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In fairness to the Governator, when he first got into office he tried hard to govern sanely, and was opposed at every turn. I expect at this point he's just given up. Who could blame him?

I feel somewhat conflicted about this issue. I think there's ample evidence that perception of masculinity and feminity are inborn. I remember reading the sad somewhat famous case of a boy whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision (it's time it was banned, for heaven's sake) and "reassigned" as a girl. Despite his parents' best efforts, he never acted like a girl, never fitted in with girls at school etc; in the end his parents told him the truth in his teens and he was able to live as a male- until he committed suicide recently. Terrible story. Thing was, in the medical journals the quack who had organised all this had written great glowing papers about how successful it was, thus proving that gender is learned rather than innate. Which was BS.

Now there's a contradiction here for radical feminists; on the one hand they believe gender behaviours etc are imposed by society, but on the other hand insist on the reality of transexuality. But it's also incosistent to believe that boys is boys and girls is girls, then deny the possibility of transexuality. If a trait is innate, then there's a potential for it to go wrong, i.e. a birth defect.

So I think the logic here leads one to the conclusion that transexuality may well be a real condition; i.e. a person of one sex who is born with whatever-part-of-the-brain-determines-gender-belief accidentally set to the opposite sex.

My inclination here would be that it would be rare. The great danger is that in moving from a position of trying to be understanding of a rotten condition, one moves to promotion of it, then you're going to end up with overshoot. I read a talk by Camille Paglia recently where she mentioned that as a kid she'd felt very "boyish" and she's grateful there was no talk of transexuality then because she feels she might well have told everyone she was really a boy, with disastrous results.

So we really ought to be intensely cautious. Even if we presume there are "real" transexuals as I mentioned above, there may be other people who will believe they are, when they're not, because they're just tomboyish or a bit girly or like to be different or they're loners and misinterpret their isolation as "difference" and so on. It's a tragedy for somebody to mistakenly believe they're transexual, not least because surgically we cannot make a man into a woman or a woman into a man, only into a fairly poor facsimile of one. For instance, the vast majority of those who are reassigned will never have an orgasm again, and living without orgasms is a terrible thing. Just ask my ex.

My gut feeling is that the real condition must surely be of a rarity that it's unnecessary to have regulations like this or transexual bathrooms and so on, and doing so can only increase the peril of "false positives".

In 99.9% of case a child is born with a penis or vagina. I don't see the confusion. Just another case of libasses trying to treat children as adults instead of being parents.

Boys can use the girls locker room? I was born three decades too late!

oops...make that three decades too early.

Excellent post, Ian.

I also have sympathy for the Governator. These laws aren't being passed at his behest, but in spite of his influence. He's saddled with a heavily Democratic legislature - the source of this nonsense - that runs amok. He fought them on everything when he first took office, and took flak in opinion polls for being divisive. (Bear in mind that the LA Times and SF Chronicle are slightly to the left of the Daily Worker, so it's easy for him to get bad press.)

I suspect he's now picking his fights more judiciously (e.g., budgetary issues), and figures that something this ridiculous isn't worth fighting over.

This is great! It can kill all Title IX sex quoatas by allowing men playing college sports to call themselves "women". Also, any business owner that's a man can now claim minority status as a woman.