September 20, 2016

"Cisgender people just got lucky. The doctor guessed your gender correctly when you were a baby."

"A doctor takes one look at us and makes a guess about what our gender identity will be: 'Well, I see a penis, so I think that this baby will grow up to be a man. Did I get it right?' If you’re cisgender it means that the doctor guessed your gender identity correctly at birth, and that you actually like the letter that the doctor put on your birth certificate when you were born."

ADDED: Interesting — unintentionally revealing? — use of the word "like." Not liking something doesn't make it untrue. If it's just a question of not liking it, Jacob Tobia doesn't have a compelling argument.

74 comments:

Brent said...

Blowing out his ass obviously. Seriously, people like him are the worst of our society

mccullough said...

Given the odds are 99% that the biology will match the gender identity, no luck is involved.

MayBee said...

Same with race or no?

mockturtle said...

Maybee, race is different in that it actually is a spectrum.

madAsHell said...

Jacob Tobia doesn't have a compelling argument.

He's just a fruitcake with a megaphone. Why in the world would you spend the effort to dissect his argument?

MSNBC has to put content between the kotex, and incontinence commercials. They found this bearded lady in a circus sideshow, and.....shazamm....we have content!! The psycho-babble words have make it sound real science-y.

Yes, this shameful content is aimed at women. Oddly, kotex is not recognized by the sexist spell checker.

damikesc said...

This is why I fucking hate transsexuals.

"The doctor got lucky". Yeah, finding a vulva or a penis is just blind fucking luck.

Listen kids --- don't assume your mental illness is the norm. You ALL are an unbelievably tiny outlier.

I find the term "cisgender" incredibly offensive, fucking trannies.

YoungHegelian said...

What sort of an idiot thinks that sexual differences start & end with genitalia?

Sexual dymorphism in mammals starts at the genetic level & just works its way up the macro levels from there. For example, sex hormones are involved in the metabolism of calcium, something that seems as far from sexual expression as can be imagined. Imagine all the "fine tuning" that needs to be done to a female mammals body so that her immune system doesn't attack her progeny during gestation. And there are more examples where those came from.

When one starts messing with these foundational sex hormones, bad things can happen, even if the doctors are very good & careful (e.g. breast cancer in transwomen).

Achilles said...

This is going to be the dumbest thread ever.

JAORE said...

Not compelling?

I think we have a consensus.

Presented from an extremely narrow slice of self serving, self identified "reality"?

I think we have a majority.

Unknown said...

Democrats: Enabling mental disorder for, well, at least decades, if not more. This person needs serious help of some sort. Instead, he/she/it is getting praise and fame for being mentally ill.

--Vance

Paul Snively said...

So it's not the doctors who are confusing sex and gender.

Duly noted.

When I was between marriages, I made the mistake of dating one of these intellectual-yet-idiots who was a Duke coed at the time. She was all about precisely this confusion, thought "The Crying Game" was some sort of brilliantly insightful exploration of the human condition, all of that. I just pointed out to her that if, God forbid, a non-traditionally-gendered person were in a horrible car accident, the paramedics would have no difficulty whatsoever in determining his or her sex, medically.

Unsurprisingly, she had no response to that.

Curious George said...

"""Cisgender people just got lucky."

Yeah, they're not fucking freaks.

damikesc said...

A determination with a 99.7% or so accuracy rate is not luck.

Scott M said...

I must ask again...just how affluent does a society/civilization have to be in order for this sort of thing to become an issue? How completely devoid of actual strife does one's life have to be before one clutches at straws like this?

Quaestor said...

No, Jake, the doctor made the logical assumption you wouldn't grow up insane.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

If you're a girl and you've got a penis that must suck.

But if you're a guy and you've got a vagina that must be awesome.

rhhardin said...

There's the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Achilles said...

Surely the best way to deal with this issue is to call people "freaks" and claim mental illness.

You people are not thinking about this with any depth. I am not saying what this individual is positing is correct. What I am saying is that you people are enabling him/her and giving them a platform and a foil.

There would be much better ways for you to approach this issue that might get you what you want.

damikesc said...


