Add a splash or two of Frangelico, put a stick of cinnamon in it, top it with whipped cream and chocolate shavings.
A valid meaning? How can a term created out of whole cloth a mere eight years ago for a comic strip (aka humor) on a website 99.9% of the world has never heard of even be a term?
In any case, using such a “term” doesn’t make for productive discussion, since most people have never heard of it, and don’t agree on a meaning, let alone a “valid” one.
Coffee. Bailey’s. Kahlua. Creme de Cacao. Optional heavy cream, whipped, on top (I don’t).
You’d think me in the morning if you had any recollection of it.
Because that’s how language works?
Can’t have kahlua, sadly, as the caffeine triggers my seizures. 
(Although I know there ARE recipes for homemade – I wonder if it’s possible to do so with decaf?)
So it does! how strange. The scrolling counter on my screen matches that pop-up right up until post 200 and beyond. For some reason by the time it gets to that post in question the scrolling post counter lags the actual count by 5.
Is that the same for you?
Again, you miss the point. I was having a conversation with Kimstu and others about whether gender identity exists independently of gender conformance, not whether it’s a thing at all.
If you’re right, then cisgender and transgender people can never understand each other. A cisgender person can say they believe you when you state that you have some identity, but unless they know what the words mean, that agreement is meaningless. And I think the evidence suggests that there is enough diversity among transgender and trans-adjacent people that there is a real question as to what people mean when they say they identify a certain way.
Now, I think cis- and trans- are in fact capable of coming to an understanding, and I don’t just mean in a superficial way. But it’s not easy to translate inner feelings into words. It takes time and effort, and certainly more than repeated declarations of stuff that’s already been agreed to.
Thank you for this beautifully succinct summary. I’ve seen this such a lot, but never quite realised it condenses down to this little truism.
Thanks for the input, and yeah, this is kinda circling around the point I’ve been trying to make. If circumstances were a little different, you might have called yourself a non-conforming transwoman. The words are different than what you call yourself, but your identity (presumably) would not have changed. A person’s real identity comes out in the way they act and think, not so much the labels they use.
Which of course isn’t to say we shouldn’t people’s preferred labels (pronouns, names, or otherwise). Everyone deserves that level of basic politeness. But if someone wants me to think of them as a woman or man, and they don’t fit into an obvious pigeonhole, I’m going to at least wonder exactly what they mean by that, because there clearly is no fixed meaning.
I watched the show Paper Girls recently, which has a tomboy character that I wasn’t initially sure wasn’t trans (until realizing that the title of the show wouldn’t have worked that way). For the purposes of the character, though, it didn’t matter. Her identity was obvious even when it wasn’t clear if she thought of herself as a boy or girl. They might have been trans had they been (fictionally) born 30 years later.
No offence intended, but this is a classic example of projecting. Just because you would be annoyed by this does not mean everyone would be. I have to say that if someone used female pronouns to refer to me (a cis-gender male), I would barely consider it worth mentioning, I genuinely don’t care. Indeed I think gender-specific language is a bit like gender-specific bathrooms (as opposed to private bathrooms that anyone can use) - rarely useful and often causes more problems than it solves.
It seems to me you are suggesting that not caring what language others use towards oneself implies you are willing to condone and use impolite or hateful language towards others (and if that is not what you intended, I apologise). I don’t think this is correct.
I would not be personally offended if someone referred to me (a white person) by a racial slur. But I do take care to avoid using (or condoning - and I hope I would call out the usage for this reason, rather than for reasons of personal offence) racial slurs myself.
I would not be personally offended if someone referred to me (a straight person) by a homosexual slur. But I do take care to avoid using (or condoning - and I hope I would call out the usage for this reason, rather than for reasons of personal offence) such slurs myself.
I would not be personally offended if someone mispronounced my name - but I do try to take care to learn and use the correct pronunciation of others’ names.
I would not be personally offended if someone referred to me (a cisgender male) by a female pronoun. But I do try to learn and use others’ preferred pronouns.
I’m cis, and I understand what Johanna is saying just fine. I don’t have to feel what she’s feeling to understand her. She’s explained it sufficiently well.
I don’t see why this signifies, any more than there is ambiguity if someone says they’re “Black”, or “a geek”, or whatever. Both of those have diversity of meaning, but any one person is going to mean one thing by it, and all you have to do is ask them for clarification if deeper understanding is for some reason required.
Labels are intimately tied in to how we think (and hence act).
