Understanding the existence of categories and their (socially constructed) correlates requires intellectual development including observation, of course. But that does not imply that social forces determine what category you feel you fit into.
What’s a kid going to observe in any strongly cis-normative culture? After aspects of gender presentation that correlate with boy/girl, they are soon going to discover the apparent universal rule that boy ⇔ penis. In most societies, there has been nothing in the social environment suggesting there is a valid option that you might be a girl despite being born with a penis. Quite this opposite: asserting such a claim will lead to horrified parents, abuse, ostracism. We’re not talking about mild social pressure to conform here, we’re talking about persecution.
It just makes zero sense to suggest that a trans person’s gender identity arises from cultural/social factors when historically trans people have persistently asserted their identity at great personal cost in opposition to incredibly strong social pressure.
Well, the definition I learned by the age of five was that having a penis literally defined you as boy; the definition of “being a girl” was explicitly “you’re equipped with a vagina”. By the time I was nine, I was having the same conundrums of “what do we call it” that we go through here as adults on this message board – because clearly although that was the denotative definition of boy versus girl, there were all these insistent connotations, stuff that everybody assumed went along with having a penis or a vagina.
It certainly wasn’t just me thinking so. I was explicitly taunted as being a girl, not merely for being girl-like. I actually wasn’t told I was “not a boy” because even in second grade the boys were dismissive of that term “boy” – it was considered insulting by adult men, I guess, and the other boys picked that up and thought so too, and instead they were already trying on the “man” word, but I was sure as hell told I was not a man.
So I realized words don’t just “mean what they mean” and that’s it. People had this other idea about what being a boy was all about, and in response to being told I was a girl, I shrugged and replied that yeah, the girls are doing it right and I’m proud to be with them, and what’s wrong with the rest of you, yeesh I’m glad I’m not like you, wouldn’t want to be, etc.
It took from the time I was in second grade until the time I was turning 21 and stepping across the threshold into adulthood for me to shift from “I don’t see any reason to conform to what you expect, I’m like a girl but so what” to “I am a girl; I happen to have boy parts inside my underpants but so what”, but I did.
But that’s social. That entire experience can only exist in a context where there is social messaging about what it means if you have a penis as opposed to a vagina. A world that did not have any different expectations or notions about how a person is depending on their reproductive morphology would not have any of those connotations, and “girl” would only refer to having a vagina and we would not have a notion about what it “means to be a girl” other than the physiology. That doesn’t mean nobody born with conventional XYish parts would ever be trans, but it does mean that it would be restricted to people who specifically think they were intended to have a vagina and that having this here penis is just wrong.
My cousin is a cis-gender male. He lives up in the foothills and lives off the grid. He checks all the stereotype-boxes for being a guy, except one. He is sexually attracted to men more than women. He told me he doesn’t want to “come out of the closet” because he doesn’t want a label.
Yes, you’re right that “being sexually attracted to women rather than men” is definitely part of the stereotypical criteria for “being a guy”, i.e., conforming to social stereotypes of what a “guy” should be.
However, nowadays it’s more common (and certainly more endorsed by biologists and psychologists) to make a distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity. So by this definition, a homosexual or bisexual cisgender male is still just as much a “guy”, i.e., just as unambiguously male, as a strictly heterosexual one.
Yup; in other words, there would be no expectation that gender identity should be demonstrated or reinforced by gender conformity in any way. I suppose there probably wouldn’t even be any recognizable gender conformity, since no behaviors would be specifically coded “male” or “female”. (Behaviors like using tampons would be coded “uterus-having” and behaviors like wearing condoms would be coded “penis-having”. But since, as you say, there would still be transgender people, those wouldn’t map exactly to “female” and “male” respectively.)
[non-rhetorical question]
But aren’t there behaviors more likely to be expressed by folks with specific physiological attributes that themselves tend to correlate with reproductive morphology?[/nrq]
Yes. This is why it is considered discriminatory against female people to bar breastfeeding. It is not a behavior that is merely culturally associated with female people, it is hardwired to the fact of being female; only female people are equipped to engage in it, so barring it only affects female people.
But we glide down a slippery slope if we aren’t careful positing that this or that culturally associated trend is hardwired to one’s sex. Better to assume we don’t know that it is, that even if it is is most often is at the tendency rather than the absolute level, and hence we should treat nearly all of them as just culturally associated.
Transgender identity is an expression (manifestation or embodiment*) of gender identity as writing is an expression of language; therefore, the existence of writing throughout history is surely strong evidence that language cannot be a social construct.
