Is it the same

[windwalker]

At this point in time its not questioned as to weather a man wanting to be a woman, or a woman wanting to be will be accepted as such

as with : http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/201 ... -leibovitz


Some people say that humans chose their sexuality they’re not born into it.
Is this the same, a woman feels she is black, changes her outer appearance to what she feels on the inside.
Makes a life that reflects this.

http://news.yahoo.com/spokane-naacp-mee ... 16770.html


Is it the same?

[Peacedog]

I think it is part of a long term effort coming from the idiot Left to mainstream mental illness.

When you can become famous for what you are instead of what you have done it becomes a race to the bottom in whole lot of different ways.

[windwalker]

I think it is part of a long term effort coming from the idiot Left to mainstream mental illness.

When you can become famous for what you are instead of what you have done it becomes a race to the bottom in whole lot of different ways.

mental illness?

[edededed]

I do see a lot about this on US news these days - it is certainly weird, and also dishonest, but the amount of attention applied to it seems excessive. I dunno about "right" or "left," but it does perhaps stem from an unhealthy fascination with race.

- A lot of people become very interested in another culture, which is fine (we are kind of that ourselves here).
- "We" also have our very own Ashida Kim - a white guy who wanted to be a ninja so much that he apparently had his eyes surgically altered so that he could look more "Asian" ("young kids" might not remember him? )
- It's important to accept who you are, I think - I'm an Asian-American male, and I really could care less that I am not white or black, not a woman, or the like. You do what you can, with what you have.

[Peacedog]

I totally forgot about Ashida Kim. Funny to think this kind of crap has an historical precedent.

[windwalker]

It's important to accept who you are, I think - I'm an Asian-American male, and I really could care less that I am not white or black, not a woman, or the like. You do what you can, with what you have.

Can you elaborate

a woman born as female can now be and demand to be looked as a male with changes to follow if wanted, men can do the same.
but those born into different cultures are tied to it and can not change or adopt it?

We" also have our very own Ashida Kim - a white guy who wanted to be a ninja so much that he apparently had his eyes surgically altered so that he could look more "Asian"

Is this worse then getting ones junk cut to be a female?

or

Her parents have said the 37-year-old activist has falsely portrayed herself as black for years.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

[windwalker]

I totally forgot about Ashida Kim. Funny to think this kind of crap has an historical precedent.

Although, I thought about writing a chi gung book once with a pen name of Wand Da Hong. I mean, really, what is funnier than a white guy selling chi gung books pretending to be a Chinese guy name Big Red Wang.

I think its not a matter of pretending, its who you are and also that the culture accepts you as such.
Many serious students of CMA get adopted into the family and given a name. Its who they are and how the family sees them.

[edededed]

Peacedog:

Funny how Ashida Kim never got the whole barrage of articles about him back then, huh? But he did always carefully cover his head with the black ninja mask after all...

Windwalker:

I meant what I said I think that learning other cultures is great - the most "basal" parts of culture are language and food, of course it is great to learn other ways to speak/think and other ways to cook/eat. Expand your horizons! There is no need to be limited by your own culture.

That said, you are who you are, and self-acceptance is important, too. Korea is now the world capital for plastic surgery - people of course want to be beautiful, but the problem is that everyone is becoming besotted with the current media's darling "beauty ideal," and so-called doctors are using their skills to cut people up to look like that. So, it's also an issue of being too affected by cultural pressure.

As for "cutting up ones junk" - well, some animals (like gobies) can change their own sex actually (as in, not just gonadal sex, but they can actually function as females or males as they decide). At least, humans don't really work that way thus far. We have a lot of options now it seems, but not everything is possible.

Of course each person's individual experience is different, and the issues are complex, so it is not a black-and-white issue (not meant as a pun). I do get the feeling that some changes are not going in a positive direction, though.

As for the person in question - I am sure she benefited the black community in the US a lot, not sure if she needed to be "black" for that to happen? I also hope that she does not get really negatively affected by all the news coverage - such as deciding to kill herself or the like. I think the media should think about the possible repercussions of what they do...

[windwalker]

I agree it raises a lot of interesting questions.
Surely you jest the media

"thinking about the possible repercussions of what they do"

The are differences between males and females no matter what is done. Notice that women competitions check for this.
It doesn't matter in male competitions for the most part there are no attributes that would help them directly against other high level
male competitors.

The most recent push for this failed in the US Army testing ranger school.

.
Human kind changing itself to match some cultural norm has always been with us.

[Steve James]

Waitaminute, is the question whether a man making himself up to look like a woman is the same as a White woman pretending to be Black? Or, is the question whether these are all symptoms of something wrong with society? Well, first off, we know that "race" the way we like to describe in the US doesn't exist. And, race isn't like sex: i.e., no matter where in the world you're born, the doctor will be able to tell from the start whether the sex organs are male or female. There may be cases when something goes awry and a person is born without sex organs or with too many.

