J K Rowling and the trans furore

In My Humble Opinion
903

Dr. Strangelove, I think there are a lot of us weakly gendered individuals. We go along with the program of our socialization because we are “go along to get along” kind of people. But if we woke up as the opposite sex, it would only be a shock. It wouldn’t cause us to take a leap off of building. We would simply “go along to get along” in a different body.

That’s why I don’t think we’ll ever find enough of a difference between “male” brains and “female” brains to be worth talking about. I can certainly believe that extreme masculine brain and the extreme feminine brains are sufficiently different that a trained person could classify them with some low error rate. But the great swath of humanity in between? No. I think it is more likely you’d be able to have three or four discernable clusters of “mental states” than two clear-cut groups.

904

Exactly. I mean, it’s possible this is just a failure of my imagination. But I don’t really have trouble with other things, like homosexuality. And while I can’t fully understand what’s it’s like to be black in America, I can understand things like microaggressions to some extent. Gender dysphoria is the only one I have genuine trouble with because my identity is so loosely coupled with my physical characteristics in general.

I think you’re right about “male” and “female” brains, and that the apparent strong clustering is mainly a result of focusing on arbitrary characteristics that get amplified by society, like clothing preference. The reality is much fuzzier than that, with far more overlap.

905

I can imagine that too. But I also can imagine being born into a male body and being perfectly fine. It’s far from a given that I would be a dysphoric person had “my soul” been put in male body. Simply because something is in the realm of imagination doesn’t make it fact.

As human beings, I never hear anyone talking about their “species identity”. It is obvious that we are humans not because we identify as such, but because we know what a human is and we are raised to see ourselves as one. But otherkin have non-human identities. These identities are real to them, even though a palpable human identity is not something most people can claim.

The existence of these people does not mean suddenly non-otherkins should be called “human-identifying people”. When we’re talking about a situation in which non-human identities are relevant, it would perfectly appropriate to specify “otherkin people” but let the rest of humanity simply be people.

“Human-identifying people who read books” is analogous to “ciswomen who menstruate”. So if you get the weirdness of the former, you have what it takes to intuit the weirdness of the latter.

906

But it’s not just within the realm of imagination, at least for me - I definitely identify as a man. That’s my gender identity, and it feels extremely strong and intrinsic to who I am. You may not have a strong feeling of gender identity (and if so, that’s fine!), but quite obviously many folks do - both cis and trans.

907

See post #56 for a critique of this sort of comparison between transgender identity and considering oneself a member of a nonhuman species, beginning as follows:

Now, I’ve got nothing against otherkin’s assumption of non-human identities. But the idea that the physical reality of such assumptions is even remotely comparable to transgender identities is absurd. Human males and females are physically very much alike: the differences in their biological development are based on comparatively small differences in genes and hormonal development, and are to a large extent reversible.

If you took masculinizing testosterone treatment, even without surgery, you would develop increased muscle mass and muscle definition, your face and body would look more male, your voice would deepen, and you would grow body and facial hair like a man while possibly losing head hair as in male baldness. Your menstruation and fertility level would decline, and you’d experience clitoral enlargement and vaginal atrophy. You could probably end up “passing” as a cisgender man in ordinary social settings with little or no effort.

There are no simple medical treatments that can give you that kind of physical resemblance to a member of a non-human species. There are no human/nonhuman “interspecies” individuals resulting from normal variations in human fetal development, but there are dozens of millions of intersex human individuals, not counting people who identify as transgender without being physically intersex.

This is why, AFAICT, scientists currently consider transgender identity to be plausible as a genuine biological/cognitive phenomenon in human brain development, while otherkin non-human identities are a form of volitional exploration of personhood, like believing in nativity horoscopes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that gender-nonconformity or gender-identity experiments can’t also be a form of volitional exploration of personhood in some cases. But AIUI, for at least a large proportion of transgender-identified people, transgender identity is credibly hypothesized by researchers to reflect actual physiological variations in their brain development. By contrast, there is no possible physiological variation in human brain development that could produce an individual whose traits are part human and part fox. (Much less dragon.)

908

Kimstu

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.

I’m not sure I’m following you. In a face-to-face situation with a stranger who is masculine in appearance, I’m have a hard time imagining how their sex/gender would even come up. Can you draw up a hypothetical to illustrate?

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.

But what if you do know their genitals and the rest because you have enough background on them to know they were born male and transitioned in adulthood?