But it is my impression that you believe language is necessarily a social construct.
A feature or property common to most or even all societies may still be socially constructed; for example, kinship relations come to mind. The prevalence of marriage (as distinguished from mating) throughout history does not imply that marriage is anything but a social construct.
~Max
ETA:
* not to be confused with the compound term gender expression which specifically implies outward or external manifestation, i.e. behavioural expression.
I have no idea why your “analogy” is remotely revelant to gender identity, but no. While the specific details of languages are obviously a social construct (we aren’t born specifically knowing English or Chinese or ASL), language ability is innate. I’ve referenced this book enough times:
It was supposed to be an analogy, I don’t know how I can make it any more clear because I used standard form A is to B as C is to D, and I made the common relationship explicit.
So is the ability to pick up on social cues and form gender identities; this doesn’t make language any less of a social construct. Going back to the feral child - take society out of the picture, is it possible to have language? Is it possible to have gender identity without societal cues?
What social cues exactly would lead one to a trans gender identity in strongly cis-normative societies? The social cues of everyone telling you that you are a boy IFF you have a penis, your parents disowning you, people wanting to kill you if you are trans?
Primarily taunting or derisive remarks about gender nonconforming behavior/expression, I assume. The underlying gender stereotypes, in turn, would be socially constructed based on parental behavior, peer behavior, what is seen on or in media (TV, books, music), etc, maybe even explicit “these are things girls do”.
I refer you to post #42,
AHunter3 wrote:
[… T]here were all these insistent connotations, stuff that everybody assumed went along with having a penis or a vagina.
It certainly wasn’t just me thinking so. I was explicitly taunted as being a girl, not merely for being girl-like. I actually wasn’t told I was “not a boy” because even in second grade the boys were dismissive of that term “boy” – it was considered insulting by adult men, I guess, and the other boys picked that up and thought so too, and instead they were already trying on the “man” word, but I was sure as hell told I was not a man.
So I realized words don’t just “mean what they mean” and that’s it. People had this other idea about what being a boy was all about, and in response to being told I was a girl, I shrugged and replied that yeah, the girls are doing it right and I’m proud to be with them, and what’s wrong with the rest of you, yeesh I’m glad I’m not like you, wouldn’t want to be, etc.
It took from the time I was in second grade until the time I was turning 21 and stepping across the threshold into adulthood for me to shift from “I don’t see any reason to conform to what you expect, I’m like a girl but so what” to “I am a girl; I happen to have boy parts inside my underpants but so what”, but I did.
But that’s social. That entire experience can only exist in a context where there is social messaging about what it means if you have a penis as opposed to a vagina. A world that did not have any different expectations or notions about how a person is depending on their reproductive morphology would not have any of those connotations, and “girl” would only refer to having a vagina and we would not have a notion about what it “means to be a girl” other than the physiology. That doesn’t mean nobody born with conventional XYish parts would ever be trans, but it does mean that it would be restricted to people who specifically think they were intended to have a vagina and that having this here penis is just wrong.
^^^ I endorse this entirely. Max’s understanding of these matters meshes with my own.
Riemann, the language comparison is an excellent one. A person acquires a gender in the same sense that one acquires a language. The ability to be gendered, including the capacity to be attracted specifically as a person of a gender and to behave in ways that may mesh with biological imperatives, is innate; the specifics of that gender’s contents, its identity, though, is social and not hard-wired, the same way we’re not hardwired to speak Urdu or Flemish or whatever.
If your analogy holds, being trans in a strongly cis-normative culture is like a kid growing up in China and being taught Chinese, but they start spontaneously speaking Spanish without ever being exposed to it, and they keep insisting on speaking Spanish even though their parents beat them and tell them they must speak Chinese.
I admit the direct cause is internal, unless we’re talking about a sex change operation or other medical/external determination of gender.
Not spontaneously - just as a transgender woman must have an existing stereotype of “woman” to identify with, a Spanish-speaker in a Chinese society must have an existing (even if imperfect) knowledge of the Spanish language.
That’s fairly simple: the fact that society associates certain traits are a particular gender. If you are told you are a boy, but have so many traits that you are told belong to girls, then it’s at least conceivable that this would lead you to believe you are a girl.
Note that all of the things I just described here are messages one would get as part of a cis-normative culture. You don’t need to have a trans-affirming culture to come to believe you are not the gender people tell you that you are.