You people are not thinking about this with any depth. I am not saying what this individual is positing is correct. What I am saying is that you people are enabling him/her and giving them a platform and a foil.


We've humored this bullshit and it gets worse.

Time to stop humoring mental disorders and pull the license of any doctor who does gender reassignment surgery and force them, in a criminal trial, to explain WHY they mutilated a clearly mentally ill person. No different than saying "Yeah, I know you're anorexic, but you're also bit pudgy, fattie"

TreeJoe said...

Two things:

1. Would it be preferable for the doctor to do chromosomal examination and say, "Hey, I see/do not see a Y - now I can label this child!"

2. The problem I'm seeing with the attempted norming of the truly transgender community is the subsequent rejection on examining the extraordinary rate of mental illness within that community.

boycat said...

Never getting the fact that if you say you don't match what your doctor sees with his own eyes then YOU are the weirdo.

Caroline said...

No one seems concerned that the nbc news industrial complex is committing to disseminating this propaganda, which will most likely end up in schools. I'm not laughing.

damikesc said...

"What do my genes know? I have my feelings, dammit!"

John henry said...

Why do people like this get taken seriously? How can there be any question about gender. If you have a penis you are male, if you have a vagina you are female. Case closed, end of story. (Caveat: A rare condition at birth is babies born with both sets or neither.)

If a male (born with a penis) is convinced that he is a woman, it is a mental disorder just the same as if they thought they were a goat or a giraffe. It should probably be treated as a mental disorder.

OTOH, if a man wants to pretend he is a woman, Even to the point of having his penis amputated, it is no skin off my nose. As a matter of politeness I will call him Sally (or Billy if he wants to pretend he is a goat)

As a matter of courtesy I will nto criticize or be rude to him. Just the same as I would not be rud to any other person with any other mental disorder.

Unless, of course, they threaten me or become obnoxious. In that case I will avoid them if I can.

John Henry

ALP said...

These people bore the crap out of me - anybody else? Nothing more boring than one dimensional people, and people with "issues" can't seem to develop any depth of personality beyond the one dimension. Yawn. Like a song with one note. Let's impose a moratorium on anybody discussing their sexual/gender issues and let's all concentrate on being civil **adults** for a change.

In other news, I have to attend a 90 minute sexual harassment/diversity training next week. I think its the first time I've had to do such a thing in many, many years. I am wondering how "Onion-like" it will be. BigLaw in Seattle.

Sebastian said...

"If it's just a question of not liking it, Jacob Tobia doesn't have a compelling argument." What do you mean? Like is all that matters. We live in the post modern era of exalted subjectivity. You do know, I believe, that "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Toby is just defining his own concept of existence. Sure, he's near the bottom of the absurdist slippery slope, greased by more than a few law profs. But there his "argument" is perfectly compelling, and even if old-fashioned law profs disagree, it doesn't matter: the Tobias have the compelling apparatus of the state and the MSM on their side. It's all the compulsion they need.

Henry said...

What is really important is that the mohel guesses your gender correctly.

MadisonMan said...

Cisgender people just got lucky.

Dad always said when I complained about something unfair: It's better to be born lucky than smart.

But it's not so much lucky as normal. Does one have to apologize for being lucky or normal? I don't think so. But I have to wonder why Tobia hasn't framed it as Transgender people just got unlucky. I think the answer is along the lines of Check your privilege.

You were lucky. You match your external sex organs. These people aren't lucky

That doesn't quite read as well as

You are normal. You match your external sex organs. These people aren't normal.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...


"There would be much better ways for you to approach this issue that might get you what you want."

Or you could call a spade a spade, which has worked well for much of human history. I don't want anything. I'm simply not going to pretend that a profound mental health issue somehow changes reality. That way lies madness.

Laslo Spatula said...

I wonder if a doctor can tell if a baby is gay by sticking a finger up its butt?

I am The Replacement Laslo.

n.n said...

Whereas gender (i.e. behavioral traits) may be influenced by personal preference, sex is an invariant property of biological determination that bears a near perfect correlation with external physical characteristics observed shortly after conception.

Richard said...

