Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you think it would be a good idea to abolish gender– that is, that you think that the world would be a better place if everyone was treated identically, down to pronouns, regardless of sex. (I do, at least on even-numbered days of the month.) Does this necessitate believing that trans people should not transition?
In spite of the positions of most actually existing gender abolitionists, I argue “no.”
(Inevitably, someone will respond to this post by being like “I don’t like this post because I don’t think gender abolitionism is a good idea for reasons X, Y, and Z!” Regardless of the merits of X, Y, and Z, this is a post which assumes that the reader wants to abolish gender.)
First: for whatever reason, some people born without boobs have extreme distress about not having boobs. They are quite stubborn about it and will gladly inject bathroom tub caulk to obtain them. Fortunately, most of them manage to avoid the bathroom-tub-caulk route and instead take the titty skittles and maybe get a boob job.
What does this have to do with gender, exactly?
You’re a gender abolitionist! Your whole point is that sex and gender are unrelated! What would people’s distress with their sex have to do with your position on gender anyway? In the Kickass Post-Gender Utopia, those people can go about having boobs to their heart’s content, without anyone ascribing any gendered meaning to it whatsoever. If in this world, they have to go about changing their legal gender markers and asking people to use different pronouns and wearing skirts, that is not their fault. That is the fault of legal gender markers and pronouns and gendered clothing, i.e., the things you don’t like anyway.
Second: Let us say a person born with breasts and a vagina wishes to engage in gender-non-conforming behavior, such as breast binding, wearing clothes typically considered male and being referred to as “he”. Which of these do you think he should have to go through?
- Being mocked
- Being fired from his job
- Bullying at school so severe he has to drop out
- Never being able to go to the bathroom in a public space because of responses ranging from dirty looks to insults if he tries
- Being disowned by his family
- Substandard medical care
- Being evicted
- Abuse from the police
- Assault
If you answered “yes” to one of those questions, I am taking away your gender abolitionist card until you learn better. If you answered “no” to all of those questions, congratulations! You agree with about ninety percent of what trans rights activists want!
Third: gender abolitionist attitudes towards pronouns clearly show different attitudes towards cis people than they do to trans people. Very few gender abolitionists use “they” for everyone. (But if you do: you’re awesome.) Few expect everyone to use gender-neutral pronouns for themselves or even get upset at people for correcting others who are mistaken about their pronoun. But when trans people want people to use the correct pronoun, suddenly everyone is up in arms.
The obvious objection is that pronouns are supposed to go with physical sex. Physical sex divides 98.5% of humanity into two clear categories, which is pretty much in the top tier for accuracy of concept as applied to humans. Unfortunately, for the other 1.5% of us, it’s not so clear.
Many people are like “but chromosomes!” And yet people with nonbinary chromosomes exist: no one seems to use “zie” for people with Klinefelter’s. You could go by hormonal sex: in that case, most trans women are “she” and most trans men are “he”. (And I would be perfectly willing to go on low-dose testosterone if that got me called “they.”)
As far as I can tell, trans-exclusive people seem to go with assigned sex at birth. Women with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome are called “she”; that poor guy who was reassigned into a girl after a botched circumcision is called “he”, because his initial assignment was male; trans women are called “he.” This is, not to put too fine a point on it, exactly as social as identified gender. We draw an arbitrary line– okay, at this point the intersex child’s genitals will be butchered with surgery into a vagina, at this point they will be butchered with surgery into a penis– and then everyone goes along with it.
As long as you are using pronouns in an arbitrary and social fashion, you might as well use them in an arbitrary and social fashion that doesn’t screw over trans people.
Fourth: the existence of social dysphoria is totally compatible with gender abolitionist assumptions. The thing about social dysphoria is that whether or not people would be socialized into believing that gender is important in the Kickass Post-Gender Utopia, they are clearly socialized to believe gender is important now. I mean, cisgender people think that being seen as a particular gender is important all the time. See: women’s suits and haircuts looking different from men’s, people who get upset when you mistake them for another gender. Is it really that implausible that some people would wind up believing being seen as a particular gender is important but for the wrong gender?
Now, you might think, we should probably encourage people to stop doing that as people not thinking gender is important is often considered to be an important step towards people not thinking gender is important. This is very true! However, trans people are entirely the wrong end to begin on here. It is true that there are many people who value being seen as a particular gender instrumentally– they think it would make them bad or low-status or unattractive to not be seen as a particular gender. If you tell them that, actually, valuing being seen as a particular gender is bad, low-status, and unattractive, then they will probably stop. However, it also seems plausible to me that the constant messaging it is Very Very Very Important that you get seen as the correct gender occasionally results in people valuing being seen as the correct gender for its own sake. (Indeed, it is remarkable that that constant barrage doesn’t do that for everyone.)
However, there are basically no people who wake up one morning and are like “I know! I will use ‘zie’ pronouns for all the status and attractiveness which ‘zie’ pronouns give me!” This is because zie pronouns do not actually give you status. They just make people make fun of you on 8Chan.
The group “trans people with social dysphoria” consists almost entirely of people who actually value being seen as a particular gender for its own sake, and thus almost entirely of people who will not actually stop caring about it if you tell them not to, and thus you are being a dick for no reason. Go bother cis people.
Rauwyn said:
“people not thinking gender is important is often considered to be an important step towards people not thinking gender is important.”
Is there a word missing or something? Or am I not getting the point of the tautology?
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Vulture said:
It’s a joke. Specifically, deliberate understatement, since obviously people not thinking gender is important is more than just “an important step towards” people not thinking gender is important; it’s the same thing.
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Hainish said:
You’re … not getting the point of the tautology (which is something like, “achieving a societal goal requires individuals to take steps toward that goal, though I’m sure it could be stated much better).
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MugaSofer said:
I spent this whole post wishing I could +1 posts on WordPress. And then I reached the end and it turned out I could! You guys, there is totally a “like” button at the bottom of posts here!
… well, it was a revelation to me, anyway.
>This is because zie pronouns do not actually give you status. They just make people make fun of you on 8Chan.
😦
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Sebastian said:
I think you make a good case here that gender abolitionists shouldn’t opposed trans people transitioning, but I’m not convinced that that makes them trans-positive. Refusing to use people’s preferred pronouns is a pretty crappy thing to do even if you do it to cis people as well.
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Imuli said:
The steel-gender-abolitionist position on pronouns: I use they for everyone unless I know they want something else.
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anonymousCoward said:
>This is because zie pronouns do not actually give you status. They just make people make fun of you on 8Chan.
As a distant outsider, my impression was that overuse of pronouns was frequently a “tribal dress code” for the tumblr set, wherein describing the vertiginous contours of ones’ inner world is a frequent part of conversation and looks remarkably like a status display. “As a demisexual nueroatypical otherkin (centauriod rabbit, preferred pronouns bun/buns/bunself), my thoughts on this issue are….”
With even brief exposure to some of these communities, it’s hard to escape the impression that a lot of the tumblrites are using the trappings of personal identity as props in some very immature high-school-style status games, sort of how people who talk about their “past lives” often claim to have been Cleopatra or Richard the Lionhearted or whatever.
You comport yourself with dignity and intelligence, so when you request gender-neutral pronouns it’s easy to comply. When tumblrites make similar requests, my instinctive reaction is to give them the bird and a loud Bronx cheer. This may be a mistake, but it sure doesn’t feel like one.
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veronica d said:
Many of the Tumblr crowd are socially awkward, weird, neuro-atypical people. If these label games are some kind of status behavior, then fine. Be the bigger person. Let them play.
Charity is admirable. Kindness is admirable. Patience is admirable. Be admirable.
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anonymousCoward said:
Thank you for the reply. it is a good one.
You ever come into contact with a group of strangers, listen to what they’re saying, watch what they’re doing, and get this creeping sensation that these people are not nice and and you should either GTFO immediately or prepare to fight? That’s the kind of feeling a lot of Tumblr gives me, and I think the identity-based status games are one of the things triggering it.
What do you call it when someone is trying to detach your grip on reality as a means of controlling you? I’m not sure what the word for that is, or if there is one, but that’s how it comes across. Status appears to be the goal, manipulating self-identity for social advantage appears to be the method, with shaming, ostracism and harassment being the enforcement.
Charity, kindness, and patience do not seem like appropriate responses when you get the distinct impression that you are being actively fucked with.
Maybe you’re right, and this is just my brain’s antivirus system registering false positives. Our host does a great job of defusing this by being upfront, honest and polite, but isn’t the point that you want this to be the default, without expending special effort to secure it? If so, having pronouns read as a manipulation attempt is a problem, and if there are actually people who do use it maliciously, that complicates fixing it.
