NYTimes Op-Ed: Transgender vs. Cisgender view of "Woman" - grabbing popcorn

In My Humble Opinion
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Opinion | What Makes a Woman? - The New York Times (behind a paywall)

Looks like another log being thrown on the fire of Twitter flame wars: a woman is slamming how Caitlyn Jenner’s transition is presenting a definition of “Woman”/femininity that some women resent on a few levels.

I have no dog in this hunt. I am a straight, white, old male. To be clear: I fully support a person defining their own identity, straight, gay, transgender, racial identity - whatever; it is all good.

In this Op-Ed, Elinor Burkett compares and contrasts former Harvard President Larry Summers getting busted for claiming that women’s brains are different, to newly-renamed Caitlyn Jenner saying he (I believe that pronoun remains his preference) always “knew he had a female brain.” Summers got pilloried, Jenner has been applauded.

Burkett then looks at what Jenner points to in claiming how he wants to embrace his female identity. She quotes someone who who tweeted that she supported Caitlyn Jenner but wish she didn’t present herself as a sex babe. Burkett also discusses the day-to-day “drip, drip, drip” of cues that a woman faces that no man - even one who identifies as female - could possibly relate to.

Again, it is not my place to offer an opinion here. I guess I can see both sides: an individual should be able to define their own identity, and a transgender M2F shouldn’t be looked at as speaking for “all Women” and that cis women could really take issues with how femininity is being presented.

It’s not quite the Mad Men era anymore :wink:

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Burkett is missing the point. Jenner is not trying to set a universal standard that applies to other people the way that Summers did and Burkett is trying to do. Jenner is simply declaring her own identity.

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On the flip side, someone trans also has a day-to-day “drip, drip, drip” of cues no one cis can understand on an intuitive level.

On the other hand, I have never had trouble determining which restroom to use or risked arrest for guessing wrong, never had to worry about reaction of others who might find out I’m not what I appear to be, feared being unemployable anywhere but niche porn, being disowned by my family and shunned by everyone else, and as for rape - given the percentage of transwomen who have experienced rape I think the author is way, way off base at dismissing the risk transwoman face.

Yes, there is considerable difference between cis and trans women. Dwelling too much on it, though, obscures what they have in common.

30 years ago, when my radical feminist sister was still alive, I used to argue with her about the trans vs. cis women issues. It’s sad that it seems not much has changed between the rad feminists and the transgender community.

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Sorry, but that’s a horrible piece.

The idea that trans women are speaking for all women is just something the article creator made up. She gave no examples of this happening. Instead, she takes claims by trans women about what it means to them to be female and decides to take it personally. She actually tries to argue that what Caitlyn Jenner said about herself is actually about the article writer.

She gets upset that schools are endeavoring to be more trans friendly. She makes arguments that the homophobes made when schools tried to be more gay friendly. Or that trans supporters say the same thing about inclusionary language as feminists used to. It’s only a few percent of people, compared to all the straight people (or in her case cis women).

She’s also holding on to the old guard of feminism, the kind where you actually try to argue against there being differences between men and women. She’s minimizing the differences in the brains of men and women. She’s arguing against the science showing that trans women with female brains feel better with female hormones. Instead of seeing how feminism is like the trans movement with a different subject, she’s setting them against one another.

Basically, what’s happening is that she’s finding herself on the other side–the bigot side. And rather than try to change, she’s trying to blame trans people. She’s trying to act as if it’s okay to be transphobic because being trans disagrees with her philosophies. She thinks it’s up to her whether to support the trans community.

There’s nothing to see here but yet another old person being unable to change as society progresses and thus becoming a bigot.

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And, yes, she prefers to be referred to as “she,” as has been consistently done (except on Fox News) since she came out. A bot on Twitter was even made to tell people to use “she.” Bill Maher got his knickers in a twist because people caught him accidentally saying “he.”

If everyone had misunderstood, and Jenner wanted to be referred to with male pronouns, she would have said something by now. And I could not find anything like that.

Also, the following paragraph may have been unclear, so I’ll fix it:

She gets upset that schools are endeavoring to be more trans friendly. She makes arguments that the homophobes made when schools tried to be more gay friendly. She is upset that trans supporters say the same thing about inclusionary language as feminists used to. It’s only a few percent of people, compared to all the straight people (or in her case cis women).

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I’ve not read the linked article (due to paywall issues) but based on the OP I don’t think you’rer correct about this. The point being made is that in order for someone to have a “female brain” there has to be such a thing as a female brain to begin with, which by definition would be different than a “male brain”. Which is pretty much the point Summers was making.

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I read the piece yesterday and while I think the author is a bit hysterical about the subject, she makes some very good points. Why is it so-so-so important to take Jenner at instant face value as a “woman” - simply because s/he says to - when it’s often so-so-so ‘demeaning’ to make assumptions about women-by-birth?

Jenner is a man who lived 60 years as a man, who’s thought about being a woman for a long time, and is finally acting out the gender role. That makes hir a noob at the job and in no way an expert on what a woman-by-birth thinks, feels or “knows.”

The author was correct to point this out, however contra-trans-squee it may be.