Maybe you genuinely think that, and maybe it’s true – dominant demographics can say bullshit like “I don’t see color” and “all lives matter”, and they can even mean it. When you’re the top of the stack, who gives a shit.
Obviously, this wouldn’t be true for someone who has transitioned or is trying to.
Anyway, I think you’re wrong – if this happened in real life, like all of your friends and family just started referring to you as she and her in person, in emails, etc., I imagine it would get old.
According to her, you’re just a fish that can’t detect water.
And to be extra clear, she fundamentally misunderstood how the thread was going. I did not deny the existence of gender identity. What I think is that it has no separate existence from gender conformity, whether that comes in the form of physical or social traits. There is no Platonic ideal of maleness or femaleness, just a set of traits that are either physical characteristics or arbitrary cultural markers.
That doesn’t make it not real or not important or anything. Just that “gender identity”, by itself, is an incomplete idea.
Geek could really mean anything, and I’m not sure really qualifies as a distinct identity for the purposes here. If someone told me they were a geek, I’d ask if they were into. About all I’d guess is that whatever it was, they were really into it.
Black carries stronger connotations. Especially if we’re talking Black vs. black, and if we’re talking about a specific country (like the US). There are some pretty distinct cultural markers, and while I wouldn’t stereotype any particular individual, I’d go into the conversation with some degree of context.
But yes, your point is consistent with what I said: it’s going to take some clarification to really get at what they mean (of course, this is all fairly personal stuff, so I’m not going to ask people out of the blue).
I don’t think I’m as onboard with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as you are. Sure, they’re an influence. But most of my thoughts aren’t in words. It’s a hard and lossy process to convert them to language. My identity is what I am, and what I do. Every label I apply to myself comes with a host of caveats.
To clarify myself slightly on this point: the conformity would be with respect to the person’s desired outcome. A person that had not yet actually transitioned in any way, but deeply wanted to, would of course have an identity matching where they wanted to be.
I do give a shit about others, just not so much about myself - I think my subsequent post (#471) clarifies this.
Quite so, which is why I’m more than happy to wear a badge showing “He/They” as my pronouns (even though I don’t really care - I recognise this can help to normalise the issue for those to whom it is, rightly, important).
To me this comes across as on the one hand, you’re arguing for better understanding of and consideration for how others experience the world, whereas with this statement you are dismissing my stated opinion as incorrect - which is kind of the opposite. It’s a really tiny issue compared with the central topic though, and I think it’s clear we agree on the important issues, so I won’t pursue this hijack further.
No, according to her YOU are a fish denying the existence of water. Because of either YOUR lack of empathy or because you are being disingenuous.
Err, no, I’m not the one questioning anything she’s said.
I wasn’t talking linguistic relativism, I was talking semiotics. Derrida, not Sapir-Whorf.
Labels aren’t necessarily verbal, but in any case, words are going to be a part of it at some point.
I don’t need to understand it to accept it. Your need to understand it, to pick it apart in minute detail, is a burden on others who frankly have more than enough going on in their lives.
We all need to stop questioning and demanding and start loving and accepting.
One of my trans women friends, a white European with a philosophical bent, went on a hell of a rant against identity. Arguing that the very concept of identity is bad and we should scrap it. I got what she was saying, I understand well what a vicious trap an identity can be (ethnicity, religion, nationality). Got me to think why we have them at all.
Human beings use identities to relate to others. An identity is like a mask, something we have to put on to be visible to others. A hermit who never has any interaction with other people can set identity aside altogether. As soon as you interact with another human, identities come into play. It’s an imperfect, often malfunctioning device. It can never sum of the perfect totality of all that we are. We are potentially so much more than our identities, but we compress our whole being into these limited simulacra of ourselves. I can understand how having gotten to that point, my friend decided it would be better to abolish identity altogether.
But she forgot about compassion toward others whose only hope of getting through crises in their day-to-day lives in the human world is with their identities. Compassion for other human beings always comes first. While it’s healthy to keep in mind the limits and imperfections of identities,* they exist in society for a necessary reason.
As above conversations have brought out, privileged white male affluent cis-het Americans can afford to scoff at identity altogether. RitterSport said it best: “When you’re at the top of the stack, who gives a shit.” I’ll always insist on compassion for human beings who have to struggle with identity. Even though I think existence takes precedence over essence, we still need essence in our existence.
*The gravy of my existence has burst the mashed potato dam of my identity and mingled with the peas and rest of my plate of my worldview.