Notice the scare quotes in the bolded part. It’s common for the most raging of transphobes to use the argument He thinks he’s a woman. (Though not everyone who says that is a raging transphobe.) There’s an entire life underneath being trans, and it’s not nearly so simple as just deciding Hey, I’ll be a woman now.
Weak. hell, I don’t even know what a pish or a roaster is.
Misgendering is when you know someone’s preferred gender but you use a different one, anyway.
This is more a case of assuming gender, which everybody does. I’m sure it’s frustrating for transmen to be called ma’am or her, but strangers can’t possibly know what is preferred. And we can’t start every introduction with What are your pronouns? It’s just not practical.
Double post
I noticed the quotes but I didn’t know they were “scare” quotes. So I have to confess I don’t know what you are really saying then.
Aren’t you saying hypothetical Betty has a claim to womanhood just as long as her mind tells her she’s a woman? If that’s not what you believe, can you elaborate because it’s certainly not clear in your post.
The person I was responding to said something like “if they think they’re a woman,” so I put in the quotes to mock that sentiment a little bit.
In a nutshell, that’s the idea, yes. If whatever parts of the mind that control our gender identity tell us that we’re this or that, then we’re this or that.
That’s the core of the debate. What did Rowling mean?
On the one hand, sure, it could be that she doesn’t agree with Maya’s views, but she also doesn’t like the fact that Maya was fired for expressing them. On the other hand, it could be that she does agree with Maya’s views and doesn’t like that people can be fired for expressing that particular view.
Thanks for trying to get the discussion back on topic.
If a male-presenting person told you they don’t have gender dysphoria and they claim “woman” because they they just love the idea of being a part of womanhood, how would you categorize their gender? Would you see that person as woman?
If you make it so that you HAVE to feel like a woman to be a woman, then where does that leave all the female-presenting people who don’t really feel “woman”, but don’t care enough to announce that ambivalence to the world with a confusing label? If a male-presenting person says they are woman because they hate patriarchy and they no longer want to be affiliated with misogynistic bros, is everyone else expected to just go along with that without uttering a single negative opinion lest they be accused of transphobia? Or is it fair to say, “Hold up now. ‘Woman’ doesn’t have that meaning for us!”
Gender fluid folks have been pushing the idea that gender dysphoria should not be a criterion for who gets to change genders. If changing gender isn’t a big deal, then there should be no gate-keeping. If a person wants to be a woman because they just want the experience of being a woman, they should be able to do that. I can go there, I suppose. But that conflicts with the “men are people who feel they’re men” notion that you and lots of folks are espousing. That idea is more reasonable to me than “Everyone is whatever they say they are no matter what the reasoning”.
I don’t see much daylight between saying someone “thinks they are a certain gender” and “the mind tells us our gender identity”.
Do you think it requires a transphobic attitude to believe that there isn’t anything seated in our minds or brains that controls gender identity? Can’t a person be skeptical of this idea yet still treat trans gendered folks with dignity and respect?
It occurred to me recently that “gender identity” is kind of like saying “person identity”. Biologically, our DNA is what makes us human beings. But DNA plus socialization is what makes us people who identify as people. If a human child is raised by gorillas, they’d still be a human courtesy of DNA. But they would likely identify *with *gorillas. Maybe they’d even self identify as a gorilla. The socialization part, in other words, is important to identity.
And yet still, we wouldn’t consider this child a gorilla even if that is what they identified as. The child might insist on being lumped in with gorillas and we might choose to do that, but we would still likely see the child as a person. Because of their DNA.
With gender, we are expected to follow a different set of expectations. Although DNA is what makes certain human beings female and certain human beings male, to avoid being accused of transphobia, we now have to accept that gender identity doesn’t have anything to do with DNA. It’s controlled by the mind. If you have a “woman’s mind”, you are a woman and that’s all there is to it. When someone asks what is a “woman’s mind”, no one has a objective answer and they are accused of asking questions in bad faith.
Do you see this as a valid problem or do you think is this just nonsense I’m spouting?
Thinks is often used dismissively, as though the person were merely picking out which shoes to wear.
Transphobic, no. But there pretty obviously is something since gender dysphoria is recognized by every major psychological organization.
I’m not sure that species dysphoria is a recognized condition.
The medicine says that (again, in a nutshell) some men do, in fact, have minds that identify their selves as women. Whether it’s induced by DNA or some other factor, I don’t know.
