Huh? It was in response to your post saying this:
The longer this thread goes on, the more it seems that the root conflict is that some people believe gender identity to be a subjective feeling while others see it as an objective (if internal) reality.
You seem to be unaware of it, but you subscribe to the idea that gender is a subjective feeling. This can be inferred from your own words.
So if you don’t know what my point is, what was your point when you said this?
In the case of your conversation with Newgent, it seems that female is being used in a biological sense. Other times it seems to refer to gender expression. Woman is a word that can be used to refer to biology or gender. Did Newgent have an opinion on whether he is comfortable being called a woman? Earlier you said that it is acccurate to call a transman a female or a woman.
I said before, I am not a biologist. It seems to me to be useful from a language standpoint to have a word for all people expressing a female gender, a word for biological females, and a word for biological males who present as females.
For me, the words are woman, female, and transwoman.
I hate my phone.
The terms male/female should be invariant, where they essentially mean individuals who have a XY or XY genetic code and exhibit typical physical characteristics based on those types. Male/female should be standalone terms that don’t depend on asking the person the gender. Male/Female should be objective classifications. In the past they were often used interchangeably with their man/woman counterparts, but now that’s not as clear cut.
I think it is reasonable to consider the terms man/woman as being more flexible and encompassing the cultural norms common to people who are male or female in a certain society. So a definition for man might be “A man is someone who exhibits the appearance and physical traits of someone who is male.” I’m not sure if it makes sense to say that a man is always male. There are some trans men who are much more masculine and have a higher affinity to typical male appearance and behaviors than some actual males. If you compare a macho trans man with lots of manly traits to an effeminate XY male, who is the real man?
But like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t consider all men/women equivalent. While I think anyone can go into the “Women’s Clothing” store, something like the “women’s changing room” should be limited to females and people who have a strong correlation to female characteristics.
Now if we could just come up with an explanation of what that means, that also is at least somewhat agreed on by most if not all parties, we’d be set!
CMC
I actually think we can do that. Statistically, it should be possible to define what it means to be male or female. Filter a society into a group for the XYs and a group for the XXs. Don’t worry that some people don’t fit into those genetic groups. Do statistical analysis of the males and females to find out what attributes are unique to each group and how statistically likely they are. Look at things like hormone levels, bone density, genitals, body chemistry, etc. Then once you have those results, you can compare each individual statistically to those two groups. Some people may be 100% one or the other, but I expect that you’d find that people are going to match X% to the female data and Y% to the male data. And once you have this kind of data, you can start looking at what sort of cultural behaviors each group displays. So the people who are statistically male, what kinds of clothes do they wear, what behaviors do they have, who do they have sex with, etc? This set of social behaviors common to males would classify what was meant by “man”. Someone who identified as a man would be saying they demonstrated many of the same behaviors as the males in the society.
I didn’t ask him about whether he would be offended by being called a woman nor am I going to. He’s made crystal clear that he sees women as adult human females, and trans women as their own separate class. I can only infer from this, plus his note to me, that he doesn’t feel it is necessary to be called a man or male to be valid. He is ok being a trans man.
I’m pretty confident that 20 years from now (or sooner), we are all going to look back on how we’re currently treating “man” and “woman” as inflammatory language and feel ashamed of ourselves. It is very absurd when you give it some thought. I can say a trans man is a female and be semi in the clear. But if say a trans man is a woman, this might be enough get me banned from the message board. But really, why? The definition for woman is an adult female human; that definition has not been scrubbed from most dictionaries (yet). Furthermore, most dictionaries do not define woman in such a way that excludes trans men. They don’t say “woman” is a gender expression either. These are meanings that are being imagined and then treated as fact.
When we all read that CNN article about COVID-contaminated sperm, no one had any doubt that biological males were the subject, even though they were referred to as men in the headline. But surely if “men” now means gender instead of sex, the first line of the article should’ve said “people’s semen” instead of men’s.
If you want to refer to the community of people who present female, what word would you use? Females and women are out, as those are both used to collectively refer XX.
(And if you don’t want to single out biological females vs biological males)
I’m trying to make sense of this question and I’m failing. First of all, I doubt there is a true community of people who present female. There are communities centered around female people, but communities centered around people who present as female? I don’t know of any those. It’s kind of like saying a community of people who present as nerds.
Secondly, I don’t see how this gets us closer to resolving theTWAW dilemma. Plenty of trans women don’t “present as female”. Examples have been provided in this thread. So even if I could come up with up a pithy term for referring to the “female-presenting community”, it would exclude many transwomen.
You cant make sense of the idea of referring to a group of people who have some degree of shared life experience being perceived as women?
I’m leaving aside the issue, at the moment, of transwoman who have no dysphoria, do not present as women, but identify as transwomen. Several examples have been provided up thread, but you’ve also referred to people who do present to some degree as females as “men.” Discussion of whether or not someone is passing or even trying to pass has ensued. You’ve made it clear that transwomen who have surgery, who take hormones, who live as female, or have been legally reassigned as women, are still men.
I suppose, after over 2000 posts, I’m STILL trying to figure out what word you would use to refer to a shared feminine experience, regardless of genetics.
I’d call those people nerds- what would you call them? Nerds and transnerds?
If, after over 2000 posts, you haven’t figured out that she doesn’t think there is a shared feminine experience, you haven’t been reading the same 2000 posts I have.
