I disagree. Sex isn’t gender. A person can identify as a male woman or a female man. (As I do). A person can transition on one and opt to retain the original value of the other if they so choose.
And it is useful to have a term that specifically means the physiological morphology, and not the internal identity.
I’m saying that there is nothing illogical, irrational, controversial, ignorant, immoral, unethical, or wrong about the definition that has been used for centuries, and sticking with the long-established definition instead of the “in-group” term from a highly-promoted small minority is not “hate speech.”
You are, of course, welcome to identify how you want if it has meaning to you, but it’s not a standard meaning of “male” or “female” in almost any circle I’ve been in. The trans community has moved past the whole sex/gender distinction in general except when we’re talking to cis people and have generally adopted the stance that given all the subtleties in physical development (intersex, XY cis women, etc) that “sex” doesn’t really have much meaning. Not to imply there’s no controversy about this in the trans community, but at this point it’s largely the older trans folx who really stand by the sex/gender canard.
That’s not what has been meant “for centuries” though, we didn’t even have the ability to test for chromosomes until recently, and some cultures already had a fluid understanding of gender, or had more than two genders.
I don’t regard it as hate speech. I respect someone’s right to argue that we should continue to treat “male” and “man” as synonyms. Or to treat “sex” and “gender” as functional synonyms for that matter. I consider you wrong in doing so, but as you can see, it’s an item of some dispute within the MOGII / LGBTQIA world as well as between it and the general community, so it’s not akin to a settled issue.
This is a position that intersex activists are not fond of, and for good reason (in my opinion). And I’m definitely not fond of it myself.
That’s not entirely true. You’re absolutely right some/many intersex activists don’t like it, but there are others within the trans community that helped push that viewpoint. I don’t know the numbers either way, but it’s not that cut and dry. In my experience the ones that push that tend to be the ones that hang out with terfs anyway but I may be wrong/haven’t bumped into the right ones.
I should probably mention that a large part of the queer community is fairly postmodern in general. This doesn’t just apply to gender and sexuality stuff. It’s not an uncommon argument to say, for instance, mathematical proofs do not have clear-cut truths and falsehoods because they’re ultimately arguments that convince an audience and can at best be true by consensus or “probably true”. Useful constructs within a framework. It’s not that different from Bayesian reasoning, but may be closer to fuzzy logic. There is a strong rejection of the notion of closed, neat categories and the concept of human-knowable objective truth in general.
Not in my experience.
Think about it.
a) Intersex activists run into laws, and lawmakers, who make no distinction between medical procedures made available to people in order to bring their physiology into alignment with their gender identity, on the one hand, and medical procedures imposed upon people too young to consent in order to shoehorn their physiology into alignment with one of the binary sexes, on the other.
b) They also encounter people who have no physical anomalies that make them different from endosex people (i.e., people whose physiologies fit into either the conventional male pattern or the conventional female pattern), but who “identify as intersex”, probably confusing it with “nonbinary” or “agender” or “genderfluid” or “intergender”.
They (intersex activists) find it necessary to explain that being intersex is not a medical pathology in need of correction, that medical interventions need to be chosen by the person being modified by the procedure. They need to speak of their physiological difference which sets them apart from male and female people. They find it difficult to do this when people think they’re talking about their gender identity. They find themselves arguing with politicians and public policy bureaucrats who think they’re doing a progressive thing by “supporting transgender rights” when they support “corrective surgery” for intersex infants and children, and needing to clarify that they’re in a vastly different situation than a transgender person who wishes to transition their body to bring it into alignment with their gender identity.
And while we’re at it…
c) There is a moment in a trans person’s life when they realize their gender identity is at variance with their physiology. We speak of “assigned female at birth” (AFAB) and “assigned male at birth” (AMAB) but it’s not that some obstetrician 23 years ago made a clerical error (or usually not, at any rate)— indeed, if we use the “nude beach” method of defining “sex”, these are mostly people who would continue to be categorized by 95%++ of the sighted people on a nude beach as the sex that their obstetrician put down on their birth record. In other words they continue to be assigned, every day, by people who see them. So at that moment they have both a sex and and a gender, an identity and a physiology, and they aren’t in the expected combination. Such a person may wish to transition in order to address that situation, or they may wish to present as their identified gender but without opting for surgical or hormonal modification, or they may choose not to do any of those things.
I understand the urge to not make people who have opted not to undergo a medical transition (or who can’t afford it) somehow “less a woman” or “less a man” than those who do; and focusing on the contents of people’s underwear has a way of doing that.
