Did you/do you actually believe that it has to get that bad before solutions are sought?
I always thought it was never anything less than completely intolerable. I genuinely didn’t know that “mild” dysphoria was a thing.
If I’d had to wait for it to get bad at all, I don’t think I would’ve done it.
In my mind, I didn’t have a problem that needed solving. I assumed “gender dysphoria” meant exactly what it sounds like: feeling bad in a way that’s obviously connected to your gender. I just wanted to experiment with something I was curious about, emboldened by learning that it had worked out well for other people who felt like I did.
There was a nearby clinic where I could get HRT prescribed simply by signing some consent forms, on the theory that showing up and asking for hormones is enough to meet the diagnostic criteria. So I went in on a Wednesday and said something like “I’ve been having some gender thoughts, and I think I want to try hormones. Can I?” They asked about my history, made sure I knew what to expect, ordered some lab tests, and I had pills in my hand by Monday.
In retrospect, I can look back at some patterns in my life and recognize that they were probably signs of gender dysphoria. I’d gotten so used to feeling like that that it didn’t register as “bad”, it was just how life was. Only after experiencing what it was like to feel good about those things did I realize what I’d been missing.
In my case, I held off for as long as I could until I couldn’t stand it any longer and the dysphoria built up to unbearably acute. When I hit a crisis, that was the signal to definitely go ahead with transition.
And I think this recognition of the very diverse ways that transgender identity can manifest itself goes a long way to explaining why Aspidistra’s black-and-white total rejection of the whole concept of “gender identity” is misguided.
Human neurobiology related to sex and gender, and perceptions thereof, is really complicated and diverse. Human neurobiology about everything related to the self-perception of human bodies and the physical world around them is really complicated and diverse. You can’t just neatly fit everybody into one of two very distinct boxes and insist that nobody may assign themselves to a different box based on how they personally feel about it.
Nobody should need to have any kind of textbook presentation of massive gender dysphoria in order to have their self-identification respected. That’s not a “gender industry”, that’s just basic human rights.
The vast majority of self-identified transgender and non-binary individuals report being happier living as the gender they identify as. Well, that’s good enough for me; it’s their own business and doesn’t hurt anybody else. If a few of them later decide that their gender transition was more experimental than satisfying, and shift back towards identifying as their birth-assigned gender, or as non-binary or agender or whatever, that’s fine too.
Plenty of people experiment temporarily with important aspects of their identity, because they’re not sure what works best for them. There are people who spend some time in same-sex relationships before deciding that they’re fundamentally straight, or more straight than gay, or whatever. There are people who feel they’ve found their true selves in a particular career or religion or whatever, but then that feeling doesn’t last.
None of that automatically invalidates the experience of anybody who finds that their new identity does really work for them and does express who they really are.
Personally, I don’t go around calling people bigots just because they have private feelings of doubt about something. That’s their business.
But I would agree that if you feel entitled to call a self-identified transgender woman “he” simply because you feel she’s not presenting in a sufficiently feminine-looking way, that’s rude. There are plenty of cisgender women who dress, talk and act “like a stereotypical man”. Some cisgender women even have beards. You don’t get to call them “he” either, not without being rude.
All of this is giving me annoying flashbacks to the dimly remembered 1970s when it was still socially acceptable to make jokes about a gay man being “not really a man”, or a lesbian being “not really a woman”. It was stupid and narrow-minded to gatekeep the labels of “man” and “woman” against homosexual people back then, and it’s stupid and narrow-minded to gatekeep those labels against transgender people now.
Let people choose their own labels about their fundamental personal identity. The minority of people who are deliberately lying about their chosen labels for nefarious purposes can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but there’s no valid reason to try to pre-empt them by making up rigid rules about who’s not allowed to use which label.
I think that literally anything in the human condition can be experienced in varying degrees. Once upon a time, it was socially unacceptable (and often illegal) to be gay. So only people who were at the far end of the Kinsey scale and had a fairly strong sex drive identified as gay. And most of them were mentally ill from the societal stress. And they had a really high suicide rate. Today we see people who identify all over the Kinsey scale, and gays and straights and bisexuals all have similar mental health issues.
