Of course we aren’t. Because you’re not one of us. You have had none of the fundamental experiences of being a woman.
Other than on the phone, have you ever passed as a woman? Or tried to?
Or wanted to?
You mean as female?
Slight amused that this link popped up on George Takei’s Facebook page this morning: https://www.knowable.com/a/men-share-things-they-like-to-do-that-society-deems-as-feminine-or-unmasculin?utm_content=inf_10_3136_2&tse_id=INF_8c5e0e90bc1c11e78240a3a6bbddd67d
To elaborate –
Think of a roomful of trans women. People akin to Johanna (btw, thank you Johanna for the supportive things you posted upthread!) and Una Persson. Apologies to either or both of them if they don’t appreciate being Exhbit B and Exhibit C to my Exhibit A, but anyway…
To some extent (between 0 % and 100 %) the impetus for their choosing to transition may have been that the “way they were” — personality and behavior and their sense of the perceptions of others —didn’t fit right as men, as the masculine gender.
To some other extent (also between 0 and 100%) it may have been that on a physiological level they sensed that the morphology of their body — the biologically male aspects of their physical structure — wasn’t what they should have been born with.
And to some extent (yet again between 0 and 100 %) it may have revolved around the specific perception of others that they were physically MALE, which didn’t feel right socially, sexually, and/or physically, they wished to be perceived as FEMALE people instead.
And probably other factors I haven’t listed or thought of.
My own tally would be 100%, 0% and 0% respectively.
Some people may feel that that first factor is somehow irrelevant, either altogether or in the absense of the second and third factor. Why, I don’t know.
In fairness, some people regard the third factor by ITSELF to not be “real” or legitimate
At any rate, I have never wished to have a female body (except during moments of frustration when I imagined I’d be perceived in the first-factor sense more as the kind of person that I am). And I’ve never wished to be taken for / perceived as a female-bodied person. I’ve never tried to pass as a female person.
What are those fundamental experiences, in your opinion, that would impact acceptance in a public group of women? My experience is that at least 75% of the acceptance derives from simple passability, in terms of appearance, demeanor, body language, and voice.
If we are all sitting around talking about life experience, I can’t talk about being a Girl Scout, growing up with girlfriends, dating boys in HS, having periods, having kids, etc. I can talk about being raped, being sexually assaulted, facing extensive workplace discrimination, being marginalized, passed over, dismissed, excluded from “the boy’s club,” being prevented from male spaces (like temples), being coddled, told I can’t do things because they’re “too tough.” I can talk about being mansplained to at auto mechanic’s and tire stores, at Sears, at coal mines and power plants, even when buying a goddamn BBQ grill.
I could talk about men assuming things for me, ordering things for me, telling me they’ll “be in charge,” that I can’t do things, like learn to ride a motorcycle, travel to another country by myself. I’ve been told by my security people that I can’t go out at night in certain cities, that entire countries are off-limits to me as a female executive traveling alone. They hire these giant, dour men to travel with me, while male executives travel alone.
And I also am used to the male courtesies: doors held open, people grabbing my bags without asking to help me on a plane, men picking up the tab all the time at purely random meetings in restaurants. It’s nice but there’s also a patronizing aspect to it.
I wasn’t born nor matured with the female experience, but I’ve paid some of my dues by living 24/7 for getting on 6 years as a woman. So I guess explains another big difference between transpeople and others: it’s assimilate or die (figuratively mostly; literally in some cases) for us when it comes to gender. If we don’t assimilate well enough, we risk underemployment, unemployment, loss of all status, loss of life.
[snipped for brevity]
I don’t experience you as the listener… I experience you as the complete opposite, in fact.
Reason:
Real-life examples: Martin Gore. David Bowie. Eddie Izzard. Prince (previously mentioned). Andre 3000.
Oddly specific. Have you tried to pass as an female of any other species?
Do you really think of “default gendered” people in such stilted ways–“female person” instead of woman, “male person” instead of man?
I was the recipient of some irritated feedback from female people who do not like to be referred to as “females” or to see/read anyone referring to female people as “females”. Beats hell out of me why the latter formulation should be experienced as derogatory, (I think maybe it has to do with Star Trek Deep Space Nine or something??) but I took it to heart and started saying “female people” instead of “females”.
I think of default gendered people in even more stilted ways: female women, and male men.
