Avoiding a further highjack from the March 27, trans man, initially identified as Female shooter kills 6 @ Nashville Christian school thread, I do need some clarification: is it the modern rule that a person’s gender identify is based upon their own self-identification from the moment they choose to so self-identify? Or is some surgical and/or hormonal basis in biology required? Or in other words, does trans include aspiring trans?
P.S. how does on place notification in the original thread to a spin-off topic?
I’m not a mod (and maybe this should be in ATMB), but my understanding is that the rule for this board is to identify people according to the pronouns they prefer, regardless of surgical or hormonal status. That also seems to be the guideline in polite, non-transphobic company.
I guess I don’t understand why it would be any different – if someone wants me to refer to her as “she/her”, why would I care whether she had surgery or hormone treatment.
The answer is “It depends”. Some transpeople think that only people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria can really call themselves trans. Others think that’s exclusionary, and that anyone who identifies as the other gender for any reason is a person of that gender. And then there are people whose views are somewhere in the middle - although my understanding is that most people believe either option 1 or option 2.
Edited to add: It’s my understanding that the majority of LGBTQ people adhere to option 2. People who adhere to option 1 are frequently referred to by the epithet ‘TruScum’, which kinda gives you an idea of how popular their views are among people who don’t share them.
“Transgender” theoretically means — and therefore includes — anyone whose gender identity differs from what their mom’s obstetrician jotted down on their birth certificate.
That is not only confusing to people such as Lumpy, the OP, it’s also problematic for some of us who are gender-atypical. What most people think of when they think of “transgender people” is “people who transition” — and what many people still exclusively think of when they think of transitioning is medical transition — hormonal or surgical or some combo thereof.
It is polite and appropriate to accept people’s gender identity as they state it, including but not limited to their pronouns. I hesitate to call it “a rule” but it’s a good guideline.
Please consider that not everyone who transitions undergoes any kind of medical transition.
Please also consider that not everyone whose gender is other than whatever they were assigned at birth is a transitioner at all.
Oh, and the problematic thing about the definition of “transgender” that bugs me is that obstetricians don’t really designate a person’s gender, they designate a person’s sex. Transgender people who do transition generally do not favor a distinction between sex and gender, and neither did the mainsteam of society, historically speaking — the mainstream world has conventionally believed that your sex defines your gender; and reciprocally, many transitioners believe that your gender is all that anybody should take into consideration and view it as creepily invasive to conjecture about what someone does or does not have inside the confines of their underwear.
But just as not all of us are transitioners, not all of us find it appropriate or necessary to omit discussion of morphological sex. So here, too, the best recommendation is to follow people’s lead in how they choose to identify. If they include information about their morphology, it’s obviously not off-limits.
Are you claiming that there are transpeople who will refer to someone who claims to be trans by their dead name and the wrong pronouns? I find it surprising that option 1 is significant in size, but I definitely may be wrong. Do you have any cites handy?
In any case, we can never know someone else’s true gender identity, unless we get ESP, so in terms of the practical effect, I think we should refer to someone by the pronouns and name they request.
In terms of the Tennessee shooter, it’s really not clear what they prefer, so I would stick with they/them until something clears it up either way.
I’ve been told by some transgender people that I’m “not doing it right”, that if I identify as a girl I should identify as female, and that my failure to do so is offensive to them. I don’t have a dead name and I don’t consider any pronouns right (they’re all wrong and I’m not picky), but yeah, I’ve had my identify invalidated by people within the community. It happens. But mostly the attitude is that if you think this is where you belong, you belong here.
I’ve never really understood how you identify yourself, and think of you as gender queer. If that’s not how you identify, I apologize in advance. If you do identify that way, I guess I don’t understand why the trans community would tell you you’re not doing it right, since it’s sort of a way of saying that your status is difficult to specify.
If you do identify as a girl but not female (and not gender queer), I suppose I don’t understand that either. In any case, I’m happy to use whatever pronouns you prefer!
That is my question for @WalterBishop as well–not whether they can find a single example on the interwebz of someone saying any specific dumb thing, but whether they can back up claims like
with any relevant definition of “frequently.”
I also have never encountered trans person who claims that
To make that claim, you’d have to believe that trans people did not exist before DSM-V replaced Gender Identity Disorder with Gender Dysphoria as a diagnosis, way back in 2013. Which would be a remarkable claim, to say the least.
So, yes: cites plz
Edit: @WalterBishop may be poorly paraphrasing transmedicalism, which suggests (according to Wikipedia) that “being transgender is contingent upon suffering and/or medical treatment.” That’s not the same thing at all as saying it’s “only people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” but I suppose it’s close enough to account for what he’s describing.
This here is the one-and-done answer to the OP; it’s not a complicated rule. Just call somebody what they hell they want to be called. The only way there can be any “confusion” is if a person just… willfully doesn’t want to do that.