Neither of you have been reading the thread, it seems, if you haven’t figured out that growing up with female reproductive organs is the single most important part of the shared feminine experience (as far as YWTF is concerned). It is not something transwomen can ever have, regardless of their internal identity.
Even compared to infertile ciswomen, there is a difference. I don’t think it’s controversial to state that transwomen cannot pass as ciswomen for very long in something like a workplace, regardless of whether they are considered women. Hence, they will not experience a particular kind of discrimination, which sounds something like “Why promote her? She’s going to get pregnant sometime soon and barely get anything done for a year. Two years if she has a second kid.” But an infertile ciswoman can pass as a fertile one very easily, and is likely to face the same discrimination.
Transwomen of course face their own types of discrimination; ones unique to them. This just further weakens the idea that they have a shared feminine experience with ciswomen.
That is, in fact, exactly what I was referring to. So yes, I did figure it out, thanks.
I have one friend where no-one at her current work knows she is a transwoman. Which I can confirm by conversations I’ve had with some of her colleagues in social settings.
And I work with one transwoman where it only comes up to new employees because her deadname is still on old GIT commits. And they are universally surprised.
That will do it. Note that when I said that, I was not referring solely to presentation. A workplace is exactly the kind of place where old things tend to bubble up. Old email addresses, phonebook pictures, LinkedIn pages, source control commits, or even just basic chitchat between coworkers. So sure, there will be rare exceptions.
I’m very, very careful not to out my trans colleague, and leave it to her to deal with those kinds of questions. As far as I’m concerned, “Bob” is just a guy who used to work here, and “Bobbi” just happens to know a lot about the code he worked on. I think the rest of the long-time colleagues are the same. So the only co-worker who should be chit-chatting is “Bobbi” herself.
I don’t know your coworkers, but that seems very optimistic. It’s certainly not true of my coworkers. They aren’t malicious, and are generally sympathetic to progressive causes, but they get things wrong sometimes. My one close trans coworker (who is remote) gets deadnamed, gets the wrong pronouns, and so on. She’s not here to gently correct them. While she is very publicly out (she’s a key figure in trans advocacy at our workplace), if she weren’t, it wouldn’t be long before she was. At some point there would be a question “was that so-and-so from X years ago?” and someone would answer yes.
There’s just too much room for error in a large organization, IMO, even if most people are generally well-meaning. They just get things wrong occasionally, and I can’t blame them too much because it’s a complicated subject. Frankly I’m not sure how I would respond to a question about my coworker, since although she’s out, and many people witnessed the transition firsthand, I don’t know her opinion about new hires. I’d probably say something like “I’m not at liberty to say”, which of course is just a yes.
I think partly it’s the nature of our company. We were a start-up, and a small one (we all sat around a boardroom table and coded away, when I first joined) for a long time. And we all went to the same uni, and half of us played DnD and LARPed together (that’s how I knew “Bobbi”, and that’s how I got hired). The other half were related to the first half. As much a family company as a tech startup. At one point, 1/3 of the company were either siblings, cousins, or spouses of same.
Then “Bobbi” transitioned just as we were being bought out by a huge global corp, and they are now throwing money at us to scale up operations, so there’s been a sudden influx of new blood. But we are still very much an autonomous unit in that global company, and a remote one at that. So the larger company has no reason to inquire, and our own new hires, arriving freshly-buffed from varsity, are a generation removed from knowing “Bobbi” from before. And the people who were here before are not just casual acquaintances of “Bobbi”. Yes, any of us may occasionally unintentionally deadname her, we’re all human. But it happens less and less, and doesn’t impact the perception of things much. Especially since we’re all remoting such a lot, and “Bobbi” had been, most of the work week, for ages before that anyway.
Sorry, I honestly misunderstood what you were getting at (that’s what I get for posting late at night)
Being perceived as a female means something different to me than “presenting as female”. I interpreted the latter to mean adopting a certain gender expression associated with women/girls. Like wearing dresses and earrings. A transwoman could have a feminine gender expression, but still be clocked as male because of her physical features.
I don’t think we need to come up with a single word to describe all people who look like female human beings. The phrase “people perceived as female” probably works just fine when we’re discussing this population’s shared experience, as we’re doing now.
In a informal context, when we are describing strangers to one another, obviously we will continue to default to referring to anyone who looks like a woman as a woman. And it works just fine, so it’s no biggie. We do this kind of thing all the time with other groups. If someone has physical features that ping as African in origin, we often call that person Black or African-American. That doesn’t mean all the people being referred to in this way are always correctly identified, These “people perceived as black” may from Papua New Guinea, which is a different racial group than African American black folks. Sikhs get mistaken for Muslims all the time and thus regularly become victims of Islamophobia. But they are Sikhs, not Muslims. Feminine-acting straight men and tomboyish straight women/girls often are assumed to be homosexual, but they straight.
Several examples have been provided up thread, but you’ve also referred to people who do present to some degree as females as “men.” Discussion of whether or not someone is passing or even trying to pass has ensued. You’ve made it clear that transwomen who have surgery, who take hormones, who live as female, or have been legally reassigned as women, are still men.
Can you post examples of me calling transwomen “men”? I honestly don’t think I’ve done that.
I would obviously need to ask what someone means by that. It is subject to multiple interpretations.