Is this the most offensive thing imaginable to say? No. But I cannot imagine any woman—especially one past middle age—who would say something this vapid. Not even a woman who has lived a opulently pampered existence.
By the age Jenner transitioned, the vast majority of women will have had experienced at least a few brushes with:
sexual harassment or assault
the trauma of being shamed or disbelieved after reporting sexual harassment or assault
domestic violence
some kind of painful or scary health issue linked to her reproductive system (endometriosis, bad periods, PMS, pregnancy complications, cancer)
sex discrimination at work
imbalanced burden of domestic/childcare responsibilities
being devalued, ignored, or dismissed as a nobody in settings where men expect to dominate
internalized sexism and body shame
But Jenner thinks the hardest thing about being a woman is finding the right clothes. Right. It’s just what you’d expect a person with only the most superficial understanding of womanhood to say.
I was wondering if Caitlyn Jenner should have to give all those gold medals back since she won them when she was still a man, and since it’s not right to deadname her, and she was always Caitlyn on the inside even when she went by “Bruce.”
She had just been crowned Woman of the Year by Glamour when Buzzfeed ran that article on her. Idiot or not, she had been a given a platform to speak as an authority on the female experience.
I like how you just managed to blame trans women for their own sexual assaults.
You still don’t get that the concern isn’t about “true” trans women. It’s about men using self-ID as a means of increasing their access to victims. These victims actually include trans women. When you say stuff like the above, I wonder why your concern about violent rapey men seems to disappear at convenient moments.
You may not be able to connect these dots together on your own, but I’m telling you almost every woman has the capacity to do that once the issue is laid bare. I would bet my life on it.
If you ask women the question “Do you agree that trans women are women?”, a big chunk will likely say yes without hesitation.
But ask a women how they’d feel if society allowed any male to identify as a woman and with zero gatekeeping, be allowed to enter women restrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, women prisons, and women sports… I’m telling you only crazy nutcases would express support for that. All the wives alluded to over and over in his thread would be screaming NO! to that. Only men seem to be willing to defend this idea.
Ask a woman whether she is okay with “woman” being redefined so it now means whatever a male wants it to mean, and you might not make it out of the room alive. But only men seem willing to defend this.
A lot of women right now are oblivious to all the madness being defended in this thread. The JKR situation has cast a spotlight on it and it’s causing many epiphanies. Twitter is on fire right now and women are starting to wake up. Slowly but surely.
Well…right. Only crazy nutcase men would defend that too. If you think there’s a crazy nutcase in this thread defending that, I’m pretty sure you’re misreading what people are saying.
That said, if I express my opinion, you tell me I only have it because I’m a man who doesn’t have a stake in this. If I point out that many women I know have expressed similar opinions, I’m told that I’m pulling a cheap “some of my best friends” bigot trick. I can tell a Catch-22 when I see one, so I’m not sure there’s a lot of point in continuing the discussion, unless you show you’ll address what people actually say and not straw man and gotcha to the rafters.
In the United States, what measures are in place to prevent predatory men from identifying as transgender? If such a man wanted to exploit this identity to improve his access to vulnerable women, what legal hurdles are in place to deter him or disqualify him?
Read this article about the push for self-identification throughout Europe and elsewhere. Is the author wrong in her interpretation of what self-ID means for women?
How can you be trans if you don’t experience any kind of dysphoria? That’s what I don’t understand about the whole “gatekeeping” thing? Cuz like I said before, surely there is some kind of criteria or definition of what “trans” actually is. Otherwise, you have people like Trisha Paytas.
You know? I mean, ARE there people out there who are perhaps confusing gender identity and gender roles? Like back in the day if a woman was a tomboy, she was assumed to be a lesbian. Now she’s assumed to be trans. That shouldn’t be automatically assumed. I would think there’s a lot more to it.
I wouldn’t say it concerns me, but it does give me pause.
And also, what happens when you have people like this, who insist that saying, “I’m not interested in dating a trans person” is transphobic? She almost reminds me of the whole “gay conversion” types. Nobody should feel that if they don’t date someone, they’re a bigot. It sucks when you have a disadvantage in the dating pool, but that doesn’t mean you get to start making people feel guilty for not being attracted to certain features.