I’m with you in saying that in most cases it’s none of our business what a persons genitals etc are. You just go with whatever a person tells you to keep things moving courteously. But we’re not really talking about politeness in this thread. We are talking about whether it’s ever permissible to doubt someone who is claiming to be a woman is actually a woman.

If a woman = whomever identifies as a woman, then the answer to that question is no. A man is a woman if he says he is. You may not find anything wrong with a concept like this, but can you really fault anyone who does? I mean, there is no other group of people that we treat like this. It is surreal to find my group is the test case but no one has asked for our opinion about it.

909

I definitely appreciate your stepping in and sharing your experience. The trauma of not being able to present as the gender you are is well-known, but I keep seeing it be ignored in this thread in favor of weird hypotheticals about people switching gender on a whim. Centering the experiences of actual trans folk is key if we’re going to be talking about trans rights.

910

You’re calling them absurd, but your opinion alone is insufficient to making that case. Both are ideologies without science to support them. Your statement is like a Baptist denying Christianity can be compared to Greek mythology. It is only because the Baptist has faith in their religion that they object to comparing it to something they don’t have faith in.

But to an atheist, the comparison is sound.

Human males and females are physically very much alike: the differences in their biological development are based on comparatively small differences in genes and hormonal development, and are to a large extent reversible.

I agree that males and females are more similar than different. In fact, perhaps it would surprise you if I asserted that there is only essential difference between them.

Only one of them has a reproductive system capable of carrying offspring.

Seriously, there is no escaping this very basic point of distinction. Everything from height, skeletal structure, body fat percentage, body hair…none of these are universal differences between the sexes. They are optional, in a sense. But not the kind of reproductive system you have. It’s the only thing that determines sex/gender because the concept of sex/gender is organized around a very specific biological function: Sexual reproduction. If we reproduced like amoebas do (asexually), we’d simply be one diverse collection of personalities and interests, all sharing the same type of plumbing.

I believe we are a diverse collection of personalities and interests, and half of us have one type of plumbing and the other half has another type. But the personalities and interests can distribute randomly across the two types.

You say that the differences are “reversible”, but thats false. The key difference that distinguishes males and females is immutable. When a trans woman gets raped by a male, she’ll never need to worry about pregnancy coming out of it. Her plumbing is not the right kind. And she doesn’t have the right gametes.

This is what is meant by sex is real.

911

Sure. You’re at a party or a work event, back when we all could go to parties or work events in person, and you bump into somebody you know slightly who says "Oh hi YWTF, I’d like you to meet my sister Clara." The person they’re introducing as Clara is very conventionally masculine-looking, and without the introduction you would have unhesitatingly guessed her to be a man. At some point Clara excuses herself to go get another drink, and her sibling says “Clara’s visiting from her home in Nunavut, Canada”, and you throw the small-talk ball back by saying “Wow, she must really like cold weather, huh?”

There’s an example of a face-to-face situation with a masculine-appearing stranger where you need some information about her gender to know how to process the conversational references to her (“sister”, “she”, etc.), and you have to get that information from verbal gender cues because your default assumptions about her appearance aren’t a reliable guide.

[quote=YWTF]But what if you do know their genitals and the rest because you have enough background on them to know they were born male and transitioned in adulthood?

I’m with you in saying that in most cases it’s none of our business what a persons genitals etc are. You just go with whatever a person tells you to keep things moving courteously. But we’re not really talking about politeness in this thread. We are talking about whether it’s ever permissible to doubt someone who is claiming to be a woman is actually a woman.
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I’m not sure we’re not talking about politeness in this thread, tbh, but I think your question about “whether it’s ever permissible to doubt someone who is claiming to be a woman is actually a woman” is also a valid one. And I would reply to it by asking “‘Doubt’ what about them, specifically, and for what purpose?”

I mean, if this is about you saying inside your own head “Gee, I very strongly suspect that Clara was assigned male at birth”, then hell yes that’s permissible. You can doubt up a storm about that in your personal speculations.

If it’s about you saying to your acquaintance “Come off it, this person you call Clara isn’t your sister and isn’t a she, he’s obviously a man”, then no, I don’t think that’s permissible from an etiquette standpoint, but it sounds like we don’t disagree about that.

So I think we need more info about the “doubt” you want to articulate about whether Clara “is actually a woman”. Is there some specific context in which it’s relevant and important to address the factual issue of whether Clara was born with a vagina?

