I have taken mass transit for over 30 years and no one ever gives up a seat for a woman just because she is a woman. I am not sure it was ever otherwise.
Pregnant women yes.
Other than that you give up a seat for the elderly and disabled regardless of gender.
Otherwise you keep your seat.
I once had a young woman get on the bus I was on and complain of feeling unwell and asked if she could have my seat which I gave her. A few days later I saw the same woman get on the bus and pull that same routine with some other guy who gave up his seat for her so she had a scam going.
Also, women complain a lot about man spreading on mass transit (and some men really do that) but they have their own version which is putting their purse/bag on the seats next to them to discourage anyone from sitting there.
The difficulty with abolishing cultural gender roles is that most of them arise, directly or indirectly, from real biological differences between the sexes. Now, some of the more indirect ones have become mostly irrelevant in today’s society, so we maybe could, with a lot of effort, abolish those. But some are more direct.
Example 1: Women get pregnant, but men don’t. This means that a population can recover more easily from losing a large proportion of its males than from losing a large proportion of its females. This, in turn, means that men traditionally take on high-risk tasks like hunting and fighting, while women don’t. Now, this one we can do something about, since risks overall are very low in the modern world, even for soldiers. We’re not going to lose all of our breeding capacity from allowing women in the military.
On the other hand, though, Example 2: Because of this long history of males taking on high-risk tasks, males have evolved different traits to better enable them to take on high-risk tasks. So men, for instance, tend to be stronger, because strength is worth greater tradeoffs (like a shorter lifespan) when you’re engaged in activities like fighting. Further, men are also biologically wired to be more aggressive, for the same reason. So even if we allow men and women to join the military on equal terms, men are more likely to pass physical fitness tests, and men are more likely to be interested in joining in the first place. This is a difference we’re not going to be able to eliminate, unless we do something to equalize the testosterone levels between men and women (which is not something that I think is likely to be a good idea).
Example 3: Women get pregnant, but men don’t. If a man and a woman have a one-night stand and never see each other again, and pregnancy results, the man faces no consequences other than those that society and his own conscience impose on him, but the woman gets pregnant. Even if she gets an abortion, the abortion is still a burden that lies on her, not on him. And if she doesn’t, she’s going to be stuck caring for the kid, while the man gets to pass on his genetic information for free (assuming that neither society nor his conscience compels him otherwise). And so, women are discouraged from casual one-night stands, but men aren’t.
:dubious: Um, what does that say about languages that don’t use gendered pronouns in the first place? I’m pretty sure that speakers of, e.g., Malay and Tagalog and Finnish and Hungarian, etc., have not lost their genitalia, but their pronouns do not differentiate between genders.
Male humans are larger and stronger than female humans for the same reasons that lots of other mammals species have larger and stronger males. The males fight against each other, and the winners tend to have more opportunities to breed than the losers.
Species that don’t have direct male-male competition for breeding access don’t have this same type of dimorphism. In some species the males and females look exactly alike. In some species the males and females are the same size but the males have different plumage. In some species the males are much smaller, the angler fish is the prime example of this.
The point is our closest relatives the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans all have the same kind of sexual dimorphism, and the males are all larger and stronger than the females, and the reason is the males fight each other.
Bringing in group selection theories misses the point, I think.
I dunno. How many Malaysians, Fillipinos, Finns, and Hungarians have you checked for genitalia?
Back To The OP
While I certainly feel that rigid gender roles are a bad thing, I don’t see the need to get rid of them all together. We can let all the kids play with all the toys as was suggested earlier.
Letting kids play with all toys is a part of abolishing gender roles. So you give Little Bobby access to trucks and dolls, and you’re fine with whatever he develops an interest in, whether that’s trucks, dolls, both, or neither.
For that matter, even if there tuns out to be a biological propensity for boys to play with trucks, in this ungendered society, the parents’ reaction to Bobby liking dolls would start and end with “Well, I guess we know what we’re getting Bobby for Christmas this year.”
I’d say that means that people using those languages are unlikely to include the removal of gendered pronouns from the list of things they need to do to achieve gender blindness.
:dubious: Males of several raptor bird species, for example, fight other males for access to their territory, including their mate, yet the males on average are substantially smaller than the females. Male horses are very aggressive with each other in mating competition, yet male and female horses are nearly equal in size and strength.
I think this generalization about “males who fight other males are significantly bigger than females” is too sweeping.
