Can some one please explain something for me...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Don't worry, you don't sound like a jackass, Clarence. The fact that you want to understand this already means that you have a much less jackass-ish outlook on this than not only most people in your age group and region, but most people in general.

The question isn't so much one of cross-dressers wanting rights as cross-dressers as it is one of people who, for various reasons that I'd probably have a very hard time explaining, genuinely do not feel that the combination of the sex that they were born with and the set of associations or social roles that that sex supposedly has matches up with who they are. It's a little hard to explain to somebody who doesn't have the experience of feeling this way, and it's certainly harder to explain than homosexuality is. Think of it as a feeling of indefinable but critical 'wrongness' about the body one has or the expectations of the body one has; or as a feeling of indefinable but critical 'rightness' about another sort of body.

I understand that this is very hard to wrap one's head around even if one did not grow up in the environment of a previous time and a conservative place. I'm probably not the best person to explain what exactly this sort of thing feels like or entails for a person to somebody who has no experience of it, but if you take it for granted that for some people who would fall into the general category of 'cross-dressers' there is much more going on than just a desire to wear pretty clothes for whatever reason, and that this is for those people a feature of how they perceive their gender that really can't be changed (similar to how homosexuality can't be changed, at least not deliberately), it becomes a question of discrimination on the basis of sex. I hope that that's easier for you to understand in that context, and if it isn't I'm sorry I have not perhaps been explaining this well enough.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I appreciate you guys trying to explain... Nathan you did help me understand a bit what these people ar ethinking

How about the photos?? eh?  Hot no?

One of the courses I'm taking this semester actually gets into the differences in cultural construction between Thai kathoey and transgender folks in the West. I thought of you when it came up.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

One of the courses I'm taking this semester actually gets into the differences in cultural construction between Thai kathoey and transgender folks in the West. I thought of you when it came up.

Interesting!  What did it say?  Maybe the cultural construction has something to do with why they're so much more attractive.. but it may also just be the small, slender builds of Thais generally...

Well, we're going to be getting into it more later in the semester, and I'll be sure to keep you posted when we get to that stage, but what Professor Shah's been talking about so far mainly involves the problems of anthropologists from Western countries going to places like Thailand or Indonesia or Africa and running into these phenomena and treating them as if they were the same sorts of phenomena as transgender identity in the West, which is poor and somewhat culturally imperialistic ethnographic practice. It seems that these sorts of presentations and ways of life are more traditionally ingrained in East and Southeast Asia, so I imagine that as such they would have more set modes of presentation associated with them, which might be why you find them generally more attractive (I haven't done enough reading or looking into the subject of kathoey to have an opinion on that particular topic).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If the guy was a post op transgender girl and looked like a girl then there really wouldn't be an issue if she/he went to the women's room.  I think it is a case by case basis taking all parties' emotions and mental health into account.

Although I understand your point, for various reasons I really don't think operation status should be a generalized cut-off point (pun recognized but not intended).