Quote from: Elwood on September 20, 2008, 11:25:16 AM
And that innocent until proven guilty phrase applies to law, not reality.
But if you follow that reasoning then you, and all of us, have to prove we are who we believe we are, which is exactly the thing you're vehemently arguing against in your original post and all the way through the thread.
You can't have it both ways. It isn't one rule for one and one rule for everyone else.
I don't mean to be argumentative, because I do agree with a lot of what you say. But you seem to be blurring two entirely different arguments here. On the one hand you're saying that claims made by people in order to try and somehow validate their own gender identity are done simply to strengthen their own case based on their own perception and the need to try and one up everyone else.
That may be true in some cases, and probably is. But the key thing is 'in
some cases'. And without the benefit of having a complete psychological profile of every single person on this site and in the outside world, you can't claim that the reason all people relate their experiences is simply to validate their existence.
But, on the other hand, when people
do express their experiences, regardless of motivation, you make another argument, which is that those experiences, in themselves, are inaccurate... regardless of the people who claim to have them. And that's the thing I take issue with because it implies that everyone who has the same experiences yet chooses not to say anything about them, is also wrong. And that's a far wider issue than a few people trying to bolster their own self-image.
What about the people who believe they have also had similar experiences and undergone similar desires... yet don't decide that they need to be shouted from the rooftops? Are they deluded also, based on the cognitive processes of others who want to try and use the very same experiences as a means to an end?
That's what I think the problem is here. In my opinion, if you want to argue that a person can't physically have an experience because the experience cannot be had, then do that... but do that only. Likewise if you want to argue that people's motivations are such that they desire to express the fact that they've had these experiences simply to empower themselves, then fine, do that, but again... do only that.
You can't use one argument to justify the other argument because the motivations of an individual making a claim has absolutely no relevance to a claim's inherent validity or lack thereof.
