I imagine it has something to do with women having been discriminated against.
If all were gender-blind this wouldn’t still be a problem, so it’s not clear what you mean about “people” saying not to talk about it. Or what it has to do with people choosing to become women — surely you don’t mean that trans women do not face discrimination?
I think the answer to this is very simple. Your gender identity is who you, sincerely and profoundly, feel that you are. It is your internal sense of self.
And there is no reductio ad absurdum like “what if I identify as a giraffe”. I’m talking about where you feel your identity lies within what we have every reason to believe is the real and non-pathological diversity of human identity. So I’m talking about an identity that, when you tell us, nobody has any reason to be skeptical about.
Would you want someone else to tell you who you are? Or for it to be decided by how you score on some checklist of “objective” traits? Or do you think that you are in the best position to know who you are?
As for the rest of it - who gets to use what bathroom, sport categories? I don’t know the perfect answer to all these things, but don’t these things pale into insignificance when the fundamental issue is treating people with respect and dignity, not persecuting them for their essential nature, believing them when they tell us who they are?
We don’t. We have laws that protect people from discrimination based on their sex and gender identity, which applies to everyone, regardless of how they express their sex and gender identity. The importance of those laws is increasing alongside increased trans visibility, because it turns out there’s a whole lot of discrimination against trans people.
Do you think transwomen don’t experience gender discrimination and sexual harassment/assault?
And the blues black women have aren’t the same as the blues white women have. And the blues disabled women have aren’t the same as the blues able-bodied women have. And the blues Jewish women have aren’t the same blues as the blues Christian women have.
Still all women, though.
Generally, adding more people to a given class is the opposite of making that class “go away.” This is purely irrational panic mongering.
Correct! But it’s not taboo to say “Let’s do a study on black women and exclude white-passing individuals.” Or let’s do a study on Jewish American women and exclude Israeli women." Or “Let’s do a study on physically disabled black Jewish Americans and exclude mentally disabled Asian Canadians.”
Will you be upset if we want to do a study on women and exclude transgender women who don’t present as women and don’t go by female pronouns, but still believe themselves to be women?
If you’re okay with that kind of gatekeeping, then you shouldn’t be arguing with me right now. If you think anyone who says they are a woman gets to be treated as a woman even by academic researchers, then YWTF, DemonTree, and JK Rowling are totally justified in being afraid of the impacts of trangenderism on women’s politics.
Okay, first, if you think the US is going to elect a transwoman as president sometime soon, could I maybe switch timelines with you? because mine is way more fucked up than yours.
Second, you’re not representing the case correctly. Emilia Decaudin said, on June 1, " I am very honored to announce that my campaign for District Leader has been endorsed by Stonewall Democrats NYC and the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, the two citywide queer Democratic clubs in New York… Getting their support means the world to me both as a trans woman and as an advocate for issues facing the queer community as a whole."
Generally, adding more people to a given class is the opposite of making that class “go away.” This is purely irrational panic mongering.
It’s erasure if the word “woman” is up for grabs for anyone who wants to call themselves one.
Anyone who has seen the movie Get Out and truly understood the point it was making should have the ability to the see the problem with allowing the identity of a disadvantaged class (female) be appropriated by the more privileged class (males). This dynamic doesn’t go away just because queers are also disadvantaged.
Because we’re not gender blind, and we’re not going to be, and biological sex still makes a difference. Eg, if two non binary people get married and have kids, I think the ‘person with the uterus’ is still going to end up doing the majority of the child care, and employers are going to think twice about employing them, because they may need more time off work, while the ‘person with the penis’ will be considered more stable and reliable for having kids and will actually benefit career-wise. And in the lesbian couple where one partner has a penis, and the other a vagina, strangely enough the same thing will happen. Only now it will be harder to collect statistics about this phenomenon, harder to talk about it (see above) and harder for the people affected (who used to be called women) to band together to advocate for their issues.
And no, I’m not saying that trans women don’t face discrimination. Just that by and large, they are discriminated against for being trans, much more so than for being women.
