And yet I’m not at all worried about being fired or being cancelled.
Because racial identity is cultural, although it is related to physiology and genetics.
That doesn’t mean you get to police other people’s racial identity based on their physiology and genetics. For example, there are plenty of racially black people who are lighter-skinned than plenty of racially white people. Are you going to tell any of those people that they don’t qualify physiologically to call themselves by the racial identity that they’ve lived their lives as, just because they don’t fit your simple binary of “black folks dark, white folks pale”?
No? Then you don’t get to tell transgender people that they don’t qualify physiologically to identify as the gender that seems natural to them, and that in many cases they’ve lived their lives as, just because they don’t fit the simple binary of “man penis, woman vagina”.
Mind you, I’m not advocating for anybody outright lying about the gender they were assigned at birth (in cases where that fact is anybody else’s business, and as long as telling the truth wouldn’t endanger their safety). Chromosomes and genital anatomy are biological facts, and just because gender identity doesn’t always correspond to chromosomes and genitalia doesn’t mean that they aren’t real.
But we don’t have to define our social categories of “woman” and “man” solely in accordance with chromosomes and genitalia. If we as a society decide that gender identity is what makes you a woman or man for ordinary social classification purposes, rather than what’s in your genes or in your underwear, then that’s what it means to be a woman or man in that context.
For more than 90% of all Christians things like the Trinity, Divinity of Jesus, and the Bodily resurrection are basic.
If someone claim to be a Christian and burns bibles, masturbates on crucifixes, constantly lies, breaks all the commandments constantly and with vigor, and constalty says that Jesus didn’t exist, then I can say “he doesn’t look like a Christian in any sensible way and will not, in my mind, be part of ‘Christian’ in my mental set.”
Can I do the same with someone claimiing to be a woman? What can a person saying “I’m a woman” do so you will not accept such self-denomination? If the answer if “nothing” then the category “woman” doesn’t exist.
There is no reasonable context in which “menstruator” is the correct word to describe a woman “Satah is a menstruator” is always wrong.
Sure, all sorts of things that aren’t happening would be a big deal if they did. She mentions, tremulously, that some entire friend groups are declaring themselves gender nonconforming at the same time. You understand what this can lead to, right?
um, right?
Because I sure as fuck don’t. If a bunch of weirdo kids (disclaimer, I dressed in a black cloak every single day of high school and for special occasions spiked my hair across my face with egg whites and prowled my downtown while carrying a walking stick to which I’d attached smooth stones and feathers and copper wires) as I was saying if a bunch of weirdo kids feel alienated from high school culture and bond together over gender nonconformity, so fuckin what? Hell, if the entire football team full of jocks starts questioning whether they want to adhere to masculine norms, bully for them.
I am not scared of the things Rowling is scared of.
Show me that significant numbers of people are being pressured into gender nonconformity, AND that it’s traumatic for them, and I’ll give a shit. Show me that teenagers are receiving a faulty diagnosis followed by surgery, and I’ll be worried.
But Rowling’s essay–and I read it top to bottom–appeared to couple cynical faux-concern for trans youth with farcical fearmongering about fake-trans-women in the bathroom, all to cover some deeply shitty prejudices she holds about gender. People keep mentioning the good points, and I guess “Some of my best friends are trans” might qualify, but I’ll be honest, I wasn’t seeing many good points there.
Well, we do that quite a bit with all manner of concepts. Remember not so long ago when the concept of “wife” meant “a woman married to a man”? There was a heck of a lot of “biology and socialization” invested in that concept, for sure! A lesbian woman couldn’t have a “wife”, that was just ridiculous.
But we decided, as a society, that the social role of the concept “wife” in the sense of “female marriage partner” took primacy for social purposes over the biological origin of the concept “wife” in the sense of “female member of a human breeding pair”. So now a married woman can be a “wife” even if she’s not married to a man.
