This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.

How do you define woman/man?

Humans come in two major clusters, based on some biological characteristics: one where people have penises, testicles, flat chests, testosterone-dominant hormone profiles, XY chromosomes, and other related traits, and another where they have vaginas, ovaries, breasts, estrogen-dominant hormone profiles, XX chromosomes, etc. Men are those humans that belong to the first cluster, and women are those that belong to the second.

Some people do not fit perfectly into either cluster, of course. A woman with a flat chest is still a woman, and a man who undergoes an orchiectomy is still a man, but there can be more complicated cases that are not trivial to classify. Indeed there’s no reason to think everyone fits in one category or the other, but the overwhelming majority of humans do.

What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?

The cotton ceiling is the complaint by autogynephilic transsexuals that lesbian women don’t consider them viable sexual partners (the woman’s panties being a barrier they are not allowed to get past). People’s right to choose their sex partners should be absolute and not subject to guilt tripping about how ‘if you really saw me as a woman, you’d want to have sex with me’; the cotton ceiling is an attempt to use queer politics to control women’s sex lives.

Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?

For the same reasons men are. I’m agnostic on whether male brains are somehow ‘better suited to programming’, or cultural messages aimed at boys make them more interested in computers, or some combination of similar factors is at play, but it’s not remarkable that transsexuals with male brains who were raised as boys have the same range of interests as ordinary men.

It’s also possible that programming has a stronger appeal to people who are social outcasts in some way, which transsexuals frequently are (cf. the nerd stereotype of a man with poor social skills and great technical skills). Spending more time at home, on a computer, for fear of social repercussions could be a factor.

Explain trans people assigned female at birth.

It’s possible that some female transsexuals are the symmetric case of homosexual male transsexuals, i.e. masculine lesbians who prefer lives as straight men; as far as I know autoandrophilic transsexuals are not a group of any significance.

Non-lesbian female transsexuals are more likely to be motivated by social/political concerns like avoiding misogyny or protesting gender roles or the concept of gender binaries (women are more likely to be involved in the social justice movement than men, and more likely to identify as nonbinary or genderqueer).

The first item on the poll refers to what side you think the author of this post really believes, while the second item refers to what side you believe. When taking the poll, if you can POSSIBLY round yourself off to Blanchard-Bailey or gender identity, please do so. Please do this even if you have major disagreements with the side you are leaning towards. Only use “neither” if you really really really cannot in good conscience round yourself to either.