I think what Rowling said was wrong, but I don’t think she’s out and out evil. I think she’s probably just ignorant, and will hopefully come around.
omg, I finally got through this whole thread so I could post having looked at it all, but it was definitely… a lot.
I think I kind of come down with @monstro in terms of wanting the word “woman” to mean something. I’m sure I’ll get flak for this, but I was thinking about it in terms of race… So here’s the thing. This is not a hypothetical. I am 100% Asian descent, but it so happens that I do actually think of myself as white. My internal picture of myself is in fact as a white person. Whenever I look in the mirror I am mildly surprised to realize I look very different from the picture in my head. But I don’t think it would ever occur to anyone, including me, to call me white. Maybe, if the dichotomy between me and the picture in my head were large and troublesome enough, I’d get plastic surgery and dye my hair and then people would call me white (although even then I think people would quibble). It’s not that big a deal to me, so I haven’t.
People who are saying the definition of woman means what people say they are on any given day, should I be able to call myself white because I think of myself as white even though I’m not by any visible definition? If not, why not? (I’m not trying to troll, I’m genuinely curious as to whether you consider this different, and if so, why. I mean, should I go around telling people I feel white?)
I’m not willing to talk about this theoretically. Which man are you talking about here? Please name him, and we’ll look at the specific hurdles in place that address his specific situation and what he’s actually done (or attempted to do), and try to figure out whether they suffice.
Speaking as a lifelong assigned-female-at-birth member of the “gender class” known as “woman”, I’m not at all bothered by the “hopelessly circular” thing either.
And I think the objections about “how will we talk about women’s issues now” and “do I have to accept everybody who now identifies as a woman as representing women’s issues” are similarly tempests in a teapot. There’s no inherent contradiction between my accepting the general social-category circular definition that “a woman is someone who identifies as a woman”, and my acknowledging that different types of women have different experiences involving female identity. Cisgender women are different in some ways from transgender women, lesbians are different in some ways from straight women, mothers are different in some ways from non-mothers, and so on.
None of this IMHO requires us to put specific anatomical or life-history conditions on who’s allowed to identify themselves as a “woman”. The fuss being made about this issue reminds me strongly of all the complaining several years back about how legalizing same-sex marriage would somehow devalue or threaten the traditional institution of heterosexual marriage.
AFAICT from reports of scientific study on this issue, intersex, trans, and non-binary people are all exhibiting normal variants of human sex and gender characteristics. We can’t shut our eyes to that understanding, any more than we can shut our eyes to our recent growth of understanding that gay, bi, and asexual people are all exhibiting normal variants of human sexual orientations.
Yes, that means that some categories that we formerly thought of as nice intrinsically cohesive simple distinctions are going to get more messy and ill-defined in order to better reflect the messy variability of reality. Such realignments can be confusing to deal with, as any plant taxonomist will tell you, and many people are doubtless going to apply new category definitions in ways that they will later change their minds about. To which I say: Meh. It’s better than trying to cling to the old, inadequate category definitions because they’re what we’re used to.
Blockquote
People who are saying the definition of woman means what people say they are on any given day, should I be able to call myself white because I think of myself as white even though I’m not by any visible definition? If not, why not? (I’m not trying to troll, I’m genuinely curious as to whether you consider this different, and if so, why. I mean, should I go around telling people I feel white?)
I think your “on any given day” qualification is a bit of a strawman: from what I understand, there are almost or entirely zero examples of people toggling a binary gender identity from day to day in that way. There are certainly genderfluid or genderqueer people who vary the masculinity or femininity of how they present, but AFAICT their basic gender identity is more about the variability than about changing their minds from day to day about whether they’re “really” male or female.
That said, if something along the lines of “racial identity dysphoria” in the human psyche is really a thing, then personally I have no problem with anybody arguing that our categories of racial identity ought to adapt to accommodate that reality.
In that case too, ISTM the most sensible approach is to start out by acknowledging that human reality is a lot messier and more complicated than the simple schemes we come up with to classify it, and that we can acknowledge factual differences between people without strictly policing how people are allowed to think of and present themselves.
The problem in your case is not feeling white, whatever that means; that is trivial. It’s how the cops are going to treat you. And not just them. This is not a new issue: there is a history of racial passing in the US, for example to avoid discrimination, or just to avoid being “classified” as Black or Asian or whatever. It’s cool if you yourself do not have any such ethnic identity, but eg the security guards who follow you around when you visit a store aren’t going to ask you if you are white before doing so. That’s the thing about racism.
