'I have to take issue with you though on one key point: you keep using terms like transgendered woman...but as you know from a factual and scientific basis, a transgendered woman is not a woman at all, as the great Germaine Greer has said, but a lie!

The chromosomes you are born with are the same as the ones you die with and a person with male chromosomes may called themselves "transgendered" after having had surgery but that person is NOT a woman!

You cant "become" a woman by surgery, you know....the only way to become a woman is to have been born a female!Fact!'

Derailing. Denounced.

Gerry

yes comedy is about what makes people laugh.. oh werent those Third Reich jokes about Jews hilarious? People laughed and laughed.

No we do not 'become' female many of us already are but in XY bodies. The 'fact' as you put it of chromosomes is body-sex not gender, and you would be surprised how many variations in that there actually are in real people. Have you ever been tested for chromosome make-up? If so in how many body sites? No I thought not. Oh look a man saying 'the great Germaine Greer', hmm who are you actually?

oh and I Love Eddie Izzard a lot. He and his anarchic stream of consciousness humour made it All Right to be Trans even cool. OK so he went off in another direction, so what. He is a human being and allowed to do what he wants he hasnt betrayed anyone, and if he has stayed true to himself then he stands a good chance of being happy. More power to him.

I hope that I am open minded and accepting, and am open to the possibility that my views are limited by my own cultural background and experiences, but I will freely admit that I have a "problem", for want of a better word, with transgenderism, as I don't understand it in how it differs from transvestitism in real terms. I am male, biologically, and tend to be the "dominant" partner in romantic relationships, am more keen on sex than my partners, drink beer and have a tendency to scratch myself in public. However, I like pink, enjoy musical, can appreciate the objective beauty of Johnny Depp, talk about my feelings and look good in a dress. My relationship with society is my own, surely, and I don't feel the need to define it in terms of whether I'm male or female. Why do transgendered people, or am I missing something here? Please don't shout me down, I want to learn if I'm wrong.

Gerry, yes, and like that other Cnut, he'd rather cling tight to his dogmatic belief in his own infallibility than look at the reality of the lives being around him.

Thank you, Juliet, for this thoughtful, illuminating post.
Gerry - I beg you to read "Normal," a slender, enormously instructive read by National Book Award winner Amy Bloom. You may discover that gender identity has significant biological components other than chromosomes.

Martha D - I have always been a feminist, reading The Female Eunuch when I was 13, and yes I did like activists like Sheila Jeffries, Bell Hooks and Andrea Dworkin.

Gerry T - ouch! Just because I state what are scientific facts, and not wish fulfilment..but hey call me what you want, interesting that you use female sex organs as a term of abuse! Many "transgendered" people, I have found, are actually deeply reactionary and profoundly sexist!

Samantha - I will find out about that book by Amy Bloom, I do have an open mind on most things, but I love evidence, facts, scientific truth above everything else, and that informs my political and social views...

gerry wrote :
"The chromosomes you are born with are the same as the ones you die with and a person with male chromosomes may called themselves "transgendered" after having had surgery but that person is NOT a woman!"

Er, no. Factually incorrect in all ways.

First, "the chromosomes you're born with are those you'll die with"

"CONCLUSION: Donor-derived cells are capable of composing endometrium in recipients, even those of the opposite sex." - from Bone marrow-derived cells from male donors can compose endometrial glands in female transplant recipients by Ikoma et al in Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2009 Dec;201(6):608.e1-8

So female patients whose chromosomes are 46XX gradually have their body becoming 46XY if given a bone marrow donation by a 46XY male donor. Even their ovaries become 46XY.

That doesn't change their appearance, or sex.

Now for the "a person with male chromosomes" bit.

"A 46,XY mother who developed as a normal woman underwent spontaneous puberty, reached menarche, menstruated regularly, experienced two unassisted pregnancies, and gave birth to a 46,XY daughter with complete gonadal dysgenesis." -- J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2008 Jan;93(1):182-9

So a mother that has given birth to three children can have "male chromosomes". In fact, fully 1 in 300 men don't have the usual 46XY set most men have; many are 47XXY, and some are even 46XX.

It's more complicated than many people realise, this isn't taught well in schools. How many know that in some parts of the world, having a *natural* sex change is more common than having red hair?

See http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html

Finally, let's look at Transsexuality. I'll grossly over-simplify, but like all of the above, it's an Intersex condition, where someone is born with anatomy wholly consistent with neither a male nor female stereotype. In this case, boy brain in girl body, or the reverse.

Not "spiritually" or "mentally" or "psychologically" cross-sexed: anatomically, visible on fMRI and PET scans. We've known this for over 15 years, and suspected it for rather longer, but we didn't have the imaging techniques to prove it.

See A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality. by Zhou et al Nature (1995) 378:68–70.

"Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones"

It was the first - there's been hundreds since.

Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041

A sex difference in the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus: relationship to gender identity. by Garcia-Falgueras et al Brain. 2008 Dec;131(Pt 12):3132-46.

Sexual differentiation of the human brain: relevance for gender identity, transsexualism and sexual orientation. Swaab Gynecol Endocrinol (2004) 19:301–312.

White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study. - Rametti et al, J Psychiatr Res. 2010 Jun 8.

Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.

and so on and so on.

G.Day: "Emily was a classic panto dame surely". I will pass on the obvious pantomime response to your specious comment. However you have clearly missed the point.

The fact that the Emily character may have its roots in a long established theatrical tradition does not make it comedic or appropriate. Blackface minstrel comedy was a popular form of entertainment in the USA for more than a hundred years, but don't think anyone is advocating a return of the Black and White Minstrel Show.

Incidentally am I the only one to spot that the Johann Hari deconstruct of Little Britain omits any reference to transgender representation at all?

...except that Andrew O'Neill one. He's garbage.

Gerry, If you define "a woman" as being a human being who was assigned as "female" at birth by a cursory examination of external genitalia and who has then subsequently grown into adulthood being treated by society as "female". Then, no, clearly there is no other way for someone to be "a woman", but that is purely by definition not by any other logic, or "scientific fact" or reasoning. But that narrow definition of woman is not the one most of us work with anymore. So we, and that includes you, are discussing definitions and semantics not "scientific fact" or reasoning here.

However you also show yourself to be rather confused as to what "scientific fact" is. There are generally agreed idea based on evidence about how the universe is, there are even some mathematical equations (models) that attempt to describe, the behaviour of the physical universe. These models have changed over the centuries of human endeavour. As Alan Turin famously stated a model "will be a simplification and an idealisation, and consequently a falsification". Not all models are mathematical equation however, Your definition of woman is part of your model that attempts to define humanity as a binary gendered sexually reproductive species. That binary gendered bit, that is a simplification and therefore a falsification. Newtonian physics had to qive way to quantum physics in the end, most people can still get by with newtonian physics, but there are some very real things it cannot describe. Just because something is beyond your model of the universe does not necessarily make the thing impossible, it might just be time to examine your model and think of replacing it with a more complicated one. I know that can be scary, but it can also be exciting.

By the way, ending almost every paragraph and sentence with an exclamation mark does not make your arguments look more convincing, it just makes you look a little bit of a knob.

Grrr, wish I had checked my comment before hitting post, sorry for lack of sense. I couldn't do the maths below either. Not having a good day...