I hope we’ll get to the same place with trans people. From those who are completely miserable living in the wrong gender, to those who are just happier and more at peace with themselves if they switch, to those who chose to inhabit someplace between the gender binary options, to those who are comfortably cis.
It’s not that rare for there to be more than one way to be something. You can be a parent because you gave birth to a baby, or because you adopted or helped raise a child. You can be an American because you were born there or your parents were American, or because you immigrated to America, lived there for years, and were naturalised. But you have to do one of those things. Similarly, it’s not unreasonable to think you can be a woman because you have a female body and were raised as a girl, even if you don’t fulfil common stereotypes of femininity, or you can be a woman because you live according to the typical female gender role in that society, are seen and treated as a woman by other people, etc. Both have traits common to ‘women’ as a group that distinguish them from ‘men’ as a group, even if mostly not the same ones.
Thank you for agreeing that trans women are women . . . unless that “etc.” is doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes.
I guess Aspidistra thinks these people weren’t making any statement other than “we have penises!” They couldn’t possibly have meant anything else, because the word only has a single definition.
@Thing.Fish: You may not have seen this:
Does that mean we’re not allowed to reply to stupid shit she posted before the topic ban? I guess that would be logical, since we’re not supposed to continue mocking banned posters. Anyway, she’s certainly not the only one to use the “words have only one possible meaning” argument.
I can’t speak to the rules.
I do agree that arguing dictionary definitions about complex topics is the kind of crap a 2nd grader (i.e. 7yo) might try against Dad. To damned little effect.
It’s what you tend to get when people try to argue in favor of essentialism with people who don’t just accept the concept. Everyone points out all the excepts to whatever definition is being used, the proponents of essentialism try to gerrymander the definition to eliminate all the exceptions while still fitting whatever they want to be there, and the argument continues in circles from there.
I’m more in favour of existentialism…
I have some trans friends. I have some straight friends, some homosexual friends.
I do not have any religious friends. The category error is not so much of an error as it is a trend.
I can be friends with anybody that can be friends with my friends.
This is a good life philosophy.
A friend of my friend is my friend.
That’s a good way of looking at it.
Fwiw, i have some religious friends. Even some whom I’d call evangelical Christians. And they are friends of my trans and gay friends. They believe that Christ preached love. And they try to live that.
(A gender-non-conforming friend said that one of them, who has kind of struggled with his movement to wearing all women’s clothes, etc., was at her church when a member of the small, tight-know congregation asked why they weren’t lobbying against gay rights. She replied, “we don’t do that”, and that was the end of it. She’s not exactly on the front lines of marching for LGBT rights, but she is keeping her church from opposing them.)
I like to think of mysefl as religious. I can really only think of one commandment out of the six hundred and thirteen that transitioning violates. It is forbidden to voluntarilly become incapable of procreation except in cases where life is at stake. So, my father violated Jewish law when he said two kids was enough and had a vasectomy. Due to the current state of science (things may or may not change. I very much hope that they do) we can remove a reproductive system, but not provide a new one.
Of course, these commandments are only considered binding if you are a Jew. Other than that commandment (which if followed means Mom should have divorced Dad when he chose to become sterile) I have no objections.
I belong to a travelling congregation. Rather than banishing Jews who have married gentiles, the rabbi welcomes those gentiles to services so they can share in our joy and learn about Judaism. For years, I wondered where the rabbi stood on LGBTQ+ issues. I was afraid to ask him in case he turned out to be a bigot. Then, one day he proudly announced that his son was engaged- to a wonderful Jewish boy. I am certain that being a Jewish parent and a rabbi, he will lean on them to adopt a child after they marry. It is my feeling that any trans Jew who voluntarilly becomes sterile must ask themselves- am I capable emotionally, physically, financially of raising a child? If the answer is yes, it is their duty to adopt one. It is also the duty of every Jew who knows them to help them adopt.
Technically… vasectomies can be reversed. My ex-girlfriend’s dad had it done. I have no idea of the technicalities. He subsequently had a son and twin daughters.
I, though in no way religious, got a vasectomy aftee my second child.
I’m also technically Catholic, so as Monty Python sung, god is quite irate.
