I would agree. There is a certain amount of lived experience required. Its going to take time to transition, that’s why its called a transition and not a “sudden impact event.” It is probable that one of the last stages in that transition is going to be getting accepted by most people - and you won’t ever get accepted by everyone. (Because we do that - you aren’t “Christian enough” or “Black enough” or you are a “RINO”).
None of us cis women were born women - we were born female and coded as girls and raised as girls. We hit puberty and started a transition from girlhood to womanhood, but that didn’t happen at 12 when you had to figure out how to use a pad and your mom took you bra shopping…it took years - probably very few for some - for others, a decade or longer. It wasn’t the mere physical transformation, there was a cultural and emotional transformation happening as well. And - outside of the puberty propaganda (“you are a woman now”) if 12 year old me started calling myself a woman…well, my women’s bookclub didn’t let our teen daughters sit in - but when the young women got to be college age, they started joining us. It seems reasonable that its going to take a woman who spent all their years until now presenting as a man at least a few years to make a similar transition.
Lately, I’ve been imagining myself as a freshmen college student who gets matched with a transwomen as a roommate I don’t think I’d be happy with that unless this person had spent the same number of years maturing into their womanhood as I have. I wouldn’t want to deal with the moodswings of the newly hormonal or the copycat phase that a lot of a young girls go through or just the general unpleasantness of being around someone who is going through a gender identity crisis. Once she’s gone through all of that, then yeah, we can do the roommate thing. But if you’re still in the transitioning? No, just no. I didn’t like being around 12-year-olds when I was a 12-year-old. Why would I want to share a room with one?
I have a transwomen coworker and she’s a great person. She was my intern when she first started several years ago–right when she was transitioning. And you could tell. She was calling me “hun” all the time (unless you are elderly, your face becomes punchable when you call me that) and showing up to work dressed like Punky Brewster. A wonderful person, but she was kind of all over the place. But now she’s found her style. She’s more relaxed and secure in herself. She’s in the “club”, in my eyes. But it took a while for my mind to laminate her membership card.
It’s not just their advantages that would drive my annoyance, though. A trans woman who has been socialized as male most of their life and is physically indistinguishable from any other male is not living in a world that sees them as a woman. Without that imprint, it calls into question their credibility as a woman representative. Maybe the world sees them as a man or maybe it sees them as trans. If you have to tell someone your pronouns for them to know your gender identity, then that makes your social experiences completely different from someone who never has to worry about anyone knowing they are a “she”.
As analogy, it would be like platforming a supposed expert on Japanese culture. But the speaker is not Japanese, has never even visited Japan, and has only recently started studying the subject. We don’t assume they are expert just because they declare it.
I’m not sure that distinction is as clear as you’re trying to present it: see below.
Well, what makes an “unrelated female individual taking care of child” as much of a mother as “female individual who gave the child half her genes and carried and bore it”? Calling an unrelated female a child’s “mother” is just as nonsensical as calling a person with a penis a “woman”, if we’re just talking about biological criteria. Biologically speaking, a female fish who never interacts with her offspring at all is just as much their “mother” as a human biological mother is, and a human adoptive mother is still just an unrelated adult female no matter how much maternal caring she does.
How you got around that, rhetorically, was by defining the primary feature of the concept “mother” to be the social caretaking role rather than the biological relationship. Then it’s obviously reasonable to expand the category to include adoptive mothers as well as biological ones.
There’s no reason we can’t do that for the category “woman” as well, if we chose to define the primary feature of that concept to be, say, having a psychological gender identity that’s female rather than having female genes or anatomy. Then it would be obviously reasonable to expand the category to include transgender women as well as cisgender ones.
Sure, it would be contradicting the established biological criteria for the category, but so does calling adoptive mothers “mothers”. We as a society are allowed to choose how we define social categories, whether by biological or social criteria or some mixture thereof.
Why? You still haven’t told me whether your supposedly natural and universal gender classification system considers physically intersex individuals, for example, to be men or women.
I don’t see why you get to demand from anybody else a perfectly consistent and universally applicable gender classification system when you can’t provide one yourself.
The thing is, I don’t believe that there ARE biologically males that present as fully male -no surgery or hormone therapy, male clothing and hairstyles, “physically indistinguishable from any other male”- running around purporting to be women in order to speak at women’s conferences and win prizes. At least not with any degree of sincerity.
