This very much reminds me of the classic anti-evolution strawmen. If you can’t show me a banana becoming a giraffe, then evolution is a lie!
There will never be a clear-cut definition that fits. So there are two sides here:
Your position appears to be that a person’s gender is what YOU say it is.
My position is that a person’s gender is what THEY say it is.
There is literally no 100% factual answer for what a person’s sex or gender is. And you should know that; even a strictly physiological definition (dangly bits) will not be able to cover everyone. People are born with both sets. People are born with a Y-chromosome but female genitals. The entire concept of “sex” is more fluid in humanity than you seem to be willing to admit, and gets even fuzzier in the rest of the animal kingdom.
So if “sex” and its physical manifestation are fluid, why wouldn’t gender identity be the same?
For the record, I was firmly in the camp that all this gender-identity stuff was bullshit, at one point. I was making the argument that “gender questioning” could only be defined as a mental illness. But after a lot of soul-searching and considering some of the points above about how fuzzy those boundaries in nature are, I realigned my position.
If the cis women members of the Manson Family strolled up in the women’s restroom, I’d be fearful. But I’d also know there’s a good possibility they just have to piss. Since we don’t have restrooms devoted to serial killers, where else are they going to go? I would pee and get the hell out of there, but I wouldn’t be calling the cops.
If Charles Manson is in the women’s restroom with me, then I’d be very fearful because I don’t understand why would he be using the women’s restroom.
A long time ago, I mentioned being more afraid when a strange man makes sexual advances towards me than if a strange woman were to do the same thing. I believe John Mace asked me to explain myself because he felt I was being unfair. I feel like I have a decent chance of defending myself against a woman, even if she’s armed. But a man? No. He’d be able to take me down hard and fast. Why wouldn’t that cause me to feel fear?
Do we also assume this person is straight? The majority of people are straight-cis-binary, and rightly or wrongly that’s many people’s default assumption with someone they don’t know. What does this prove, other than a background cisnormative prejudice in society?
You’re just making a circular argument that if we accept your simplistic definition that we can always reliably identify a man or a woman by their dangly bits, then there will be no problem knowing who’s a woman.
Are you seriously claiming that you wouldn’t call the cops if you encountered known murderous psychopaths in a restroom because… cisters needs a place to pee?
And that if Charles Manson wants to come into the women’s restroom to murder you, he will feel that there is some sneaky advantage in first coming out as trans in order to do so? I mean, wouldn’t it be better if he just dressed up as a woman without telling anyone? Seems like the whole coming-out-as-trans thing would give the game away.
For >99% of people all these things do line up. Even what gender they call themselves. In these cases there is a definitive factual answer. For a small minority the various sex characteristics do not match up, and in those cases there is room for interpretation.
Also he’d probably be pretty smelly, having been dead for three years. I will come down firmly against the rights of dead male psychopaths to access women’s facilities.
To me “cis” means that a person possesses the biological indicia of their preferred gender.
Why do we have to equate cis and trans identities? Why would be it regressive/hateful/transphobic/bigoted/TERFy/whatever to just say that while ciswomen and transwomen have some overlapping concerns and issues, they are their own categories and as such no one is obligated to meld these identities into a single group? Why is it wrong for YWTF to feel her womanness as something very different from the womanness of a biological male?
Why do you care so much that she thinks “bits” matter a whole deal? I think most women will tell you that they wish they could just say “fuck biology” and not have to think about the “bits”, but they can’t because those bits are what separate them from the freedoms and privileges that men take for granted. The “bits” are what have influenced how we’ve been socialized. They give us shared experiences. They are part and parcel of why we are discriminated against. So hell yes, lacking “the bits” does strike me as something that shouldn’t be handwaved away in defining gender.
If someone is saying they are a woman but they don’t want any of the “bits” that we’ve recognized as biological indicia of femaleness since the beginning of time, not even the hormonal ones, do you think YWTF should be obligated to call that person a “woman”? Or do you think she should only be obligated to use a feminine pronoun? Explain to me the societal downside of excluding those people from the "woman’ category and maybe I’ll understand. Because it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me to exclude SOMEONE from the “woman” category as long as there is some rationale for it.
How about “white women” and “black women”? Who gets to decide which subsets of women “have some overlapping conerns” but that “no one is obligated to meld these identities into a single group”.
Whereas you’d feel fine with your daughters mingling with the (cis) women members of the Manson Family?
I would perceive them as women using a space that they are entitled to use (by dint of their sex class). As people connected to Manson, I will probably keep a close eye on them but I wouldn’t just walk out of the locker room if they entered.
I would perceive Charlie as a man using a space that he and may not be truly entitled to use (because there is no way to validate whether he has a “real” female gender identity). Given this doubt, plus him being Charlie Manson, I would not use a locker room with him present. I would run the fuck out of there.
I don’t care if this makes me transphobic, misandrist, or whatever names y’all want to call me.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally assume people’s sexuality right off the bat, because sexuality isn’t that important to how we casually relate with others. You don’t have to peg someone into a sexuality category when describing them or when coming up with pronouns. We don’t have “straight” and “gay” restrooms.