Or are you just looking for permission to declare “I do not consider this woman-identifying person to qualify as a woman!”? What exactly would be the point of that? I mean, yes, everybody can see that Clara is not conventionally feminine-looking and may plausibly not have been born with a vagina. So?

The people who say “transgender women are women” AFAICT are not using that phrase to mean “you are morally obligated to believe and assert that everybody who identifies as a woman was born with a vagina”. If you know anybody who is using the phrase that way, I’ll be happy to help you disagree with them.

912

Wait, what?? It is absolutely scientifically factual that human males and females are far more similar, and far more likely to have substantial overlap and “mismatch” of gender-related biological traits due to variations in fetal development, than humans and non-humans.

That is why the biological reality of transgender identity is a scientifically plausible (note that I didn’t say “proven”) hypothesis attracting a lot of serious research, while the biological reality of shared human and non-human traits in “otherkin” is completely nonexistent.

[quote=YWTF]I agree that males and females are more similar than different. In fact, perhaps it would surprise you if I asserted that there is only essential difference between them.

Only one of them has a reproductive system capable of carrying offspring.

Seriously, there is no escaping this very basic point of distinction. […] It’s the only thing that determines sex/gender because the concept of sex/gender is organized around a very specific biological function: Sexual reproduction.[/quote]

Well, for example, there are plenty of those intersex people I mentioned who have parts of both male and female reproductive systems. How does your simple and specific binary criterion classify them?

There’s that cavalier intersex erasure again. Even if I assume that you are using “half” only in the approximate sense of “something over 49%”, I am still strongly opposed to accepting a system that purports to construct an elementary, fundamental, universal, binary classification system for humans predicated on simply ignoring the existence of maybe 1-2% of all humans.

Sure, the human species is sexually dimorphic, in the approximate sense that the majority of human individuals fall into one of two categories physically capable of sexual reproduction at least for some part of their lifetimes. But trying to represent that as a truly simple and universal classification scheme requires significant denial of reality.

“Immutable”, huh? Speaking as a solidly post-menopausal cisgender woman, if I Ogforbid were to get raped by a male, I’ll never need to worry about pregnancy coming out of it either.

Whaddya know, that allegedly “immutable” distinction “mutabled” all the way from one category to the other, right within my own individual lifetime. (If indeed it ever was a possibility with my personal plumbing in the first place, a hypothesis that I never chose to test and that I’m thankful to say was never tested on me without my consent.)

Sure, you can patch up your claim about this “key difference” with caveats and qualifications, but it’s just reinforcing my point: when you try to define a social category based solely on a simplified biological one, you end up having to handwave away a whole lot of messy biological reality.

Real-life people are more complicated and varied, even in their genital anatomy, than any simplistic binary classification can suffice to describe.

913

Okay, I see.

I would use their pronouns and call them by their name, but whether I would actually mentally “see” them as a woman would depend on if mentally saw them as male as opposed to just masculine. It’s hard to say if I would without actually seeing them.

I’ve been around masculine women before because butch females aren’t exactly rare. I’ve never needed them to tell me their pronouns for me to know what their sex is.

I have to assume it’s because my eyes are good at picking up signs of biological femaleness (and maleness) no matter what someone is wearing or how they are carrying themselves. To me, it is intuitive that this ability would have been selected for in humans (just as it is with other species). Reproduction would very inefficient if you couldn’t figure out very quickly who to mate with.

914

Kimstu

I’m not sure we’re not talking about politeness in this thread, tbh, but I think your question about “whether it’s ever permissible to doubt someone who is claiming to be a woman is actually a woman” is also a valid one. And I would reply to it by asking “‘Doubt’ what about them, specifically, and for what purpose?”

I can’t force myself to believe something if I don’t believe it. So “doubt for what purpose” doesn’t compute. Doubt is the result of disbelief.

If it’s about you saying to your acquaintance “Come off it, this person you call Clara isn’t your sister and isn’t a she, he’s obviously a man” , then no, I don’t think that’s permissible from an etiquette standpoint, but it sounds like we don’t disagree about that.

Again, I don’t think etiquette is relevant. I would consider this rude behavior, but that has nothing to do with my actual belief that Clara was a woman.

