How is a “girl” gender different from a “female” or “woman” gender?
(cough) Stefonknee Wolschtt (cough)
Female isn’t a gender. Female is a SEX. (At least as I use the terms). Sex is your biology, your plumbing.
Girl versus woman is conventionally an age thing. And a puberty-and-menarche thing.
That is mitigated by the fact that post-pubescent female people in our society often refer to themselves as “girls” although they certainly qualify as “women”.
I tend to say “girl” because the conscoius identification started when I was in 2nd grade, give or take. The folks I was identifying with were definitely GIRLS, they were 7 years old. And around the age when those girls were transitioning to women, my identity was jumping off the rails and going into WTF-land. Puberty and adolescence was complicated. Being male, and being attracted TO the girls, threw a spanner into my sense of being one of them.
Do you think there will ever be a time when you start identifying as a “woman”?
I do sometimes now. I’m not particularly consistent with the terminology. At my age, it might make sense to start telling folks I’m an “old gal”. Feminine person, girl, woman, whatever… that’s my gender.
IIRC, you’re almost 60 years old.
I’ve never met a 60-year-old woman who seriously refers to herself as a “girl”. I think it would be especially jarring to hear a 60-year-old feminist describe herself that way. YMMV.
Your use of “girl” (as well as “sissy”) conjures up images of specific fetishes in my mind. I try to push these thoughts away because I know they are not your intention. And yet every time I stumble across those words in your writings, the harder it is for me to resist the reflex.
Some yes, some no. There is no unanimity.
Some feminists say it’s perfectly fine for a woman to marry, stay at home, have babies, and subordinate her independence to her family. Other feminists say this is a bad thing.
FWIW, I’m uncomfortable with how transsexualism plays to traditional sex roles. I don’t like the reinforcement of stereotypes – girls wear dresses, boys wear pants, girls play with dolls, boys play with trucks. Or, much worse, girls are nurses and boys are doctors. In my opinion, feminism is about tearing down those stereotypes, as they serve to separate people into unequal classes.
Yeah, I’ve tossed away “sissy” for that very reason. Too bad, because it was a good word. It comes from “sister”. It’s the reciprocal of “tomboy”. But yeah, at this point it’s way too tied in with the fetish community and that makes it very misleading. I haven’t as of yet been worried about “girl”. I’m actually a children’s libber sort of person and reject a lot of the adultish notion that adults are radically different (and more ‘whole’) people. Still, it may be time to retire “girl”. I’ll think about it.
Because it may have gotten lost in the discussion about whether or not the OP was too hard to understand, I want to re-ask a question about it:
I would be surprised if any feminist said it was OK to subordinate a woman’s independence to her family. But that may be part of the disconnect that seems to be happening between “regular” women and feminists - the idea that marrying and staying home with your children necessarily subordinates a woman’s independence. Or fulfilling other, traditionally feminine roles - the idea that some New York magazine writer or political activist is telling women “you should be free to choose how you want to live your life, but don’t live your life like THAT” doesn’t resonate very well.
It is related to, although not identical with, the idea that all heterosex is rape because of the patriarchal structure of the society in which it necessarily occurs. Women with what I would consider a “normal” sexual relationship with a man tend to look at that idea and think those pushing it are cra-cra. Because heterosex isn’t necessarily something he does to you, and political action is not the best way to change it if it is. Some men are jerks, sure. Some relationships are exploitative, sure. Some situations are unjust, sure. Therefore they all are, or that’s the dominant narrative, or whatever - no, they aren’t.
This is pretty much what I thought was what AHunter3 was saying.
But most of the problem for me to understand the OP is that many of the terms used are fluid, to put it mildly.
This is an explanation that doesn’t explain, because it hasn’t been established what the terms mean.
Does a gender of “girl” mean wearing a skirt on occasion? No, because boys wear skirts too. Which boys? The ones who define a gender of “boy” as “someone who wears a skirt on occasion”. Does male mean having a penis? No, because transwomen insist they are not male even if they have a penis.
People don’t necessarily have to explain their gender/sex/orientation/identity/ambiguity/whatever to me, but if the only answer is “No, that’s not it” then it helps to let me know ahead of time.
Regards,
Shodan
The OP isn’t talking about feminists. He’s talking about radical feminists. Is there not a difference?
[QUOTE=Eonwe]
I’m not quite sure, AHunter3, how you feel gender inversion does away with the subject-object paradigm. Doesn’t it still rely on the ‘fence’ to define relationships between people, even the sex characteristics of the participants don’t match their culturally-expected behaviors?
[/quote]
I did indeed forget about this one; I’d spotted it the first time around and intended to reply and then got lost in other exchanges and never came back to it.
Let’s start here:
It looks like I have once again assumed that the conclusions express themselves, and that isn’t fair because I know where I’m headed with this and my readers do not. YES, the two individual people involved in a gender-inverted relationship are recapitulating gendered dynamics, right down to the subject-object paradigm, as you say. But the focus should not be on the two individual people, but on the surrounding world and the inner world of all the people in the overall context.