Does the existence of very rare people born with both sets of genitalia makes the concept of biological sex invalid or worthless? Of course not. But you’re making that kind of argument here. You’re taking concepts that capture distinct aspects of gender/sex, pushing them to extremes to generate some caricature hypothetical person, and concluding that the concepts are therefore worthless.
We have -
Biological sex - not a term I favor, because the brain is also biological, but it’s commonly used to mean everything physically sexually dimorphic other than the brain. Sex organs, secondary sexual characteristics, hormones, chromosome configuration. “Sex assigned at birth” may be a more appropriate term in contexts where transition may apply.
Gender identity - your mental state, also a biological phenomenon; your internal sense of who you are wrt gender. Humans evolved consciousness as a way to influence adaptive behavior, so gender identity is an aspect of consciousness that will have a strong influence on behavior, but it is not the behavior itself, that is called…
Gender expression - how we present ourself, how act, wrt gender norms in the society.
The first two can certainly be categorized, and are obviously strongly bimodal, with most people being distinctly male or female. Gender expression not so much, since it encompasses a wide variety of behaviors in the context of societal gender norms, and no two people will be quite alike.
And the key point is that these aspects of gender are somewhat independent. In a technical statistical sense, of course they are not COMPLETELY independent - quite the opposite, the correlation is high; but not 100%. And, as I say, pushing things to hypothetical opposite extremes to create a caricature does not invalidate the concepts or disprove the fact that the correlation is not 100%.
Your reasoning here is that if some men can become women, then men = women and therefore there can be no gender discrimination, but this is fallacious, in particular since most people do still have gender identity even if it is not absolutely immutable, and it is not true that nobody sees anybody as men or women or queer whatever.
A lot of people’s careers suffer if they take any significant time off work for any reason, and I know people who had to take their young kids to the office, certainly an issue. In any case, if someone is not hired on the basis that they might, perhaps, get pregnant, or miss a couple of days of work one day to give birth or something, that sounds like gross discrimination to me; who says nobody should talk about it?
Okay, first, if you think the US is going to elect a transwoman as president sometime soon, could I maybe switch timelines with you? because mine is way more fucked up than yours.
I’m living in a timeline where girls as young as 9 are being married off to men three times their age. They cannot vote, drive, become educated, refuse sex, or legally abort an unwanted pregnancy. No one bothers to ask about their gender identity when they are subjected to all of this. Despite this, in my timeline, a increasingly large number of people think biology doesn’t matter anymore and that sex-based differences are only social constructs and that anyone can be a girl now.
I think my timeline is more fucked ou than yours, but YMMV.
Second, [you’re not representing the case correctly](
Well, she’s calling to be trans woman now but her bio leads me to believe she was non-binary in the recent past. Which really only underscores the craziness, if you think about it. Vacillating between gender identities
Just as with the dishonest “separate but equal” characterization of racism, the problem is not with the existence of bona fide subcategories. The problem is quite obviously with the subtext that one subcategory is in some way inferior, not a “real” member of the nominally encompassing class.
If you looked at a country-by-country correlation between this kind of abuse of young women (or pretty much any aspect of culturally-ingrained misogyny), and social acceptance of trans rights, what do you think the correlation would be?
Well, right. People are doing those shitty things because they think the girls’ biology should determine their destiny. I want to tell those assholes, fuck biology: the girls should be able to determine their own destiny regardless of what you think their biology should determine it to be.
“Fuck biology” doesn’t mean that there aren’t societal expectations and injustices that are based on biology. It means that there shouldn’t be.
That doesn’t strike me as craziness at all. It strikes me as pretty hopeful, if gender identity is increasingly up to people to manage as they see fit.
If I’m interested in studying the effects of gender bias on a specific gender class, don’t you think it is important for me, the researcher, to select a subject pool that would be sensitive to that bias, asuming it exists?
Would you expect a subject pool comprised of mostly penis-possess, male-presenting individuals who don’t go by female pronouns and have only been claiming “woman” for the past year to be as sensitive to anti-female bias as one comprised mostly of vagina-possess, female-presenting individuals who go by female pronouns and has done so their whole lives? If your answer to this question is “yes”, then you can stop reading the rest of my post. Because we don’t have any common ground if that’s what you believe.
