Quote from: Ravenna on June 15, 2015, 08:21:06 PMShe said it was no different from believing you were born into the wrong species or the wrong race.
Here is how you should respond to this kind of fallacious argument:
1) (Species) It is possible for humans to imagine or experience what it is like to be human, as well as to live in the shoes of another human being by interacting with or reading about them; however, it is not logically possible for a human to know what it is like to be a nonhuman in any real sense, just as we cannot expect a dog to know what it is like to be a squid, or a bat to know what it is like to be a velociraptor. Being transgender, however, is an experience of being human. Therefore, it is logically absurd to compare being transgender to believing one is another species because it is not possible to literally know what it is like to be another species. (Tell your friend to read Thomas Nagel's famous essay, 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' to go deeper into this kind of thinking, if she wishes to.)
2) (Race) Being transgender involves brain states that are describable by neuroscience. There is a neuroscientific explanation--in a general sense--of what it is like to be male or female (with some variation), and (binary) transgeder people have brains that correspond with the expectations of the gender they identify as. Race, by contrast, has no corresponding brain states. There is no 'black brain' or 'white brain' (and 'black' and 'white' are extremely vague terms, much like race itself), except in racist pseudoscience. The comparison, therefore, is without any foundation and is logically absurd. Race, moreover, is largely a social construct, like gender traits, but because race does not operate on the brain level like gender (can), and because it is more accurate to speak of geographic populations rather than 'races' (since one group of people on one side of a mountain may have very different genes than those on the other side of the mountain, even if they are 'racially' very similar-looking), race is actually even *more* of a social construct than gender.
Both arguments are common caricatures of transgender experience, but it is worth knowing that neither is actually logically or scientifically valid. You don't need to appeal to emotions to argue against such people; they're actually just plain wrong.