For those who wondered how Lysenkoism could replace the science of genetics in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, you now know why. All it takes is for an ideology to take control of the state. In the former Soviet Union, science had to conform to the Communist’s belief that Lamarckian inheritance takes place. This gender nonsense being foisted by the Left is just a modern day version of Lysenkoism.

Joe said...

"Guessing" gender on the presence of a penis or not has a higher success rate than all birth control other than abstinence.

Guessing that someone will NOT have body dysmorphia disorder also has excellent odds.

~ Gordon Pasha said...

I'm an endocrinologist. One of the few endocrine crises is when a child is born with what is called "ambiguous" genitalia. The standard advice is to administer corticosteroids while the diagnosis is narrow down - oh, and name the baby Francis while the tests are pending.

Otherwise, the general rule is, anatomy IS destiny.

tim maguire said...

Doctors guess gender identity? I thought they just noted biological gender. Aren't biological gender and gender identity two different things? Isn't that the whole point? That one need not determine the other?

mockturtle said...

ALP justifiably complained: In other news, I have to attend a 90 minute sexual harassment/diversity training next week. I think its the first time I've had to do such a thing in many, many years. I am wondering how "Onion-like" it will be. BigLaw in Seattle.

If I were you, I would find out if there were other dissenters and then, as a group, refuse to go. You could always say you have an extreme allergy to bullshit.

mockturtle said...

I suppose we therefore have 'cisgender' privilege. STOP, already with this crap!!!

DanTheMan said...

There is no objective reality. Everything is a narrative.
In my narrative, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, and 2+2=4.

Your narrative may be completely different. It may get you killed at the next red light, but you will have died knowing that your reality was as good as anyone else's.

Except God's.

gerry said...

If it's just a question of not liking it, Jacob Tobia doesn't have a compelling argument.

Look, same-sex "marriage" had no compelling argument, it was only a redefinition based upon postmodern emotional claptrap. Once you accept the claptrap approach, anything goes. It is a sort of "living constitution" logical thing.

Static Ping said...

The doctor is pretty much declaring if the baby can potentially get pregnant someday. Barring some unusual disorders or extremely poor eyesight, it is 100% accurate.

buwaya said...

Why is all this confusion about just sex?

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life"

Indeed. I define myself as a billionaire, and therefore I demand that all you people validate my concept of existence. My personal identity issue is much easier to solve because there is no technological problem coming up with a solution, all I require is money.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Blogger tim maguire said...
Doctors guess gender identity?


New Think says that you are not born a male or female. Instead you are arbitrarily assigned a gender.

mockturtle said...

Some people who identify as Superman or Jesus Christ are classified as psychotic.

Pianoman said...

What about ultrasounds? Those nurses that tell the mother what sex their baby is? Are they "lucky" too?

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
jg said...

hello mental illness

mockturtle said...

New fathers will have to pass out different cigars now. No longer, 'It's a boy!' or 'It's a girl!' but 'It's entirely dependent upon future preference'.

pdug said...

I think its funny that when he plays the role of a [male] doctor he dresses in a business suit, but not a doctors white coat.

Why? Is he not paying attention to how doctors (both genders and both sexes) actually dress?

Why?

jr565 said...

""A doctor takes one look at us and makes a guess about what our gender identity will be: 'Well, I see a penis, so I think that this baby will grow up to be a man. Did I get it right?' If you’re cisgender it means that the doctor guessed your gender identity correctly at birth, and that you actually like the letter that the doctor put on your birth certificate when you were born."

No, its not that they will grow up to be a man. They ARE a man already. A doctor doesnt have to guess whether this baby will be confused about his gender later in life. If he has a penis - boy. In 99.99999% of cases. Very rarely there is an intersex condition that makes identification more confusing. But even so, its a matter of sex, not gender as a social construct.

ccscientist said...

If men and women are really identical, why do trans want to change? The trans individuals I have seen in public are acting more "female" (sashaying around, primping) than the most feminine woman around them--what exactly are they doing? It is like a parody of femaleness.
The idea that children can "choose" in any meaningful way their "preferred gender" before puberty is crazy. Children have no idea what sexual desire is. Boys exhibit some but not all "male" traits and think girls are "icky". Little girls do not yet feel a desire to have children. Giving them the idea that they can be the other sex by choosing it, when they don't even feel the drives and desires that will define their own sex is simply nuts.

