According to this survey, there are still high rates of attempted suicide for lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. Bisexual girls had nearly as high a rate as ftms, who were highest, and lesbians had a higher rate than mtf youth. Maybe acceptance isn’t as high as we thought:
So how do you explain why women are being called TERFs for wanting privacy from “random dicks” in their safe spaces?
I think you’re making a valid observation: under normal conditions, we would totally understand the importance of enforcing boundaries to protect vulnerable women/girls from predatory men. We know that there is a dynamic there that is worth paying attention to.
But when it comes to gender affirmation, we have to call time out for all of this? No big deal at all that “random dicks” appear in spaces that used to be reserved for nude and vulnerable females? It doesn’t add up, does it?
No one said, “If we don’t change the way we speak about ourselves, gay people won’t stop killing themselves.” Instead, they said, “We need to stop pathologizing and stigmatizing homosexuality so that gay people will feel more accepted.” The problem facing gay folks wasn’t words. It was the belief that homosexuality is wrong.
No one except for very old school robots thinks people shouldn’t be able to dress the way they want to dress. Most people seem to be OK with respecting reasonable pronoun preferences. Most people are OK with anti-discrimination laws for gender minorities. If these things aren’t sufficient to keep trans and nonbinary folks from killing themselves, then we’re talking about a community that is profoundly mentally ill. Not people just like everyone else.
Trans is the same. Trans people are only just now coming out. Soon I expect everyone to know some, and to have more personal sympathy, and better understanding. And to recognize that a lot of transwomen actually do “feel feminine” and transmen “feel masculine”.
I don’t deny that people feel the way they feel. And I’m all for letting people handle those feelings the way they see fit. But there is a limit on societal accommodation. I’m not going to start calling myself a “person who menstruates” on the off-hand chance that referring to myself as a “woman” will trigger someone somewhere to kill themselves. No one should have to endure a bullshit argument like this.
I’m not sure that everything transpeople are asking for right now is exactly the right “ask”. I’m not sure that homosexuals asked for exactly the right things at first, either. (And they failed to ask for some of the right things, too. Like marriage.) I think the really big thing that transpeople need is acceptance. Moral and emotional approval from other human beings.
The last sentence isn’t something I’m prepared to give absolutely everyone, because I don’t think all trans people are a monolith. We’ve got people with lots of narratives. Some of those narratives are respectable. Some of them are eye-rolly. Some of them are harmful. All the trans movement needs is fair treatment. Trans folks and their allies need to let other people’s thoughts and feelings progress on their own timeline.
I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I see a really big problem. And I want to be on the side of trying to fix it, not of shoving those inconvenient people out of sight and out of mind.
I don’t see a big problem, personally. I see a very small minority doing a smash-up job convincing lots of big-hearted folks that there is a big problem. But on the scale of societal problems, what they are talking about is very First World. Someone who refuses job opportunities because the job applications don’t have “Mrx” isn’t oppressed. They aren’t suffering. They are creating a problem so that can have content to write about, so that folks like yourself will think there is a big problem. I think there is room for improvement in how we handle gender. There are areas that we can budge on to accommodate trans folks. But we don’t need to ditch “mother” and go with “birthing person” just to spare the feelings of 0.001% of the population. I don’t need to say I have “chest cancer” just because someone might kill themselves to hear me talk about my breasts–the body structure that everyone is born with. This histrionic rhetoric undermines acceptance rather than promoting it. If people want me to think there are big problems to tackle, they need to stop focusing so much on diction and focus more on actual rights.
Biggest takeaway from that paper is that young transmen have the highest attempted suicide rate out of all groups.
The majority of transmen are same-sex attracted females (lesbians, in other words). As we can see from this thread, lesbians have it hard right now. If they aren’t being likened to men because of their sexuality and masculine aesthetic, they are being attacked for not sexually validating transwomen. But it’s hard as a transman too, so their life doesn’t necessary become easier by identifying out of womanhood.
TWAW is the mantra of the day but TMAM isn’t. Transmen know this but they can’t admit this is a symptom of misogyny because the cognitive dissonance is likely is too dysphoria inducing.
It’s notable that relative risk for trans teams seems to depend on their natal sex rather than gender identity. Here’s another study that shows the same thing:
I wish they’d dis-aggregated the non-binary and unsure groups by sex, so we could see if they followed the same pattern.