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Barryogg said:
@anonymousCoward
>What do you call it when someone is trying to detach your grip on reality as a means of controlling you?
The term you’re looking for is “gaslightning”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
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po8crg said:
“What do you call it when someone is trying to detach your grip on reality as a means of controlling you?” Gaslighting.
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no one special said:
(Status: Yes, but…)
Gaslighting is conventionally used to describe abuse between intimate partners. I’m really leery of accepting a noncentral gaslighting that happens (1) in public, (2) over the internet, and (3) from strangers. Especially (3).
Interestingly, while I have seen feminists try to make a claim of gaslighting when people disagree with them on the internet, this is the first time I’ve seen it leveled against them. I think both of those varieties are noncentral at best, and a gross power grab, appropriating the suffering of abuse victims at worst.
anonymousCoward, I read and reread your above post, and I think you’re right that some people are using identity to score status points. I don’t think that they are trying to detach your grip on reality to control you, though. I think they believe in their own words, and are trying to convert you. (That is, there’s no deception. Or very little.)
If you feel like you should not engage, you’re probably right, but that does not mean that this is a purposeful attack.
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Zorgon said:
YUSSSS. This. Plz no more expanding the meaning of the term “gaslighting” kthx.
Honestly, at the current rate by 2015 the word is going to mean “saying anything at all other than ‘yes, you are completely right”.
A: “Do you think I’m pretty?”
B: “I think you’re beautiful.”
A: “STOP GASLIGHTING ME!”
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Ghatanathoah said:
@anonymousCoward
The tech blogger Eric S. Raymond has invented the concept “Kafkatrapping.” It avoids the interpersonal connotations of the word “gaslighting,” although I’m not sure his concept is a 1-1 match with what you are describing.
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citrom said:
re: your last post that I can’t reply to, wtf wordpress: yeah, tumblr has good subcultures and toxic subcultures and it is not very useful to pretend that the second one doesn’t exist in order to protect the first. More concretely, the rule of “anyone lower-status in the mainstream can’t by definition can’t hurt anyone higher-status in the mainstream” encourages cruelty and downplays the importance that tumblr, fandom etc can play in young, shy, anxious etc. people’s lives. And this means that some people will eventually take “die cis scum” seriously, and some peopel will say it not as venting, but as a status display to show that they are badass serious hardcore activists. So we have adolescents going over their identity with very fine-toothed combs to find anything that would make them other than part of the Opressive Cishet Class. And things that the mainstream is actually ok with, or judges based on general misoginy etc, become improtant identity markers because they help heeping the hate from being directed at you – yeah, die cishet scum, good thing that I like smart people, thus my sexuality is sapiosexual, and I dislike Cosmo and this means disliking gender roles, which means I am at most a demigirl! Or there was the circumgender person, who wished she was a trans woman instead of a cis woman, and bam, this made her somehow trans! And I wouldn’t care for their identity, if they wouldn’t use it as attack weapons and shields, but they do, so I do, too. (Ozy said to an ask that peopel woth neopronouns who don’t accept “they” are assholes, and wow, this changes everything, because most people dislike them not for being sensitive souls, but for bullying everyone else into making huge efforts wben talking to/about bun.) For those who think I am exagerating: There was a respected/feared user Monetizeyourcat, whose persona was of the angry recolutionary marxist trans radicalist variety… who seriously, I am not joking here, proposed transitioning for all cis men as a necessary step to end patriarchy. (And detransitioning to trans men). And many people have seen it to be oppositional to the general trans activist goal of accepting other people’s genders, but she used the opressors’-pain-doesn’t-matter argument, the “i am mentally ill and saying I am wrong makes me sad, so stop it” and the “i can make an unintelligible remix of deconstructionism and academic Marxism, therefore I am right” one. So people learned to shut up. Untill it became obvious that she was abusive towards teenage trans girls whom she offered her couch, so suddenly everyone started talking about how her ideas were kinda mean and absurd, too. But yeah, abusers can use any and all ideologies, so it is not a good idea to build in get out of jail free cards like “your tears don’t matter, because you aren’t opressed enough”. And this last one can be playede horizontally with no problems, you just have to decidethat whatever makes your life hard is more important than whatever makes their life hard.
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anonymousCoward said:
>Gaslighting is conventionally used to describe abuse between intimate partners.
Yeah, I wasn’t comfortable calling it gaslighting either, although I was thinking it pretty hard. And you’re right, calling it “Gaslighting” is a pretty irresponsible appropriation, especially when the more mundane “Con” or “Scam” are probably more descriptive. My apologies for the bad argument by implication. Of course, scam and con aren’t quite right either, because it’s based on community-wide social customs enforced by the group as a whole. “Cult”, maybe?
“Detaching you from reality” is meant in the sense of, saying things that are pretty obviously questionable, and then using social pressure to keep you from asking questions even to yourself. It seems like a pretty good description to me, since the end goal is disorienting the target to make controlling them easier.
Citrom’s post is a much better and more detailed description. Claiming Tumblrites are typical of feminism is an obvious strawman, and one I want to point out that I am explicitly not attempting. I don’t think I’m knowledgeable enough about Tumblrites or Feminism to lay out the distinctions properly, but I am very sure they aren’t the same thing. I’m just not comfortable agreeing that the best approach to militantly post-rational communities is to ignore them and hope they go away. Pointing and laughing would be the usual fallback, but that doesn’t seem ideal since it encourages the sort of people who come here and act rudely to Ozy. But then again…
>Ozy said to an ask that people with neopronouns who don’t accept “they” are assholes
…so maybe pointing and laughing is the solution after all.
I get the feeling I’ve derailed the topic beyond what is useful, Citrom’s explaining my point more concretely, and NOP’s critique has a fair degree of truth to it. Thank you for the replies, they were very elucidating.
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ozymandias said:
The circumgender thing was a troll blog, and even if it wasn’t I said similar things (I distinctly recall the phrase “genetically challenged drag queen”) when I was a teenager, so I’d be inclined not to judge. Is it stupid? Yes. But every trans person has come up with some incredibly stupid conceptualization of their identity at some point in the questioning process. It doesn’t mean they’re cis and it doesn’t mean yelling at them is helpful.
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veronica d said:
The trans community overreacted to the “circumgender” thing. Waaaaay overreacted. I lost friends over it. The whole episode was fucking bizarre.
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citrom said:
Ozy, even if the circumgender thing was a scam (the proof was ambiguous), it was reblogged and defended seriously, so there are tumblr-ians who agreed. More generally, if someone invents strange words to describe their transness, it is ethically neutral. If someone invents strange words to describe their identity that in 99% of all other frameworks were majoritarian, just in order to feel safe while yelling “die cishet scum”, it is still understandable, but is also a symptom of the medium being deeply disfunctional. I hope/guess that you did not use your “genetically challenged drag queen” status to argue with, say, real-life drag queens that you are just as opressed as them (or even more, bc of your “genetical challenges”).
I am not for yelling at people with strange identities. I am against conceding them an inalienable right to yell at ME for unchangeable and thus morally neutral aspects of my (boring, mainstream) identity. I could invent labels to protect myself if I believed in the game, and I do have enough suffering in my life that would be useful to exploit in this. But I dislike the rules of the game itself.
A popular, seriously-reblogged post this also reminds me of was “nice gender, did your parents pick it for you?” And I get that hurting cis people is cool, but the whole question only makes sense in a framework where the point of having a gender is not to live peacefully with it, but to be cooler and edgier that the mainstream… basically exactly what tumblr identity subcultures are accused with all the time, and what they would negate if asked directly, but still, they somehow are rejoicing in sharing that. And the obvious effect in anxious etc cis people is “damn, my gender is uncool and I feel bad, let’s try to invent a label vague enough that I could name myself anything but cis”. And this is not an useful way of going around doing activism, because we can’t abandon the definition of Real Womanhood to Cosmopolitan, and Real Manhood to MRAs – if gender-role-disliking men and women still feel like men and women, we should’t pressure them to renounce the labels, otherwise the labels remain just as stupidly inflexible. And we’ll have people feeling bad for stupid reasons. Even Nostalbegraist have felt bad once because of taking Monetizeyourcat seriously, remember? He is a man, and being a man is Problematic => let’s suffer in circles! (I am making fun of tumblr norms here, not of Nostalgebraist).