But to explain what it means to be trans instead of cis sort of requires a fundamental understanding of the gender identity as something other than the morphological configuration.
And the tendency to subsume sex within gender (instead of the other way around as it was for eons), to say both of them are what the person identifies as, makes it difficult for some of us to even speak of our situations. It erases us.
This conversation and the assertion that using language how it has been used for millennia is somehow hateful is rooted in advancing an ideological viewpoint more so than factual knowledge. At some point, regardless of the idea that things in real life are fuzzy, words have to mean something and not all things. Words need definitions and boundaries, so to speak. Otherwise, communication becomes very difficult. Can. One precisely and with perfect accuracy define the set of all members of a particular species? If you really think about that question you’ll see why it’s impossible. Species are fuzzy sets, that doesn’t mean that taxonomy is useless, counterproductive, or misleading.
All words have limitations to what they refer to or mean. Humpty Dumpty is not the model to aspire to. Now, just because words and reality aren’t easily categorized precisely, just look at the Pluto nonsense, doesn’t mean that words themselves should be infinitely fluid.
Now as time goes what it means to be man/woman/male/female might become more inclusive or broad. But it’s not hate speech to say that, aside from rare intersex occurrences, that most mammals have real differences between the sexes. How can one even state that they feel like a particular sex/gender if there wasn’t a common understanding and thus difference in what that particular sex/gender typically feels?
I mean, literally none of “intersex people shouldn’t have their bits coercively messed with at birth”, “intersex people should have their needs met by the law” or “it’s kind of an asshole thing to say intersex when you mean nonbinary” are contentious. The only thing that’s contentious is the notion of sex as an objectively true closed category. Even outside intersex, not all skeletons can be sexed after death, not all cis people have all the organs associated with their assigned sex (whether by surgery, hormonal development reasons, or genetics). Sex is still a label applied to a physical concept, and is exactly as tied up in culture as gender. And yes, im doubling down, just like mathematical concepts are tied to the cultural biases of the mathematical community. It is, in some cases, a useful construct, of course. Especially in scientific contexts, but it is ultimately nothing more than a fuzzy, probabilistic definition like any other category or descriptor (again, even outside sex/gender/sexuality). All taxonomies are fuzzy.
Also just on male/female, I mean, shoving definitions of sex aside… The common denotations for trans men and trans women is mtf and ftm, “male to female” not “male to woman” nobody says that.
I guess the point is not that sex does not have a useful understood meaning within the current cultural context, you’re right that that’s unassailable, it’s an argument that there is not per se an ** inherent ** meaning and the categories should be deconstructed. For instance the push for hospitals to have organ inventories for people rather than sex designations because it’s more fine-grained. E.G. “this person has breasts and a vaginal shaft, no prostate, but no uterus. Experienced endogenous estrogen development beginning at puberty.” for someone AFAB with a normative hormone profile along their life, but post-hysterectomy.
I get that. I just don’t think you have to objectively closed sets for the idea of labeling a set to have utility. Nor is it hateful for different people to have different opinions on the accuracy or more importantly the utility of the label. I generally distrust this modern trend of deconstructing language for political/ideological purposes. It strikes me a very Orwellian.
Labeling things as hate speech or whatever is problematic in an environment where not only is the common person becoming more classically illiberal with regards to freedom of expression but the state and extensions of the state are blatantly violating the constitution and making speech illegal and jailing people. Of course warnings that that was the goal were ridiculed…
Right. I know words don’t have inherent meanings. They have meanings by usage and consensus. Which is why debates on a certain racial slur is always entertaining with the deliberate self-induced cognitive dissonance people employ to disregard actual usage.
But, since it’s precisely because words don’t have intrinsic meaning that it’s a bit backwards to expect that what is frankly a fringe viewpoint is the only viewpoint that is not hateful.
You raise some good points though. I concede that. The broad labels of masculinity, femininity, the various political ideologies, the various religions, all can cause as much confusion as clarity so the idea of using a set of labels as opposed to a single overly broad label does have quite a bit of merit. Actually communicating that way I think it is a long way off.
On the subject of names, pronouns, whatever I think it’s polite to refer to a person however they wish to be referred to. But I don’t think it’s problematic for people to hold the viewpoint that there are legitimate differences between the sexes. For example, some people find that very important for intimacy. I’m not going to say, because I don’t believe that it is, hateful for people to desire what they desire biologically or however you want to categorize it as.
