How do I feel about transgender rights?
This is a complex one that has been rolling around in my head for a bit. Maybe spelling out my thought process will give me a better understanding of where I stand, and should stand.
First off, people can do whatever they want to their own bodies. People who modify their body have a right to exist.
Second, gender dynamics are now a huge mess that I think the internet magnifies, and I do not blame anyone for knowing absolutely nothing about the subject. It hardly affects my life at all. I work with a post-op MtF transsexual and have known her for decades. She is a very hard-working, honorable person. I also have known several others in the past and present, both pre- and post- transition.
To clarify my position, I want to explain some technical details. A person can change their gender, but not their sex (at least, not yet). Gender is their role, sociologically applied, and such traits can be swapped and the opposite trait imitated to enforce their inclusion into the opposite gender. However, sex is biological, all the way down to the DNA, and we aren't able to change the DNA yet. People who wish to change sexes have gone farther than mere gendered traits, though. They've gotten hormone treatments, which changes them fundamentally but non-genetically. There should be a third term, trans...something, which denotes these type of changes. These people are neither merely transgender, but also not completely transsexual. Maybe 'transhormonal'?
Can trans gender people marry? This is along the same lines as gay marriage. This is as fine to me as gay marriage is.
Should trans people have the right to change their birth certificate? At first blush, you'd think, hey, it's not hurting anything else, but a birth certificate is what you were at the time of birth. To change your sex on your birth certificate is revisionist history. As far as I know, 'gender' is not most birth certificates, 'sex' is. So my answer to that is no, unless 'gender' is specifically on the birth certificate. Maybe there needs to be some sort of official document that denotes a change of gender, if it makes transgender people feel better.