A different example is being demisexual, ie. only desiring to fuck people you love, which is exactly how “good girls” are supposed to feel if you ask the slut-shaming mainstream, and the concept is useful to avoid people typical mind fallacy-ing each other etc, but as everything in tumblr, it became an arm/shield, with the most heated arguments being about if hetero demisexuals can call themselves queer… not other facets of their problems, not, say, the pressure on men to be indiscriminately sexual, but the most relevant one for tumblr, ie. are they cool/opressed enough? and they want so much to be cool/opressed enough, because it is a virtue to pick on uncool people, and they don’t want to be picked on…
anyway, @anonymousCoward, of course the worst of tumblr =/= feminism generally. Luckily.
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Sniffnoy said:
So since I was just talking about this on the second-most-recent open thread naturally I’m going to have to write a long reply to this. Like basically I don’t think you’ve addressed the strongest arguments against this, which OK might be because you were more interested in arguing against what’s largely out there, and what I consider the strongest arguments against this are not necessarily shared by anyone else. 🙂 Still, gotta respond.
Anyway, First let’s take this point by point:
Point 1: On this I agree entirely. The more interesting question to my mind is whether some people should be *required* to transition. 🙂 (Probably not, because I doubt there’s any non-horrible way to do that.)
Point 2: Obviously, I am almost entirely in agreement here. However: One of these things is not like the other! Namely, “being referred to as ‘he'”, for at least two reasons. Firstly, if we accept the framework of trans rights activists, it isn’t gender-non-conforming behavior at all, but rather being-of-a-different-gender in the first place! (Well, probably, anyway. I get the impression it’s a little more complicated than that.) And while trans rights activists may indeed want to protect those who are gender-non-conforming but not transgender, a lot of my argument is that regardless of their intentions, what they are actually doing will make things worse for such people, not better.
Secondly, notice how it’s in the passive voice? It’s not something you do, it’s something you ask or demand that other people do. That said, obviously if someone wants to be referred to as “he”, either together with or without any of the other things, responding with any of the things on that list is still horrifying and not remotely warranted. Well, except possibly “mockery”, although probably only in a hypothetical world that is not this one. Like, given what else transgender people are subject to, and given the whole “gender dysphoria” thing, it’s a nasty thing to do, but if that surrounding context weren’t the case, then it doesn’t seem horrible, regardless of whether it’s really warranted. (Though I guess it may depend on what we mean by “mockery”; you may have harsher things in mind than me.)
Point 3: This one is longer so I’m just going to respond to a few particular things.
Very few gender abolitionists use “they” for everyone. (But if you do: you’re awesome.)
You know, I’ve considered doing this recently! But seems a lot of the trans rights activists would object that I’m failing to acknowledge their gender…
Few expect everyone to use gender-neutral pronouns for themselves
Also something I’ve considered doing, now that trans rights activists have invented to technology of “it’s OK to demand people refer to you by a particular pronoun”! Naturally I’m afraid they’d get on my case for appropriating it thus and using it purely as a political tool. Also I worry that without clarification it would, y’know, not be interpreted that way, and instead be taken as implying that e.g. I do in fact accept the whole framework promoted by trans rights activists, which at present I don’t. And thus I’m not sure I’d actually be helping my cause.
Regarding intersex people: I agree with the (implicit in the use of the word “butchering”) claim that altering their genitals for no better reason than we’re-uncomfortable-with-intersex-people is terrible. I agree that assigning binary sexes where they don’t make sense, artificially forcing our categorization where it does not make sense (sometimes by altering things so that it does, wtf!) is kind of a failure to engage with reality.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, exactly as social as identified gender.
I don’t think this is true. Now you’re right that the dividing line is arbitrary; and while I would not endorse butchering intersex genitals, even if you don’t do that you still have to draw arbitrary dividing lines around “intersex”. But the presence of an arbitrary dividing line does not make it “exactly as social”. It is less social in some ways (rooted in physiology) and more so in others (arbitrary socially-decided dividing lines). I do not want to repeat my whole previous comments on the matter, but for the purposes discussed in that comment, the fact that it is ultimately rooted in physiology but also has an arbitrary component is actually a combination with some really nice properties for my purposes. (I would certainly endorse those actually on the dividing lines identifying as they please.) Crudely speaking, the first part is what allows you to tie it down so you can kill it with the second part. (Well, OK, you want to attack it with more than way more than just the arbitrariness, since the arbitariness affects only a small fraction of the population, but the arbitrariness helps.) If instead you loosen the bonds, eventually it will escape and then you’ll be in much worse trouble than when you started.
That is to say: “arbitrary and social” ways of using pronouns can differ in important respects other than whether or not they screw over trans people!
…I expect that my response to the fourth point is going to be really long, so I’m going to just leave off here for now and get back to that later if you don’t mind…
(Also: Thank you for writing this post and thus giving me somplace to argue about this! 😀 )
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veronica d said:
“You know, I’ve considered doing this recently! But seems a lot of the trans rights activists would object that I’m failing to acknowledge their gender…”
Some trans rights advocates are gender abolitionists. Most are not. Moreover, I don’t think cis folks would like “they” much either.
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Bugmaster said:
I am a heteronormatively oppressive cis-patriarch, and I do indeed dislike “they”, for the reasons I outlined in my comment below. For what it’s worth.
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primality said:
Cis here.
If you used neutral pronouns for me only, I would mind, because that’d imply that you were reading me differently than I want to be read. But if I knew you did it to everyone, the weirdness lies in you rather than me, and I’ll protect your right to be as weird as you want.
I think the difference is that for a lot of trans folks, the first hypothesis is much more likely.
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davidmikesimon said:
Here’s my two bits of anecdata: I am cis and male, and I equally like being referred to by “they” or “he”.
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meaninglessmonicker said:
I really don’t see much risk of gender “escaping”. From your comment on the other thread, I take it you’re afraid gender will become conflated with masculinity/femininity. If trans people were universally or near-universally very gender-conforming in their identified sex, I could see this worry, however IME they’re not. I don’t have any data, but the entire concept of “autogynephilia” was developed to explain gender-non-conforming trans women, trans women seem to be disproportionately LGB, and there was an entire tumblr about mtf butches. I imagine similar things are true on the ftm side of things. There may be a brief period as trans people gain visibility where “woman” is equated in the public consciousness to “girly person”, but if that happens I predict cis and trans gender-non-conforming people will become likewise more visible, and the cause of gender abolitionism will be no worse off than before.
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veronica d said:
For the record, autogynephilia was developed to explain late-transitioning, lesbian trans women, which to my view does not imply “gender non-conforming.” Specifically, these women commonly make every effort to pass as a femme woman, even if they often cannot. Furthermore, they often show a rather awkward mix of feminine stereotypes combined with residual male socialization, which bugs the crap out of a certain class of feminist. But they seldom present as *butch* per se. Certainly they *want* to pass as mainline femmes, even taking classes for voice and comportment. Facial surgery is common among those who can afford it.
These women vary in their politics, as one would expect among a diverse group of women. It is becoming increasingly common for them to identify as feminists, and therefore for them to have less patience with “comportment” classes. But this is a new development and probably quite outside of Blanchard’s theory.
If you are interested in a better understanding of these women, I suggest avoiding Blanchard’s garbage and instead check out Vitali’s typology. These women are “Group Three.”
http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
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meaninglessmonicker said:
I had no idea that there was a non- absolutely-terrible treatment of late transitioning, lesbian trans women in the literature. Thanks for that!
So maybe the group of women described by “Auogynephiliac” or “Group 3” are more gender-faily than gender-non-conforming, as a whole, but there are trans women who don’t present in a traditionally feminine way, and I expect as gatekeeping becomes less about “are you literally a 50s housewife?”, there will be more of them.
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veronica d said:
Well, if the “DES Sons” [1] theory is true, then yeah, there are tons of these people, although I expect by now they are either dead or have figured out how to make peace with it.
In fact, I know quite a few older FTM crossdressers who wish they could transition but cannot, either for family reasons or job reasons. One in particular works in outside sales in a not-so-progressive industry. For her transition would be career ending.
That said, the women I know at that age do tend to want to be 50’s housewives, at least a fair number of them. It is what they know.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol#DES_sons
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Audrey said:
People can mean very different things when they say they want to abolish gender, but I don’t think any of them mean we will treat all sexes in an identical way.
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meaninglessmonicker said:
Other than maybe penisier people not seeing a gynecologist or using tampons, and more vagina-ish people not attempting to use the urinals in public restrooms, I thought that was exactly what they meant.
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stargirlprincess said:
What else could they mean?
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Audrey said:
They mean that gender is a hierarchy that puts some men at the top and everyone else underneath them. They want to abolish that hierarchy. It does not follow that you would need to get rid of all gender expression, non rigid gender roles or even deny the possibility that there are innate aspects to psychological gender. You only have to get rid of the aspects of gender that are coercive or that treat people as unequal and lead to systemic inequality.