If such a thing happened it would be probably some sort of Milo Yiannapolis / Jacob Wohl right wing performance art and I wouldn’t feel obligated to enable it. I’d probably call the guy out as a troll.
And I’m not going to consider right wing fearmongering Fox News unicorn hypotheticals while forming my opinions on transgenderism.
I think everyone has a different concept of what trans acceptance looks like and that’s the crux of the debate started by JKR.
I think these are the things we all can agree on:
99% of the time, it’s rude and harmful to not use a person‘s preferred pronouns. Referring to someone by their stated gender identity is respectful. Misgendering is shitty.
Some sex-segregated spaces don’t require biological females to be separate from males. It not a big deal whether males (cis or trans) use women’s restrooms. People should chill out on this.
Gender dysphoria exists and should be accommodated. Not every trans person has it, but many do. It is not a phony condition.
This is where I think things break down. Point out where you disagree me:
Gatekeeping is necessary to prevent people from abusing
accommodations that are intended for trans individuals. This means “trans” needs to be defined in some way using objective criteria, so that a man can’t just assert he’s a woman to get into the female locker room. We shouldn’t have to point to a specific example of this happening to recognize this as a plot hole.
Women have rights just like transgender people have rights. Both deserve respect. In situations in which women’s safety, privacy, and access to opportunity is compromised by allowing transwomen share space with them, then there needs to be 3rd spaces. This includes locker rooms, DV and rape shelters, and prisons.
Females have the right to compete against other females. Title IX is a thing. It hurts women’s access to athletic opportunities if males take up spaces and win spots that are intended to mitigate female disadvantages.
Transwomen are transwomen, and that is okay. The experiences that come with being transgender are rich and important. They are not collapsible under the same umbrella that covers adult human females, because they have a different basis. We don’t have to modify how “woman” is defined to allow trans women to feel validated. “Transwomen are transwomen” is actually more validating that implying that being a woman is all that matters. We need to be able to say this without incurring the wrath of a million people yelling TERF at us.
And I’m willing to bet you, like me, respected her pronouns and womanness on a one on one basis, while saying “not quite there yet” to yourself. Because we don’t need to be a jerk about it and we can respect someone, while at the same time thinking “not quite there yet” and not feeling like they are appropriate at our women’s bookclub - at least, not yet.
But mother is a role, woman is not. At this point, the analogy is not helping to clarify anything.
A legal guardian who is called Mother and a biological parent who is called Mother have equal rights because the law says so. But in social situations, it is purely context dependent. A nun is called Mother all the time. But no one would think a Mother in this sense belongs in the same kind of entity as the mothers in the maternity ward.
It seems obvious that it’s both - a woman who gives birth and then puts the baby up for adoption and never sees it again is not fulfilling the role of mother, but is still that baby’s biological mother.
Yes, that was me. And when a couple of woman coworkers made negative comments about all the “she” and “her” stuff behind her back, I told them to stop. And now they get along with her well.
To go back to the “mother” thing: Suppose every time the word “mother” was used, nuns interpreted thaty to mean them. So a sentence like “For centuries, mothers have risked their lives giving birth” could cause virginal nuns to take offense. They are “mothers” but many haven’t given birth.
It’s obvious that although there is a biological definition for mother and a social one (e.g. nuns), they are two different concepts. The don’t represent two variants of a single concept. They are two completely different concepts.
An adoptive mother and a biological mother are two variants of a single concept. But that is because they have a role that can be objectively defined that unites them.
A mother is a female parent, according to the dictionary. This would describe the adoptive parent who is female and the female who parented the fetus in utero.
I think to a certain degree. If someone who considers themselves female came up to me looking no different than a male I would have skepticism, but I would respect their wishes. Non-binary people get into a whole other murky category.
I have one trans male friend who isn’t physically transitioning at all and still goes by his birth name of Maggie. He still dresses masculine and everything, but he does look more like a butch lesbian. It does get confusing sometimes because he still uses Maggie and my brain automatically associates that name with female. But I consider him a man.
Rights aren’t a zero-sum game, one group of people gaining equal rights doesn’t take away the rights of anyone else, except the “right” to discriminate. We are facing somewhat of a backlash among LGB people since some people can’t see that the fight is the same.