To match the situations we’re talking about in this thread, we need a scenario where a male stands to gain something if he identifies as a woman, that would not be available to him if he didn’t identify as such. That something could be as basic as peace and quiet while urinating in the women’s restroom, or it could be as non-basic as an Olympic gold medal.

For the purposes of this hypothetical, let’s talk about something in the middle of these positions.: an invitation to speak at a conference on women in businesss. This invitation doesn’t come with payment, but it does come with status. You get your name printed in the program, and you get to be the center of attention for an hour.

This is you. Credit Suisse director slammed for appearing top women list | Daily Mail Online The program contains your bio and it explains that you are a gender fluid trans woman. But when you speak, you make no reference to trans status. Rather, you talk about your own experiences moving through your career and breaking barriers as a woman.

Questions:

  1. If I’m in the audience, I will be annoyed that out of all the women the conference organizers could’ve platformed, they picked someone who.is not actually an adult human female. Is my feeling valid or am I just a transphobe?

  2. My annoyance stems from not believing this person is a woman, despite them making that claim. I have my own definition for that word, and they don’t match the definition. Is it wrong of me to have this belief?

  3. I will likely feel compelled to share my annoyance with others. I won’t be making a scene or anything, but hell yeah, I’ll be providing my take on things to the conference organizers. Is that wrong?

915

Nobody AFAICT is requiring you to force yourself to believe anything. It’s not about “belief”, it’s about acknowledging facts.

For example, a transgender woman is (almost always) someone who identifies as a woman and who was not born with a vagina. That is a fact, and nobody is asking you to believe otherwise.

It is likewise a fact that in many contemporary contexts, the concept of “woman” as a social category has been expanded in common usage to include both cisgender and transgender women (and correspondingly for the social category “man”). Acknowledging that fact doesn’t require you to deny the fact that transgender women are in many ways physically different from cisgender women, or to deny any other facts, or to force yourself to believe anything that isn’t true. So, we cool?

Does it matter? You don’t get to decide how the conference organizers choose to define the social category “woman” and who qualifies for it. And they don’t get to decide how you personally choose to define it, either. (Although they, as the organizers, are of course allowed to set rules about respectful behavior at the conference in accordance with their own definition of “woman”.)

If the speaker doesn’t match your own chosen definition of the social category “woman”, then naturally you can’t be expected to believe that she does match it: that would just be factually incorrect.

On the other hand, you don’t have any right to expect the conference organizers to abide by your chosen definition of “woman” rather than their own. So it sounds as though your being annoyed about the speaker matching their definition of “woman” but not yours would be kind of pointless.

Again, how it mostly sounds to me is pointless. I mean, I’m pretty sure that when the organizers picked a transgender woman as a speaker for a businesswomen’s conference, it wasn’t because they simply hadn’t noticed that a lot of people still prefer to define the social category “woman” to exclude people who weren’t assigned female at birth. So I doubt your annoyance at the mere fact of what you consider their category violation is going to impress them much.

[1 of 2, silly new board character limits]

916

Now, there is an objection you could make that I’d be more inclined to take seriously if I were a conference organizer, even if I had no time for rehashing stale controversies about social vs. quasi-biological definition criteria for the category “woman”.

Namely, I’d be interested if you voiced a concern along the lines of “I appreciated the talk by [Speaker], but I feel it missed an opportunity to raise important issues about gender identity, gender socialization, and sexism. A transgender woman’s experiences are likely to be very different in many ways from those of cisgender women as a group, and I was disappointed that [Speaker] entirely ignored those differences. I would have liked to hear how she resolved issues in her career with transphobia, sexism, and reconciling her affirmation of her female identity with her previous male socialization, including residual effects of male privilege. I think there’s a complex diversity of experience here that we should seek to understand, rather than just lumping transgender and cisgender women together as though they’re exactly the same.”

As an organizer, I still might not agree with your objection (e.g., suppose I think that [Speaker]'s specific experiences as a female executive are more interesting or illuminating than her transgender identity, or I don’t see why transgender women should always be tasked with doing the educating about gender identity, etc.). But I’d be a lot more receptive to a nuanced criticism of that sort than to predictable tired old whining about “This person isn’t really a woman because she doesn’t have a vagina!”

[2 of 2]

917

Kimstu

Now, I’ve got nothing against otherkin’s assumption of non-human identities. But the idea that the physical reality of such assumptions is even remotely comparable to transgender identities is absurd.Human males and females are physically very much alike: the differences in their biological development are based on comparatively small differences in genes and hormonal development, and are to a large extent reversible.

