In the age of transgender, does man/woman mean anything?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Yes in a medical sense it is sometimes important for a doctor to know one’s birth gender status, along with possibly any modifications made such as sexual organs removed and when, so medically there is a reason for cis/trans/male/female and other relevant medical history.

But what are we saying when a particle birth gender person identifies with the other gender, or their own gender. In an age where one can pick and ‘be’, and regardless of what they are can also pick their preference for a mate. What are they actually picking and based on what?

How can one know what a gender feels like. Even their own gender? What part of ‘you’ is attributed to your male/femaleness? How can one ever know what gender they feel without being able to know what both feels like?

How do gender stereotypes play into this, if at all? What about gender based roles in society, and are they actually male/female traits, or just something we burden a group of people based on their birth organs?

I suspect that it is very clear to most people that males and females can be treated differently in different circumstances, however that seems to be stereotypical and not true gender based differences but a learned behavior. I won’t blame anyone for getting out of a group which seems to put them at a perceived or real disadvantage, but that doesn’t seem to be a gender based cause, though I may be wrong.

In the end do we just do away with male/female distinction as no one really knows what the difference is (besides medically).

Though if we do that, we may be back to where we started, as we may start defining people as person with a penis or person with a vagina (which I have seen done), which brings us back to what we were trying to overcome.

2

Not to stray too far from the seriousness of this topic, but I always think of this movie clip from 1957 when this subject comes up. I used to think it was pretty enlightened, now of course it looks different to modern eyes.

I have only one personal example in my life, one which still leaves me somewhat puzzled: there is someone I work with very occasionally in the non-profit where I volunteer. This person appears to have been born as a woman, but now wishes to be considered and addressed as a man. Fine, no problem as such. Only he has made no effort that I can see to change anything about himself so that, without any advance notice, one would suppose him to be a man, while on the other hand he seems quite touchy about being appropriately identified. So I wonder, mildly, what is the point for him of making this change. I draw no conclusions, only express my personal confusion.

I too wonder about gender stereotypes. I’m a gay man who does not conform to a lot of male stereotypes (which often seem to be more class-based sometimes), but I am also not interested in being anything but a man. You could ask me why, and I would have a lot to say about it I suppose, but I wonder how much of it is about the extra privilege that society still confers on men.

Not a very inspired first response for your thread, sorry, but perhaps it carries the ball a yard or so downfield.

3

The terms are mostly meaningless when talking about a single person, but still useful when talking about the population as a whole. There are lots of terms like that. For example, if I say “I am an American”, that tells you virtually nothing about me as a person. There may be typical attributes of an American, but I personally may conform to zero of those attributes, and I may deviate wildly from those American norms. Even what I mean by American is not clear. Does it mean I currently live in America? Was born in America? Was born somewhere else but spent significant time in America? But we can still look at what it means to be American as a whole and describe it by significant traits (e.g. white, Christian, English-speaking, etc). However, any single American may share none of those defining traits. The same thing is true for man/woman. Each person who calls themself a man or woman is doing so by their own meaning of the word, but as a whole there can be attributes which are much more common with one group than the other.

4

I’ve actually had this discussion with one of my children. The absurd societal gender stereotypes had him questioning his gender. He cooks; he sews; he sings songs from musicals - all of these are traits that American society associates with “woman”. He is the one saying that “gender” is a societal construct. I agree.

I use the quick joking idea that some people are “innies” and some people are “outies”. You got an outie? You like your outie and how it makes you feel? You’re male. You sexually aroused by people with innies? You’re heterosexual. I don’t give a crap about what activities you do or don’t enjoy.

That is about the only time it should matter. The male body has certain hormones; the female body others. These can have differing effects on medication and treatment. From a MEDICAL perspective, it is absolutely necessary to know the sex of the person, and what medications they are taking (some of which may be hormones).

I am seeing some changes in American society (small changes; very gradual). I do foresee a time way in the future where we talk about “our child” not “our son” or “our daughter”; where male vs. female is a
medical construct, and things that have nothing to do with reproduction are referred to on a non-gender basis.

Yeah, way way WAY in the future.

5

This is very well put. People often ask transgender women “How the heck can you know that ‘who you are’ is the same identity that [AFAB] women in general share? You’ve never been one, so how can you know that you’re ‘like them on the inside’ ?” But the same is true for cisgender women — exactly as kinicbird just put it, they’ve never been some other woman so as to know what part of ‘you’ is attributed to what they have in common with women in general, as opposed to being distinctively their own!

