I’ve re-read your post. If it was not your intention to call transsexuals deluded, you really screwed up. If it was (as I maintain) your intention to call transsexuals deluded, you did an excellent job.
In my example, which may or may not map onto the bathhouse incident, a pre-op MTF transsexual who insists that [he or she]* is a woman despite having a penis and male secondary sex characteristics is either being dishonest or delued. [He or she] may BECOME a woman in the near future, but the fact is that in American English as expressed on sexually segregated signs for restrooms and locker rooms, the terms “man” and “woman” refer exclusively to apparent physical sex. They do not refer to one’s identity or to the number of somatostatin-expressing neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. The argument here isn’t with biology or with social attitudes, it’s an unwinnable battle with language. To insist that the other 300 million people in America are in fact referring to “people with a certain number of neurons in this brain region” when they say “woman” is absurd. That is where the delusion comes in.
*I REALLY don’t care to get into a pronoun debate here and will happily use whatever pronoun you want for this example.
You know, there was a guy in this thread earlier who was complaining about people reading a lot of assertions into his posts. Whatever happened to that guy?
It’s rarely that transsexuals are alone are the ones claiming their mental gender is different from their physical gender. There are these people called psychiatrists and psychologists who have been studying this for a very long time, and gender dysphoria has been recognized, albeit not always under that name, for just over a century or so… The psychiatrists I speak with as I work in the trans community - board-certified health care professionals - certainly have no trouble referring to transwomen as “she” and transmen as “he,” and they write and sign “carry letters” to the effect of telling Mr. and Ms Whom it May Concern that the person holding the letter is in fact their mental gender and should be treated as such and given all possible courtesy.
If you propose that you are more qualified than they for putting such on official letterhead, or even on affidavits under penalty of perjury (which I have seen), well, doggone it, I would love to believe that, truly, for you seem like an intelligent fellow and all, but I’m afraid you will need to present some links to your Q&E.
Second, there is a large amount of evidence of physiological differences in transsexuals, backed up by brain and other studies. This has been in the literature for decades. Surely you’ve come across it in the many discussions on this message board. I fear I do not have the time to send a score or so of references your way, but I understand public libraries and universities can offer such a service.
Third, the definition of a female and male aren’t as solid as people would prefer to think, nor are gender roles as fixed. This is pretty self-evident, despite decades of thinly-disguised hysterical male homophobia in American culture, with sadly seems to be present in this thread as well.
Fourth, it is disgust and bigotry to refuse to show compassion and tolerance towards the transgendered, no matter how you try to spin it with bombastic examples of dragons and hobbits and such. It simply is wrong, dead wrong, to treat transgendered individuals with the mockery evident in your own posts. It hurts you not one iota to refer to a trans person as their presented gender. “He” and “she”, “him” and “her” take the same number of syllables. Transgendered persons do not use more water when they shower in a spa, nor more toilet paper in one bathroom or the other. They are living, breathing, real human beings who are fighting something which would absolutely floor most people - a fundamental disconnect between their brain and body gender.
Threads such as these are always enlightening. Disappointing, true, but enlightening.
“Well, there’s glory for you!”
Or to put it another way
Why do man and woman mean what you want them to mean and not what I say they mean?
Nm
I’m not sure why you’re being so coy about referring to my post, but I didn’t make any reference to your use of pronouns. I was referring to the larger trend of posters in this thread who are implying that trans men and trans women aren’t “really” the gender they identify as, and the phrase I used was almost a direct quote of the post that was just before mine. Were you actually following the conversation in this thread?
I’m not going to conduct a course on descriptive linguistics for you, but there’s a whole Internet out there and presumably your local public or university library if you really need a lot of proof that when people say “woman” they mean “person who looks like a woman” and not “person with a certain number of neurons” (I don’t really believe you do).
Do we actually know what happened now?
It seems to me that all the arguments on the side of letting the transgender person use whichever locker room s/he prefers could also apply to the gender divide in general.
Uncomfortable with a penis in the women’s area? That’s your problem, not the possessor of the penis.