Let me resort to an analogy (a genuine example drawn from real life). In all the elementary schools I was in before 4th grade (which was a fair number considering that’s only grades K-3), the principal had always been a male and the teachers had always been female. Sallas-Mahone, where I started 4th grade, had a female principal. In the previous schools, all of us (teachers and students alike) had a significant opportunity to internalize the notion that in schools men ran the overall show as principals, and women taught; and hence women reported hierarchically to a man. At Sallas-Mahone we had a different model in which the authority difference between teacher and principal wasn’t gendered. Then in 7th grade I transitioned to junior high school and for the first time had male teachers as well as female teachers. Now I was seeing men and women teachers interact as equals.
But I still had not seen male teachers reporting to a female principal. I had been exposed to a model in which the relationship of the adult males and females was one where the females reported to a male authority figure. I had been exposed to a model in which female teachers ONLY (no male teachers at Sallas-Mahone) reported to a female principal, so I knew female people could occupy that authority position. And by junior high, I had seen male teachers so I knew male people could occupy that position.
Do you see that it would have exposed us all to a different first-hand understanding of possibilities if the principal at the junior high had been a woman? It’s not that the evidence wasn’t there in the abstract, as a theoretical possibility: if teachers could be male and principals could be female, obviously there could be a situation where the principal was female and some male teachers reported to her as the authority over them. But we hadn’t seen that. I hadn’t seen that. When an assortment of adults entered a school auditorium, my real-life experiences had taught me that either they were EQUALS or that the male people were IN CHARGE.
On average that comes out to an assumption of male authority, as I said in the quoted passage above.
Now let’s drop in a hypothetical substitution, let’s pretend the male principal was replaced with a female principal and I spent my junior high years in that environment. When an assortment of adults enters a school auditorium, my real-life experiences NOW tell me that sometimes there is a male in charge, sometimes they are equals, and sometimes there is a female in charge. Even if I don’t encounter the latter situation as often, it’s a materially different experience.
In the specific relationship between the female principal and the male 7th grade teacher, there is a power inequality. It isn’t “better” than the power inequality that would exist between a male principal and a female 7th grade teacher. But in the entire milieu of the junior high, a connection between gender and authority has been significantly modified by us all seeing that specific relationship.
It changes things.
Radfems think gender is not a natural spectrum but an artificial hierarchy, and they’re all for deconstructing traditional gender roles so I think they would support AHunter3’s “gender inversion,” though I’m still not exactly sure what you mean by that. They wouldn’t support you identifying as a woman though, which is why libfems call them TERFs.
I found this on your blog:
Why call yourself a girl, and not an effeminate man? Why can’t men have whatever characteristics you see in women that makes you identify as them?
Is this identity in relation to the culture, or independent? For example, ancient warrior cultures would think most modern Western men are effeminate. Or what if the culture had changed around you such that masculine stereotypes became much closer to feminine ones, would you perhaps then identify as a boy? Or would the two identities collapse into meaninglessness?
What do you think of the term “female penis”?
People tend to be invested in their beliefs, and people who are invested in their beliefs often both formalize them and assert them. Formalization of beliefs sometimes makes it difficult to accommodate new beliefs, particularly if those new beliefs do not fit smoothly with the believers’ existing beliefs.
Feminism is a big tent “ism”, with feminists who held to the “all sex is rape” only being a very small but very vocal part of feminism. Their belief in “all sex is rape” was part of their belief system that only seriously considered straight men and straight women, that assumed that society was formed only by straight men and straight women, and that defined the relations between the two only in terms of power/control.
As with any true believers, they tended to reject anything outside of their binary belief based model (male v. female, power v. submission, control v. subjugation, free sex v. Puritanism, sex ranging from loving bonding to just plain fun v. sex as a political act), not because of any comprehensive fact driven observations or rational arguments, but rather because they were invested in their beliefs.
We have learned what we could from them which in turn has modified our beliefs. We have used and continue to use what is useful, and discard that which does not help us in creating our own world based (for better or worse) on our beliefs.
You can’t argue with a true believer, so listen for what might be useful, but only until their record starts skipping, and then move on past them, but remember to apply what you learned.
I have at times done so, or “more or less so”. Did you see monstro’s comments about my use of “sissy”? The word “sissy” basically means “feminine male”, etymologically from “sister” and originally conveying “guy who is like one of the girls” much like tomboy does for the reverse situation. But it has come to mean something rather specific and different, thanks to the fetish community, so I don’t use the term any more.
I’m not sure if you’re asking rhetorically here (“Why oh why can’t men be permitted to exhibit the characteristics we see in women? You should be allowed to call yourself a man despite having those characteristics!”) or personally and pointedly (“Why don’t you say it this way instead of the way you’re saying it?”) but I"m guessing the second, and the reason for all of my choices for what to call myself, and “it” (the situation) are from experience and intended effect and so on.
I don’t really want to call myself a “man”, that’s WAY to loaded a term and loaded with stuff I’m specifically trying to disassociate myself from.