So let us assume that we do uproot all the social connections in our collective heads between morphological maleness and “manhood” or “masculinity” and likewise for the connections betwixt physical femaleness and “womanhood / femininity” — how would they persist as notions at all? They are already generalizations — some people prefer to say “stereotypes” — what would they be generalizations about at this point?

Conversely, people (including many people on this board) have asked me, “Why the heck can’t you just be a male who rejects all the sexist stereotyped expectations? Why do you say you are a girl, or femme or whatever?”

Imagine that over there, through that door — pretend I’m pointing at a door — someone male is going to walk into this room. You don’t know anything about them except that they’re male, okay? What expectations and assumptions do you make? I bet (for many of you at any rate) your first thought is “I am not sexist, I don’t ascribe to a bunch of moldy outdated preconceived notions about how males are, as distinguished from females, so all I’m going to expect of this male stranger is the same stuff I’d expect if it were to be a female stranger instead”. But is that true? Can I challenge you on that? Because I bet you are well aware that a lot of the male people on this planet don’t believe that, although you do, and you have met some of the ones who ascribe to a lot of “shoulds” about how male people should be, and how they should not be. So this hypothetical male stranger could be one of those, or they could be one of the people who didn’t spend a lifetime conforming to sexist claptrap. And maybe, just maybe, in the back of your mind, you haven’t entirely dismissed the possibility that some of the generalizations about male and female are valid as generalizations. So isn’t that going to affect your expectations about this stranger who is about to walk in through the door?

Here’s what may not be among your expectations: that the male person who is about to walk through the door matches up pretty closely to the stereotypes about women and girls — that he fits the description of feminine. After all, if this male person is nonsexist and really free from sexist stereoyping, we’d expect a sort of unisex person with a mix of traits, a sort of androgynous person.

So when it turns out that the male stranger who walks in actually is like that (feminine, I mean), your expectations — which are probably over there somewhere midway between unisex/androgynous and conventionally masculine — aren’t a much better fit than if you held sexist stereotyped notions yourself.

In math we have the concept of an asymptote, a line that a curve approaches but never actually gets to. Our attempts to suspend sexist stereotyping tend to be like that, I think, for the reasons I’ve just described.

But if you believed that some male people — a minority perhaps — are feminine, not merely neutrally androgynous, that shifts your expectations somewhat.

Those of us who are like this grew up in a world that had (and still has) notions about how male and female people are different. We may be the way we are (feminine males and masculine females, that is) because of something built in, or we may be this way because the folks we identified with at some point in our lives were the people of the other sex, and we aspired to be liked by them, admired by them, accepted among them, and so while others of our sex were policing their own behavior to fit in with their own sex, we were policing ours to fit in better with the sex of the folks we admired. And that policing, it models a person, it shapes who they become.

6

I like that analogy. Am I an American. I was born and spent my first 31 there, but I really consider myself Canadian. But my wife in a similar situation still considers herself primarily American. We both carry two passports incidentally. I still view myself as a man and she views herself as a woman, but I can imagine people who feel differently about their genders.

You know, I think it might take a dozen or so years, but I think these questions will get sorted out eventually. Right now we are groping.

7

You said it yourself: if culture regarded men and women equally, perhaps it would not matter to him as much, but it does, so it means something to be acknowledged as a man (what do you mean by “change anything about himself”, though? Clothes? Mannerisms? Surgery?)

8

He wears baggy unisex clothes but they don’t disguise a female form; his voice is a woman’s voice, his hair is long. Mannerisms seem pretty neutral I guess. He is obviously not required to change any of those things to suit other people, but the gestalt of what I experience as this person doesn’t say “man” to me, so it’s an effort (which I certainly try very hard to make) to remember to address him and refer to him correctly. This isn’t a complaint, only an observation, and possibly a confession of inability to completely keep up with the rapidity of change in this area.

9

Words have clear meanings. This aids in clear thinking. Confusion about words may be a sign of confusion in general.

10

If you tell me that the person who’s about to walk through the door is male, then I’ll assume that he is probably taller than the human average, I’ll assume that he probably has facial hair of some sort if he doesn’t shave (nowadays, very likely to at least have a bit of stubble), I’ll assume that he’s likely to be losing some of the hair on top of his head if he’s of a certain age, I’ll assume that he’ll have only vestigial breasts, and so on. I can think of a lot of things that I’ll assume will be probably true of a male human. But there are people who assure me that, despite having most or even all of the traits I correlate with “male”, that there’s some sense in which they’re “really female”.