Yeah, it kind of is. Gender-divided locker rooms require a binary categorization, and reality doesn’t want to oblige. Transgender is a complicated concept, complicated way to be, and complicated issue for a society.
It’s about context. If someone who is born male wants to be a woman it’s not my business. If they do or don’t want to get surgery to match their physical reality to their mental self-image, that’s not my business. And I’m not going to tell them that they are morally wrong or mentally ill for wanting or not wanting to do any of these things. Because in the context of me meeting someone in a business relationship, or watching a baseball game with someone, or sharing a bus with someone, it’s none of my goddamn business and it would be intrusive and presumptuous of me to make it so. So, to a large degree, “male” and “female” are fluid in these scenarios–if you are presenting and acting as woman I could care less if you have a Captain America jawline with a five o’clock shadow on it or a linebacker’s frame. Not my place to ask why or to draw any conclusions about you.
But in the context of a gender-segregated spa, it’s pretty goddamn clear that “man” and “woman” ARE NOT user-defined. It is, in fact, the penis room and the vagina room. Argue against the concept of gender segregation in clothing-free environments if you want, but don’t pretend that it’s exactly the same as firing someone for being transsexual. Context matters.
No dispute with your assertion, just with the insistence that biology equals linguistics equals social convention. Context.
No dispute from me. Gay btw.
I disagree with the notion that it is non-compassionate or intolerant to insist that people live in reality. In contexts where “woman” means “person with a vagina and an otherwise female body,” a pre-op MTF is not a woman, period, no matter how legitimate their self-identification is. In many contexts, that is not what it means. In the one under discussion, it is.
You realize that there really are many thousands of people who do in fact identify as real or fictional animals? Since this has less political baggage than transgender issues, and unlike transgender identification is very plainly delusional in all cases, I find it a convenient way to examine the question of how far my participation in other people’s self-identification must go.
As I’ve said, I’ll happily refer to any real or hypothetical person by the pronoun of choice. I don’t care about this.
Certainly, but what is the relevance of that?
Has anyone in this thread said they’re the same thing? If they have, I must have missed it: seems most everyone agrees that there’s not enough detail in this story to judge the spa one way or the other.
Where has anyone in this thread insisted on this? The closest I’ve seen is an argument that social convention and linguistics should be changed to more accurately reflect biology, but no where have I seen anyone insist (as you’ve claimed at least three times now) that these three things are already in accord. Hell, if they were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.
What you seem to be unable to grasp is that people aren’t calling your posts intolerant or uncompassionate because of the opinion you’re expressing. They’re calling them that because of the way you express your opinion. Regardless of one’s feelings about the legitimacy of transexuality, no one would disagree that these people are dealing with something that’s extremely difficult. If you want to claim that you treat people with “dignity and fairness,” you don’t do that by coming out of the gate calling transexuals “deluded,” referring to their issues as “bullshit,” and throw around snide comparisons like “Lord Griffonlord Flamebreather.” That’s not treating people with dignity. That’s being a dick to an extremely marginalized minority, for no good reason other than trying to make yourself look clever.
So in other words, “they” have nothing legitimate to say? Meta-discussion about people’s tone is a refuge of non-argument.
Anaamika, I hope that you’re still reading. As the mother of a transgirl, I want to thank you for the honesty of this post.
My daughter also knows she’s female. She thinks female. She has some male traits (at least for the time being, a penis), but she’s definitely female. You would never, not in ten million years, see her penis is a locker room because nobody sees her penis except her when she has to. You would see her as a teenage girl. She doesn’t want to see boys and men in the women’s locker room any more than you do.
I mostly lurk. Also want to say how much I appreciate Una Persona’s posts on transgender folks.
I’m transsexual - NOT transgender: the distinction is important to me and I find being lumped in with transgenders offensive. That said, here’s what I think.
First, the vast majority of pre-op transsexuals aren’t going to be comfortable completely stripping down in front of anyone but their partner, and some of us not even then. So this isn’t going to be a common occurence regardless of how accepting society becomes.
