Did they, though? They arrived at the same word, but not necessarily the same category.
I don’t have perfect insight into other people’s thought processes, but language has a bunch of words to describe internal state and it mostly works as one would expect. If I think chocolate is tasty, and someone else says the same thing, I can look if they voluntarily eat chocolate, that they appear pleased when doing so, that they also seem to enjoy it in conjunction with the same things I do, like peanut butter, and so on. I don’t know for sure that their internal experience is identical, but I can guess it’s pretty close based on the evidence.
If two people identify as male, but their description of it is totally different, and it results in completely different behavior, and so on–how is it meaningful to talk about? The word itself is just a sound, or a string of letters. It has to have some meaning aside from that. I’m not demanding a hard delineation or anything; no word is perfectly precise in its meaning. But there’s gotta be something.
For me, the only way I was able to understand this was to imagine identifying as female, and how that would feel. What if people started referring to me as “she”? Can I actually look at who I am, and think that I am female?
I understand that, for some people, it doesn’t seem like that would bother them. They do not have a strong sense of gender identity. But I found that I do.
I don’t know if this method will be helpful for anyone else, but I thought I’d put it out there for those who say they don’t get what it means to “feel like a man.”
I think that, ultimately, as @Dr.Strangelove noted, gender identity has to involve exclusion, of not identifying as something else.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel defensive or that you were demanding evidence. It’s just that when gender identity and external body are in sync you don’t feel anything unusual. But when people who feel female and look male, when they look at themselves in the mirror there’s a complete disconnect- imagine tomorrow if you woke up, got out of bed, felt like yourself but when you looked in the mirror you saw a female body. It’d be a shock and your internal narrative would not match the external. Trans folks often feel that way their whole lives, like they were placed in the wrong body. Little kids begging not to be called a girl. Not just little girls who don’t like pink or dolls but are happy to be grouped with the girls, but those who reject that label in its entirety.
That’s what I mean about just believing them- how do you begin to explain or even notice what your internal state feels like, except when it’s wrong?
Ever so clearly shown when they can not answer when presented with photos of folks that are more than passing and are asked ‘Which facilities should this person use?’
I guess maybe it’s best understood in a relative sense. “Identify as male” has no fixed meaning. However, it may mean “I am AFAB, and uncomfortable with some components of that, and have taken steps toward maleness”. Those steps may not be the same for different people, and they may travel a different distance. But it is the step away from their assigned gender that is important.
But the meaning is that they don’t identify as female or nonbinary. They were both given the female hat at birth, and felt that didn’t fit. They presumably tried on various non-binary hats, and that didn’t fit. So then they found this male hat, and it did fit.
You seem to be seeking something beyond that, and I don’t think there necessarily is such. If we lived in a different society with different gender classifications, they’d likely wind up identifying differently. Consider the cultures with three genders, where someone we would think of as trans female identifies instead as third gender.
As for the usefulness: both of them can say they want to be referred to using male pronouns, and acknowledged as men, not women. Their male identity changes how people interact with them.
Edit: yes, I think what you say in the post above mine gets at the issue. You posted that while I was still typing.
Yeah, I hope it goes without saying that I’m happy to use whatever pronouns/names/whatever that are requested. But that is also a cultural artifact. I get that it is important to some, but it really is just an arbitrary language thing. As an element of gender identity, it only makes sense as a function of how gender is treated in language and society.
At any rate, it seems we converged on the same basic idea here. Thanks.
Well, being cisgender myself, I don’t have much of an intuitive understanding even of what it means for real transgender people to identify as a gender different from their birth biological sex, much less what it means for two fictional characters made up by a fellow cisgender person to do so.
All I can do is to take their word for it about their own identification, and have the courtesy to use the names and pronouns that they prefer. If it should be the case that either or both of them somehow still don’t “seem” male in some way to my gender-binary-indoctrinated perceptions, that’s my problem (and not a particularly big problem, at that).
I will say, though, that I’ve recently been surprised at how easy it can be to reprogram one’s perceptions just by the habitual use of preferred names and pronouns. I was talking the other day to a transgender male acquaintance who had fairly recently transitioned, and whom I had met and spoken to quite a few times while he was still presenting as female. I had been a little nervous about accidentally misgendering or deadnaming him just because I thought I might tend to associate his conversation, activities etc. with his previous female presentation (and his current appearance isn’t all that different).
But it didn’t happen, and as I encountered and talked to him a few times in passing, although I didn’t forget the fact of his previous female presentation or the stuff we had talked about back then, more and more I began to get the impression that I had previously been talking to, I don’t know, some female cousin of his or something who had been telling me about what he was up to and working on and so forth.
Is that weird? I’ve got a sort of vicarious dissociative identity disorder about this guy, because the female-presenting person I assumed he was when I first met him still seems like the memory of an actual person to me, but it no longer seems to be him. I imagine that if I keep on meeting and talking to him, the memory of this imaginary “cousin” will fade and I’ll forget he ever seemed different to me from how he seems now.
I’ve missgendered non passing trans people before. I hate doing it, but I’ve never once been scolded about it. It’s something I think is understood to have been engraved in me since forever. That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt them when I do it. But I try not to.
It’s something I truly want to be understanding of, because so few seem to be. And that’s got to be awful to deal with sometimes. It kinda breaks my heart.