The extent to which people are going to have different experiences and require different treatments naased on sex are going to vary. But I have spent the vast majority of my twenties constantly either pregnant, giving birth, miscarrying, recovering from birth or breastfeeding. And I have the benefits of not having had any long term health issues as a result, have free health care, community health visits for 5 years, paid maternity leave , live in a developed country and had legal protection under equality law as breastfeeding parent is a protected characteristic in equality law just as being trans is. The situation for pregnant people elsewhere is often terrible, leading to suffering, disability and death. The provisions required to ensure pregnant people get equality with everyone else is going to require a lot more social provision that sanitary protection. Although there would be a huge increase globally in girls attending school if they had access to sanitary protection and toilets to change it in schools, so the describing it as about tampons certainly is not trivialising sex either.
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veronica d said:
I don’t think this position works very well, mostly because gender is super complicated and saying “Let’s just get rid of the bad parts” is fine in principle, but in practice it usually ends up a mess.
Which, look, we should pretty much despair in trying to *define* gender, but I usually go to the classic, “How we behave socially as sexed bodies” (I think I got this one from Butler). That works pretty well, except it leaves out the internal sense of gender, which some of us feel deeply. So, yeah, *behavior* is part of it, but *how we feel* matters a lot.
For example, my gendered feelings were there before I transitioned, and thus for a long time my internal gender and my observable behavior were at odds. I think this happens to a lot of us. Many people never get to express their true gender. I had to fight like hell to express mine. For this I paid huge.
So my gender is kinda important to me.
So to your point, the ways gender is about *power* — yeah, that stuff is fucked up. We should fight that part. We should eliminated it, if we can, if doing so does not cause too much damage otherwise.
And that latter point is, to my view, the big deal. We don’t fully know how gender works. It’s easy to get shit wrong and hurt people. So feminism should have these goals:
1. To identify how our gender system actually works, insofar as we can understand
2. In particular, to understand how it hurts people, to know who is oppressed
3. To mitigate against these effect
Over time this will require revolutionary change. However, that does not mean we should support whatever changes come to mind easily. The law of unintended consequences is always there. Entropy always wins.
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stargirlprincess said:
I assume there is a long story here that I just don;t understand. But Aubrey I don’t see why any of the stuff in your post should go under “gender abolition.” I’m not sure what country you live in but there are no countries that have abolished gender norms. Yet your country seems to be able to support pregnant women pretty well. Some of the USA has no shortage of tampons or restrooms (Though there is still the terrible attitude that periods are “gross”) and yet gender roles are alive and well here in the US.
I am not sure why the type of thing you are talking about is “abolishing gender.”
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Creutzer said:
My pet theory of gender roles in the US is that they are, indeed, alive and well, except nobody knows what they are.
More seriously, though, it probably depends on the area and social group, but gender roles in the US don’t look so alive and well to me when compared to, say, Russia.
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veronica d said:
I think “gender roles” refers to socially sanctioned assemblies of gendered behavior. “Gender identity” on the other hand is something more deep. Myself, I sense it but I cannot put it into words.
Here’s a bit of gendered brain candy: over on the big trans thread on SCC, someone suggested sexuality is about *who* you desire while gender is about *how* you want to be desired. That makes sense.
Except, I do not think that is all of it. In fact, I think we err if we assume it is all primarily sexual. On the other hand, I think we also err if we deny that in some ways this might be sexual all the way down. (Even maybe for asexual people. Even if indeed they have no desire whatsoever to fuck anyone.) Cuz maybe what we experience as gendered or sexual is built from deeper cognitive structures, and these might play roles in all kinds of stuff that do not look gendered or sexual at all.
Myself, I think this stuff is fundamentally *illegible*, and attempts to make it legible, to draw bright, comfortable lines, tend to fuck over a lot of people. It fucks over trans folks most of all, along with those lovely constellations of gender-non-conforming weirdos.
(Love you all!)
But thing is, I bet this fucks over cis folks to, if only in terms of lost opportunities to thrive.
In my own way I’m a gender radical.
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Audrey said:
Stargirlprincess, treating pregnant people as if they are expendable and it doesn’t really matter if they die, become disabled or suffer is an example of imposing a gender role. Some countries have attempted to abolish this and other damaging gender roles whilst also leaving some other damaging gender roles in place. Or in the USA, this treatment through the medium of biological sex is both a gender and racial role, as African Americans are four times more likely to die of pregnancy related causes that white Americans.
So abolishing gender as a hierarchy must have quite expansive provisions around biological sex. And also then, according to Ozy’s post, that must include provisions for sex dysphoria.
But all of that was a digression away from the point that gender abolition does not have to abolish all aspects of gender identity, expression, psychology and role. It just has to abolish the rigidity, discrimination and power structures.
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MugaSofer said:
@audrey:
>treating pregnant people as if they are expendable and it doesn’t really matter if they die, become disabled or suffer
I’m pretty sure this is a strawman, in the sense that no-one is in favour of it and yet I am occasionally talked to as if I beieve it
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Audrey said:
I don’t understand why this is a strawman. It is a matter of fact that there is terrible treatment of pregnant women in various countries. The treatment of pregnant African American people is an Amnesty international campaign. There doesn’t have to be an individuallarguing for it. It is the systemic nature of discrimination.
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fjvfjfh said:
Rich women don’t get treated badly when pregnant. Poverty means lack of access to medical care. All the clinics and birth centers, tell me they don’t exist?…
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fjvfjfh said:
“I’m going to the hospital to give birth while maximizing my chances of survival” ” wow, you gender outlaw, this is so subversingly unfeminine of you!” medical acces is a gender role AU
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Audrey said:
No, rich people frequently don’t get treated badly during pregnancy, but isn’t the point of the gender abolition Ozy is talking about that it would be abolished for all people, and everyone would have accessto the services they need? I’m not rich. I have access to medical and social care because activists fought for it. For the same reason, transition is treated as a medical and social need that is prptected in law and paid for by the state.
Sorry, I don’t understand the outlaw comment. It is a radical demand to abolish the systemic discrimination against pregnant people. It is one of the major components of fighting damaging gender roles – see the reports of UNICEF, WHO, Amnesty and so on.
A large part of what Ozy is arguing is that sex dysphoria must be recognised and supported during hender abolition,, and I think that has to be a core component. You actually cannot abolish gender as asystem without meeting medical and social needs based on sex,, including sex dysphoria.
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Ken Arromdee said:
If rich people don’t get trated badly when pregnant, how can we say there is “systemic discrimination against pregnant people”? That’s like saying there is systemic discrimination agaiunst New Yorkers because poor New Yorkers get treated badly (because all poor get treated badly).
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fjvfjfh said:
What i wanted to say is that no woman ever was called unfeminine for seeking medical care while pregnant. It is not a gender problem, it is a poverty problem. Similarly, prostate cancer non-prevention in poor men does not mean we live in a matriarchy. ( coincidentally, I do think we live in patriatchy, I just disagree with this argument. Queen Victiria was a promoter of getting anesthetics while giving birth; do you say she was not normatively/mainstream feminine? )
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Audrey said:
Ken, because rich and powerful people often get some exemptions from systemic problems. For example the US had both a black president and a systemic racism problem (and I did not say that rich people never get treated badly when pregnant).
Fjvfjfh, most gender problems are also poverty problems because the global poor are mostly female. This is a basic of intersectionality, surely? If you only want to talk about gender problems that apply to rich people, that is some particularly elitist form of Western white feminism, but it isn’t the kind of gender abolition believed in by the kind of people Ozy wants to become more trans inclusive in their post.
Most of the major problems that disproportionately have an impact on women – lack of health care, sanitation and sewerage facilities, access to education, to adequate environmental resources, to community decision making processes, to livelihoods, to power are usually intersectional problems of being a woman, having caring responsibilities and being poor. It is considered entirely ‘feminine’ for an eight year old to be illiterate and not attend school because they are walking miles every day to collect water while looking after numerous siblings, but it is still a gender problem. it is considered entirely ‘feminine’ to be pregnant and African American and receive inadequate housing, social and health care, but it is still a gender problem.
You seem to be conflating problems with not conforming to gender roles with gender problems. Not conforming to gender roles is a sub set of gender problems. Most people experiencing gender problems experience them mostly because of discrimination against their gender, not because they aren’t feminine or masculine enough.
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soosoos said:
Somewhat unrelated question. You mentioned that the percentage of trans people is very low, probably less than 4%. Even in cultures with widely recognized and roughly accepted gender options that would be considered trans in modern america, we still don’t see that many of them.