If it is wrong for me to do any gatekeeping and the results of my study are completely mixed and thus inconclusive, how do I address concerns that I didn’t attempt to eliminate confounders in my subject pool?
If you actually read what I wrote, you will see that in this hypothetical, I’m not positing that I would exclude all transgender women. Only those that I believe don’t believe “ping” as woman to 99.9% of casual observers, including their coworkers and supervisors. I would not be denying their right to claim “woman”. But for the purposes of research, I’m saying they wouldn’t meet the criteria that would make them “ping” as woman as a social construct. Whether or not you want to knowledge this or not, woman as a social construct is real. And to understand whether and how much of an anti-woman bias exists in a particular context, we must accept that there is a social construct of “woman” that exists separately from the self-identity of “woman”. It should not be taboo for us to talk about this. It should not be taboo for us to exclude people from a gender class in certain contexts.
If it is always wrong to exclude people, then JK Rowling and other gender critical folks have a good point and women really should be concerned about gender ideology rhetoric.
It strikes me as confusing, though. If anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, but next week they can say they are a man again, then it seems to me that I should be able to say to that person, “You aren’t in my gender class because no one in my gender class changes their gender. In my gender class, we have a stable mental state.”
To go back to my hypothetical women’s-only organization, would you find it acceptable for me to exclude individuals who have not lived as women continually for the past year? Or do you think that is problematic?
Your reasoning here is that if some men can become women, then men = women and therefore there can be no gender discrimination,
I’m not saying that, lol. If anything I’m saying the opposite.
The discrimination against adult human females (cis women) will continue just as always, but because our identity as women has been redefined to include any male who wants in, it will be harder to call it out as discrimination specifically against our class.
To go back to my POTUS example, if one metric for success in the women’s rights movement is female representation in elected office, allowing males to be counted as women could distort the picture of progress and make it seem like sexism is fading when it’s not. Trans women, especially those obviously male in their outward appearance, will not be subject to the kind misogynistic assumptions that women are. They could simply “pass” as men, get into office, and then come out as “women”.
If you looked at a country-by-country correlation between this kind of abuse of young women (or pretty much any aspect of culturally-ingrained misogyny), and social acceptance of trans rights, what do you think the correlation would be?
You tell me. Gender identity is something that is not taken seriously anywhere except in highly privileged societies. Everywhere else, if you are born with a vagina, there is nothing to opt out; you are woman and that’s there all to it.
And if you are born with a penis, being a woman would be the last thing on Earth you’d want to be.
Sure. That sounds like you want to subdivide womanhood along a different axis. In addition to trans women and cis women, now there are gelled women and fluid women? Great. If you want to have a support group for gelled women, cool. (And if you have a better term than “gelled”, I’m all ears–but “stable” ain’t it, given its connotations and implications for those who aren’t stable).
Left_Hand_of_Dorkness
That doesn’t strike me as craziness at all. It strikes me as pretty hopeful, if gender identity is increasingly up to people to manage as they see fit.
It strikes me as a way for people to have their cake and eat it too.
One day your gender identity is male, so you partake in the double helpings that male privilege gives you as you move through the world in your natural male body.
The next day you claim to be non-binary. Now, you get to distance yourself from other males by rejecting your birth sex (even though your birth sex is still apparent to anyone with two eyes ) while also not saying you’re a woman and subjecting yourself to any of the shit they get (which you are unlikely to get anyway because your maleness is evident).
Then a month later you claim to be a woman, so not only do you get to distance yourself totally from other males, but now you get to claim spots set aside for females while inhabiting a male body. All the male privilege that help you to get to this point? Let’s pretend none of that matters now. Because TWAW.
I don’t see any hopefulness in this. I see this as a game that me and other women could never expect to win at. If a gender fluid person who vacillates in and out of womanhood is as much as a woman as I am, then “woman” is a completely meaningless term. Please help me understand why women shouldn’t be raging mad about this corruption the word used to define us?