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Why does he wear fake breasts? Is he planning on nursing a baby with these fake breasts? Signaling his (non-existent) fertility with these fake breasts? Or is it perhaps that male sexual fixation on female breasts informs the things that he does as a part of what appears to be a crossdressing fetish?
Police handcuffs serve a practical function that assists the public generally. Do Sarah's fake breasts serve a similar practical function? (No).
They’re about as practical as replacements after a mastectomy, augments on a post-menopause trophy wife, or whatever the hell Rudy Giuliani was doing. Which is to say, not very.
Not everything impractical is a fetish.
Are you arguing that he had a mastectomy or is post-menopausal?
And in those cases, yes I agree with you that there is a sexual attraction component to it. This seems like an example that supports my point, not detracts from it.
Let's take your example to a similar place: suppose a woman got large fake breasts implanted, and then insisted on wearing revealing clothing to a children's birthday party, or insisted on brushing them up against married men at her workplace. Would you agree that this was inappropriate?
If somebody wants to wear...whatever they want, in their own private home, then by all means they should and nobody should interfere with them. Even if they want to wear just about whatever they want out in public, that's fine too (to an extent).
The problem here is that there are women who are clearly requesting not to be involved in the bathroom part of the fantasy, and there are people want to force them to. That's not okay.
Yeah, flashing the fake titties would be inappropriate. Has McBride done that? Or posted provocative pictures, or stolen women’s luggage, or whatever?
Last I checked, most women have their breasts even when they aren’t nursing a baby. This doesn’t lead you to assume they are sexual deviants. Unless, I suppose, you take the fundamentalist view. Would you feel better if McBride wore a burqa?
There is a whole world of impractical signals out there. I think you’re picking one to back up a mistaken intuition.
No, but what he has done (until recently) was insisted on coming into the women's restroom, which is really strange behavior.
Any guy who is making a big deal about wanting to go into the women's restroom, or the women's locker-room, to the point where the speaker of the house has to address it, and women have to come out and fight to stop it is acting inappropriately.
Surely it's less strange than all the other stuff he's done to get to this point, right? Like, a random guy in drag insisting on using the women's room, that's separately a strong signal of weirdness/sketchiness. But if he's convinced himself that he's a woman at this point, and (quite possibly, though I couldn't say for sure) been on hormones and had surgeries to get there, then surely that's the strange part, not the part where he subsequently wants to use the women's restroom.
It's all strange. Trans activists themselves acknowledge that it is strange when they continue to insist that without transition they'd die. That's how strange it is, that's what it takes to make this palatable even when it's not affecting others.
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These are both strange behaviors.
Sure, but the "uses women's bathroom" behavior doesn't add any additional strangeness on top of the "made permanent changes to body and lifestyle" part.
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Do you know that McBride wears fake breasts vs. being on estrogen (which produces natural breast growth; yes, even in biological males)? I couldn't discover either way from a quick search, and ... weirdly ... this seems relevant for your point.
Look I'm not trying to get into an argument about some guy's fake tits here, and I don't really care to keep googling photos of it. If you think that estrogen makes somebody look like that then I guess we just disagree.
Why would this seem "weirdly" relevant to my point?
Have you never heard of gynecomastia? Estrogens produce breast growth in men, too, sometimes quite a bit of it. There are boys who have to get mastectomies because of endocrine issues, even! McBride seems to have been "trans" ever since his early 20s more than 10 years ago, so while that amount of growth would be unusual, it's not unheard of.
It's relevant because your point seems to be that McBride is just acting out a fetish in which he expects the whole world to be involved, as evidenced by his "wear[ing] fake breasts" (I assumed you meant prosthetics, though maybe you mean implants?), and if he's actually on hormones for 10 years, and made permanent changes to his body, I don't think that's very likely.
I don't think you need to insist that every MtF transsexual is just acting out a fetish in order to have a good argument against blanket letting any man who claims to be a woman into women's bathrooms. I actually agree with you on the conclusion! Bathrooms are vulnerable places and women are uncomfortable when men are in the bathroom with them, and that's a good enough reason to forbid it. You don't need to assume the worst about people in order to make the point.
(FWIW, on priors I wouldn't bet against McBride being AGP, but that's not always the same thing as just a fetish, and I would not expect someone who just has a crossdressing fetish to commit literally his whole life to the bit.)
What's so unlikely about it? Implants are usually... pretty permanent as well, it's not like he's swapping them in and out.
I agree that the 'wearing' addition is an odd turn of phrase, but 'fake breasts' to me applies equally well to ones produced by hormonal as surgical intervention.
Maybe we're talking past each other but the thing I think is unlikely --- conditional on his making permanent changes to his body --- is that the whole thing is just acting out a fetish. Most people with fetishes don't make permanent changes to their bodies or try to constantly act on them in public, and the ones who do are generally disturbed and disregulated enough that they'll get themselves into trouble with undeniably inappropriate behavior pretty quickly.
Maybe -- but this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'. Which I'm pretty skeptical of, given the prominent examples. I'd be surprised if Bruce Jenner didn't have at least aspects of this for instance.
Either that or they reshape society such that people who complain about their inappropriate behaviour are the ones who get into trouble!
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
Well I wouldn't say that it's 'just' a fetish -- it's a fetish in addition to a bunch of social confusion and weird medical enablement.
What were all these people tormented to the point of suicide by their birth-bodies doing about it prior to the invention of current-day medical/hormonal interventions?
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