I will, of course, refer to such people as “she”, because it’s always been polite to refer to people how they wish to be referred. And I don’t care what bathroom anyone uses. But I still don’t understand what this “inherent femaleness” or “inherent maleness” is, that some people apparently have (cis or trans-- Plenty of cisgender folks also claim to have a strong “gender identity”, whatever that is).

11

I strongly identify as male. That means when folks ask ‘Are you male?’ I say ‘Yes, I am!’- and that’s all it means. I would MUCH rather spend time sewing a costume, petting small animals, or caring for a baby than watching professional sports. In many ways, I don’t fit the idea of a typical man.

12

Ok, but so what? Suppose all I know instead is that a human will walk through that door. I can predict that the human will probably be between around 5 and 6 feet tall. They’ll probably have two arms and legs and be able to see and hear. They’ll probably have hair. If it’s a typical situation for me personally, they’ll probably be white and there’s at least a 50% shot at them being between 30 and 50 years old. They’ll likely speak English. They’ll probably like sports. They’ll probably have a visually recognizable gender of some kind.

Any specific person may fall outside these preconceptions. In fact, it’s almost certain that any specific person will fall outside at least one of them. So I’m already highly trained to throw away any preconceptions as soon as I have evidence to the contrary.

That’s not true. Almost no one is androgynous. Even if I have no additional information, expecting that a random person will be obviously male or obviously female is far more likely than expecting “unisex.”

13

I’m not talking about physiology, I"m talking about all the stuff that isn’t physiology. Please keep that in mind and reread the post to which you’re replying.

14

Whether talking about physical or behavioral traits doesn’t matter. If I’m told someone is male, I can make predictions on various behavioral traits. Perhaps on each one I’d only have a 75% chance at a successful prediction. I would nevertheless make the “stereotypically male” prediction on every one of those traits, even though my expectation is that I’d be wrong 25% of the time. I should not expect to be either 0% wrong (a behavioral “super male”) or 50% wrong (fully androgynous).

That I am guaranteed to be partially wrong in my predictions means that I am already trained to discard any incorrect ones. But that doesn’t mean I expect androgyny, either.

15

A relevant song!

16

I would say it has always meant gender. It’s not like we were checking chromosomes or genitals before. If someone had masculine signifiers, we called them a man. If they had feminine signifiers, we called them a woman. What is masculine and feminine? What society says it is, same as what counts as, say black or white. Does anyone ask “well, are Italian people really white? They didn’t used to be considered such.”

Now, if we want to get into what gender is, that’s a bit harder. I argue that the easiest way to understand it is to realize that there are different aspects of that, too. There are gender roles, which is what people used to focus on. But there is also gender identity, which is an internal mapping of oneself to gender. And, like sexuality, studies suggest this mapping, once formed, is generally immutable, especially if it is very strong. This often causes dysphoria, an extreme feeling of anxiety, depression, unreality, self-loathing, etc. And the only treatment with any success is transitioning, changing one’s gender expression (another aspect of gender) to match one’s gender identity, In fact, sometimes this change involves hormones and other physical alterations, suggesting that there is something biological here that needs to be fixed.

(For example, in cismen, there is a such thing as low testosterone levels, yet that can be more testosterone than women have. It can lead to lethargy and depression. So if you can give testosterone to someone who was assigned female at birth, and it actually has the same effect, maybe something about their biology was “male” in the sense of needing testosterone.)

I would say that the terms “man” and “woman” are a combination of gender expression and gender roles. However, as time has gone on, we’ve been deemphasized the latter, and started bringing in gender identity as part of the equation.

Outside of medical or dead body, “man” and “woman” were only ever terms for gender. All that has changed is how the different aspects of gender interact.

17

I would say it has always meant both sex and gender. Our notions of what the sex identity of a person means is something we’ve had a lot of personal stake in. Our own identities have tended to be tied up in those notions, and they’ve also been eroticized for us.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful from an analytical perspective to make the split between the two, even if we still have trouble figuring out what specific trait goes in which category.

18

Actually that’s not necessarily the case. I don’t have the cite handy, but I got curious a while back and went hunting and found polling that a substantial minority even a plurality of transwomen are perfectly happy with the plumbing they were born with and have no plans or wish to change that. What’s in your pants and how you feel about it isn’t your gender.

19

Too late to add: which makes sense. A pre-op transwoman feels she is a woman, both before and after SRS. And a transwoman with no plans for SRS feels the same.