Moreover there’s just no point in arguing over the semantics of transgender identity. How often does this stuff ACTUALLY come up, in REAL LIFE? How hard is it to just let things slide? If someone makes known that they prefer some pronoun, use it. If you don’t know what it is…when is it even necessary to use it? And if you do have to use some reference to the individual in the third person, and you take a guess and it turns out to be wrong…well then just say “got it” and move on.
You know, nobody would ever confuse me with an SJW. I’m 32. When I was growing up, transgender identity was not commonly discussed, fewer people openly lived that life, and when I first started noticing it becoming more open - around 10 years ago, I’d guess - I was a little freaked out. Yes, there was something “weird” to me about someone looking like one gender and acting like another. There was something strange about seeing what looked like a male face on a female body. I didn’t think anything against them, but I thought it was…weird. And why wouldn’t it be? It was contrary to how I imagined life was “supposed” to be.
What I’ve witnessed - large numbers of people choosing to live their lives this way, identify this way, and it makes them happy to do that and doesn’t hurt anyone else - has shown me that this IS in fact how life is “supposed” to be. It just wasn’t condoned by society in the past. But neither was so many of the other things that we enjoy in life today! So just roll with it!
This is precisely where I didn’t want the conversation to go – arguing about the definition of “man” and “woman” – but here we are.
Immediately, I want to say that no one claims this:
or rather, no one claims that a transgender man is no different from a cisgender man.
There’s been some talk about the “classical” definition of man and woman, and I think the argument usually goes that there’s a large component to gender that varies from culture to culture. For example, a number of gender-critical folks online make an appeal to sex chromosomes, XX or XY, but we only learned about chromosomes in the 1800s. And of course I’m ignoring the other less common chromosomal variants, but my point is that that particular definition of gender is less than 200 years old.
You want evidence that the words “man” and “woman” are changing through a natural progression that is apparent in “common experience”. My immediate questions are
What’s wrong with changing the definitions of words through advocacy?
Whose experience counts as “common experience”? Does my experience count? Why or why not? Does it ever make sense to defer to “uncommon experiences”?
But since we’re talking about common experience, I’m also interested in the way that you use the words “man” and “woman”. A lot of people (and I’m presuming you as well – correct me if I’m wrong), claim that they use “man” to mean “a person born with a penis and XY sex chromosomes”. Are those the criteria you use to gender a stranger you happen to see walking down the street? If not, what criteria do you use?
My only contribution to this thread is about the definition of words and their supposed evolution. I have no beef with you, nor do I wish to say something that will hurt your feelings or seem insensitive.
We don’t attempt to change the definition of words through advocacy because words are what makes a language and what informs us of what we are each talking about. If I say that I was walking my “dog” today, you know what I am talking about and other posters know what I am talking about. That is the purpose of having a language.
If I have a particular position to advocate about dogs, cats, wild animals, the treatment of animals, the ambiguity or unfairness about how I can keep a dog in the house, but not a snake, etc. then I can fully advocate for all of those positions without changing the common understanding of what the term “dog” means and I can do so in a way that does not demean those who use the term “dog” how they have done so their whole lives.
IMHO, this “language evolves” argument is not so much about you being able to live your life on your terms, but telling others how they must react to your life on your terms. Literally.
Well, first of all, we do change words through advocacy. When CA Prop 8 was passed, I spent a lot of time walking door-to-door advocating that we, ultimately, change the definition of “marriage”. When I was growing up, “gay” often meant “bad” or “uncool”, a definition that had evolved “naturally”, and a lot of us worked hard to shame that definition into near oblivion. See also: “retarded”.
Secondly, I’m not a philosopher, and I’m sure someone here smarter than me can think way harder about this than I am, but here are a few anecdotes.