Second, people who think our operative or crotch status matter are looking at it the wrong way. I’m not a woman who was born a man, I’m a woman, born female, with a brain that’s observably more female than male[1], who happened to be born with some physical abnormalities. I’m exactly the same as any other woman who had some defects at birth. What’s in my pants right now is pretty much the same thing as a tumour. I didn’t ask for it, I hate it, and want to have it surgically corrected (but can’t afford to). It’s not an indicator of my gender.
Third, people are born with what’s called ambiguous genitalia all the time. Until recently this was almost always “corrected” at birth based on which (of penis and vagina) would be easiest to give the child from what they had to work with; often without even informing the parents, or asking permission. So genitals aren’t binary; there’s a spectrum that goes from vagina to penis and includes unrecognisable things that don’t resemble either. Which changing room do those people use? The one that best reflects their emotional and mental gender, right? So why not people who have normal-looking genitalia, that happen to be the wrong kind?
[1]http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20032-transsexual-differences-caught-on-brain-scan.html
That’s nice. Care to answer any of the questions I asked you in that post?
Well, it depends on what the purpose of having a divided locker room setup is. What is it?
I thought the purpose of dividing locker rooms was to keep about 90% of people who are sexually interested in your gender in the other locker room, so that you don’t feel leered at, and to keep adolescent boys from being overcome by desire.
I know it’s silly, and I know that gay people are going to be there so it doesn’t accomplish the purpose, and I fully agree that reality is not binary for gender, genitalia or probably even for gender identification - but other than that, I don’t know the purpose of dividing the locker room.
If someone who says you should go into the locker room that reflects your emotional and mental gender, even if your genitals and overall body look like the other gender, can explain what the reason is for a divided locker room, I would appreciate it.
I’m pefectly willing to accept the scientific consensus here.
My issue is this: if in fact it is true that trans-people with the (currently) incorrect genetalia are not confortable stripping before anyone and so will not use changerooms in public venues, as you and others have said in this thread (and I have no reason to doubt it you are right), then what is wrong with enforcing the ‘you must use the sex-appropriate changeroom’ rule? Practcally speaking, it will not have any adverse effect on actual pre-op transpeople, except, as you say, in rare cases.
I have no problems “inconveniencing” the majority to make room for minority rights, where the issue is a real and pressing one. For example, the analogy was drawn to Blacks being refused service at a “White” lunchcounter in the '50s US. I can get that feeling discomfort at seeing the “wrong” genitals could be analagous to that (though this discomfort is felt mostly by women seeing men in their “space”, and I’m not a woman - so I can’t really comment on how appropriate or not that response is - I suspect though that because rape is so widespread a fear in our society it has some legitimacy).
However, to overturn a societal norm, I think a certain amount of actual need should be demonstrated - in proportion to how entrenched that norm is, whether there is any reason for that norm existing, and whether actual people are being inconvenienced by the existing norm.
In the case of “no visible male genitals allowed in the woman’s change room” norm, the norm is very entrenched and there is at least some reason for it (that women may be legitmately be put in some fear). The decisive factor, in my mind, is what I’ve learned in this very thread: that few real-life transpeople are, in fact, inconvenienced by the rule because due to their condition they are generally reluctant to appear naked in public anyway.
Seems to me that in these conditions there is no really compelling reason to change the societal norm. It is unlike the case of “Black people cannot eat at the lunch counter” in a number of ways, but (for this analysis) mostly in the fact that Black people had no reluctance, aside from the societal norm in question, to eating at lunch counters and so were seriously inconvenienced by the rule.
I suspect the main reason is that women are put in anxiety at the presence of naked men in the space where they are also naked, because fear of rape (of women by men) is a major concern for many women in our society.
Most men would not really mind the presence of naked women when they change all that much, or at least not for that reason, and most men and women do not have the same fear of being raped by their own sex (at least, not a fear triggered simply by the presence of naked members of their own sex).
So which room should one use if one is a “person who looks like a woman” at all times except when fully nude? The room that matches 99.9% of her appearance 99.9% of the time, or the room that matches that .1% of her physical form .1% of the time?
You raise a good point.
My answer is this- pre op and non op transsexuals are not inherently averse to getting naked in a locker room. They don’t want to do it only because it would almost certainly result in their being mocked, insulted, beaten or raped.