It’s not always so simple. I have a transitioned coworker. Switching to the new names, pronouns, etc. was easy enough, even though I’d known her for >10 years. The ongoing issue is that we are a programming house, and this person’s deadname (including usernames and initials) is embedded all over the place. It’s basically impossible to get rid of; the code and checkin history and other things are just always there as a constant reminder.
I haven’t slipped or anything, and the acquaintance would be understanding even if I did. But I can’t pretend that the old them was a relative, because occasionally I have to ask her about code she wrote way back when, and possibly the code still contains those references. I don’t think she’d particularly care if those references showed up, but I still feel like I have an obligation to avoid these situations, and that means some degree of diligence on my part that would not exist for someone else.
It also doesn’t help that her (first) deadname is the same as my name, as well as a third person who is no longer in the group. At one point were called the “Three Firstnames” since it was a little unusual to have three people with the same first name in a group of about 10 people.
Yeah, well, that’s not so much about transgender identity per se as about the curse of literacy. I love reading and writing, but sometimes I do wonder if inventing it was a mistake for our species. Just little scraps of the past sticking all over us all the time.
That’s not true. Takes a little work, but totally doable (I know, we’ve done it.) git filter-repo is your friend (assuming you’re using git, but doubtless similar toolsets are available for others)
Perforce doesn’t allow normal users to rewrite history like that. I believe admins can, but I don’t know the details.
But the problem is worse than that. She’s been at the company for around 20 years, with maybe the first 15 using her deadname. There are hundreds of branches. Branches within branches–we have a release branch, and then several numbered subrelease branches. Not all old branches are dead; some of them are for customers that want high stability. No obvious way to tell which is which.
Code gets moved around. Sometimes dozens of times, usually by someone else. Sometimes whole files get moved or renamed, other times it’s just bits of code.
The references are not always obvious. Just imagining a simple note to oneself:
// First Last: fix this at some point
// FirstL: fix this at some point
// FLast: fix this at some point
// FMLast: fix this at some point
// FML: fix this at some point
I’ve seen all of these, and probably more. I’m not even sure that FirstL is unique. We have thousands of engineers.
Now, there are some simple changes that could be done now. I’ve seen these persist, so my supposition is that she actually doesn’t care too much. Maybe she fixes them as she runs across them, but I review a fair amount of her code and I don’t recall ever seeing a deadname replacement.
And of course there’s more than just code. I have a collection of very old emails, either useful or funny. We had an employee retire a short time ago, and I copied a funny email he wrote from the past. But after I sent it I realized I didn’t check it for her deadname. And actually it did have it, but it referred to me, not her. Crisis averted, but it was close.
It’s almost exactly the same timing with my colleague, and it sounds like a similar codebase size. We still made it happen. Now, admittedly, we were going through our entire codebase anyway, to transition from Python 2.7 to 3, so it felt like a good time to do this as well. But it would have happened anyway.
That’s entirely possible, not everyone who transitions is hung up on avoiding deadnames, IME.
The bathroom stuff is such a bullshit issue. If trans people have to use bathrooms matching their biological gender than predatory men can pretend to be trans men. If trans people use bathrooms is their gender identity than predatory men can pretend to be trans women. The former does not protect people any better than the latter, and obviously puts trans people at greater risk by forcibly outing them.
On a more fundamental level, rape and assault are already against the law. Someone who’s willing to do those is likely willing to also walk through a door they aren’t supposed to walk through.
There were rapes in public bathrooms back when all the trans people were in the closet. Letting trans women use public ladies rooms does exactly zero to the risk of predators lurking in them, because those predators don’t give a shit about a piddly little law about who’s allowed in the room.
And if running because you see a guy in the bathroom worked, there wouldn’t have been those rapes 20 years ago, when an insurance underwriter who looked at claim data told me i should use supermarket rest rooms, not the ones at gas stations. For that matter, if running because you see a suspicious person works at all, it’s still a valid thing to do. You just substitute suspicious behavior for “looks masculine”. After all, you can’t tell whether the person hiding in the other stall is male, you don’t actually know they are waiting there to pounce on you until they ACT in a suspicious way.
It’s a total red herring.
And i think enough people have realized that that the trans-haters have moved on to attacking the tiny number of trans women athletes. A miniscule number of people who barely matter, except they give transphobes the opportunity to say, “that person isn’t really female, and by the way, neither are any other trans women.”
Sex segregation is needed in places where violence is a risk (like prisons and domestic violence shelters), where women are undressing (because most men are heterosexual and stronger than women so they both desire the female body and are capable of imposing their will to get it) and in any physically based contest (because, again, men are significantly stronger than men). This is the entire point of sex-segregated spaces.
So now I’ll turn this around - why is there a need for binary classification by gender? Are you simply arguing that we should be all humans together all the time? Because that’s actually not what gender theory argues - it says that there must be a classification system but it must not be based on the body.
The reason why the classification system was created in the first place was because of differences in the body - because if a man and a woman come into physical conflict, 99 percent of the time the man will win. This may not seem significant to you if you’re in the part of the population that would win 99% of the time, but it’s certainly significant to that part of the population that would lose 99% of the time
…and then immediately went back to being wrong again. If you don’t think people intrinsically have a gender identity, then clearly you don’t think that it “matches” your sex, because how can something that doesn’t exist “match” anything?
I love reading and writing, but sometimes I do wonder if inventing it was a mistake for our species. Just little scraps of the past sticking all over us all the time.