This sort of revamping is nothing new, either. For example, some time probably not too long after the origin of human language, humans developed and evolved terms for the concept of “mother”, meaning “a female who has given birth to offspring”. That’s a solidly biological notion. But apparently at some point before the dawn of recorded history, humans revamped that concept to include the notion of an “adoptive mother”, a female who undertakes a motherly role for a particular offspring but did not biologically give birth to him/her. (We know because there are official adoption contracts from early literate societies using the ordinary kinship terms such as “son”, “father”, “mother” for the people in adoptive relationships.)
Again, we as a society decided that the social role of the concept “mother” in the sense of “female adult responsible for and caring for dependent child” took primacy for social purposes over the biological origin of the concept “mother” in the sense of “female who gestated and gave birth to child”. So now a woman can be a “mother” even if she didn’t actually give birth to her child.
The transgender rights movement is merely saying that the social role of the concept “woman” (or “man”) in the sense of “someone with a female (or male) gender identity” should take primacy for social purposes over its biological origin in the sense of “someone with a vagina” (or “penis”).
AFAICT, nobody at all is saying that we should deny or refuse to recognize the genuine biological differences between transgender women (or men) and cisgender women (or men), in circumstances where those differences are relevant and important. Any more than anyone advocates denying the genuine biological differences between the heterosexual wife of a man and the lesbian wife of a woman, or the genuine biological differences between a biological mother and an adoptive mother.
But we don’t have to define the social category “woman” based solely on that biology, any more than we have to define the social categories “wife” and “mother” based solely on biology.
Read post #37.
I want you all to call me Loretta from now on.
Why do you want to be called Loretta, Stan?
Because I want to have babies.
YOU WANT TO HAVE BABIES? YOU WANT TO HAVE BABIES? WHERE’S THE FETUS GONNA GESTATE? YOU GONNA JUST KEEP IT IN A BOX?
If I tell everyone that I’m a “wife”, it would be socially acceptable for people to argue with me that I’m wrong. They can point to the fact I’m not married and not seeing anyone.
If I tell everyone I’m a “man”, there’s no way to argue with me about that without catching some flak. There’s no legal documentation that proves my “manness”. There’s no medical test. Anyone can say they are a “man” and everyone is socially obligated to accept this.
Now, I’m actually OK with this. I’m really exhausted by gender and all the binds that come from gender roles and expectations, so I’m ready to take gender off of its pedestal. It is no skin off my nose what someone wants to call themselves. If I wake up feeling like a man tomorrow, I want to be able to shout it from the rooftops without people throwing tomatoes at me.
But when I look around me, I see that gender really is super important to most people. It’s how people identify potential mates. I might not like gender roles, but I participate in them–allowing men to be chilvarous around me and all that. And not gonna lie, I feel more comfortable around other women. I don’t know why, but I do. And presumably, gender is super important to many trans folks. It matters a whole lot for them to be seen and treated like their preferred gender.
So I’m hearing conflicting things from the gender activist side of the table. “Why not let gender be whatever the individual says it is? What’s the big deal, it’s just a label!” versus “You’re a monster for not calling that person by the pronoun she wants and now she’s going to commit suicide, you horrible person you.” Other identities are not given this kind of importance. Which is why I don’t blame people for digging in their heels on definitions and terms and wanting to do some gate-keeping to protect them.
I was talking to someone on reddit the other day about this topic. This person asked me why biology and socialization should even matter when it comes to gender identity. That’s so crazy to me. Shouldn’t they at least be in the equation? I mean, I don’t know if I feel like a woman. Does that mean I’m not a woman? Are we really at the point where we’ll give the “woman” card to the male-presenting biological male who claims “woman” but question it for the vulva-possessing, menstruating, female-presenting person who hasn’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about what it means to have a gender identity? If so, then I can’t see how we aren’t making “woman” a meaningless term.
But I wasn’t talking about using the term “wife” for single women; I was talking about using it for women in same-sex marriages. If you were married to a woman, it would not be socially acceptable in most circles for people to argue that you’re not a wife, although there are lots of conservative religious types who would be eager to make that argument.