ETA: Sometimes I want to refer to a cluster of people in the aggregate, and what they have in common is that they are female. Not all of them necessarily identifying as women. At other times I may wish to refer to a cluster of people in the aggregate who have in common the fact that they are women. Not all of them are necessarily female. If you’re going to stipulate (as I do) that gender and sex are two different things, yeah, you need to not use gender terms to refer to sex and vice versa, and to be conscious of which distinction(s) you’re trying to make.
I find “female” irritating because in informal speech, it is used in negative and objectifying ways.
It is been my experience that a person who refers to women as “females” in an informal context is about to say something that’s offensive.
Interesting.
I am ethnically a Jew. I was also raised Jewish.
In recent years I have been aware of the fact that some people become incredibly offended if the former word is used instead of the ladder. I am not one of those people.
I will always be a Jew. My family predates the 12 Tribes of Israel by over 3,000 years.
OTOH, I’m not Jewish. I’m a baptised Episcopalian.
Soooo… IMHO, one word currently applies and the other doesnt. Neither is racist or Anti-Semitic.
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Good for you. If I had a scoobie snack, I’d throw you one.
I didn’t say I find “female” to be “incredibly offensive.” I said I find it irritating. This article encapsulates why.
And by the way, I have no problem being called “black person”. But I find “Negress” irritating. I find “the blacks” irritating. I find “colored gal” irritating. Because usually when someone uses these terms non-ironically, they about to say something stupid. That has been my experience with the word “female”. People don’t go around talking about “males” unless they are describing a suspect on the six o’clock news. I just want the same treatment.
Una, I don’t want to speak for Green Bean, but from what I know of her, I think she was including transwomen when she spoke of “us”. (I mean, the only major experiences you’d miss out on would biological stuff. That’s really about it, and it’s not important in the long run)
The way I interpreted it is that she’s trying to say that AHunter3 has about as much experience “being a woman” as a tomboy would have “being a man”. (If I’m wrong, Green Bean, please correct me)
So out of male/man/female/woman which ones are you claiming are sex terms and which are you claiming are gender terms? Because to me, all four are sex terms and masculine and feminine are gender terms.
If I were to switch to your terminology (which isn’t by any means wrong or bad, by the way), instead of
male woman
male man
female woman
female man
we’d have
feminine male (or feminine man)
masculine male (or masculine man)
feminine female (or feminine woman)
masculine female (or masculine woman)
Using my terminology, “male” and “female” are sex terms (they are about the physical body) and “man”, “woman”, “boy”, “girl”, “masculine”, “feminine”, “butch”, “femme”, etc, are all gender terms.
I think people of all feminine gender identities experience some of the same things, but to different levels. I guess the point I’m making is, where does one draw the line?
There are trans women (and trans activists in general) who tell me I totally qualify as transgender. Some say I should feel free to call myself transgender, some are a bit pushier and say I flat-out AM transgender, but either way they say that you do not need to be a transitioning person (such as male-to-female or female-to-male) to consider yourself transgender or to be considered by others to be transgender. They say a person is the gender they say they are and that you don’t need to seek hormones or operations or present as the target sex in order to be “trans enough”, you only need to have a gender that is other than the gender you were “assigned at birth” by other people. Period, end of story.
I myself do not use that term. I do NOT say I am transgender. No offense intended to the warmly and acceptingly inclusive transgender people. But to most people it means, or at least implies, that the person so designated has physical sexual dysphoria (that they DO NOT LIKE the body in which they were born, that on a basic physical level it doesn’t properly reflect who they are and is, in fact, wrong, like a birth defect). There used to be an older term – transSEXUAL – which explicitly meant that but it has fallen into disfavor and so people use transgender to mean what transsexual used to mean – someone who is going to to transition, or wants to, or already has.
That’s not me. Frankly the transgender community has successfully done what I’m only attempting (not, as of yet successfully) – to explain my situation and get people to the point they understand it and accept it and my claimed identity and all that. And despite their kind offer I don’t think it really works for me to say I’m transgender. It seems to me it would weaken the meaning and understanding that they’ve created for themselves and THEY WERE HERE FIRST and I’m just tagging along behind saying “me too”. And because it confuses people. When folks think I am saying I am transgender, they think I wish to transition, that I do not wish to remain physically male, that I wish to be addressed as “she”, that being perceived as a female-bodied person is important to me, and so forth.
I suspect that he’s writing for a very small subset of elites and deliberately writes walls of text to discourage others from understanding.
Which is too bad. I think he could actually invoke more interesting debates were the writing accessible to those who may not have unlimited time to parse it.
But he takes pride in the difficulty it invokes in the readers.