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Where does "The clergy are wrong about God's will" fit in this schema?
What about "God gave us the firewood, but expects us to light the match"?
It's a thorny issue to be sure and relies upon what could be called ineffability to work, i.e. there's no satisfactory intellectual answer from just about any standpoint.
A Christian should be obedient to his priest and the church hierarchy in most cases. However, the hierarchy is made up of humans, who can and do go wrong. At the individual scale this can be devastating and 'should I ignore my priest about this' is a very uncomfortable question for a Christian to ever have to ask. The reality is that most people aren't really equipped to make that call. Ideally the problem is fixed by those priests being accountable to bishops and so on, but in practice the whole system can and does fail. Then again, at one point the Orthodox patriarchs and bishops all decided to reunite with the Church of Rome under the Pope, and the laity stood firm and told them 'no', and the hierarchy demurred.
What we have is a system where we all understand that human components sometimes fail, sometimes en masse, and yet we believe that Christ in His capacity as the head of the Church makes it work out anyway. It's gotten us this far.
Example?
Was Huckleberry Finn equipped to make that call, or should he have sent Hard-R Jim back into bondage?
"God will decide for me whether I survive this flood."
"I sent you two boats and a helicopter!"
(Context for today's lucky 10,000)
Ultimately he has to follow his conviction, as we all do.
Probably my fault but I'm not grasping the relevance.
And my conviction is that trans-women are women in every way that matters outside the bedroom and the doctor's office, that if the mind and body disagree on whether someone is werman or woman it is better to bring the body in line with the mind rather than vice versa, that if two people engage in coitus the morality or immorality of their act does not depend on their genders, and that parents of teenagers developing same-gender attractions or children with genital dysphoria do not have an inalienable entitlement to force or gaslight them into a heteronormative mould.
Human actions, including those that appear to go against nature, might be part of God's plan. For instance, Eliot Page being born with female parts doesn't necessarily mean that He intended Mr Page to live as a woman; His plan might very well involve hormones and surgery.
I appreciate that perspective, as the conversation under the assumption we all have the same values but disagree on facts has been extremely frustrating. That said, do you mind elaborating? If bringing the mind in line with the body is so costly (in the sense that it's better to do the opposite), why is it ok to force the majority of the population to see trans women as women "in every way that matters outside the bedroom and doctor's office"? Also, why those particular exclusions, and how do you argue against people who think even those are also a sign of bigotry?
Not at all. I believe everyone is entitled to my opinion.
It's not about the majority's minds, per se, so much as their manners: what Tim Walz described as:
There are physical differences between the sexes; we can change some of them, but have yet to discover how to change others; measuring and sorting along these physical attributes can sometimes place trans individuals in the category opposite their identity. However, these physical attributes should not be relevant outside a narrow set of circumstances.
They are the most obvious instances where someone's genitals might matter.
WRT bedrooms, I again refer to Mr Walz' Golden Rule. If I am not, personally, dating someone, than the difference between their being attracted to/not attracted to 'people born with female/male/ambiguous parts', 'people identifying as women/men/non-binary', and 'people who look feminine/masculine/androgynous' is very low on the list of my concerns.
WRT the field of medicine, my recommendation is to Replace The Symbol With The Substance. If Alice:
&c., &c., list that on her medical chart. Asking if she is 'really' a man or a woman is, at that point, superfluous. (Cf. "A Human's Guide to Words", E. Yudkowsky, February 2008)
This assumes we are all on the same page about what constitutes good manners, and the boundaries of your own damn business. neither of those is the case, so you will necessarily be involved in changing their minds, possibly forcefully. This all would be fine, but given your portrayal of bringing the mind to be in line with the body as something to be avoided, I don't understand how you're so flippant about the minds of the majority of your countrymen.
That would be a decent (but still debateable) argument for abolishing sex segregation altogether, and sorting them by physical characteristics. It's not a good argument for keeping sex segregation but letting trans people into opposite-sex spaces modulo some physical characteristics. Why are you in favor of the latter rather than the former?
Right, but a certain type of trans activist would invoke it to tell you your partner's genitals is none of your damn business, and that (assuming you're straight) if you're not attracted to a woman just because she's trans, you should psy-op yourself into at least being open to it, the same way you want people to psy-op themselves into believing that trans women are women in every way that matters. I don't see how those arguments are fundamentally different.
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I will cut in here to ask how this conviction is compatible with the fact that transgender (biological) men resemble other men far more than they resemble women, and transgender (biological) women resemble other women far more than they resemble men.
The prototypical trans male is a system network administrator and Warhammer collector who grows their hair long and wants to be called Anna, and the prototypical trans female is a slight girl with anorexia who cuts her hair short and wants to be called Eliot. (I've met both in my time). Both display physical and mental traits that are strongly associated with their biological sex and strongly disassociated with the sex they proclaim themselves to be.
How do you draw a cluster that includes women-who-want-to-be-men and men but excludes women, and vice versa? What do they have in common? As far as I can see transgenderism correlates far more with autism and self-loathing than with resemblance to the opposite sex, and therefore fixing the self-loathing seems like the most kind and effective approach.
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