I remember last summer, I was walking about the butterfly pavilion at the LA Natural History Museum. I felt a bump on my thigh, and a girl who had gotten excited about all of the butterflies had bumped into my leg. A voice from behind said something like “Sweetie, be careful! You just ran into that woman!” So what did “that woman” mean in this instance? It meant something like “that human with the long hair and the floppy hat and the dangly earrings”. The two participants in that exchange had a publicly agreed upon meaning about what “woman” meant in this instance. Does it describe all women? Well, no. And I recognize that whatever meaning they were operating under places a lot of emphasis on my passing and assimilating into what we consider gender-normative modes of presentation. But it certainly didn’t mean “that human with the vagina and the XX chromosomes”.
When I came out, I worked in a biology lab that investigated, among other things, X-chromosome inactivation – the inactivation of one of the copies of the X chromosome in XX mammalian cells. We had a line of XX mouse stem cells that we commonly used for experiments. These were routinely referred to as “the female line”. One day, the lab went into a panic because someone had discovered that the line had somehow jettisoned one of its Xs, leaving them as XO cells. “We have a problem: the female cells are XO.”, someone said. Well, what does “female” mean in this case? It used to mean “our XX cell line”, but now it no longer seemed to mean “XX”. If it did, the lab tech might have said “The cells we use in all our experiments are no longer female.” Now, the word “female” appears to have evolved into something like “The cells that we thought were XX.” – which explicitly is the opposite of what you might expect! – or more probably “The cells that we keep in the cold room on shelf A, row B.”
I can imagine someone pointing at me from across the room and whispering, “Look! That woman… is a man!” (shock, awe). And I can imagine someone else standing up for me, “Shut your dirty mouth, that ‘man’ is a woman!” A man is a woman? A woman is a man? Do words mean anything anymore? But the thing is, “That man is a man” is the sentence that uses the “classical definition” of a man, and it doesn’t even make sense here.
Sure, language depends on a shared agreement about what words mean. And not only does that agreed-upon meaning shift, we often aren’t aware of when, how, and it what context it shifts. To be fair to you, this argument cuts the other way, too. I’ll occasionally see a paper released about some property of the neovagina (a vagina resulting from bottom surgery on a trans woman), and without fail, someone online will point to it. “See, the pH of my vagina is the same as that of a cis woman!” Or the microbiome is the same. Or the cells are the same according to some histological assay. Or whatever. And some of us get a lot of validation from this! “Look! Look! Trans vaginas are vaginas according to science” will show up in my Twitter timeline for the good part of a day. Well, I see at least two problems here
These criteria are arbitrary. At some point, a biological test is going to test for some property that distinguishes between a cisgender vagina and a transgender vagina. (Hell, a karyotype will do.) We’re cherry-picking properties at this point to serve some need. (But now the question is, what’s wrong with defining words to serve some broader ideological need?)
I don’t look at what seems to be a vagina and say, “Well, it’s pH is slightly acidic. It must not be a vagina.”, because that’s rarely the context in which anyone uses the word “vagina”. To put it bluntly, someone can say that my friend’s vagina isn’t “really a vagina” because it was the result of her bottom surgery, but I guarantee that if she tells you that so-and-so fucked her in her vagina, you know exactly what she means.
The reality is that the majority of the people I interact with daily (who are either young or some stripe of LGBTQ) have a different definition of “man” and “woman” than you do. Y’all can argue whose definition is “correct” as though you were a bunch of ornithologists talking about birds, but we birds can talk. Just ask us! Why are our experiences discounted? I think it’s pretty clear to you that I’m not delusional. Furthermore (and this is the dirty secret in the trans world) we ourselves bitterly argue about what gender is among ourselves! It’s only when society-at-large threatens us materially that we band together and show a common front. And that brings me back to my original post, which is that, regardless of what we are, we’re here. We are often the victims of sexual violence and have little or no resources available to us. In most states, we can be fired because of our trans-ness. As the pissing and shitting things that we are, we need to use the bathroom just like you, but often cannot do so safely. As trans people, we have a need to fully participate in society as who we are – because humans are social animals.
