I have a friend who underwent extensive surgical procedures to transition. Not because she wanted to, but she felt she had to because nobody would accept her as she saw herself unless she did so. She went through a GoFundMe and raised the money (of course I contributed) and was able to make enough money. But it broke my heart and pissed me off somewhat that she had to do that. I tried to put myself her in place where I had to go through all of that just so people would see me as me and not something else, and it just seems like some dystopian nightmare.
I know that isn’t a universal experience. Another friend went through the process and felt amazing afterward, and was so happy and wanted to show off to everyone how she looked and everything. It was something she had always wanted to do.
People shouldn’t feel pushed into it. Gah, it makes me mad just typing this.
Yes, I think this is the crux of the matter. I think, if given the freedom to do so, many people would choose to express themselves somewhere “in between” on the gender spectrum. Our society is one that is largely intolerant of anything outside rigid expectations for gender, so often transgender people feel that they have to be all the way to one side or the other. A better world would have let Atamasama’s friend live as she wanted to without the pressure to make her body a certain way.
I’m trying to carve out room in people’s heads for folks like your friend to manifest as who they are, in the body to which they were born, and be viewed and accepted as such.
Yes. For someone who isn’t trans, looking at it from outside, it’s a pretty good understanding. You and I have in mind one type of trans people, the ones who physically feel a physical as well as psychological need to transition. There are many here to remind us that not all trans people are like that. “Transgender” is a broad umbrella term, only loosely defined at best, covering various types of people, easily leading to misunderstandings when one person means one thing by it while another person understands something quite different from it.
The old word “transsexual” was a more specific designator of those who feel a physical need to transition. But the vox populi has obsoleted it these days.
IMHO we need to recognize that there is a difference between gender identity (how someone feels / perceives themselves to be) and biological sex (how someone’s body is wired). I get why those advocating for acceptance of people who are trans and non-binary try to deny that distinction, including the fact that biological sex, just like gender, is not binary. None the less, I don’t think it’s helpful to deny that these are two separate aspects of being human. IMHO using man / woman and the various terms preferred by those who are trans, non-binary, or gender queer for gender identity, and male / female / intersex for biological sex would help clarify the distinction between these two aspects of being human.
So what? For the vast majority of casual social purposes, there’s nothing at all wrong with such a “circular” definition. Any more than there is with similar common definitions like “your family is whoever you consider to be family”.
There are always going to be contexts in which it’s necessary to have information about people’s chromosomal gender and/or birth-assigned sex, and there are always going to be unambiguous descriptors for those categories. But for the everyday social categories of “man” and “woman”, we don’t need definitions that meet some arbitrary standard of logical rigor. We just need generally understood meanings of the terms.
At present, the meanings of “man” and “woman” as “someone, either cisgender or transgender, who identifies as a man” and “someone, either cisgender or transgender, who identifies as a woman”, respectively, are very widely understood and becoming more so over time. The theoretical circularity of their definitions is not an impediment to most people understanding and using them in the real world.
In both cases we rely on preexisting notions of what the words mean, though. Our notions of “family” originally developed out of our experiences of reproductive couples and their biological offspring. Our notions of “woman” and “man” originally developed from the social experiences with male (XY) and female (XX) people. In both cases these notions don’t depend on the situations from which the concepts developed and in both cases not all of the situations in real life match up to the shared concepts. Some set of parents and their biological offspring match up better to some other relationship-notions that we share as a society than they do to “family”. Some of us male (XY) people are more accurately envisioned when people conceptualize us as women than as men.
No. There is so much more to it than that superficial concept. Ideas to make trans people disappear will never be realized. There is more deep down forming a trans person’s gender identity than society’s conception of gender. This probably doesn’t apply to all who are currently gathered under the wide umbrella of “transgender” but is true of those who were formerly called transsexuals.
I think this is probably true. And it is part of the reason that I strongly prefer “genderqueer” although the trans umbrella has been extended over my head. I think in my case I don’t have anything other than a mismatch with the cultural notion of what goes with typical XY physiology. The plumbing is something I have no issue with.
Hey, for a confluence of reasons, I’ve been delegated to help out with moderating this thread.
This post is off-topic. The topic under discussion is whether there are biological factors underlying gender, or whether it is purely a social construct. Actually defining men and women, and how to split people by sex or gender in those circumstances when we do that, is adjacent, but not the topic of the thread. It’s also a topic that has sparked a great deal of incivility on the board in the past, so I’m asking everyone to avoid it, so we can discuss the actual topic and the mods don’t have to close the thread.
Hm, no, that’s not the argument I’m making, and I’m certainly not presenting an idea that would make trans people disappear. I was in fact arguing the same thing you are, that the things deep down that form your identity are what matters rather than society’s concept of gender. A society with no concept of gender would allow people to freely interact with their own identities. Trans people wouldn’t disappear in such a world, but what would it mean to be a trans woman in a world where being a woman was one choice along a wide spectrum of expression, and where everyone adjusts their hormones and bodies freely to their own satisfaction? They’re still a trans woman, but that would carry a much different weight than it does in our world.