I’ll concede I got Mad Online™ and doubled down a bit. To be honest my more reasonable argument is more along the lines of “okay but people largely don’t solely use male/female solely to mean normative XY/XX development, e.g., see MTF.” I view the definition of male away from meaning “man” to itself be kind of a redefinition in reaction to the increasingly more gender-leaning “man”. Maybe it is a useful one, IDK, I’ll concede it probably aids in communication rather than hinders it. I’m just very sensitive to the people who legitimately use the word “male” or “female” as a bludgeon to hurt people rather than communicate useful ideas, and tend to get those feelings tied up in the conversation.
I have to get to a party, but I don’t have any major arguments to make other than I’ve never been fond of the “Orwellian” argument. The entire purpose of newspeak was to simplify the language so that concepts against the state couldn’t be thought about. I don’t view this as that, exactly, it’s more calling for more nuance and specificity instead of relying on more broadly-normative cultural ideas. E.G. Creating the categories “cis” and “trans” does result in a redefinition of “man” (broadly), but it ultimately creates more ways to talk about things, not less.
Aside from needing to gather various organs and secretions for reproduction, I’m not sure why it matters, myself. If reproduction isn’t the intended goal, then aside from catering to personal tastes… who cares?
Of course it is. It’s explicitly denying them and their opinion any validity or reality.
I just came across a really good parallel for this, in fact : in our society it is allowed and even somewhat common for couples to adopt children, for various reasons. When they do so, we call those couples “parents” and the kids “their children” and all of society considers them a normal family ; functionally equivalent to any other even though technically and scientifically speaking these people bear no kindred relationship with each other whatsoever.
Adopted children call their adoptive parents “mom” and “dad” and nobody tells them they’re wrong - sure, there’s an entire genre of fiction that deals with coming to terms with the notion or big reveal that one is adopted and ultimately the realization that non-bio parents are more parents than some stranger who did the sex thing at some point ; and there are some medical contexts where positively identifying oneself as “adopted” or “adoptive” is helpful - but the point is that in 99% of cases and life experiences there is no meaningful or material difference between a bio family and a family with adopted kids.
And a person who would follow adopted people around and “helpfully” correct them whenever they talk about their mums and dads ; or adoptive parents talking about their children ; would rightly be considered an unbelievable jerk.
But it does, is what they’re trying to tell you. It’s not an if. This is something that cropped up in a thread about Donald Trump of all things - and prompted me to come complain here, which is why I’m in this here thread :
This is fucking hateful. Yes, it’s in the Pit, and people are allowed to be mad and use bad language in the pit. But yeah, no, this is the language of hate, period. This is on the spectrum of blood libel. And it is fucking unbelievable to me, a cis white het dude whose only irl social connection to the trans community is on the level of “I once clocked a trans girl in the subway”, that **Annoyed **is still here and hasn’t even received so much as a fucking warning over this heinous shit. I can’t even imagine the kind of emotional minefield trans folk must live in that this sort of comments can spring up anywhere they read, about any subject, on any part of the internet that’s not strictly and explicitly respectful towards them.
Same here.
Your self-appointed role as trans lator for the community (see what I did there ? This type of cleverness is why I am popular and have lots of friends, but you wouldn’t know them, they live in Canada) is genuinely helpful, needed even.
I’m not on the left and to me that’s hate speech. (What you quoted, not what you said.)
Except there are people do EXACTLY that - they go on and on about the mystical connection of blood and talk about biological “facts” and the parent-child bond… it’s quite toxic.
The difference? Their beliefs aren’t mainstream at this point in time. But there’s a reason adoptions used to be a Super Secret Secret, birth certificates where changed, and it was once considered a Deep Dark Secret.
AHM JUS SPEAKIN’ THA TROOTH!!!
Honestly, I once heard someone say that. Not to derail this conversation, but societal attitudes towards adoption are somewhat parallel, and toxic ideas still persist. One manifestations is glurge about happy reunifications between adoptees and their bio-parents. The publicized ones always seem like Hallmark movies, but in real life the adopted and their bio-relatives often have little to nothing in common and might even loathe each other. But the trainwrecks aren’t held up as examples. “Don’t you want to find out who your [del]real parents[/del] biological parents are?”
On the flip side - it seems the successful transitions aren’t well publicized - “person transitions to their identified gender, has happy life, well adjusted” isn’t catchy enough or something. The public, especially certainly segments, seem desperate for unhappy endings and disasters in regard to gender issues.
So… did anyone report this to the mods as hate speech? If we don’t point out what’s objectionable and why we should not be surprised if they miss it.
And yes, I agree, that is unacceptable.
But ever notice how it’s always a concern about “creating” trans women - apparently trans men aren’t scary. I think Annoyed is yet another case of castration anxiety being in control on the keyboard.