I was OK with “sissy” but I’ve dropped it because of connotations. My choice of nomenclature was problematic and complicated in 1980 and it continues to be to this day.
I assume that if I had grown up in a culture whose ideas about “how you’re supposed to be if you’re male” were much closer to (what we now call) feminine, I would have been fine with the default identity of “boy”. So, cultural.
:dubious:
I’m not in charge of telling trans people what nomenclatures they should use. But I do think it is important and necessary to have SOME FREAKING WORD OR TERM to refer to the plumbing, the morphology —even if we do acknowledge that we perceive those through the lens of our social upbringing — and to use it consistently and not reshape the word to conform to personal internal gender identity considerations.
I don’t ever, under any circumstances, call myself “female”. Because how I use the word it refers to a morphological physiological bodytype. And if I speak of a penis I would be speaking of a part of the male, not the female, morphology. But that’s me and my use of the words. It does get complicated when engaging in discussion with people whose perceptions are heavily influenced by considerations of the transitioning process and the experiences of folks who wish to transition or are in the process thereof.
What I often “punt” to, as need be in such discussions, is “Let us not speak of what ‘IS’ is, and spare me the Bill Clinton jokes. I will tell you that for purposes of this discussion when I speak of SEX or of sexual morphological parts such as ‘penis’ or ‘clitoris’, pretend we have a room of 100 randomly selected non-blind English-speaking American adults from Iowa and Indiana and Missouri; what sex would they altercast the person in question? What word would they use for the body part in question? That’s how I’m using THOSE words, as the social consensus normative values most directly attached to the physiology, with no reference whatsoever to how the individual person conceptualizes the same matters. EXTERNAL attribution, in other words”.
Skip to the next post in the thread, 'cause this one is only a long analogy to get across a simple point.
In the late 70s at the University of Toronto, the Communists often set up a table at the western entrance to Sidney Smith Hall. The Marxist-Leninists often set up a table there as well. Sometimes they shouted at each other, and on several occasions they brawled with each other.
That hall had been built in 1961, as part of a massive expansion in government funded education, which pretty much paralleled a massive expansion in government funded health care and government funded infrastructure. To accomplish this there was a corresponding increase in legislation and growth in the civil service that had more and more input into directing the economy. At the same time, there had been a growth in collective bargaining through unionization and protection of unions under the changes in the law.
In short, it was a socialization or quasi-socialization of some major parts of our economy that we are very glad for today. We learned from the 1848 revolutions and from Marx and Engels and the benefits that followed, we learned learned from the Russian revolutions and the tragedies that followed, and courtesy of WWII we learned a lot about how to manage our economy.
Yet at the same time, we rejected the extreme version of socialism in which the state would control the means of production, distribution and exchange with an iron fist, and we opposed communism.
We took what was useful from socialism and tremendously improved our lives, but we also passed over what was not useful and what demonstrably would have held back our lives.
That left folks such as myself wondering just what the fuck were the Communists and Marxist-Leninists fighting about at UofT in the 70s? They were as fervent as those evangelical pentecostals out by the airport who were into rolling on the floor while speaking in tongues, but their determination to abide by their beliefs regardless of facts and reason stood in the way of them moving forward.
Over the decades when I have come across all sex is rape, or penetration is occupation and a violation of boundaries, or intercourse is a means of physiologically making a woman inferior, or intercourse is the the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women, my eyes glaze over and I think back to the Communists and the Marxist-Leninists duking it out with each other over who the hell knows what without stopping to realize that we had already adopted much of what they had to offer but were not willing to join them in their true believer fanaticism that would have us throw the baby out with the bath water.
I’m not one to tell anyone what terms they should use. BUT, this whole struggle of yours would go away if you simply decided to take back the term “man” and define it as you want. A feminine man who is biologically male and is attracted to women isn’t that much of an outlier. Drama free existence. You’re welcome.
Procrustus You’re not welcome. You don’t know. You think I started doing this because my 8th grade experiences weren’t sufficiently dramatic?
You have no clue.
I came off as more insulting and less supportive than I intended. I have read much of your blog, and many of your postings here. You seem intelligent and likable. You have, at times, put considerable efforts into wanting others to *understand *you. I get that you don’t identify with traditional conception of “man-ness.” (I don’t blame you). But I don’t yet understand why you can’t life your life the way you want to without worrying about what label you apply or engaging in prolonged discussions about what it means to be someone like you. While being a girl might certainly cause problems in 8th grade, I would hope that things have changed since then. (plus, most of the world is not made up of 8th graders, thank god)
So, are you currently having problems interacting with the world to an extent that we should get back up to speed on radical feminist theory, or can you manage as “a girl who is biologically male and attracted to females” and leave it at that?
I am not having problems at my current age, nor have I had significant problems for decades now.
The book, blog, and related projects are on behalf of kids growing up now who still don’t get to read a book about people like us, so they still have to sort it out themselves without the sense that there are such people and that they live OK, happy, lives complete with romance and sex and friendships and so forth.