The culture one lives in is probably the biggest influence. In some it is just not accepted, in others it is seen as not an issue. We like to think that whether we are gay, straight, bi or whatever is our choice, but it really isn’t. Most of this will be determined by our parents, culture, and authority figures in our early years.
Sure, we can make our own decisions and decide for ourselves, but I think those factors play a huge part in determining which sort of sexual identity we have. I don’t think biology has anything to do w/ it other than the normal human urge to have sex. That is biological, and needed to perpetuate the species.
To claim that this is intrinsic to the definition is just wrong. And I think you are confusing the issue by using the word “gender” unqualified. As OP has acknowledged, gender expression is largely a social construct. But that does not apply to gender identity.
OP is correct. The existence of trans people throughout history is surely strong evidence that gender identity cannot be a social construct. If it were, why on earth would there be any trans people in the face of massive persecution? When trans people have always existed despite immense cis-normative social pressure, it is nonsensical to suggest that their gender identity is a result of social factors. Gender identity is generally refractory to social pressure and in no sense a choice. (The existence of non-binary or gender fluid people does not contradict this: people do not choose to be non-binary or fluid either.)
We don’t have much clue what it means to “have the brain of a man/woman”, but it must mean something, and whatever it is gives most people a consistent and persistent internal sense that they are a man or woman, a sense that (as trans people demonstrate) is independent of somatic sexual characteristics. However, the fact that it is not a social construct and that it is usually firmly established early in life does not imply that is necessarily innate. It could also be attributable to environmental factors either in utero or early in life.
See also this post and the subsequent conversation on the likely biological basis of gender identity (it happens to be embedded in a Pit thread, but that’s irrelevant).
There is nothing remotely “circular” about the fact that gender identity is determined by the properties of the brain, not by the genitalia or karyotype. Our neurons have no less objective physical reality than our genitalia, and the way we find out about someone’s neurons is by listening to what they tell us.
To the contrary, I think the problem that you are encountering is that of many progressives who have been exposed to mainstream thinking in the social sciences. The social sciences have been dominated by the “blank slate” model that everything is a social construct, accompanied by the mistaken ideologically-driven notion that anything that contradicts this (such as innate differences between men and women) is regressive.
And the problem you face is that the existence of trans people (and in fact all LGBT people) very obviously contradicts the blank slate model. It makes absolutely no sense that massive cis-normative social pressure would cause trans gender identity.
You obviously want to be a progressive ally of trans people, but you have the ingrained notion that acknowledging that anything is not a social construct is regressive. The correct response to resolve this cognitive dissonance is to discard the blank slate model, which was always a priori ridiculous and had no evidence to support it anyway.
Color me skeptical about the idea of a separate concept of “brain sex”. This just strikes me as an acknowledgement that gender identity is obviously not just a social construct. But for those imbued with social science dogma, defining away a separate concept that is intended to capture everything that is not a social construct just allows people to pretend that they were right all along that gender identity is entirely a social construct.
It seems unlikely to me that it’s useful to analyze our internal sense of self with respect to gender/sex as two separate components, one that is a social construct and one that is not. Why not just acknowledge that gender identity - like everything else in biology and psychology - is the complex combined outcome of causal contributions from both nature and nurture.
Gender expression is obviously cultural, but let’s think about gender identity. Let’s say you were the way that you are (however that is) and raise the quesiton of gender identity. How do you know what it is? You may run into the living room and tell your parents you’re a boy when you’re five, but how do you know what a boy is? Only from the outside, by observation of (other) boys. That’s cultural.
Now, there may or may not be a built-in tendency to behave a certain way and embody a certain personality structure and prioritize a set of personal goals; and they may or may not form an observable pattern in which most of the folks with XX chromosomes cluster around a different set of those things than most of the folks with XY chromosomes. The jury’s still out on that. Research that indicates a difference tends to get attention more than research that doesn’t, because the latter is a negative, not obviously distinguishable from a failure to find a result. (If I go fishing and catch a fish, it proves there are fish in yon stream; if I don’t catch a fish, it doesn’t prove there aren’t). And yet there are good solid studies supporting the probability that the male brain and female brain don’t have built-in variations of the type we associate with the concept of gender.
I did not choose to be genderqueer, but as I wrote 3 days ago in a blog post, I observed typical male folks to be different from me and disapproved of them in a rather judgmental way pretty damn early, already crafting the opinion that I was glad I wasn’t like them. I thought it was social because I was being pestered to be more like they were, with sufficient intensity to explain why the other male kids were acting that way: going along with the social pressure, wanting to be accepted and to fit in.
I’m not saying I was not wired to be different from them, but I don’t need to believe that I am in order for my identity to be valid. And I can outgrow my narrow hatred of them as weird different normies without needing to believe they can’t help it because they were born that way – I can get over the notion that my way of being in the world is superior to theirs in the first place.