If you took masculinizing testosterone treatment, even without surgery, you would develop increased muscle mass and muscle definition, your face and body would look more male, your voice would deepen, and you would grow body and facial hair like a man while possibly losing head hair as in male baldness. Your menstruation and fertility level would decline, and you’d experience clitoral enlargement and vaginal atrophy. You could probably end up “passing” as a cisgender man in ordinary social settings with little or no effort.

I went back and read this more thoroughly. I have detected internal inconsistency.

On one hand, you’re saying it’s wrong to look at a masculine looking individual and deem them non-woman on the basis of their appearance… I assume the rationale for this position is that you don’t believe you have to look like a certain gender to be that gender. You assert above that men and women have few physical differences, which implies you think phenotypes in one group can show in the other. Okay, I can get behind that.

So what’s the relevance of taking T to grow facial hair and muscles and acquire facial changes? What’s the relevance of baldness and all the other stuff you mentioned? Whether you’re aware of it or not, you are anchoring gender to one’s physical appearance. You are affirming the idea that to transition to the opposite gender, you can’t just embody it mentally. You have to change physically.

You can’t reconcile the two positions you’ve expressed to me. Either women and men are essentially are the same and therefore, their appearance has absolutely no bearing on the plausibility of their stated gender. Or it does it have bearing.

A 6’5 bearded person who is built like a titan will not be perceived as a woman by most of humanity. Even if he says he’s a woman, he will be perceived as a man. We need to not pretend otherwise. I feel like people are gaslighting me when they act like I’m the one talking crazy.

918

I want to say thank you to you as well. I appreciate you taking the time to post.

919

Kimstu

Does it matter? You don’t get to decide how the conference organizers choose to define the social category “woman” and who qualifies for it. And they don’t get to decide how you personally choose to define it, either. (Although they, as the organizers, are of course allowed to set rules about respectful behavior at the conference in accordance with their own definition of “woman”.)

This isn’t responsive to my question, I’m asking am I necessarily transphobic by being bothered by the choice in speakers. Everything you’re saying above is not in dispute.

On the other hand, you don’t have any right to expect the conference organizers to abide by your chosen definition of “woman” rather than their own. So it sounds as though your being annoyed about the speaker matching their definition of “woman” but not yours would be kind of pointless.

Truth in advertising is a thing, though. If I order a large pepperoni pizza, but I receive a medium sausage pizza, can the restaurant argue that it was wrong for me to expect them to abide by my definition of a large pepperoni? I think we all would agree this would be a poor business strategy. If you advertise large pepperoni pizzas, you’re implying you have a product that has X dimensions and a specific kind of meat topping on it called pepperoni.

Again, how it mostly sounds to me is pointless. I mean, I’m pretty sure that when the organizers picked a transgender woman as a speaker for a businesswomen’s conference, it wasn’t because they simply hadn’t noticed that a lot of people still prefer to define the social category “woman” to exclude people who weren’t assigned female at birth. So I doubt your annoyance at the mere fact of what you consider their category violation is going to impress them much.

You didn’t answer this question either. I didn’t ask would the organizers cared if I complained. I asked it if was wrong,

If I complained, I imagine I would let them know I was hoping to hear a story from a woman who has navigated the business world as a lifelong female, since females are so underrepresented in the field.

920

[quote=YWTF]On one hand, you’re saying it’s wrong to look at a masculine looking individual and deem them non-woman on the basis of their appearance… I assume the rationale for this position is that you don’t believe you have to look like a certain gender to be that gender. You assert above that men and women have few physical differences, which implies you think phenotypes in one group can show in the other. Okay, I can get behind that.

So what’s the relevance of taking T to grow facial hair and muscles and acquire facial changes? What’s the relevance of baldness and all the other stuff you mentioned? Whether you’re aware of it or not, you are anchoring gender to one’s physical appearance.[/quote]
Well, no, I’m just emphasizing that it’s relatively easy and natural, based on human hormone levels, to change many typical physical characteristics across gender categories. Which is not at all the case for changing one’s physical characteristics across species categories, which is why your analogy between transgender identity and “otherkin” non-human identities is not very persuasive.

As your first paragraph correctly states, I certainly am not in the least trying to argue that anybody, whether transgender or cisgender, should be expected or required to make their physical characteristics conventionally gender-conforming.