But with gender, our language forces to do on-the-fly assignments. Which requires visual cues. And those cues are heavily biological in nature. When those cues are ambiguous, we go to dress and grooming. We generally do not wait for people to tell us their identity before treating them as a member of a particular gender. When we evolve into a society with a dozen different genders, maybe that’s what we will do. But that’s not how it works now.
Acting like these visual cues don’t matter a great deal to how a person internalizes their own gender and that of people’s is disingenuous. They matter a great deal and it is almost certain that they always will matter. So it seems to me that yelling at someone for saying that “sex is real” is also disingenuous. Biological sex really and truly is real. No matter how hard gender activities try to dismiss it with “fuck biology” away, it is going to matter. We can talk about there being twenty different genders, but it is undeniable that there are not the same number of sex classes.
I think YWTF is getting frustrating because it is now taboo to make a statement as simple as that. We can define gender a million different ways, but biological sex really does need to rest on concrete biological-based, non-subjective, non-idiosyncratic definition. And by equating both sex and gender, we’re trivializing that need.
I don’t agree with YWTF on everything, but I kinda feel like ya’ll are dodging this point because you don’t have a substantive rebuttal to it. Clownfish are cool and everything, but they don’t disprove that men and women have different private parts and thus experience the world differently because of it.
So you think the differences between white and black women aren’t literally skin deep? You think the difference between white and black women is the same degree as the difference between cis and trans women?
Yes, there are cultural differences between white and black women. Different histories with respect to gender discrimination and oppression too. But despite it all, the two groups has coochies, uteri, bodies awash in similar hormones. They have shared experiences with carrying children, menstruation, being shamed for menstruating, being “mansplained” and condescended to, being raped and sexually harrassed, and having their health issues their mocked and ignored.
I have to remind you, though, that race is subject to self-policing and scrutiny. It is perfectly accept for me, a black woman, to proclaim that Rachel Dolezal is a fraudster trying to capitalize on black pain. If Rachel Dolezal were to appoint herself the expert on black female identity, so many eyes would be rolling over that. And no one would be called any names.
That is what cis women want. Cis women just want to have the right to pull the microphone away from someone who looks to be pulling a crazy Rachel Dolezal. Cis women don’t want a situation where a biological male identifying as female is listened to more when it comes to women’s issues than biological females who have a more conventional and thus boring backstory. Maybe this wouldn’t be a bothersome proposition if there was more gender parity in politics, but women are still underrepresented.
An obsessive concern over whether someone was born with what you see as the correct dangly bits to “belong” in a bathroom, to a point that this is of greater concern to you than whether they are known to be psychopathic murderers? Well, my primary concern would be for your safety, not labeling you as bigoted.
If you don’t think this whole kerfuffle isn’t over whether gender and sex aren’t one and the same, what do you think we’ve been talking about for the last umpty-ump pages?
Why do you think JK Rowling has been catching flak for saying “sex is real”, if I’m the only one up in here equating gender and sex?
Why are we even dicking around with “cis” and “trans” prefixes, if all this time biological sex is a different thing than gender? Why do transgender folks get on hormones and get reassignment surgery, if biological sex is not equivalent to gender?
What an exhausting and unsatisfying discussion this has been.
I certainly do think the differences between white and black women are skin deep. And I don’t accept your plan to apply “separate but equal” status to trans women any more than you would accept it for women with different skin color.
I don’t have anything worthwhile to add, but I think this thread has helped me understand a lot of different perspectives. And maybe even more important, the different languages that people use to offer their perspectives.
I’ve yet to meet a trans person who wants the qualifiers there; they want to be seen as a man/woman/gender neutral, they don’t want it rubbed in their face that they were not originally assigned the gender they’ve chosen.
I also am pretty sceptical of the idea that there’s some innate woman-ness to be gained from childhood experiences. Some women, genetically XX, ‘F’ box ticked at birth, no-one except maniacs ever denies their womanhood, don’t really develop breasts, or never menstruate, or otherwise don’t tick all the standard ‘woman’ descriptors. Women don’t all have the same experiences, and I don’t like the idea of turning it into some kind of game of ‘well, you’re only a grade 3 woman- you’re kinda butch and don’t need a bra, so you never experienced the trauma of bra shopping or guys talking to your cleavage and guys take you more seriously’. ‘Ooh, you had sexist parents who made you tidy up after your brother, had your first period during gym class when you were 11 and the male gym teacher didn’t know what to do, and you worked for a guy who called you ‘sweetie’ and made you get the coffees during meetings- you get grade 1 and a gold star’…
And it matters. The current situation in the UK means that trans people need to live as their chosen gender for at least a year (iirc, not 100% on the length of time) before they can start taking legally prescribed hormones, let alone be considered surgery. Making people do that- likely losing jobs, friendships and family along the way- without any legal protection of their gender change, any consideration of their safety and any access to, well, somewhere to piss and get changed, right at the point where they’re least likely to ‘pass’ is pretty horrific. Turning to those people and denying that they are actually trans unless they’ve managed to get through this experience is just adding insult to injury. And if they get through it? Well, they’re trans now, but they’re still not really who they say they are.
And trans people are assaulted, raped, murdered and discriminated against at a rate way, waaay higher than cis women. So many of the people in this thread, as well as elsewhere, are getting all het up about keeping safe spaces for cis women, very few seem to give a damn about the safety of trans people.