I want to support trans folks, and make the world a kinder, more transhuman place. But at the same time, I’m not sure how to square that with general “shut up and multiply” utilitarianism. For example, trangender day of remembrance was a few days (or weeks, I can’t tell time well while at college), and I remember looking at the number of deaths cited and my honest emotional reaction was “Oh thank god, that number’s so small, I should obviously be way more worried about the orders of magnitude larger number of people who die very year from much, much more preventable/easily advanced causes.” But people seemed very, very concerned over what is a comparatively tiny number of deaths.
I similarly have a friend who gets violently angry whenever people don’t signal sufficient concern for trans people, and center helping trans people over other forms of charity, and this concerns me, from an effective altruism standpoint.
I guess my question is… how do I square the very small numbers associated with trans issues, with the desire to help the most people the most effectively?
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ozymandias said:
The best evidence suggests that trans people are 0.3% of the population. I see no particular reason for anyone to prioritize trans activism unless they have some sort of comparative advantage or happen to find it very interesting. (I find it interesting and thus write essays about it.) The average cis person has discharged their duty, IMO, by not being a dick to the trans people they interact with.
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veronica d said:
Well, it is not just the raw numbers of deaths. It is also the chances that an individual trans woman will be murdered. There is a lot of dispute over this number, but almost certainly it is higher than for similarly situated cis women. This weighs on us. Many of us know murder victims. All of us know multiple suicide victims. This is just part of the game, a fact of the community. This has a cost. Add to this the HIV infection rate, the poverty rate, the homelessness rate, the unemployment rate, on and on. This all has a huge cost.
Yes, numerically we are a small group. But that implies that helping us will be quite cheap. For example, I’ve seen estimates that requiring insurance companies to provide trans healthcare would cost next to nothing when it gets averaged out. In fact, my employer provides trans healthcare. When they account for the cost, it vanishes in the noise.
The CDC has estimated the rate of HIV infection among trans women to be 26%. Now, this is almost certainly an overestimate. It comes from a set of studies set in urban areas, associated with certain gender clinics. No doubt selection bias plays an enormous role (I hope I hope I hope I hope). That said, among poor trans women there is an alarmingly huge amount of HIV.
The reason for this, it is speculated, is that they get a double whammy. They have all the risks of HIV combined with a lack of any support structures. Most HIV programs target gay men. Those that target women are often unprepared for the specific needs of trans women. Both groups often treat trans women poorly. Trans women learn not to trust. (Add to that homelessness, joblessness, suspicious and transphobic social programs, etc., and these numbers begin to make sense.)
(Before I transitioned I had no idea I would become friends with multiple poor, racially diverse full service sex workers. Now when I pass a sex worker on the street, I tend to strike up a conversation. We often have mutual friends.)
This is a small number of women, in absolute terms. But that means that the costs of helping them would be small compared to the costs of the broader gay-targeted HIV prevention programs. This is a small group with a great need, but who have been ignored because they lack the kind of voice that gay men have, and the LGb(t) community kind of ignores us most of the time.
Unless we scream a lot.
Like, if we make a big deal out of things like TDOR, get attention, get people to look close.
It’s getting better. I hope you will help, even in small ways.
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veronica d said:
I have a not-so-charitable theory of the TERFs, which goes like this: their preoccupation with trans folks arises from a simple fact, that trans folks are one of the few queer groups with less social power than the TERFs, and as the TERFs have no real capacity to bully gender-conforming cis folks, such as the women they see at faculty meetings who are friends with the dean — socially established women such as those — so when they want to kick a woman, the only one’s weak enough are the trans gals.
Which is why the rise in trans politics drives them batshit. Laverne and Janet must make them bellow in rage.
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Bugmaster said:
The reason I dislike “they” as a pronoun is because it confuses plural and singular, and confusion is usually bad (unless you are invoking it deliberately as a poetic device). It is quite likely that this issue affects me more than it does others, because I’m a programmer; but still: seeing “they” applied to a single person always makes me wince.
Even if you are not a programmer, consider the sentence: “Alex walked away from the basket of kittens, even though doing so made them sad”. Who is sad in this sentence, Alex or the kittens ? Now, consider the alternative: “Alex walked away from the basket of kittens, even though doing so made fooself sad”. In terms of silliness, “fooself” is no better than “zie” or “bunself”, but now we know exactly to whom the adjective “sad” applies.
Similarly, gendered pronouns can be quite useful when referring specifically to gender-binary people. For example, consider the following variations of the same sentence:
1). “Jack and Jill went up the hill, and when they reached the top, they finally worked up the nerve to kiss them.”
2). “Jack and Jill went up the hill, and when they reached the top, foo finally worked up the nerve to kiss fooself.”
3). “Jack and Jill went up the hill, and when they reached the top, she finally worked up the nerve to kiss him.”
I believe that there’s only one version of this sentence that is unambiguous (and, as a bonus, not silly); and that is version #3.
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Protagoras said:
“You” is ambiguous between singular and plural, and our existing pronouns are ambiguous when there are, say, two men, or two women, or two groups relevantly involved in the story. Sometimes, the ambiguity doesn’t matter, perhaps because context makes it clear; when this is not the case, and when the ambiguity is important, there are other options (repeating proper names or using uniquely identifying descriptions instead of using pronouns). I can’t see that a slight reduction in ambiguity problems that are easily solved in other ways could possibly be important enough to outweigh the other issues involved here.
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veronica d said:
Agreed. The whole “Singular-they is bad cuz {linguistics}” is usually pretty weaksauce, as if anyone is unaware that the term is traditionally plural.
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Bugmaster said:
It may surprise you that I also dislike the plural “you”, but that’s probably because my native language uses a different word for it, so I am used to the luxury. Or, to put it another way, I have non-native-speaker privilege !
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po8crg said:
Second person pronouns were number-specific: “thou” and “you”, but it became polite to address everyone as plural (compare the “royal we” in the first person).
Later on, the lack of number-specific second person pronouns became a problem, resulting in people re-inventing a plural second person pronoun: y’all.
IAC, it’s not the plural “you”, but the singular “you” that’s the original problem.
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Creutzer said:
With second person pronouns, number-neutrality is much less of a big deal because they are never used anaphorically. Having a number neutral third person pronoun does make anaphor resolution that much harder. To all the con-langers out there: have you ever heard of a person that has number-neutral third person pronouns? I haven’t, and would be surprised to, but then I know little about typology.
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meaninglessmonicker said:
When people say “nounself pronouns”, they don’t literally mean that every form besides the subject is “nounself”.
With regard to ambiguity, look what happened with “you”. Thou/you->you/you(->you/y’all). I bet if we all started saying “they” “they all” and “them all” would catch on pretty quickly.
With regard to your example sentence, I could construct a similarly ambiguous sentence with two people of the same gender “Jack and Bill went up the hill, and when they reached the top, he finally worked up the nerve to kiss him.” The solution is to replace one of the pronouns with a name, e.g. “Jack and Bill went up the hill, and when they reached the top Bill finally worked up the nerve to kiss him.” or just to rewrite the sentence “Bill only worked up the nerve to kiss Jack once they reached the top of the hill.”
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Bugmaster said:
Sure, but my point was not, “gendered pronouns solve all ambiguity problems for all time”, but rather, “gendered pronouns can be instrumental to solving a certain set of common ambiguity problems”. Ultimately, if we all talked in LISP we wouldn’t have any ambiguity, but until that happens, we do (IMO) need a set of tools in our toolbox that can improve communication without requiring us to drastically rewrite our sentences.
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veronica d said:
Heh. But what about when your symbol is defined in a macro that produces a macro that produces a macro that reads from an external data source to generate symbols in more macros! And then some jackass decide to use eval-when and progv!
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Bugmaster said:
My eyes ! My eyes ! The googles, they do nothing !
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veronica d said:
She is running on my machine right now, growing, consuming heap.
kill -9 does not work anymore. Shutdown only makes the machine laugh. I dare not glance at the power cord. Who knows what that would bring forth.
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Rauwyn said:
I’m generally in favor of singular they, but if you’re really concerned about ambiguity, Adam Cadre came up with a pretty interesting idea: use “fi” and “se” to refer to the first and second person in the sentence (http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14601.html).
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stargirlprincess said:
I also dislike singular they. I find it very confusing. However I really like ze/zir/zirs and use them in my writing. I only use them in irl speech in certain company though :(.
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po8crg said:
One of my friends uses “zie” but softens the initial consonant, which results in conservatives mishearing it as “she”. Zie prefers “zie” but will accept “she” for zirself, so that works out OK for zir.