Hyphenated American said...

There is no objective reality. If the party wants it, 2 plus 2 is 5.

jr565 said...

One of the funny arguments made by those pushing this theory is that on one hand they want to say that doctors shouldn't assume that a baby born with a penis is a boy. But if a woman thinks she is a boy and has surgery she will ask the doctor to fashion a penis for her. Because, apparently, a boy has a penis. How do the doctors know what a boy is supposed to look like and how do trans people know what genitals they are SUPPOSED to have if we dont accept the premise that boys have penises and women have vaginas. If you take that away there is no reason why you'd ever need to have surgery to give yourself the "Correct" genitals.

Anonymous said...

To simplify things doctors should just record whether the child has a dick or is dickless.

Lucien said...

Gee, how does amniocentesis work? Are there dice involved?

mockturtle said...

gerry summed it up succinctly: Once you accept the claptrap approach, anything goes.

jr565 said...

"If men and women are really identical, why do trans want to change? The trans individuals I have seen in public are acting more "female" (sashaying around, primping) than the most feminine woman around them--what exactly are they doing? It is like a parody of femaleness. "
Agreed. its like they are caricatures of the sex they are trying to emulate. Its extremely hard to even understand what they are talking about when they say they "feel like a woman" or a man. How do they know what that feels like? Trying to get them to articulate what that even means is extremely difficult, because I'm not even sure if they know. But it seems to be more of a question of feeling "feminine" or masculine"
Gender roles as a social construct were actually critiques of gender norms. Yet to the trans community, they seem to be proof of gender.
How often do we find a trans woman who then dresses like a man? There are a lot of women out there who reject the idea that girls have to be feminine and thus dress like men (having the butch haircut and dressing in "mens" clothes) How often do we find trans women (men who identify as women) then becoming gender benders and dressing like men? The gender norm then is reinforced by almost all trans women that women wear make up, and are overly feminine and glamorous.

n.n said...

Hyphenated American:

5 is congruent to 2. Congruent relationships are equivalent but not equal in that their properties are retained with a reduced set of operations. They are useful for reducing complexity and estimating higher dimensions.

Quaestor said...

I wonder if a doctor can tell if a baby is gay by sticking a finger up its butt?

Ask Tight-Ass.

Yancey Ward said...

I really don't know what else to say- only that parody is slowly being strangled to death by reality.

Martin said...

Utterly and unquestionably insane, but so much of the Left's post-modern discourse these days is exactly that. They deny reality, even the most banal of facts such as penis=male, vagina=female, and then blame everyone else in the world for being right and for themselves being wrong.

Anonymous said...

It's all just "pay attention to me".

damikesc said...

New fathers will have to pass out different cigars now. No longer, 'It's a boy!' or 'It's a girl!' but 'It's entirely dependent upon future preference'.

This made me laugh. Even better than what I would've chosen of "To Be Determined".

I really don't know what else to say- only that parody is slowly being strangled to death by reality.

I look forward to the WNBA becoming a league laden with dunkers when dudes decide to make some money playing there instead of in D-League or Europe.

Bad Lieutenant said...

You know how you could find out if these people are really crazy or not?

Start shooting them. If the flow dries up, you'll know they were just in it for the ride. If people keep putting their hands up for it, you'll know they're serious(ly crazy).

Delayna said...

I never thought that the star bellied sneetch ride at Universal was educational. Until now.

Michael said...

I intend to knock the teeth out of anyone who utters the word "cisgender" in my hearing. If they are smaller than me, of course.

fizzymagic said...

What a perfect example of the anti-science left. Sexual dimorphism is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, and is likewise observed in every primate species. This argument is effectively the uber-right creationist argument, that humans are some special creation and are fundamentally different from our ancestors.

Not only do they believe this, but they try to suppress any scientific investigation that could even possibly come to a conclusion they don't like. Such censorship is immensely destructive to science as an enterprise.

effinayright said...

