What would actual transgendering take?

How transgendered are you if all you actually did was change your clothes?

Pitt, Johnstown won a case against a butch transvestite who claimed to be a transgendered student

The case was apparently decided as it was because anti-discrimination law does not cover supposed transgendereds in any event.

But the situation is complicated because various political authorities manipulated by liberals insist that the law does or should require people's gender be taken pretty much at their word and in defiance of any silly opposing physical evidence like genitalia.

[Aside.

This is similar to the liberal view that race should be taken at a person's word.

In both cases the standard is defensible only if only thinking makes it so or anyway no other, better evidence is available.

In the case of race it certainly could happen that a person's own report might be the best evidence available.

But that other defense has actually been made, in both cases.

And liberals insist they are the "reality based" party.

Oh, my.

Gender is self-determination, and Caitlyn Jenner’s seizing that self-determination in such a public fashion will save lives.

/Aside.]

Pennsylvania law, apparently, does admit the possibility of gender change, but accepts that is has occurred only in case of surgical removal of (ahem) dissenting genitalia.

In the present case that has not happened.

But "The World Health Organization has condemned any legal requirements for transgender people that demand surgery," says the author, in a liberal huff.

This is my personal test for successful gender reassignment.

Medical science will successfully make the blind see when they can actually see.

Extrapolate.

Most people who dismiss sex reassignment as impossible are basing that judgment on what I think is the excessive requirement that no cell in the body, nor any larger structure, nor indeed the whole body, any longer contain the slightest trace of the gender from which the individual has allegedly transitioned.

Surgery Can’t Give Bruce Jenner XX Chromosomes

If we use that standard to judge whether people are sighted we will rather stupidly never accept that electronic and nanotechnology suitably stimulating the right parts of the brain might be able to do the trick though the eyes, the optic nerve, or whatever are still unable to properly function as they do in persons sighted without medical intervention.

Phooey.

On the other hand, in cases short of that society is being asked - nay, compelled - to play "let's pretend," the alleged point being to make life as little miserable as possible for the very, very tiny minority of humans afflicted with gender dysphoria, a condition in which they "experience significant dysphoria (discontent) with the sex and gender they were assigned at birth."

Actually, it is essential to the condition that these individuals identify with the sex opposite their birth sex.

There is no cure and pending the medical possibility of actual sex reassignment various degrees and mixes of pretending and surgical modification to remove birth genitalia and other physical traces of one's birth sex are recommended by, er, those who recommend such things.

I am not aware whether that approach actually helps and doubt the truth is much wanted, anyway, this being a question so deeply implicated in sexual and identity politics and the coercion and bullying that naturally accompany such things that lying on all sides, including by medical professionals, is to be expected to dominate discussion, evaluation, and controversy.

For all I know, dragging these folks through this huge to-do of pretense does far more harm than good.

But maybe it does help, really.

Humans are very strange animals.