In theory, maybe? In reality, AFAICT people aren’t just declaring themselves to be transgender out of the blue and with no attempt to live their transgender identity beyond “I said so and now you’re socially obligated to accept this”.
Not seeing the “conflict” here, tbh. There are plenty of things that are “just a label” to a random stranger but deeply important to the person attached to that label. Lots of people care about other people getting their name right, for instance, and are hurt or irritated if others persist in using a different spelling or nickname for them. The concept of “this is no big deal to you but means a whole lot to them” isn’t really intrinsically self-contradictory.
Who is “questioning” whether a cisgender woman who considers herself a woman (even if she hasn’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about what it means to have a gender identity) is entitled to be considered a woman? I have never once heard any trans-rights activist arguing for any position even remotely close to that.
Again, I keep coming back to the same confusion because so many of the talking points of the self-described “gender critical” activists seem like pointless and irrational imaginary fears. Cisgender women will no longer be accepted as women? Now that anyone can just claim to be a woman we’ll have predatory men invading all the women’s restrooms? Teen girls depressed about sexist culture will rush off and get phalloplasties to avoid having to live as a woman? Cisgender women are going to have to put up with being contemptuously dismissed as “menstruators”? In what world is any of this actually happening?
I see Velocity has moved on from helicopters to giraffes now.
That’s contented.
Kimstu, do you think it makes sense to infer “womanness” by the way someone presents?
Like, if you see you a female-presenting adult person in feminine clothing, do you automatically put them in the “woman” gender category until they specifiy otherwise? Or do you put them in the “female-presenting adult person” box until that individual tells you she’s a woman.
Because I suspect the person who questioned me on why biology and socialization should matter to gender identity would question the righteousness of pegging someone as a “woman” based on how they look. I don’t know how else to take their argument. And I really don’t get that viewpoint. Not even a little bit. I’m tired of people acting like this is a sign I’m not progressive enough or “down” enough. For eleventy-billion years, gender presentation mattered. I can’t see why it shouldn’t matter.
I don’t know how prevalent the “biology and socialization don’t matter!” mindset is. But I have seen it expressed before in multiple places. I have heard people actually demand to know what it means to “look like a woman.” I can’t tell if they’re pulling my leg or not. Seems to me a person who asks this question must either constantly misgender people or constantly refer to people by non-gendered pronouns.
But maybe I’ve only had run-ins with fringey people? I’m open to this possibility.
Sometimes gender is anything but obvious. Ever met someone that you really can’t tell if they’re male or female or somewhere in between? Often it doesn’t matter either apart from how to react. Like the song says, c’est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
As a first approximation, sure. Given that we’ve inherited this fairly rigid pair of cultural boxes labeled MALE and FEMALE that we’re supposed to assign everybody to in a mutually exclusive way, our best strategy when confronted with a random unknown person is to guess which box to put them in based on cultural cues.
But I think it’s important always to recognize that we might guess wrong.
Okay; I wasn’t there for that discussion so I’m taking your word on it. All I can say is that for me personally, I can see there being a distinction between a statement of principle that biology and socialization shouldn’t matter to our understanding of gender identity, and a reality-rejecting claim that they don’t matter.
“Male” and “Female” are not the same things as “man” or “woman”, correct?
But sure, I’ve met folks whose sex or gender identity I couldn’t readily surmise. Maybe half a dozen times in my life I’ve had this experience and it wasn’t a big deal.
Not to be a dick, but I’ve had this experience with race as well. And yet for some reason my mind does not draw a blank when someone describes someone as a “white guy”. And I have never in my life heard someone demand to know what a white guy REALLY looks like. Probably because we can all agree that as a social construct, racial identification requires people to have a somewhat coherent visual framework. Over time we can revise our individual frameworks so that the images it contains are more accurate or representative. But there’s always going to be some kind of visualization involved.