Starting in my late 20s, I became depressed. I experienced sucidal ideation that lasted into my mid-30s.
I think the reasons were many, but I think being asexual had a part to play. I was at that age when everyone in my cohort seemed to be in serious relationships, married, and having kids. The switch on my depression was triggered when I started my first real job outside of academia and suddenly everyone seemed to be interested in my love life. In the office breakroom, the topic of conversation was always on who I had a crush on. Not whether I had a crush, but who it was. I tried to be coy at first but eventually I threw out Anderson Cooper because I like him as a TV personality. But is he my crush? I have no idea. I don’t even know what that means! One day I came into the office and discovered that one of the guys had decorated my cubicle with Anderson Cooper print-outs. I laughed because everyone was laughing, and I wanted to fit in. But I hated myself so much in that moment. I felt like a huge phony, a big-ass weirdo trying to do a convincing human impersonation but failing. I wanted to die right then and there.
Were my coworkers insensitive to the sexual minority in their midst? I don’t know. Yeah, maybe? Maybe they shouldn’t have assumed that I’d want to talk about my sexuality in the workplace, with people I didn’t know or trust.
But I actually think most of my angst was completely self-imposed. I know that sounds victim-blamey, but it is true. No one was really studying my sexuality as much as I assumed they were. They were just trying to get to know me because I came across as likeable, and they were hungering for whatever conversational crumb they thought they could get from me. My feelings of alienation were a me problem, not a them problem. I had to learn to accept myself and my weirdness. That wasn’t their responsibility.
Being different in any way is rough on the psyche. Every time I have motor or phonic tic in public, I feel a little tinge of “kill me now” since I hate sticking out like a sore thumb. This is not that unusual. But this is my cross to bear. It ain’t anyone else’s job to pat me on the back and tell me “there, there”. I have to do that on my own. Society can help a little. But it should not be in the business of providing unconditional acceptance to everyone, no matter what. Sometimes people have to face some invalidation to discover who they really are.
You realize that suggestions for how professionals might refer to the clients, however useful or silly they might be, are a completely different thing that suggestions for how you refer to yourself in ordinary situations.
that’s fairly obvious from your posts.
Again, suggestions to doulas who are assisting in the process of giving birth and might have a trans client and might possibly find alternative language helpful are not even MEANT to apply to your Facebook post about wishing your mother a happy mother’s day. Is there someone somewhere who might be offended? Probably. That is not a mainstream suggestion and wasn’t even meant to be so.
I don’t think it is useful to look at the weirdest pro-trans writings you can find and take them out of context to bash an entire movement.
Yes, of course they were.
Does everyone have to deal with some insensitivity from time to time? Of course they do. None of us lives with saints. If you don’t into worse than insensitivity, it’s probably a good day.
But does that mean we should all ignore the benefit of being sensitive when we can? Of course not. We should all strive to make the world a slightly better place.
You do realize that people don’t always differentiate from “professional” and “non-professional” speech, right? If professionals feel pressured to speak a certain way, then it becomes that much easier for their clients to demand everyone speak that way. They can demand that their instructors speak that way. Their bosses speak that way. Their colleagues speak their way. Their family member speak that way. In this very thread, we’ve got folks who think “biological female” and “biological male” are the only ways we should be talking about biological sex. They aren’t professionals. We aren’t professionals. They just think that’s the best way to speak. All of us are making up rules as we go. It’s OK to say, “Um, this stuff is cringey bullshit, yo!” to some of it.
Again, suggestions to doulas who are assisting in the process of giving birth and might have a trans client and might possibly find alternative language helpful are not even MEANT to apply to your Facebook post about wishing your mother a happy mother’s day.
Can you explain to me why “chest feeding” is helpful alternative language? And if we should ever get to the point where folks object to laypeople speaking about “pregnant mothers” in a casual conversation (like the one we are having now), will you find it acceptable for folks such as myself to tell them STFU? Or will you take their side?
Our lexicon is already subject to regular PC updates. I don’t like forced updates.
I don’t think it is useful to look at the weirdest pro-trans writings you can find and take them out of context to bash an entire movement.