Following the outrage that proceeded the outing of Rachel Dolezal, that’s the type of question that one would expect to get skimmed over or ignored. Tribal politics always leads to further factionalizing.
The issue is not just being treated with dignity and respect. Some women feel oppressed by men and that because of that they need to create female only spaces in order to be free of that oppression. Thus they want to exclude men from these spaces. Some transwomen want to be included in these spaces. tthere is a tension between women who want to be away from men and transwomen who want to be included. No amount of treating people with dignity and respect can solve the problem. There must be agreement over who is a woman and who can be included in women only spaces.
The ask to be treated respectfully, to have your preferred pronouns respected, the whole package of rights that go with that, is a more than very reasonable one. Doing otherwise would be hateful. If that is what Rowling did then she was being hateful.
The ask to demand that others think of you in the way you want them to think of you, that others in their minds consider you in the manner you wish, and when asked what they think (which this thread does) either parrot what you want to hear or be quiet … is not at all a reasonable ask.
I will ask again my question if those who identify as “fluid” really belong in the same grouping as those who are trans. My understanding is that most people who are trans have a persistent from childhood cohesive and pervasive internalized identity of a gender discordant with their biological sex, such that trying to live as the gender of their biological sex is painful. Do those identify as fluid or non-binary claim that? Do they have to deal with that same issues that transpeople do? I suspect I will be flamed for even asking this, but do some younger adults put on “fluid” or “non-binary” as an image statement more than as a persistent and dysphoric gender/biological sex mismatch? (Not anything I’d ever say to anyone who so self-identifies, or course they are “they” or “he” or “she” or just [name], and no comments otherwise made.)
And why do people care what a celebrity happens to think? I do not think cancel culture can have much impact on her at this point. Do you?
On preview I see puddlegum’s post. If the only time this came up was when cis-women wanted to have spaces private themselves, dealing with issues that they feel are different issues than a transwoman experiences, I think it would be one thing (and could be expressed with dignity and respect, without denying a transwoman’s womanhood, but appealing to the differences in the issues they, as women with different paths to their womenhood, are dealing with. The behaviors discussed here are much wider than that narrow application, and with exclusion which are to the quick read at least based on … other factors.
Is there research showing the frequency of males identifying themselves as men who have female brains? I think if we’re going to point to brain scans as evidence of gender, we need to know how well a brain scan predicts someone’s self-identified gender. We need to know the rate of false positives and negatives. I don’t think we are there yet.
At any rate, I don’t think we want to make it so that transgendered folks are only deemed “valid” if they can produce neurological evidence of their self-identified gender. Because if a self-professed feeling is all it takes for someone to be a gender, nothing else should matter.
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I’d be more comfortable letting someone who is genderfluid respond to that. On the whole, though, I think that anybody who doesn’t conform to their at-birth identity faces many of the same issues.
It happens. Anything that’s seen as edgy or non-conformist eventually draws poseurs.
Honestly the fact that a sense of gender has any correlation with something as big of structural brain change to be measurable on MRI is pretty flabbergasting.
Same here. As a cisgender woman, I don’t see any problem with expressions like “pregnant people” and “menstruators” to acknowledge that the experiences of pregnancy, menstruation, etc., are not limited exclusively to those who currently identify as female.
Yes, we also need to be able to talk about the experiences that are unique to cisgender women (as well as many transgender men), e.g., the experience of being perceived and treated as female beginning in one’s childhood. But we can do that without inaccurately assuming that the category “woman” = “cisgender woman”, or getting hurt or indignant if somebody points out our inaccuracy.
Yup.
I’m not aware of this research. Can you cite it?
My impression is that these group-wide correlations are NOT at the level of having testing predictive value, positive or negative. Still first I read Una citing some of them was a major whoa moment to me.
FWIW my ignorant take on it would be that what matters most is the longstanding persistent and pervasive nature of the sense of identity … and of course respecting others’ autonomy in matters of their identity within very wide ranges (clear appropriation being a limit to that range, which is why the Dolenz comparison fails).
As I understand your analogy, you’re suggesting that just as a black person who can pass for white will experience less racism and may not understand the experiences of black people who can’t pass, there could be women who can pass for men who will experience less sexism and may not understand the experiences of women who can’t pass.
Is that a fair summary of your analogy? Black people are analogized to women, white people are analogized to men, racism analogized to sexism?