I identified as a gay male before I transitioned (knowing that wasn’t really the case) and the same arguments I see against transgender people are the same arguments that were used unsuccessfully against LGB people. I was in the military when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell finally ended, which helped me survive as a gay man, but not as a trans woman because we are often marginalized within the community.
I think this mother analogy illustrates my problem with the new definition. I’ve been told a woman who gives birth but doesn’t raise the child is a mother. Fine. Then you say a woman who doesn’t give birth to the child but adopts/raises it is also a mother. And I’m fine with that too. But now you’re claiming you don’t need to be either of those things to be called a mother, you just need to declare you are one, and you’re using the two previous examples to justify it. “You agreed you don’t need to give birth to a child to be called a mother, and you agreed you don’t need to raise a child to be called a mother, so you have to agree that someone who does neither is just as much a mother as the women who do both.” Um no, that’s bullshit.
Exactly. I have been a part of a number of transgender communities both in real life and online, and these kinds of extreme examples that YTWF and others are coming up with are extremely rare (and we are usually not friendly to those we think are trying to fake a trans identity). That’s why I just don’t bother addressing this kind of fear-mongering.
Eh…sometimes that is true. Sometimes it isn’t true. If trans women are treated as women under Title IX, that is less positions on teams for cis women - which means fewer scholarship opportunities, less opportunity for college resume building, etc. Those things have been proven to matter. Likewise, if there are two spots on Target’s vendor list for companies like mine that are woman owned, and someone built their business and reached success with it while presenting as a man, then six months post coming out, snags one of those spots, then that does take something from the women who struggle to run businesses due to their gender. Again, those sorts of programs have been proven to matter. Sometimes it is a zero sum game in that there are only so many resources to go around, and those resources have been targeted toward women - cis women - because we’ve faced lifelong systemic negative bias. Having the advantages of having grown up male, and having the advantages of male biology, you haven’t had the same bias - different bias, I am sure when you were a gay man, but these programs aren’t set up to rectify the disadvantages of a gay man.
I’d still need to see evidence that anybody’s safety, privacy, and access to opportunity is actually being compromised, and that segregating transgender women would realistically remedy those problems. Again, speculative scenarios aren’t enough to justify that.
I support women’s sports but I don’t think that a blanket exclusion of transgender women is the way to go. Yes, I think we should be able to set some competition criteria so that, for example, a bunch of comedy bois on the men’s track team can’t just declare themselves female-identified on the day before the women’s meet and sweep all the trophies. But I don’t think that that means that every transgender girl should automatically be permanently disqualified from participation on girls’ teams.
As a parallel to a statement like “Ciswomen are ciswomen, and that is okay”, I 100% agree with this. If it’s intended to imply that transgender women should by default be excluded from the social gender category “women” designating cisgender women, though, I don’t agree.
There have been lots of people wanting to enforce similar distinctions between, say, “normal women and lesbians”, or “marriage and same-sex unions”. Some of those people were well-intentioned, by their lights: for instance, they wanted lesbians to be happy and tolerated in society, they just didn’t support the linguistic implication that lesbian identity was a normal way for women to be. Or they were fine with same-sex couples loving each other in stable relationships, but they felt “marriage” was an intrinsically heterosexual concept that same-sex couples didn’t qualify for. The success rate of such two-tier nomenclature systems has not been high enough for me to be enthusiastic about drawing similar distinctions between “women and transgender women”.
We didn’t have to modify the traditional definition of “marriage” to let same-sex couples know that we respect and value their unions, either. But, y’know, there’s something about that explicit refusal of inclusion that always smells a bit funny.
If transgender women tell me that that’s how they want me to show my support and validation for them, fine, I’m perfectly happy to do that.
But the validation that transgender women seem to be actually asking for, AFAICT, is “Transgender women are women”. And (with the usual caveats that this refers specifically to the social category of gender identity, that it does not require anyone to believe or assert anything counterfactual about transgender women’s biology or life history, that there are situations where differences between transgender women and cisgender women should be taken into consideration, that everybody is entitled to date and marry and present however they please, that transgender identity should not be resorted to as a “fix” for problems with gender stereotyping, homophobia, sexism, and so forth in our society, etc. etc. etc.), that’s where I stand.