I don’t think the tendency to identify based on visual presentation suddenly becomes hateful, backwards, or wrong just because we’re talking about gender. We can be open-minded about it, of course. But I think it is expecting too much out of people to expect no one to ever be confused or suspicious about a male-presenting biological male who requests feminine pronouns and demands access to women-only spaces. I definitely don’t think shaming people is going to help them to change their mental frameworks.
But maybe you are right, Kimstu, and the gender critical folks are reacting to a scenario they’ve only drummed up in their heads, that likely will never happen to any significant degree. I can go along with this.
I’ve been predisposed to acknowledge a lot of good points made by the people loosely described as “gender critical feminists”, for a variety of reasons.
• I’m in a somewhat different situation than stereotyped transgender people, the ones who not only claim the same identity as people whose body was assigned/recognized the other sex as the one their own was assigned, but also prefer that they be considered to be of that sex. I was assigned male at birth and identify as femme / girl /sissy, but still consider my sex to be male. (It has male morphology; and my existing body is not the problem). So I’m more willing (and privileged, let’s acknowledge that) to consider that being differently gendered should not be considered as coterminous with being absolutely identical to people who were born of that sex.
• I cut my teeth on feminism, which validated my identity at a time when there was no validation to be obtained from the LGB[del]TQ[/del] community, which back then was just barely and unclearly accepting the “T” folks as members/participants. And back then “T” meant “transsexual”. It meant you were deciding that the body in which you were born was just wrong. That it should have been a body of the other sex. As I said above that’s not my experience so no voice in the community back then was resonating with me. The feminists on the other hand were saying it was sexist to have any different beliefs about how men versus women were, naturally and innately, and that it was sexist to hold different yardsticks for assessing the behavior of the sexes. So I embraced feminism.
• It seemed to me that there ought to be a way to validate transgender people’s identities without concatenating them with the political concerns of people who had been regarded and treated as female/women for an entire lifetime. I could see grounds for saying “Yeah you’re a woman but you weren’t a girl in sixth grade. We want to meet and organize and speak to the political concerns of folks who have had to content with being in the female position lifelong. Your experience is a different one, even if you, too, are marginalized”.
… BUT yeesh, fucking hell. No. The hateful transphobia I’ve encountered whenever I’ve attempted to participate in these debates and to connect with the “gender critical” feminists has just appalled me.
It may not be true of all of them. Generalizations don’t tend to be, do they? But still. The inflexibility and the refusal to listen or consider, the litmus-testing I see going on, has really driven me away from much sympathy for their camp.
Really, are we doing this now? It’s straight out of the ‘but but men will marry their dogs’ anti-same sex marriage playbook.
This sounds like a fairly straightforward aside…but actually I’m not sure it is.
I personally cannot say whether those terms are, or are not the same thing. To be able to do so we’d have to be able to give an agreed definition for each of them and to date I’m not sure I’ve been presented with one, certainly not one that doesn’t raise the hackles of one or both sides of the debate.
If that’s the price we have to pay* to get people to stop being incredible assholes to other human beings, who frankly, have probably already had a tough enough time with the world, regarding their gender identity, then Hello Mr Giraffe, how are you today?
*I mean, it’s not the price we have to pay - it’s a slippery slope or appeal to consequences, or whatever.
But that’s the point–there’s nothing to be tired of putting up with, for two reasons. First, there’s not all that much one has to do. It’s all just stuff we’re supposed to do for everyone: (1) don’t vilify someone for being different from you (2) don’t assume they are inferior to you (3) treat them with kindness, as they want to be treated (4) try to empathize by putting yourself in the same position as the other person.
The second is simply trans people are real. There is no conspiracy. The science really does show that they exist, both in psychology and in physiology. If someone denies they are real, then they’d have to deny that anxiety disorders exist or that brain structure is relevant to how people think.
People who choose to treat trans people differently and choose to deny their actual existence are wrong and cause harm to others. But accepting reality as it is and treating trans people with respect causes nobody any harm. And it genuinely is not very hard.