It’s great that people here tell me to use whichever restroom I want. I’m happy that you want me to live my life on my terms, but being opposed to “telling others how they must react to life on [my] terms” sounds an awful lot like me being fine with people reacting to my life by confronting me in the restroom and telling me I’m a pervert, or telling me that I’m corrupting children, or asking me if I know about Sodom and Gomorrah. And, contrary to me telling others how they must react, or being “LOUD” as another poster said, my MO is to clutch the taser that I have stashed under my armpit, apologize profusely, and GTFO.
You keep talking about this like it hasn’t happened yet. But it has – the language has already evolved. The transphobes have lost, and the trans advocates have won, in terms of language. It’s in the dictionary, even, in addition to the millions upon millions of “natural” usages of the new definitions of these words.
Any discussion of how this language has evolved is pointless if it refuses to acknowledge that this has already happened “naturally”.
Because, zoey, they might leave a virus on the toilet seat and other people might catch teh gay or cooties or something. Fortuinately, they seem to be fighting a rear-guard action most of the time.
Fee up: Did you ever use a single use, one stall bathroom of the “incorrect” gender because the other was occupied?
I once went into a two seat ladies room, only to notice the feet in the other stall were facing the "other way. When I was washing my hands after doing my business, a young man came out of the stall.
Did I scream? No. Did I get the heebie-jeebies? No. Did I faint, Hell, no. Did I run to the authorities to report this atrocity? Nope. When he asked “Is this the ladies room?” I opened the inner door, held it open with my front, opened the outer door, looked at the sign on the door, and said “Yep.”
I think opposition to bathroom rights was chosen because they wanted to oppose transgender people somehow. It’s not that they want you not to use one bathroom rather than the other. It’s that they want you not to exist, nor even the notion of you to exist. I visualize them with fingers in their ears singing “la la la la, I can’t hear you”.
I live in North Carolina. We have a pee-pee law. No one in the Pee-pee police want to talk about enforcement. The legislature doesn’t want to talk about the Pee-pee police, or the number of reported incidents that prompted the need for the Pee-pee law. No one in the Pee-pee squad of the State Police department will discuss it.
What they really don’t want to talk about was the insurance law suit restrictions that are the second half of the Pee-pee law. None of the political discussion during the legislative hearings even mentioned those. But no chest thumping all American North Carolina legislator was about to object to a law to keep Pee-pee places sacrosanct.
I got a dozen “I’ll go with you.” buttons when it passed. (a resurrected idea from Israel when it was used to support creating allies for Palestinian arabs in Jerusalem in fear of attacks.) It was started by children looking for ways to protect their friends from thuggery encouraged by our legislators. It was intended to be a way to let a transgendered person know that you were willing to be a witness for them, if they felt endangered by complying with the law.
I don’t go many places where I might be asked to do that. (Hey, I don’t all that many places at all!) Each time I have gotten a reaction from someone in public, it was from a person who appeared to my non-analytical assessment to be a woman, who thought it was “nice” of me to wear it. Were they transgendered? I have no idea. But the strongly hetero-normative among my other associates assure me they must have been. Generally I offer the button I am wearing to the person who responds, and about half the time they accept it, and seem grateful. This pretty much accounts for my entire participation in advocacy for transgendered people.
I suppose it is my own position on sexuality that yours is none of my business unless at least one of us is interested in having sex with the other. I am fairly circumspect about the cases where I am the one interested, and I am habitually oblivious to all but the most blatant of expressions of interest by new acquaintances. That leaves the chromosomal characteristics of strangers out of my range of interest, socially. If you are doing the things public toilet facilities are designed for, I am enough of a last century man to be unlikely to address you in any fashion, that being the norm I was raised to expect. If you had to hike up your skirt to pee in the urinal, yeah, I would notice. Not sure I would break the silence of the John to mention it, though.
I would kick up a bit of fuss if anyone was kicking your ass, or vice versa.
Tris
“American Standard” If you have been there, you know what I was looking at.