"What a perfect example of the anti-science left. Sexual dimorphism is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, and is likewise observed in every primate species. This argument is effectively the uber-right creationist argument, that humans are some special creation and are fundamentally different from our ancestors."

*****************

Exactly. And what's particularly galling is that these same proglodytes will praise themselves to the skies for supporting Darwinism --without having the slightest idea how they are contradicting themselves.

effinayright said...

New fathers will have to pass out different cigars now. No longer, 'It's a boy!' or 'It's a girl!' but 'It's entirely dependent upon future preference'.

*************

IOW it's sort of a Shroedinger's Cat theory of sexuality.

n.n said...

It's the same argument used by scientific mystics who conflate logical domains, including evolutionary creationists, anthropogenic global warmists, big bangers, etc. when they assume/assert uniformity, independence, and linearity over time and space, forward and reverse.

As for the evolutionary (i.e. chaotic) process, it has been grossly anthropomorphized to fit people's beliefs and transcends the scientific domain. The same as the establishment of the Pro-Choice quasi-religion (i.e. selective/opportunistic principles) in order to deny the evolutionary process from conception and offer comfort to abortionists and their advocates alike, [class] diversitists, etc.

Freeman Hunt said...

"Lucky" is usually used in reference to a desirable but unlikely outcome.

n.n said...

Sex is binary in humans. Gender (i.e. behavioral traits) is a narrow normal distribution centered on sex. The issues relevant to society is whether the transgender spectrum disorder (e.g. homosexual, crossover) is a progressive condition (e.g. anthropogenic) and whether the [selective] normalization of these orientations have a redeeming (or adverse) value to society, humanity, and to the individuals. For example, the value of reducing men to sperm depositors and women to reproductive prostitutes (barefoot and pregnant, but still taxable and serviceable) in order to normalize transgender/homosexual couplets. It didn't start with transgenders -- it started in liberal abandon with female chauvinism, as did the resumption of abortion rites -- but it progressed in order to exploit a politically profitable wedge.

DanTheMan said...

>>. But if a woman thinks she is a boy and has surgery she will ask the doctor to fashion a penis for her.

This, I believe, is known formally as an adadicktomy.

Bob Loblaw said...

"Getting lucky" and "not getting unlucky" are not the same thing. I'm not "lucky" because I haven't been struck by lightning. I simply haven't been unlucky.

I see no reason we, as a society, should allow people with mental problems to force the rest of us to live in their private realities.

Bruce Hayden said...

This whole thing brings up a lot of questions. There do seem to be a small number of individuals who ended up with the wrong genetalia furor their chromosomal sex. My guess is that they tend more often than not to be genetically male, because the female is the default. And, they tend to be over represented in the Olympics because of the natural advantages of males in athletics. These probably are going to be quite rare though because that would be a complete evolutionary dead end. They most likely cannot breed at all. And, if species are going to survive, they can't be common. Which makes me think that more transgendered fall into the category of wrongly wired brain. And that probably puts them much more in the category of having brains not wired correctly (from an evolutionary point of view). Which could be argued to be an extreme of what appears to cause much of homosexuality. If the genetalia and sex organs match genetic sex, the individual is likely capable of breeding (necessarily with the opposite genetic sex). They may not want to, and in a society like ours, not in danger of extinction, we have the luxury of allowing them not to. But they likely could, if and when not that case. Which is to say that the evolutionary disadvantage is not nearly as severe as for complete chromosomal gender screw ups. Esp when the homosexuality (or even transgenderism) is not chromosomal, but rather environmental in nature.

My next thought is that there may be a business opportunity here, of developing a low cost chromosomal sex identifier which could be used at birth by progressive parents who obsess about this sort of thing. Already, newborns of mixed RH parents (or at least of RH- mothers) is tested at birth. And, in some cases, drugs and diseases are tested at birth too. Just add this test to the others. Insurance likely won't pay, because of the rarity of true gender mismatches. So, the solution would be to get the transgendered to lobby HHS, etc, to include this in mandatory ObamaCare coverage. Or, just sell it hard in progressive media like the NYT. Would it be useful? In the aggregate, very likely not. But it might still be a money making opportunity.