Oh yeah, I don’t think they’re leading the hate train. I do believe they are the ones demanding ‘women’ be excised from everywhere and the Venus symbol removed from tampon boxes. I think the contrast between ‘girldick’ and ‘chestfeeding’ is really striking. Transwomen are proud of their male parts. Transmen want to deny their female ones. They don’t necessarily have a problem with breastfeeding, but can’t bear to acknowledge they have breasts.
Yeah, Demon Tree, I was confused by those quotes in iiandyiiii’s post too They seem to be everything I was saying. Not everyone thinks “lived experience” should be a criterion…
I see a big problem with that – I’m just not convinced that’s an accurate description of the legal situation. By my reading, it appears different.
Not quite. I think a lot of young AFAB people are choosing a genderqueer identity to escape misogyny. I don’t know whether a lot of them transition for this reason - they may just id as non-binary, fluid or genderqueer. I think there has to be some dysmorphia to choose to transition (although women and dysmorphia…that’s sort of a common cultural issue - its the rare woman who hasn’t spent at least some time hating her own body). There is a lot of nuance in genderqueer, and its nuance that I really have to admit I’m a poor spokesperson for.
No, of course not. But that’s not what JKR did – what she did was make a quip about an article that deliberately used inclusive language to make sure trans men weren’t rhetorically erased – JKR responded as if it was terribly wrong to try and include trans men, and that the only appropriate language to describe people who menstruate is “women”. Apparently JKR has a real problem with trying to include trans men in these discussions.
This is as off-the-wall to me as the claims I remember hearing in the 90s from those skeptical of gay rights – “I don’t have a sexual orientation – I’m just normal”.
I think this might be the fundamental point of this disagreement. In my understanding, gender identity is a real characteristic that everyone has, just like sexual orientation (which includes far more potential categories than straight, gay, and bi).
[quote=“YWTF”]I don’t believe I have a gender identity. All I know that I have is a female reproductive system. So what does that make me?
Do you think it’s wrong that women just want to be called women?
[/quote]
ISTM that a crucial question here is whether psychological concepts like “gender identity”, or for that matter “sexual orientation”, are scientifically and socially meaningful in a general sense, whether or not we personally happen to “believe” in their relevance to our own psyches.
I’m old enough to remember many women being similarly indignant about being designated “heterosexual women” instead of just being “called women”. They felt that having a female reproductive system, rather than having something called a “sexual orientation”, automatically implied something fundamental about their sexual nature that they should be able to regard as the default, not just as one among multiple possibilities.
For many people back then (and I suppose for quite a few people even now), the biologically fundamental opposite-sex nature of sexual attraction was an essential part what it meant to be male or female. “Lesbians aren’t real women” was considered by many to be as reasonable and realistic a statement in those days as “transgender women aren’t real women” is considered by many nowadays.
I’m not trying to argue that there aren’t significant differences between sexual orientation and physical anatomy, just pointing out that the ways we essentialize sex and gender have in fact changed over time.
I agree with you. I think, especially for young people, their ideas of gender norms are far too limited - they don’t match the reality. Girls who didn’t fit in with the popular girls at school (and I sure didn’t), wonder where they DO fit. And that eventually some (but certainly not all) will decide that she/her pronouns are just EASIER than banging their heads against a binary society and find place to fit where they can be women - because a lot of us are weird and awkward and geeky and really aren’t boy crazy. But in the process, they will make society less binary. In the meantime though, respect who they are and assume that is who they will remain - its part of respect.
It’s not the legal situation currently, but it’s the legal situation the trans rights groups are campaigning for. This is one of the reasons ordinary women have been organising and pushing back against them. It’s one of the reasons I’m supporting J K Rowling, despite some possibly unfortunate word choices.
Kimstu
But at the same time there seems to be this strong insistence on the “gender critical” side of the debate that male biology or male socialization is just going to make you ultimately hopeless at womaning, or vice versa. Or that it’s perfectly fine for, say, a cisgender woman to be super gender-nonconforming and “look like a man” if she wants to, but it’s appalling and intolerable and totally disqualifying for a transgender woman to “look like a man”.
