Amadea, I think I love you. Thank the Gods for you and this insightful comment- hail pluralism! Down with liberal agenda "inclusiveness" that will try to destroy any and all hint of difference or right to dignified and necessary discrimination! And thank you for pointing out that the true "oppression" going on here- mentally and linguistically, on this board- has to do with the way it's suddenly okay to start screaming "BIGOT" at anyone who dares to question the emerging party line in any way.

She's not trying to reframe this in a way that is difficult to square with reality. She's reframing the conversation to be simply more in line with reality. She's correct in every way.

This notion that a person's will to identify with whatever gender they want, and that this takes precedence, somehow, over any other aspect of their person, has to be one of the most extreme and ridiculous aspects of new-agery that I've ever come across. New-agers were already at war with most other aspects of reality that they felt uncomfortable with, to the point of denying reality wholesale, in favor of their fantasy version of reality. This is no different- they can't even bring themselves to admit that there is something non-chosen, spontaneously arisen, and outside of their control with respect to gender.

I think more than just genitalia "sexually differentiates" us.

My claim is a negative one. "No surgery can give a woman's spirit to a man." I'm not saying "A man can have any spirit he wants". I'm saying what a surgery can't do, not what a person can do just by choice or procedures.

If we both believe in spirits, then we have a baseline for our debate. I'm saying what you can't do with spirits. You're saying, on the contrary, that we can do something with them, like just change them as if they were coats. So. Where's your evidence for that?

I mean, if you want to strip this bare of metaphysics, we can. I can just say "there are no spirits" and watch you try to provide evidence for them, which I doubt you could. But that debate is playing out in too many other places. I was hoping for a better one here.

Not anyone. Just certain people, who actually deserve it, due to their true wickedness, wherein I don't think the Dianics do deserve it here.

Well spoken, Mr. Filan. I was just perusing a book of yours about Haitian Vodou, which I received as a gift from a friend who knows my long interest in Haitian religion. I'm from New Orleans, and our Louisiana/New Orleans Voodoo down here owes everything to Mother Haiti, and I am always a respectful worshiper, in my own way, of the Lwa. I happen to be a conjure man, as you may or may not know- owing to the fortune of my being born and raised in the shadow of the Old Sultan of the South, where such things aren't so shunned as some would like to believe.

I like your book a good deal. It seems to be expressed maturely yet with a subtle humor I personally adore- a real feat for such a contentious subject matter. What I think I like the most about it is the picture of sanity you present for yourself- I'm always working to figure authors out when I read their books- and your brand of sanity runs just barely alongside a realization of something beyond sanity. It's a sign that, at least at the time of the writing of this book, that you had established a dynamic balance between what is seen and what is Unseen.

Don't know about you presently, or where your path has taken you. Kenaz, I don't think anything I've said in any of my posts about this topic has presented me as hostile to trans people. I am fully aware of their full humanity and their rights to life and their rights to be protected from forces that would rob them of life and their human rights.

I just view them as not really belonging to a gender at all- shape-shifters forever caught in the borderlands between this category and the other, or any others. There is something very powerful about their strange position in the great scheme of things. Beings that can look one way, feel one way, assume the emotional standpoint of other genders, freely choose to take up the roles of men or women, though nature itself sculpted them differently in so many ways. The Dianics haven't said what I would have said about them coming into my "bleeding woman only" circle- that their strange power may be too much or too unbalancing to the ceremony I intend.

I truly believe that trans people need their own ritual spaces, and their own metaphysical realm of respect. Trying to force fit themselves into spaces like the Dianic one isn't just infuriating to the Dianics, for a multitude of reasons, but really, in my way of seeing, it's selling themselves short.

But that's all just me. I hope that everyone finds a place for themselves that they feel comfortable in, and that everyone learns to get along... though I don't hold out any hope for the latter. I know humans- and their human history- too well for that. As for finding a place to feel comfortable... a sorcerer already knows that to do that often spells the death of power, not the birth of it, or the maintenance of it. Straddling one world and many others, not belonging here or there- that's a well of power. As I suspect you may already know from reading your book.

That's where you'd be wrong. From the perspective of skeptical analysis, the positive unproven position is the weaker one. It is less valid than the contrary negative opinion. If someone says "I don't think there is a god", and someone else says "I think there is", you can say that there are two opinions here, and you'd be right. But one of those opinions doesn't have the burden of evidence that the other has, and one isn't as supportable as the other. They are different claims, one of which appears to be, even without evidence, more valid.

I don't have to prove it to the contrary. The weight of evidence is on the people making positive claims, as you are. Saying "you can't prove it to the contrary" is precisely what fundy christians say when atheists say "There is no god". The fundies say "Well, you can't prove that there isn't one." But the atheists don't have to prove that there is one. The fundies have to prove that there is. That's how debate works, and how evidenciary standards work.

This is good. I've never seen this info before, and it's well laid out. I deplore the loss of life. Of course, 29 deaths in 2008 (to cite what's inside) still falls woefully short of the "every two days a trans woman is murdered" claim made earlier here. One death inflicted on another over something like sexual orientation would be too many- don't get me wrong- but these numbers, however outrageous, hardly seem like the holocaust presented by so many.