Nope, that’s what I’ve been clearly stating all along that I’m not affirming. I was merely using the example of masculinizing hormone treatment to illustrate how permeable these boundaries of gendered appearance can be, if people want them to be.

So what? Why is the fact that some people are inevitably sometimes going to guess other people’s gender identity wrong, especially if we loosen up our attitudes about gender conformity, such a big deal for you?

If a 6’5" bearded titan identifies as a woman, then yes, she’s likely to be frequently perceived as a man. Again, so what? She’ll need to deal with that gracefully (at least when people are making honest mistakes rather than deliberately misgendering her), and people who know her need to make the effort to respect her gender identity. Why should this be an issue, irrespective of whether the 6’5" bearded titan happens to be cisgender or transgender?

Who’s pretending anything? ISTM that you are, if not “talking crazy”, at least quite strongly overreacting to a pretty simple and easy approach to the issue of gender identity. Namely, accept that for ordinary social purposes people are the gender they identify as, and accept that gender-nonconforming people (whether cis or trans) are more likely to be accidentally misgendered by people who don’t know them.

Really not seeing the supposed problem here, tbh. So I have to apologize to a 6’5" female-identified bearded titan the first time I meet her and mistakenly call her “sir” instead of “ma’am”. Who, and I ask this in all sincerity, cares? We all make superficial mistakes about people sometimes.

921

Well, I would disagree with your opinion in each case. Namely, I disagree with your opinion about how the social category “woman” should be defined, and I disagree with your opinion that a conference organizer choosing a conference speaker based on a different definition of “woman” gives you meaningful grounds for complaint.

I don’t quite see why you’re begging me to reframe that disagreement in terms of moral judgement about whether your views are “transphobic” or “wrong”. Can’t we just disagree about the opinions in question?

:face_with_raised_eyebrow: Well, I can only advise you to read the menu descriptions carefully before placing an order. If it’s really very important to you that any establishment you order pizza from is using exactly the same definitions of terms like “large” and “pepperoni” that you are, and you’ve encountered unexpectedly large discrepancies in category definitions in the past, then by all means check up on that before buying. Caveat emptor.

At this particular cultural moment, I think it’s reasonable for institutions such as business conferences to expect that most people will be aware that not everybody is using the exact same definitions for social categories such as “woman” and “man”. Caveat auditor.

922

I don’t speak for YWTF, but a lot of my problem with this is that we aren’t just talking about ordinary social purposes. In the UK there is currently a campaign to make this true for legal purposes. So anyone who wanted would be able to sign a piece of paper and be legally recognised as the opposite gender in cases where they are treated differently.

But why is it relevant to distinguish between genders legally? It’s because of the physical differences between the sexes, and because of the social differences in upbringing and how people are treated based on their appearing to be a certain gender. So I don’t think it is unreasonable to say, that if we are going to divorce sex from the simple biological definition that YWTF prefers, that these two aspects are still very important.

That means for things like sports, the different treatment should still be based on physical sex. For sharing a shower, it should be based on body and genital appearance (I’m less fussed about bathrooms because the cubicles give privacy).

Whereas for things like the conference of women in business, scholarships and affirmative action type things, being socially recognised as a woman due to appearance and behaviour should be a requirement. Because if you are not, you don’t have any of the experience of and problems with sexism that make these relevant. This appearance is something that trans women will have to work harder for than cis women, but that’s just bad luck.

People here keep saying OF COURSE it’s fine to make a distinction between cis and trans women in certain circumstances, but the trans activists are fighting to ban all distinctions, no exceptions. I am opposed to this, for the reasons given above.

Coming back to your original statement, there IS a difference between the burly bearded 6 footer with male bits and the burly bearded 6 footer with female bits. One of them will have been raised with male socialisation that leads to the ‘entitled dude’ attitude Dangerosa mentioned earlier in this thread. This person will be likely to dominate conversations, they will expect to be deferred to, maybe even to be served by the women around them. I want to be able to call out the entitled dude attitude without getting accused of transphobia.

And when I say by the women around them, I mean the people who look like women. Because most of the differences in how we treat people are subconscious, and your subconscious doesn’t care how people identify, it cares about appearance and behaviour. So if you actually care about being treated as the sex you identify as, then yes, those things are necessary.

So to summarise, these real world effects of biology and appearance are why I believe both are still important to defining gender, depending on the situation.