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stargirlprincess said:
Should I try to pronounce zie so it definitely does not sound like she? Maybe I should. I don’t want to accidentally misgender people :(.
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davidmikesimon said:
These kinds of pronoun-dereferencing problems are already endemic to English; if you want to avoid them, then .i e’u ko lojbo se bangu
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no one special said:
This looks like a good place to talk about conjugation. I like singular “they”, so I’ll use that when useful. If you have better answers, I’d love to hear them. (I don’t know if Ozy would or not.)
Known person (Male):
Bob felt sick. He decided to leave.
Known Person (Female):
Alice felt sick. She decided to leave.
Known Person (Other):
Paul felt sick. They decided to leave.
Known Person, Gender Unknown:
Is Pat coming to the meetup? I’d really like to meet them in person.
Unknown person, unknown gender:
When the user wants to stop, they should click on the logout button.
Unknown person, (Female):
When a mother wants to breastfeed her baby, she should remove her shirt.
Unknown person (Male):
When a father wants to see his children, he should call his lawyer.
Unknown person, Other gender:
When a nonbinary person wants to specify their preferred pronoun, they should click on the profile button.
Groups:
When the employees heard they were getting a bonus, they were very happy.
Are there other situations where there is confusion? I know that you can set up circumstances where he/she is unambiguous, but “they” is ambiguous, but these do not seem to be common circumstances, unless you’re authoring a romance novel.
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Bugmaster said:
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but are there two orthogonal kinds of dysphoria — one that makes you want to change your body (e.g. breast binding/implants), and a different one that makes you want to change how other people treat you (using specific pronouns, etc.) ? Or is there only one kind of dysphoria, which manifests in both ways mentioned above ? Obviously, humans are complicated and it’s a spectrum etc., I’m not trying to force anyone into the gender-binary-binary here, I am just trying to understand what’s going on.
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Loki said:
Trans people tend to talk about body dysphoria and social dysphoria. So in short, yes, there’s two kinds, but it seems more common than not for trans people to have both.
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Creutzer said:
It’s not a stupid question, and I’ve been asking myself the same thing for a while. People don’t seem to be doing a very good job at being clear about this (maybe because they think everybody knows?). The fact that “transgender” and “transsexual” don’t seem to be distinguished does suggest that these two dysphoris generally occur together. I still want to know whether they necessarily do, though, because that’s relevant to how this whole stuff is represented in the brain. So are there, for example, people who are perfectly okay with having a penis, but genuinely want to be called “she”?
Judging from a sample size of 1, my impression is that even the non-binary versions of the dysphorias go together: Ozy wants to have a gender-neutral social role and would prefer an androgynous body, i.e. they are upset about *having* female characteristics, but not about *lacking* male characteristics. Of course, please correct me if my perception is off!
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anon said:
It’s pretty much the normal view among trans theorists that dysphoria has physical and social components. However they are very highly correlated, and even in cases where they don’t obviously “correspond” people nearly always have both.
As for Creutzer’s example in specific, some trans women are ok with their penises, but I’ve yet to encounter even one who didn’t want to change some conventionally-sexed aspects of their body.
Whether the correlation is indicative of a root cause, or is causal in itself (e.g. people want to be read as the correct gender, society relies heavily on bodies to read gender, therefore they change their bodies) is pretty unclear though.
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veronica d said:
I know a number of trans women who honestly do not want genital surgery, but *do* takes hormones and present as normative women.
But also note that this stuff can be hard to understand *even to trans people*, *even about themselves*. (Which is not an argument about their rights to self-determine, but it does acknowledge that this is a complex process of self-exploration.)
Anecdote time!
I’ve felt a strong, nagging sense of female gender identity since my late teens.
Which, before that I definitely had cross-gender feelings. I thought often about being a girl. My favorite books featured female characters — in fact I found such stories intoxicating. I even crossdressed a few times (in private). However, it was not until around age 18 that I said, “I totally wish I was a girl.”
I have an early memory of this. I am driving my car to a friend’s house. For some reason I remember *the place* of this quite distinctly, the exact neighborhood. The whole time I’m driving, I am imagining being a woman. I realize it *feels great* to think this. So I keep thinking it. I think about this a lot. It becomes my single daydream, all consuming. This never changes.
If you had asked me if I was transsexual, I would have said, “No fucking way!” The thought terrified me.
From time to time I saw a trans woman on television, in some Jerry Springer style expose. I though they looked like freaks. (Which of course they did! That was their purpose on the show.)
When I first saw *Silence of the Lambs* I experienced a deep and sudden wave of hopelessness. You see, *even that* would not work. Even a skin-suit would not let me *be a woman* and *be a lesbian*. No one would accept it, and being some kind of psuedo-freak-woman, alone in my mirror, would not be enough.
I still denied I was trans.
I had no conscious bodily dysphoria. If someone had asked, “Do you hate your genitals?” I would have said, “No.”
I often fantasized about having a female body. I rather did not like my body as it was. In fact, I did not take care of myself. I got fat. I was a “neckbeard”. I kinda wished I was attractive, but then, not enough to do anything. Falling apart felt strangely natural to me.
Later I got into working out, lifting, and martial arts. I least I got healthy. If you had asked me, I would have told you my body was fine.
I played roleplaying games. After a while I found a group that were cool with my playing a woman, which I then did obsessively. Very obsessively. It was a problem. If the GM canceled a session, my whole week was ruined. Which I mean literally; the only part of my life worth living was, for that week, gone.
The group broke up because I was such a freak about it.
I figured out I was trans. (Like, duh!)
Soon enough I read *Whipping Girl*, cuz we all read *Whipping Girl*. In the book, Serano talks about her bodily dysphoria. She presents it as an essential part of being transsexual.
I *know* that I am trans. However, I do not have the sustained bodily dyshporia that she describes.
Of course my body is totally wrong and actually I’m completely dysfunctional sexually and I totally dissociate when I do have sex and I am never present with my partner and dammit I kinda do hate my body like all the time.
But I am not “dysphoric”. It’s just social gender. Really, just go back in time and ask me!
This all made perfect sense to me at the time.
I think to myself, “Maybe I’m not really for-real trans. Maybe I’m faking it or something, or maybe I’m some kinda half-trans. Perhaps my lifelong dream of being a woman is just some weird thing. Don’t most guys think this stuff?”
Time passes. It gets worse, and worse, and worse. I am suicidal. Specific plans get made.
At this point I transition. Why not? If it doesn’t work, I have an exit all set to go.
I get my diagnosis, my prescriptions, my cool new pronoun. (She!)
I go out in a miniskirt one night. I call this genderbliss.
Soon enough my body starts changing. I get boobs. (BOOBS!) My skin softens. Curves form. I like it. It feels nice. It feels *right*.
“Rightness” is a word trans people often use. It’s hard to explain. In fact, I think this is the part that cis people cannot quite get.
Which, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
I like my new body. Not perfectly. Parts sag in unattractive ways. My tummy is a bit rounder than I want. My face is — well — better than it was. But I’m not pretty.
I can do *sexy* however. I have great legs. My ass does what it needs to do. Plus, I have badass purple hair.
I think back to my old self, that poor girl-hidden-in-a-boy who would never admit she hated her body, and I realize, hell yeah you hated that body. It was *wrongness*, but you could not articulate it. You had no idea how bad it was cuz you never compared it to something else, just the general backdrop of a diminished life. All that stuff that Serano wrote, you basically had that, but not in a way you could quite see.
My point is this: dysphoria, either social or physical, is not a simple thing. These are not binary variables that just trigger all one way or all another. Brains are weird. Gender is weird. We cannot even understand ourselves half the time.
I am so much happier now as a woman that I cannot even describe.
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Creutzer said:
Veronica, thanks a lot for that in-depth reply!
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Bugmaster said:
My heart goes out to you, veronica d (or at least to your younger self).
That said though, the fact that you “could not understand yourself half the time” does not, in and of itself, imply anything about dysphoria. People in general are very poor at understanding themselves (regardless of their gender or lack thereof). This is why psychologists, neurobiologists, and mental health professionals exist; and I wish we had more of them.
This way, when another teenager goes through what you went through, her doctor could just say, “Oh, it looks like you’re trans, let’s start you on this prescription right away. Meanwhile, your latest blood sugar tests look good, so please keep taking your insulin the way you’ve been doing. Oh, and also, there’s a flu going around, so see the nurse on your way out for a flu shot.”
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ozymandias said:
I have met people who experienced purely bodily dysphoria or purely social dysphoria, but they seem relatively rare. For most people, the dysphorias seem to go together. Bodily dysphoria can produce social dysphoria, and vice versa: some people don’t want to be called “she” because it reminds them they have a vulva which they are dysphoric about; some people are upset by their bodies because they have penises and penises are male. So even people who ‘naturally’ only have one form may, practically, have both.