I agree that both sides are victims of internally inconsistent positions sometimes, but I don’t think you’re being fair in your characterization here.
We know that men and women are socialized differently. We also know that men and women carry out different lives, with different outcomes. Men are much more likely to perpetuate violence against women than the other way around. Men are more successful in politics, Hollywood, corporate America, and professional sports. Women live longer because they are less often the victims of the “diseases of despair” that kill men.
Those in the gender critical camp believe that these differences are the result of socialization, not because men are naturally more X than women.
There is much more gender essentialism on the gender ideology side than the GC side. Supposedly having a “female mental state” is supposed to make you act/think/feel like a woman regardless of the male body that contains it. That’s gender essentialism in its purest form.
Why the big gender-essentializing fuss about this? I don’t in any way deny, as I’ve been saying all along, that transgender people and cisgender people have significant differences in biology and socialized experience, which are not automatically erased or nullified just by opening up the social categories “man” and “woman” to include both cisgender and transgender people. But why should the rules about gender conformity be considered so much stricter for transgender people?
It goes back to having a workable definition for a woman. If a male can identify as a woman but literally present exactly the same way when he identifies as a man, then what information am I supposed to infer from
the statement “I’m a woman now”. It means nothing.
For instance, I’ve met cisgender lesbians with short hair and big muscles and even the occasional mustache who were often assumed by strangers to be men, and I have no problem whatsoever with their gender-nonconformity and would never dream of asserting that they ought not to be considered “real women”. But if I meet a masculine-presenting transgender woman who looks indistinguishable from one of those “butch” lesbians, what basis do I have for complaining that she’s not being “womanly” enough in her presentation?
The lesbian is a woman regardless of her gender expression because her body is female and she accepts that reality.
The trans woman is calling themselves a woman because Reason X that cannot be inferred from their body or their outward appearance. They are making an ideological statement without an obvious rationale, and yes that is going to be confusing to people who want words to have shared meanings.
I’ve been debating for a while whether to post in this thread, but considering there are no actual transgender voices in here (that I can see), I will step in.
I’m a trans woman (yes a WOMAN) who started transitioning three years ago and for me the reason JK Rowling (and her supporters on this) are TERFs is because she has this view that we are all just men wanting to infiltrate women’s spaces and it’s fucking disgusting. I feel sympathy that she was sexually assaulted and is still dealing with that trauma, but she seems to have turned that into hate and distrust for men in general, and then started lumping us in with them.
Ever since I was a kid, I had a feeling that being a boy wasn’t right for me, and that feeling grew more as time went on and I entered puberty. It wasn’t until high school that the internet came around and I finally had an answer to how I was feeling, I was transgender and there was a way to become the woman I knew I was.
Despite this, it was still the late 90’s, so trans rights weren’t really a thing and I was deathly afraid of the consequences of transitioning. So I stayed in the closet for another 20 years, with multiple suicide attempts and liver damage from alcoholism to show for it, before society came around enough that I decided “Either I become who I should be, or i’m going to die, period.”
Since then I have become so much happier with my life and i’m “passable” (ugh, hate that term) enough that people don’t know i’m trans unless I tell them. Using women’s restrooms and locker rooms was actually nerve racking for me since for a while I wasn’t sure how passable I would be to other people and didn’t want to make anybody uncomfortable, but I never have. I am a woman, just like all the other women posting here. Not exactly the same as a cisgender women, but a woman nonetheless.
That makes sense, and it’s part of why I think Rowling’s concerns over the increase in young women transitioning are justified. It was easy enough for girls to hate their bodies even before airbrushed instagram models and ubiquitous internet porn.
Do have a “right handed” identity? Or are you a person who writes with your right-hand.
Do you have a “bipedal” identity? Or are you a person who walks on two legs?
I live in Richmond, VA. I don’t have a “Richmond” identity. I just live here.