So, let's be clear, Jenner is a man who likes to dress up like a woman. That type of news goes back a long way in Western society. It's not new. Jenner, moreover, isn't going to have his junk cut off or have surgery. And, he's not even gay. I.e., he's a cross dresser who has created a female persona. Female impersonator would be the best way to describe him, and he's not much different from RuPaul, except for the gay part, and the fact that he was on a Cheerios box as one of the most macho men of the 70s. Again, though, that's not new, or a product of "the left" . Jenner, Ali, OJ were the top three public athletes.

At any rate, guys dressing up like women is not quite the same as "pretending" to be another "race." But, it's certainly not usual for White people to pretend to be Black. However, the rules for "Blackness" are fairly loose. I mean, in many places, if you have any "Black" parentage, you're Black. Now, what makes Obama a Black man and not a White man --since, in American and Jewish tradition, the child "follows the condition of the mother"-- is in fact a matter of his choice. However, assuming that "race" exists, it is clearly possible to be "mixed." This fact, too, is not the creation of any political ideology.

Assuming for the moment that this woman is a "White" woman who pretended to be Black. The real question is her motive and whether she disadvantaged anyone else by her actions. Some say that, by going to an historically Black college, she took that opportunity away from a Black person. That's bs. These schools love to have White students; they get scholarships. I had a dentist who got his degree at Howard. Afa this woman being a leader in the Black community, it is more important to find out what she accomplished than her "identity." One of the NAACP's first leaders was Walter White;

He wrote in his autobiography, (A Man Called White "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me."
White would attend lynchings in the South and report the events --which was the original purpose of the NAACP.

Another question about the woman is why she just didn't work for the NAACP as a White person. There are lots of White members, in fact, always have been. If she's down with the program, there's no reason she shouldn't participate. But, whether she has the right to adopt another culture or ethnicity is not even worth considering --especially when there are so many people who go to great lengths to learn and study other cultures.

Of course, there may be a more complicated back story. Remember this one?

[edededed]

Interesting stuff about Mr. White (who was "Negro"), Steve - fascinating stuff (he would probably be considered "white" today). In that case - the lady in the news is technically only an iota or two "whiter" than Mr. White was

Good point that race is not exactly binary - it is similar to how colors are expressed differently in different languages (and in a social construct or cultural construct in that way, i.e. how one divides people). Even sexuality is not entirely binary, although of course the vast majority of people are (since that is how it usually works for mammals).

[edededed]

Actually - what if Walter White himself was actually wrong about his having had black ancestors at all? He after all did not look black at all, but everyone did believe him when he told them that he was, in fact, a "negro."

He also mentions (in his book) that many "negros" like him, who looked more white than black, would one day "disappear" - to try living in the less-difficult world of the whitefolk, often marrying whites themselves, and in that case often not mentioning their "negro blood." By that logic, it is slightly possible that the lady in the news may not be lying after all! (And her parents would be part of the game, too.)

[Andy_S]

If people want to change the way they look or are built, good luck to them: biological science and liberal society now makes it possible.

And is this really so utterly weird?

I would imagine most people here on RSF have changed (well, altered) their own physical constitutions to a greater or lesser extent due to their training.

[Bao]

Some people say that humans chose their sexuality they’re not born into it.

Genetics, hormones, circumstances... I have the feeling that we very much are what we are before we are born. But then we can change to protect ourselves.

Boys and girls are not "taught" to like certain colors or certain toys. They are born to like something more than the other. There's a study with monkeys to show that this is true:

In their study, the researchers compared how 34 rhesus monkeys living in a single troop interacted with human toys categorized as either masculine or feminine. The “masculine” set consisted of wheeled toys preferred by human boys (e.g., a wagon, a truck, a car, and a construction vehicle); the “feminine” set was comprised of plush toys comparable to stuffed animals and dolls (e.g., a Raggedy-Ann™ doll, a koala bear hand puppet, an armadillo, a teddy bear, and a turtle). Individual monkeys were released into an outdoor area containing one wheeled toy and one plush toy, with the researchers taping all interactions using separate cameras for each toy, identifying all specific behaviors, and statistically analyzing the results.

The results closely paralleled those found in human children. As with human boys, male rhesus monkeys clearly preferred wheeled toys over plush toys, interacting significantly more frequently and for long durations with the wheeled toys.

http://animalwise.org/2012/01/26/born-t ... -primates/

I believe that in certain ways we already know what we want, what we like and what we dislike before we are born. We express what we are, but in some respect we are not taught what we are. We are not a "tabula rasa", not only social construction.

[Patrick]