Am now even more confused. Are you saying that discarding gendered pronouns entirely for, e.g., English speakers would require losing our genitalia, even though other speakers of other languages that don’t have gendered pronouns haven’t lost their genitalia?
Or are you just saying that discarding gendered pronouns is one of the things a culture would need to do to achieve gender blindness? In that case, why suggest that it would require losing physical genitalia, which sounds very drastic?
Okay, the idea of eradicating gendered pronouns came from the opening post (as did the idea of casually coed showers). It was suggested that these could be possible side effects/driving factors/something of the theorized eradication of gender.
In my opinion, I don’t think that the eradication of gender awareness would cause english to lose gendered pronouns, because there’s no reason for it to - we still could us gendered pronouns to identify people by their sex. For the differentiation between “him” and “her” to be literally meaningless to the point where separate words have no use, we’d have to lose our physical sex as well.
I also don’t think that eradicating gendered pronouns would be particularly causative of societal gender blindness, but I concede that i could be argued against on that point. Do cultures with languages without gendered pronouns tend to be culturally gender blind?
I dated a trans guy for four or five years. Before he came out as trans, he spent about ten years of his adult life identifying as a butch lesbian. He buzzed his hair super short. He wore men’s shirts. Dated women. Hung out with other radical queers. When he came out as trans, he basically changed none of this, except he started dating gay men in addition to women, and started taking testosterone, which gave him five o’clock shadow and, after a few years, the ability to grow a teeny tiny soul patch.
And he’s not an outlier. I know four other trans guys well enough to know a bit about them before they transitioned, and all of them identified as butch lesbians before they identified as men. Likewise, I know three trans women well enough to know a bit about their transition, and each of them spent at least a year identifying as crossdressers before they came out as trans. One of them even wrote a book about how to crossdress on a budget!
All of them, and the additional twenty or so trans people I know more casually, are deeply embedded in San Francisco’s queer culture. Their entire social sphere is made up of people who show a constant, casual disregard for gender norms while still identifying as cisgender. They are all fully cognizant that you can be a man who likes to wear dresses and make up, or be a woman who’s into football and motorcycles, and have access to a community that would support them in those choices.
So, the idea that trans people are trans because they have a rigid, archaic, and/or patriarchal concept of gender? Seems like a load of bullshit to me.
That’s the part I don’t get. I don’t see why we English speakers, with our normal genitalia and awareness of sex difference, couldn’t end up using the pronouns “him” and/or “her” in a way that has no direct correlation with physical sex, just as nowadays we frequently use “they” in a way that has no direct correlation with physical plural number.
We’ve already got a (slightly archaic) tradition of using “he” as a non-gendered indefinite pronoun, which some people nowadays modify by using “she” in the same way. It doesn’t really seem like that big a leap to me to start using either or both of those as a non-gendered definite pronoun. But what would be more likely to happen instead, ISTM, is that we’d just use singular “they” to refer to everyone, definite or indefinite.
Nope, AFAIK. Which is one of the reasons I find it strange when some anti-trans people have conniptions about the alleged ridiculousness and total unworkability of having a non-gendered personal pronoun. Plenty of languages have non-gendered personal pronouns and AFAICT it’s completely uncorrelated with societal gender egalitarianism. (Just as having grammatical gender for inanimate objects without sex appears to be.)
That seems incredibly weak-sauce to me, even for the wacko TERFS. It reminds me of the conservative “horror” at the prospect of transgender people using the restrooms of their expressed gender: “Oh then you’ll have sicko perv men becoming/dressing/behaving like women just so they can get access to your 6 year old daughter in the women’s restroom!”
TERFs have a wide range of beliefs about transmen, each of them fascinating to behold in its own way.
“Our damaged daughters” – there’s this whole TERF subculture built around “trauma theory” where trans men (and only trans men, you’ll only find a few who grudgingly may say that maybe some trans women fall in here too instead of being evil oppressors) are traumatized damaged women who retreat to a male identity to escape a sense of female powerlessness they feel because they got raped/assaulted as girls.
“Gender traitors” – basically, butch lesbians who decided not to be butch lesbians as, IDK, a personal slight against them. Internalized misogyny. Tools of the patriarchy. Misguided attempts to harness the patriarchy for themselves instead of smashing it. ???. The reasons given for this vary and are just odd.