I have brown skin. I don’t have a “brown skin” identity. I just have brown skin.
So I get what YWTF is saying. I can see what you are saying too, though.
I have a black identity. Blackness is a sociopolitical construct that encapsulates culture, socialization, history, and politics. You could put my brain in a white person’s body and I would still have a black identity. My attitudes and beliefs and outlook have come to me because of my lived experiences as a black person. So that’s an identity, I think.
I am both a woman and I have a woman identity. It is undeniable I am an adult female. But take my brain and put it in a male body and I still think I’d identify as a woman. But only because of my lived experiences as an adult female. I think and feel a certain way because I have experienced things as an adult female. When I say I’m a woman, I’m not just saying I have a female body. I’m also saying that I have had a set of experiences and those experiences have influenced me and the way I interact with the world.
So I can relate to the idea of having a “woman” mind. But I have to admit that I don’t know what people mean when they say they have a “woman” mind in the absence of a lived experience of a woman. I totally get feeling ambivalent or negative about one’s gender classification. I just don’t get the leap from “I don’t like being X” to “I know I’m a Y.”
I feel the need to say this: I’m not discounting the validity of the transgender experience. I I’m just saying it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around the notion of someone knowing they have a “woman” mental state versus some other mental state. I get the gender fluidity/nonbinary stuff a whole lot more because it seems less invested in mental states and more about interpersonal modes.
Sure, and like I said, I agree wholeheartedly with the people who say that we shouldn’t be so quick to slap “female” and “male” labels on all our “mental states” and preferences and styles and favorite colors and so on in the first place.
[quote=YWTF]It goes back to having a workable definition for a woman. If a male can identify as a woman but literally present exactly the same way when he identifies as a man, then what information am I supposed to infer from
the statement “I’m a woman now”. It means nothing.[/quote]
That seems to me an overly intrusive criterion for a general social category. Suppose I don’t have any idea how a self-identified transgender woman used to present? Why should I have to, or be entitled to, scrutinize her current vs. past levels of gender conformity to determine whether her gender identity qualifies as “meaningful”?
The information that I infer from her declaration of her gender identity is that she identifies as a woman. (And in most cases, I can also infer from it by default useful information about the pronouns to use for her.) In a routine social situation, what other information do I really need or have a right to expect?
As above, that seems like a way too intrusive criterion to apply to the question of whether I should consider the person in question to be a woman, in a routine social situation.
If I meet someone in a routine social context who self-identifies as a woman and whom most people would describe as “looking like a man”, it’s absolutely none of my business what her genitals or chromosomes look like, or whether the reality she’s accepting involves being a butch cisgender lesbian with a vagina or a masculine-presenting transgender woman with a penis.
If it’s okay for a cisgender woman in an ordinary social situation to “look masculine” without having to show her anatomical or genetic credentials—and IMHO it damn well better be—then I don’t see any valid rationale for declaring that “looking masculine” is unacceptable for a transgender woman in a similar situation. The only reliable way to tell two such women apart is by demanding personal information that in those circumstances is none of your business.
It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around too. But considering my entire life and what drives me, I can imagine that being in a female body would feel wrong. I don’t know exactly how it would feel were I raised as a girl and lived as a girl/woman, but I believe it would feel very wrong to me – my male body, and being treated as a man, just feels very right, and in a way that’s different from other aspects of my identity. Obviously being white is a big part of my life experience, but being white doesn’t feel intrinsic to my identity the way being a man is. Even being straight doesn’t feel as intrinsic to my identity as being a man – in my younger days gay stuff was “ooh, gross”, but I realize now that was entirely socialization. It doesn’t particularly appeal to me, but it doesn’t feel personally wrong – just like it’s not really my preference right now. Maybe this is all easy to say as a straight cis white man – everything feels right! Everyone treats me great. Everything is designed for me.
But the “man” part feels absolutely intrinsic to who I am as a person in a way that those other characteristics do not. So that’s the part that makes sense to me – I can imagine, at least conceptually, how much it would suck if my body felt totally wrong… especially when it feels so right as it is now.