I remember that thread, must be where I got my knowledge from. Interesting to read it again, there are some pretty relevant comments. This one presages complaints made in this thread:
That’s exactly what we’ve been saying about gender. The way people treat you doesn’t depend on how you identify inside your head, it depends on how you look and present yourself. Sexists don’t care if you don’t see yourself as female.
I wanted to add, that article was published before the case was concluded. Yaniv lost the case against the waxers (though not before driving several out of business), but there is still a lesson here for other countries contemplating similar anti-discrimination laws, that exceptions are needed in some cases.
And that’s the thing about sexism too. People can feel like any gender they want. But if they aren’t perceived as that gender, then their “feelings” don’t really matter in a political sense.
Self-identity is self-identity. It isn’t political identity–the way others perceive you to be. It seems to me everyone should agree that a gender class primarily describes individuals who are perceived by others as being similar to each other. If you always have to say “I am an X” in order for others to know you are an X, then I really do think members of that gender class who don’t have that luxury should be allowed to look at you as different from them.
To go back to race, if someone who is not “black-presenting” told me they were black, I would not demand they hand over their negro card. I am related to too white-passing black folks for that to make any sense. But if I’m talking to someone and they share their narrative with me and that narrative sounds like a Rachel Dolezal narrative, I don’t want to be constrained in what I do with that information. I don’t want someone to lecture me on the importance of accepting that person as “kin” to me. I don’t want someone to tell me that that person’s narrative should be treated with the same gravitas as George Floyd’s narrative. And I wouldn’t want that person to weaponize their identity (like Rachel Dolezal did) without me being able to sit them down in the most effective way possible, like by telling them that they don’t have any right telling anyone they aren’t “black enough” given their weak-ass narrative. I don’t like when black people play the “not black enough” card willy nilly, but the card isn’t inherently a racist card to play. I just want gender to be treated the same way.
If a trans-Rachel Dolezal is weaponizing their woman identity, I want to be able to snatch that person up by telling them they are the last person to be beating anyone over their head with identity politics, given their weak-ass identity narrative. 99% of trans people don’t have a weak narrative. 99% of trans people will not be weaponizing their narrative. But that doesn’t mean that 1% isn’t out there and that it will always be 1%.
For some reason, people seem to be assuming that the questionable “women” will always be a super teeny tiny fraction of the population. Maybe that assumption will be prove to be true, but I’m not ready to take that on faith. I expect to see edgelords and others to test the system, to either to mock it or to personally benefit from it. I just want guard rails to keep this from happening. I’m not even talking about institutional guard rails. I just want progressives to not remove all of our rhetorical defenses in our efforts to be “woke”.
So you’re saying it’s how you are perceived by others that matters most when it comes to racial identification. You are acknowledging the importance the physical body has when determining how it should be classified in the ecosystem called society.
Why doesn’t the perceptions of others matter when it comes to changing one’s gender? Why doesn’t the physical body get to determine a person’s gender classification. If a 6’3 bearded person with a penis steps into a shower beside a grandmother whose only brush with naked males were from her dead husband, you don’t think she’s going to be seeing this person as 100% male?
If the same bearded person pulled off a bank heist, you don’t think the cops will identify them as a male suspect if they knew nothing about them except physical appearance?
I can totally buy that 99.9% of woman-identified people will present as female or flash tells of “femaleness”.
I just want people to admit that visual presention matters. If people are going to keep telling me that the male-presenting woman is a hysterical red-herring since their numbers of so rare and insignificant, then those same people need to be honest and admit that they there is a criterion for “woman” that goes beyond “mental state”. Someone who looks a certain way. Someone who acts a certain way. Which makes “anyone who says they are a woman is a woman” a weak-ass rule. If a person isn’t “doing” woman in any discernable way, I should be able to say “that ain’t a woman” and not have to take it on faith that they possess the requisite mental state of “woman”, sight unseen.
Since gender isn’t a big deal, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? Again, if gender ain’t a big deal, then applying one’s individualized gender rubric shouldn’t be a big deal either. I get that people don’t care about the logical circularity of “woman”. But is it unreasonable to demand more logical consistency with gender ideology, is what I’m wondering.