“Homophobic lesbians” – they don’t want to acknowledge that being gay is okay so they make up this wild fantasy about them being men to rationalize their attraction to women as being straight. (Trans women get this one about as often). Never mind that a lot of trans people are bi or gay, not straight. This one has some historical precedent in that a few cultures like Iran are really accepting of (binary) trans people, but also force gay people to pretend to be trans if they want to not face the legal or social repercussions of dating their desired gender, but TERFs take it to the loony zone.
Some trans men… don’t help cases by continuing to participate in lesbian subculture and groups after transitioning. A lot of trans men started exploring their gender in butch lesbian spaces and remain attached, some of it being transitioning is hard, but also trans men kind of have some social issues after transitioning. Trans women can go into lesbian/wlw/queer woman spaces (as long as they’re not TERFy), and also women’s spaces, but trans men aren’t generally as welcomed in gay male spaces and cis straight men welcome them far less easily than cis straight women welcome trans women.
So groups kind of tend to drift to “people that aren’t cis, straight, and/or men”, which means for a lot of trans men it’s easiest to float around the same lesbian circles they’ve been floating around since before they transitioned, even though they don’t identify as lesbians anymore, which can make things appear to those who are… uh… assholes that “no, see, they’re really just lesbians still!”
(Personally, I think that trans men should not be in wlw spaces after transitioning. Of course, we don’t gotta kick them out the second they come out, it’s sensitive and they need time and support when transitioning, but I think it’s better if they gradually move out. Which most do, it’s just a few that stick around. They can keep their friends of course! Just maybe make a separate night with them instead of coming to lesbian night).
My best friend is a trans man who aspires to be a drag queen. My ex is a trans dude whose hobby and profession was makeup. I know at least two deliberately butch lesbian trans women. The idea that trans people adhere to some rigid view of gender is absurd to anybody who actually hangs around most trans people. Hell, the gross power dynamics at play in old fashioned cis, heterosexual relationships are usually derided by a lot of trans people usually refer to it as “het bullshit” (even if they’re het themselves).
It’s mostly the uber respectability politics oriented, usually conservative, often older, often straight trans people that really, really try to adhere to rigid gender norms. Trans people have a wide variety of likes and dislikes both aligned with and opposed to traditional roles and views of their gender. Just like, y’know, cis people.
A lot of what may be perceived as trans people, especially women being “stereotypical” is often a defense mechanism. Trans people not being… well accepted, often will overcorrect or dress or act in super-affected overly-feminine/masculine ways in a desperate bid to pass because not passing can be at best emotionally exhausting and at worst dangerous. This is especially pronounced for the first one or two years of socially transitioning, before they get a chance to feel themselves out and figure out what things they actually like in practice. The first couple years of transitioning usually end up being a second adolescence (if transitioning as an adult of course, otherwise it’s just an adolescence :P).
There is also, of course, the issue that trans people just can’t win either way. Dress too much like their identified gender? “Oh, you’re just being stereotypical and patriarchal and holding up outdated gender norms”. Dress or act too much like they’re their assigned at birth gender? “SEE!? TRANS PEOPLE AREN’T REAL!!! THEY’RE FAKING!!!”
For TERFs it’s less close to “perving”, which while creeping on people is obviously horrible, doesn’t really sell the sheer level of evil TERFs think is going on here.
TERFs would phrase it a bit more of a… conspiratorial fashion. Something closer to “trans women are a deliberate attempt by men to erase the meaning of ‘woman’ so they can undo the rights we’ve worked for. Bathrooms, in particular are an attempt to undo one of our sanctuaries and safe spaces we have that are free of men so they can assault us, quite literally with our pants down, and keep us down.” It varies from TERF to TERF whether they think trans women are doing this consciously or if it’s just some fucked up thing men are doing reflexively because they’re terrified of losing privilege. But the language is phrased as if this is some shadowy campaign waged by men to deliberately wrong and oppress them, with which the bathroom is but one lone battleground in the war.
It’s noticeably different how TERFs phrase it in this fashion, as opposed to conservatives. Conservatives are more concerned about “perving” and THE CHILDREN and general sexual impropriety. While TERFs are often very anti-kink, and incorporate that into their rhetoric against trans women, their rhetoric viz bathrooms is closer to their general rhetoric about trans women in women’s spaces in general. You’ll see them use almost the same language if they see, say, a trans woman in a rape survivor or eating disorder support group for women, for instance.
:dubious: Males of several raptor bird species, for example, fight other males for access to their territory, including their mate, yet the males on average are substantially smaller than the females. Male horses are very aggressive with each other in mating competition, yet male and female horses are nearly equal in size and strength.