100% concur with you on this. Of my own experience, I have absolutely no idea what it actually feels like to have a “female gender identity” as opposed to a different gender identity.
For that matter, I have no real idea what it feels like to have a heterosexual sexual orientation: I know that that’s what liking dudes is called in the case of someone like me, but to my inner consciousness it’s essentially just part of the standard female-body equipment. I also don’t know what it’s like to feel like an ambulatory person instead of a wheelchair user, or a hearing person instead of a Deaf person.
Hell, I just barely know what it’s like to feel like a white person instead of a non-white person, on account of having spent some time living in a nonwhite-majority country (and also I’m getting a bit more attuned to my manifestations of stuff like white obliviousness and white fragility). But for the most part my personal identity is stupefyingly cis-everything: the characteristics that I’ve been socialized to view as the standard default correspond so closely to what I think of as “natural” for me that I have pretty much diddlysquat in terms of conscious perception of it.
To go with the alpine metaphor that gave us the cis/trans terminology, I have basically no innate conception of what any of the Identity Mountains actually look like up close, because I’ve spent all my life in the Valley of Cis where I was born with the mountains just a theoretical backdrop. So I totally get you about the difficulty of wrapping our cisgender heads around the notion of, say, conscious awareness of gender identity. It’s just that based on the reporting of others, I’m pretty sure that those mountains are a real thing and it is possible for some people to be looking at the world from the other side of them.
[ETA: Just pointlessly correcting the record to make a previously overlooked exception for religious identity: parents from two different religious traditions, personal beliefs not aligned with either, consequently do have some sense of what religious identity feels like.]
Then you have a strong cis identity. But that’s hardly universal. I’m also a straight white man, but man-ness is just not a strong part of my identity. My body doesn’t feel unnatural, but neither does it feel natural. In terms of gender-specific behavior, I’m certainly on the male end of the spectrum but neither was I ever interested in the most stereotypically male interests.
It feels to me that strong/weak identity is a separate axis from cis/trans, and I wonder where most people fall. But believing people when they say they have little to no gender identity seems like the polite thing to do.
I can actually relate to not liking one’s body, since I’ve never liked my secondary sex characteristics. I have never liked my boobs, my butt, my hips, etc. I would love nothing more than to have a body with no “womanly” curves and just smoothness between my legs, like a Barbie. If I had could design a body for myself, that’s the one I’d go with.
And yet I don’t want to be a man. I don’t like my female parts, but I don’t want male parts.
If I did want male parts, it would make certainly make sense to go “whole hog” and live as a man. So I do get that.
I think what’s complicating the discourse are people who want a different gender identity than their birth-assigned gender class but they also want to keep their original parts. We have been programmed to believe that people with certain parts are entitled to spaces devoted to people with those parts. That programming is deeply entrenched and goes back since forever. So while I agree that concerns about transwomen in women’s restrooms tend to be overblown, I also get the JK Rowling side. Why are we perpetuating the social programming that people with certain private parts are entitled to safe spaces (which is implied with “women” and "men’ restrooms), when obviously that isn’t the case? We need to stop saying that and get rid of gender-segregated bathrooms. That to me seems like the obvious solution rather than having the women’s restroom be the sanctuary for all marginalized sex and gender groups.
That’s fair. That seems like the equivalent of “asexual” for gender identity – no preference, or not interested, or fine with whatever… that still seems like a gender identity, just like asexual is a sexual preference, but I guess it doesn’t matter if someone calls it “no gender identity”.
There’s a slight difference, though. An asexual can simply choose not to have sex. They can opt-out of that completely, and so they can actually get a distinct category of behavior. But a weakly-gendered individual still has to buy clothes, get haircuts, participate in activities, and so on. It seems likely that they’ll just go along with what’s easiest, which is probably what they were socialized with and probably on the traditional spectrum. Or because some things relate to sex, not gender: I buy men’s shoes because they fit my feet, not because I have some special attraction to them.