So do you agree with me that that piece is not helpful at all to the trans movement? Because you’re sitting here arguing with me, but it sounds like we might actually be in agreement that that writer is not and should not be seen as representative of trans folks.
Do you feel this way about the changes in the terms that are appropriate and inappropriate when referring to black people?
An analogue might be if we were debating whether the use of the word “tranny” should remain an acceptable way to refer to trans people.
Yes, we should all be striking to make the world a better place. But we should not be blaming other people for our own lack of self-acceptance. A lot of suicidal people are suffering from a lack of self-acceptance. They need therapy. They do not need their friends, family, coworkers, or strangers on the street to perceive them the same way they perceive themselves. They do not need affirmation/validation beyond that which is granted to anyone else.
Nope. That sounds silly to me. I’m sure I could find some ridiculous recommendations on pretty much any topic if I go looking for them. See my comment about “weirdest pro-trans writings” as well as about “taking it out of context”.
I wasn’t able to read the whole piece because the link was to twitter, but from what’s been reported here, I agree that it doesn’t sound like it was helpful to anyone. And also, that y’all are taking it out of context.
It is notoriously easy for teenagers who are hated and demonized by their community for who they are to nevertheless find love and acceptance in their own hearts, right?
“Mad because you were born male but want to be female? Well I wish I could deadlift 300 lbs and run a 4 min mile! Get over it.”
This is where the “fairness” argument inevitably leads so I’m flummoxed by it. Almost as flummoxed by that treatise on gender-inclusive language that opens with saying “gender doesn’t really exist”.
The term “black people” has changed over the years, yes. Over the last one hundred years, we went from nigra to negro to colored to AfroAmerican/AfricanAmerican/black American. Now folks are doing the Black thing. I don’t know why, but OK.
I don’t see any other terminology being changed by black people. We have changed our name (or more precisely, offered preferred alternatives that can be chosen depending on the context, such as using “African American” when speaking about the culture). I don’t have a problem with groups modifying their own labels and names. But when a group tells existing groups what their names should be, members of those other groups have every right to tell them to buzz off, IMHO. And when a group takes it upon themselves to police words and names that have nothing to do with them, then they should expect a lot of pushback from society as a whole. Language doesn’t belong to 1% of the population. It belongs to all of us.
The article I posted was wasn’t on Twitter. It was posted on HuffPost.
The writer doesn’t mention “chest feeding”, but they do say that we should all strive to use inclusive language to keep folks from killing themselves (it’s a no brainer!). This was the opinion I was objecting to. I will use reasonable inclusive language to make people feel included. But I’m not going to be moved to degender my speech from an appeal to sucide. “Hi guys” is not gendered. “Breasts” are not “gendered”. The writer thinks this stuff is a “no brainer”, but I don’t think it is since there are uber sensitive people out here who see gender in just about everything–like menstrual cycle.
People keep poo-pooing the articles that have been posted here as “cheery picked” or “unrepresentative”. But I think that underscores the problem. There aren’t a lot of trans activists who are writing against this kind of stuff, from what I can see. It would be great to listen to a trans activist who can outline what most trans folks would consider sufficiently inclusive language so that we don’t have to worry about the weird Twitter posts we’re coming across.
Just about every stigmatized minority group faces elevated suicide risk.
We can help all stigmatized minority groups have fair access to opportunities. But eventually there comes a point where the acceptance really does have to come from within the community (including the individual) rather than from outside of it.
I have no doubt that we can do better on reducing teenaged suicide by shoring up mental health care services and continuing to normalize non-heteronormative sexuality. But elevated suicide rates by itself is not indicative of a non-accepting society. I would be shocked if suicide rates in sexual and gender minorities ever reached parity with the majority. Cuz being different sucks.
Of course “hi, guys” is gendered. So is starting your presentation with “Gentlemen”.
I agree that all people have breasts, and “breasts” isn’t gendered.
try this
She has a lot of videos, and this may not be the best, but it’s one that I’ve seen that covers some of the points you are asking for.
“Guys” has gendered and ungendered meanings. It is not at all unusual to refer to a mixed group as “guys”. I guarantee every woman posting in this thread has at one time or another been addressed in this manner and not felt misgendered or reacted emotionally to it. Because we are psychologically sound.
Has nothing to do what gender we are. This is mental illness staring us right in the face but people are oddly in denial about it.