and transsexuals rightly, in view of these facts alone, to be fair to natural, genetic females, especially pubescent and post-puberty non-SCSM (non-surgically-chemically sex-modified) natural, genetic females, should compete in sports with themselves.
In reality, the attire-fashion, hair, makeup/cosmetics and body adornment collective behavioral differences between the natural, physical (anatomically and physiologically down to and including their cells) male and female genders are societal-cultural constructs and such arbitrary conventions, albeit en masse so. Apart from primarily family parental, caretaker and sibling socialization and enabling socialization conditions therein conducive to the formation of these, persons, as very young children, with naturally keen or acute aesthetic sensibilities and cross-gender temperaments, in the observationally general statistical regard, very well may perceive and associate, in significant part, what they, personally as responsive individuals, value in the social and behavioral gender aesthetics of the physically opposite-sex gender to their own and make and harden that association as an imprinted psychosexual, socio-behavioral gender identity for themselves.
There is a real general or overall (with some overlap and patterns of exceptions of low ratio individuals or subtypes between the physical sex genders) set of functional and behavioral categorical differences between the physically natural male and female genders, that can be viewed as normative gender auras, the male-spectrum aura and the female spectrum aura of which a very young child of a given physical sex gender can cognitively-emotionally better relate to the socio-cultural gender aura of the opposite sex in whole or part and identify with and assimilate it.
Observed male-versus-female dominance, authority, love-and-affection, attention, jealousy and glamor connotations and power dynamics no doubt are significantly operative and influential too.
Transvestite and transgender persons may be circumstantially socialized and psychologically imprinted to identify with and believe they are the opposite sex to their own physical gender before they are of the age, reasoning and knowledge as young children to understand that there are such things as naturally, involuntarily determined and decreed physical males and females, in the objective sense, with structural and developmental physical differences between them, that make them, objectively and societally, nonconsensually of the male or female gender, physically and socio-culturally.
Early-stage gender identity guidance or appropriate gender identity guidance from parental or caretaker figures is probably wise -- such as "You are a boy, she is a girl; you are a girl, he is a boy because, because and so..."
I neither take the two following comments on this subject seriously nor as instructive, but for some people they may be at least innocently entertaining or something on which to spend some thinking time:
If I want to be a baboon, imagine myself to be a baboon, imitate the behavior of a baboon species, and undergo surgery and biochemical treatment on an ongoing basis to cover my body with hair (which may not be possible with current medical-biochemical science), and somehow attach a prehensile tail above my butt, as well as also undergo the said ongoing biochemical medical treatment so as to maintain these other-species traits, to somewhat resemble a baboon, and try to live with the related wild baboon species and mate with mature baboon females, am I therefore a baboon? Would the baboons in the wild, as well as almost all humans, treat and regard me as [though I were] crazy or weirdo?
What if I thought the same way and tried to do the same but be a hyena and to resemble, live with and mate within a pack of wild hyenas -- how would they respond and what would happen to me?
A similar feral nature in many adolescents and post-adolescent normative human males, in normal human environments/situations analogous to the above, may explain the numerous violent attacks and killings of publicly conspicuous transvestites and transsexuals reported yearly in the USA.