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The much more interesting (and in some cases hilarious) parts of the article to me had nothing to do with Jenner.

[QUOTE=NYT]
In January 2014, the actress Martha Plimpton, an abortion-rights advocate, sent out a tweet about a benefit for Texas abortion funding called “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas.” Suddenly, she was swamped by criticism for using the word “vagina.” “Given the constant genital policing, you can’t expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a policed, binary genital,” responded @DrJaneChi.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=NYT]
“So you’re really committed to doubling down on using a term that you’ve been told many times is exclusionary & harmful?” asked one blogger. Ms. Plimpton became, to use the new trans insult, a terf, which stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.”
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=NYT]
Let me get this right: The word “vagina” is exclusionary and offers an extremely narrow perspective on womanhood, so the 3.5 billion of us who have vaginas, along with the trans people who want them, should describe ours with the politically correct terminology trans activists are pushing on us: “front hole” or “internal genitalia”?
[/QUOTE]

It just can’t be true that the trans community is really pushing to use the term “front hole” instead of “vagina”.

[QUOTE=NYT]
“Abortion rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue,” wrote Emmett Stoffer, one of many self-described transgender persons to blog on the topic. It is “a uterus owner’s issue.”
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=NYT]
Accordingly, abortion rights groups are under pressure to modify their mission statements to omit the word woman, as Katha Pollitt recently reported in The Nation. Those who have given in, like the New York Abortion Access Fund, now offer their services to “people” and to “callers.” Fund Texas Women, which covers the travel and hotel expenses of abortion seekers with no nearby clinic, recently changed its name to Fund Texas Choice. “With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the group explains on its website.
[/QUOTE]

Seems like a losing position to act like abortion is not a woman’s issue.

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So you’d deny Caitlyn Jenner one? Is that it?

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I think they’re hitting it from the other side. I took it to mean that because a born female that identifies as a man could get pregnant, then not all people that need abortions are women. Of course it is obvious that not all women have the capability to become pregnant. Even disregarding the transgender women such as Jenner, you have a huge number of women that don’t have the potential to be pregnant due to age or whatever other reason. They’re now say that pregnancy isn’t even just a woman thing, it can be men as well.

I find most of this language policing stuff ridiculous, but I generally play along.* I recognize that comes across as patronizing, but so be it. It doesn’t bother me much to use the language that others insist on. You’ve got a couple of prolific language policers potentially butting heads here in the more outspoken subsets of the feminist and transgender communities. I think it might be interesting watching them go at it.
*I have my own moments of disliking terms. If something’s usage is highly inaccurate then it bothers me. If it works 95% of the time and is inaccurate 5% of the time that doesn’t bother me though.

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oh man. “Front hole” is a word than needs to be held down in the bathtub and drowned and buried in an unmarked grave.

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It’s just so absurd I don’t know what to think. Next they’re going to tell me that the politically correct term for a homosexual is gay wad. Seems like 12 year olds are in charge of this or something.

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… it’s been several decades since my anatomy lessons, but isn’t the front hole the uretra?

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As someone who wants to be fully supportive of transgendered people in society but struggles to understand it, the redefining of what it means to be a “man” or “woman” is the biggest stumbling block for me. It seems like people want to define gender down to a list of stereotypes that they associate with the group they feel they belong to, and say that those stereotypes and behaviors are what define membership in that group. And that runs contrary to everything I’ve understood since I was a kid, which is that gender stereotypes don’t matter and aren’t relevant to what a person can or should do - a boy isn’t a girl because he plays with dolls or wears pink, a girl isn’t a boy because she’s into sports and GI Joe, and having an effeminate name doesn’t mean you’re female or vice versa.

So while that may be a bit of a tangent, I understand where this author is coming from.

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No, no, no.

It’s back hole. :smiley:

So the dialogue becomes about holes - front hole, back hole, top hole, a… never mind.

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Jenner may have an unusual experience as a woman, but so what? I don’t have any magic mind-meld connection with all people born with a vagina. My experience as a woman is different than, say, one of a woman in Taliban Afghanistan or an Taiwanese heiress or prostitute in Australia. There isn’t one monolithic female experience.

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Of course not, but the notion of the “feminine mystique” as reinforced by decades of feminism, Goddessing, worship of the few matriarchal societies and so forth has pretty well embedded the idea that “women” have some monolithic secret culture.

Which, for me, boils down to “Yeah. You [del]guys[/del] gals bleed in sync with the moon. Wow.”

After two wives, two long-term relationships and four daughters, I am no longer spooked or awed by the event. :slight_smile:

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Get back to me when she has ovaries and a uterus. And, even if she had them, she would be post menopausal.

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That’s the point I was talking about. It’s wrong for you or me or anyone else or society in general to tell somebody who they are or what they are. The only person who has the right to decide who and what they are is the individual themselves.

So Caitlyn Jenner has the right to say she is a woman. She does not have the right to define other people.

You, me, Elinor Burkett, Larry Summers, and everyone else has the same right as Caitlyn Jenner. We can all define ourselves.

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Well, it’s one of them, but everybody’s got one (even intersex…), so it can’t exactly be used as a definitive term (“this person is a ____ because of a front hole”).