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veronica d said:
Thanks for your kind words, both of you.
@bugmaster — I honestly doubt a psychologist could have diagnosed my gender stuff. It was buried too deep. Like, there is *no way* I would have mentioned the crossdressing. And liking girl characters in books? That is hardly exclusive to trans gals. Looking back I can see how these thing fit together into a narrative, but alone they prove nothing. Certainly there are cisgendered narratives that contain these things.
That said, what would have helped me is this: no fucking Jerry Springer, no fucking *Silence of the Lambs*. And I am *not* saying censorship. Instead, I am saying authors and creators who *do a good job* instead of doing a terrible job.
Had I turned on my TV to see Lavern Cox, had I gone to the punk rock show and seen Against Me!, had (by some strange set of events) the book *Nevada* found its way into my hands — those things would have saved me. Especially *Nevada*, cuz I am Maria AND I am James. Which is the whole point.
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PDV said:
I am confused. What are motivations for gender abolitionism that aren’t rooted in trans issues?
I’d independently come to the prediction that in 2-3 generations gender will be an obsolete concept and that this is a good thing, but that was entirely from extrapolating the attitudes of my trans-friendly, hyper-liberal social circle to the wider population.* Could someone point me to a (preferably non-hate-filled, if that’s an issue) essay about it from the mentioned ‘ actually existing gender abolitionists’?
For the record, I think that incidence of transitions will drop massively once gender is effectively abolished, and that this is not a problem. But that’s because I think that when gender is no longer an issue and everyone is essentially ‘genderfluid’ by our current standards, the rate of dysphoria will drop dramatically, probably staying above the ‘background rate’ of body integrity identity disorder/xenomelia but not necessarily way above it. (Also transitioning will probably get easier and the switchback costs lower in roughly the same timeframe, potentially even to the level that would allow it to become a temporary lifestyle choice.)
*I figure a hyper-liberal college is 1-2 generations ahead of when the college-age population reaches wide consensus, and that’s a generation or so ahead of societal consensus. Making the prediction specific in terms of years would be reliant on the length of a generation going forward, which I’m not confident of the correct way to break down.
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Bugmaster said:
I think you should at least qualify your prediction by saying that it only applies to the USA. I am reasonably sure that in places like Saudi Arabia (or, to a somewhat lesser extent, Russia), gender will remain if not forever, then at least for tens if not hundreds of generations (contingent upon these places even remaining in existence for that long).
I personally think your prediction is optimistic even for the USA. There’s a big difference between saying “people will stop persecuting others because of their gender or lack thereof”, and “the very concept of gender will be abolished”. I would say that the first scenario is 50% likely to occur in 2..3 generations, but the second one is highly unlikely to happen that fast.
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Loki said:
Interestingly, some conservative Muslim countries are actually far nicer to trans people than to gay ones (possibly leading to pressure for gay people to transition in order to be straight).
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Bugmaster said:
Umm, forcing people to change their genders does not count as “nice” in my book.
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PDV said:
I’d apply it to the English-speaking world generally. I put too much credence in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to speculate for the effect of stronger grammatical gender on the rest of the world.
Also, the Saudis and Iran are decent to trans women, and particularly shitty to gay men in that they try to force them to act as trans women. Their intent is shitty but their behavior is not.
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veronica d said:
It is important to note that the Iranians (and I guess the Saudis) are “decent” to trans people insofar as transition is legal and medical care is somewhat supported. This does not imply your family will accept you or that you will be able to get a job. Trans people in these countries continue to face substantial bigotry not unlike what trans people experience elsewhere.
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po8crg said:
Try googling for gender-critical feminism.
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Audrey said:
College is an exceptional situation where people who are disproportionately young, able bodied, free from caring responsibilities and relatively wealthy socialise with each other. One of the primary functions of gender is that it codes essential unpaid or low paid work as female – care for children, the elderly, the profoundly disabled and the sick. As most college students only have themselves to look after, they are very unlikely to have come up with solutions for abolishing gender based on their own interactions. Not knowing the history of feminism or why feminists wanted to abolish gender to benefit women as a group is also probably symptomatic of not being involved in activism that is inclusive of people from different generations, which often happens at college due to the large numbers of young people. On the positive side, people not knowing the history of feminism suggests they are not from activist families themselves, so perhaps activism is growing and taking in many people who did not grow up in an activist culture.
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PDV said:
The social circle I mention is only mildly activist in attitude. Some are, but more aren’t, and treat some variety of genderqueer as just a-fact-about-themself, not a thing they are committed to activism about. For my own part, I am no kind of activist.
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Audrey said:
http://www.troubleandstrife.org/new-articles/talking-about-gender/
I am neither an advocate of queer theory or radical feminism, but I found this useful in understanding where they part company on what gender is and what should be done about it.
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Lizardbreath said:
A response solely to the title, because the title makes me see so much red you don’t even know:
Whatever, you kids are the ones who just up and started labeling all “gender abolitionists” as “evil, horrific terfs,” so.
(I know. But that *IS* how I/we experienced it. I’ve seen you post about this type of situation applied to other disagreements; I know you understand.)
Since I wrote a long “gender abolitionist” post on Scott’s blog and part of it addressed you, I’m obviously going to feel like this post is directed at me, even though I imagine it’s really a reaction to *many* different people you’ve talked to. But since I *am* gonna feel that way, I also feel EXTREMELY condescended to. DO YOU EVEN KNOW IF I AM TRANS-POSITIVE OR NOT? No, no you do not.
So I wind up basically re-experiencing the same thing I did before, the same thing I was complaining about on Scott’s blog: Someone *up and assuming* my “gender abolitionism” automatically makes me “anti-trans.”
(Yes, there are political disagreements. No, they don’t come from bigotry. But “bigotry” is what they were dismissed as, by people who never bothered to learn our political positions until after they’d adopted that assumption.)
So, now’s not the time for me to read the body of this post. Maybe some other time. For now, here. (For clarity, I am not that blogger, nor do I agree with her on everything; I agree with her on this.)
…guess I’ll go comment on something less incendiary. Like, you know, Darren Wilson’s non-indictment or something. 😀
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ozymandias said:
I didn’t see your post. I mentioned that I was sometimes gender abolitionist in the first paragraph. The entire post is arguing that trans-positivity and gender abolitionism can be friends. I like Andrea Dworkin and have pointed people to her thoughts on Woman Hating in the past. I am confused and think perhaps you should not write long angry comments on posts which, by your own admission, you did not read.
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Richard said:
Just a random thought that just occurred to me after reading several of your posts:
Have you considered doing endurance sports?
– It gives rather exquisite pain in a socially acceptable, even admired form
– It messes up your hormonal balance in the direction of maleness
– It means more oxygenated everything which means more cutlery
– It reduces fat deposits, usually first in the chest region
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Lambert said:
Personally, I find the pain from endurance sports (respiatory tract due to breathing large quantities of cold air and muscle fatigue) one of the least bearable kinds. I only bear it for the sense of it being something to be overcome, as a test of willpower.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
I made the mistake of some months back wading into a discussion about gender abolition without being aware of its TERF-y baggage, and got into a lot of trouble. I wish I’d had something like this to link to then.
I mean, my initial reaction to “talking about abolishing gender is deeply hurtful to trans people because it means abolishing transness” was that that was as ridiculous as saying “talking about abolishing nations and borders is deeply hurtful to immigrants because it means abolishing immigrant-ness”. Technically true, but I’m never sure why that would be bad for the group in question. I mean, as somebody who’s trans* or genderqueer or something (I can never tell what because it’s really hard to find a non-circular explanation of what gender identity is suitable for self-diagnosis), I don’t get it. Or, to go with the analogy at the beginning of this paragraph: as a would-be immigrant, I don’t feel that the institution of nations and borders is really something that I benefit from.
I just … I could’ve sworn Kate Bornstein said something about wanting to do away with gender back in the day, and I know people have some issues with her, but I’m pretty sure nobody would accuse her of hating trans* folks on that basis, but suddenly when I say the exact same fucking thing, I’m apparently being profoundly transphobic. It’s all very confusing. How did gender abolition become the exclusive domain of TERFs to begin with? It seems like there’s an easy-to-imagine alternative history where it’s part of some of the main slogans of the trans* rights movement.
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veronica d said:
[Here I focus my comments on the perspective of trans women. I hope other members of the trans umbrella offer their perspective.]
I think some things happened in practice. To begin, a big part of gender abolition is the premise that feminine gender expression is fundamentally sexist and that women who chose to do it have been falsely programmed. Such a belief, of course, puts the anti-gender crowd at odds with a great many women. However, most of those women have the social power to more or less ignore the gender-crit crowd.
Trans women do not have the social power to ignore them, as we often seek solace in queer or feminist spaces, but find our access blocked. We are one of the few groups regularly at the mercy of hard left feminist power structures.
The gender-crit set often has a very simplistic view of gender. They have much critique of its power relations — which surely is a thing that needs critique. However, they seem rather oblivious to gender in its full spectrum. When challenged on this, they handwave that stuff away as unimportant. They really only care about the power aspects of gender. Those parts that can be bundled with power relations are seen as all bad in every way. Those that cannot are ignored. How these things are linked in complex ways is ignored.
They ignore the fact that gender, whatever it is, can be a central aspect of a person’s life. This is particularly true for people who face scrutiny over their gender. Little thought is given to how the *forced removal of gender* would be traumatic to some people. In radical utopia, this somehow all just works.
Again, most people have the social power to ignore these movements. Trans women do not.
No attention is paid to the power structures that oppress trans women, nor to how the gender-crit feminists themselves contribute. This is the one area of gendered power they ignore.
If you force them to address trans oppression, they will offer empty lip service. They will say, “That sure is tragic. Of course I don’t support that. But…” Everything they really want to say follows the “but”.
Experiences that run counter to their gender theories are assumed to be false consciousness. Trans women are assumed to be liars and perverts because we (many of us) find femininity deeply fulfilling. We find the radfem rejection of femininity to be rather hamfisted. In turn, the radfems dismiss our experiences as male-gaze based perversion.
There is a long history of hatred. This goes back to the early 70’s, for example, when lesbian separatists worked to exclude trans women and drag queens from the Christopher Street Parade, under the theory that drag mocks women. The role that drag queens and trans women played at Stonewall was dismissed.
Remember your history. This is the very beginning of organized post-Stonewall gay liberation activism. From day one we have been excluded. Furthermore, this was long before any organized trans political movement. The idea we could *demand* our pronouns had not yet been imagined.
Radical feminists and lesbian separatists led intellectual crusades against trans women. Books were written, papers were published, all extremely hostile to our interests, dismissive of our lives. Individual trans women were run out of queer organizations.
I experienced this literally last month. It has not stopped.
Straight trans women are assumed to be a mockery of women, tools of the patriarchy, the ultimate male assumption of power over female bodies. Lesbian trans women are assumed to be evil male interlopers trying to trick lesbians into having sex with men. They are very concerned with these boundaries, espousing a blunt version of purity-versus-corruption ethics. In places where they have power, they use it relentlessly against us.
In recent years the same women who espoused radical lesbian separatism have begun to adopt the language of gender abolition, despite the fact this is an uncomfortable philosophical fit. This seems not to bother them. Somehow they find a way to combine “abolish gender” with “vigorously defend the boundaries of lesbianism and womanhood.”
These are the people who claim to want to abolish gender. Clearly they want to abolish us first.
Anyway, this is the history. If you want to enter this conversation and use these labels, you should know what has happened so far.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
“To begin, a big part of gender abolition is the premise that feminine gender expression is fundamentally sexist and that women who chose to do it have been falsely programmed.”
So, like, I reject that this is part of gender abolition. I mean, I get that it’s a big part of the cultural phenomenon that has laid claim to the term “gender abolition” movement, but I’m not sure why it follows from anything about the idea of abolishing gender that entails or necessitates this. Certainly, as a MAAB person with a bunch of dresses in their closet, when I say I’m sympathetic to getting rid of (i.e. abolishing) gender, that’s not what I have in mind. I feel like saying that that is a part of gender abolition, as an explanation for why gender abolition got associated with TERFs, is sort of begging the question. Why does that have to be a part of gender abolition, or, indeed, why does it have anything to do with gender abolition. Abolishing nation-states wouldn’t mean sinking all the land into the sea. It would mean that that land no longer belonged to any particular nation-state. Abolishing gender seems, likewise, like it could just as well be about liberating gendered expressions from belonging to particular genders, as about destroying the expressions that happen to have gotten classified as gendered.
Everything else you say seems to restate the history of awfulness of various queer and feminist movements towards trans women (which is, indeed, awful).
The question is, how did those people, rather than, say, the radical trans crowd (which from time to time, if you read what they were writing especially in the nineties, about gender anarchy and subverting gender and all this other stuff that sounds basically the same as abolishing gender to my untrained ears) gain undisputed ownership of the “abolish gender” trademark?
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veronica d said:
The TERFs got the radfem and gender-crit labels because they were the loudest group trying to claim them. Really it is that simple.
You are making a mistake. You are assuming that your understanding of a position, how it fits into bigger structures (regardless of how rational your understanding might be) is how others will understand that position. This is not how social movements actually work. People disagree in fundamental ways. The ways they structure knowledge is incommensurate with how others structure knowledge. Labels fit uncomfortably over actual beliefs. Debate occurs, but during debate *actual communication* is rare.
People also express power. They fight for control of the discourse. Winning these fights is a big deal.
These fights are ugly. Often you will see what looks like object-level rational debate. But if you look close you will see that the debates never settle much and the actual fight is happening in other ways.
Right now the TERFs kinda own these various gender-crit labels, cuz they’re good at playing in the mud.
Which is okay. I’m good at playing in the mud also.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
I’m not sure why you think I’m assuming all that. I asked a historical question, and pointed out that you were saying that something was fundamental to a position when it in fact was not.
My position, insofar as a have one, is:
(1) That the idea of getting rid of gender as a social institution is not intrinsically TERFy.
(2) That if the TERFs have taken over all the obvious phrases, then those of us who are interested in that idea but not TERFs are at the very least entitled to some non-obvious phrases we can use to signal our position. (That is, if the TERFs have tainted certain catchphrases, I’m willing to accept that’s you it is, but I am not willing to accept that certain ideas are bad because the TERFs have misused certain expressions for them. That’s like saying we can’t be in favor of peace any more because the Strategic Air Command ruined it forever with the slogan “peace is our profession”.)
(3) That maybe when people express opinions that they could have gotten by being trans or trans-positive, using words they could easily have gotten from canonical trans activists who literally used those words to express their opinions, maybe the decent thing to do would be to allow for the possibility that they might, theoretically, be trying to just say that, instead of immediately treating them like transphobes.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
And are “gender anarchy” and “subverting gender” still good and trans-positive, or are those bad and hateful now too?
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veronica d said:
Look, I don’t know what you are trying to achieve here. I’m not going to justify everything any trans activists has ever said to you. Nor do I have any interest in telling you how to talk about gender-crit stuff with them. I cannot do that. They own their own minds and have their own interests.
All I really wanted to do was give you some perspective on the history, which has done a lot to shape how trans folks look at stuff, and a sense of how turbulent this space is. People have deep wounds caused by terrible people.
But then, my knowledge is situated. I am a binary-identified trans woman. My trans-feminist consciousness comes from authors such as Serano and Stryker. In many ways I’m old. But the history is the history, and even among the furious Tumblr sect this stuff filters down. The past never goes away.
So of course you’ll find trans activists who love “gender anarchy” and “subverting gender.” You’ll also find some who think those are terrible ideas. You’ll find a few, especially in SJW spaces, who will call you a terrible transphobe and Literally Worse Than Hitler for the most simple disagreement. You’ll find others who are infinitely kind.
Some will find your ideas boring, old-hat. Others will find them toxic. Some will find them problematic, but try to be nice about it. Some will just ask you to go away. Then, perhaps, you’ll encounter someone who thinks your ideas are great and wants to hear more.
What did you expect?
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
You seem to consistently be replying to things I didn’t say and ignoring the things I said. I assume you are acting in good faith and the dissociative forces of the internet are just making it impossible for us to understand each other, but I don’t understand how anything you’ve said has really engaged with anything I’ve said. In any case, I doubt we’re going to have a productive conversation, but let me try one more time.
Ideas like “gender anarchy” and “subverting gender” appear *in the trans canon* going back at least to Bornstein’s writings in the 1990s. “Subvert gender” was one of the approved radical queer trans-friendly slogans that got circulated at my liberal arts college in the early 2000s, before “whipping girl” or tumblr. Is a huge swath of canonical trans activism from the 1990s retroactively not only misguided (everybody has a perfect right to declare past activists misguided), but TERFy? There were plenty of TERFs around at least a decade before all this stuff was being entered into the trans canon (cf. Janice Raymond). The people writing the gender-anarchist stuff into the trans canon were well aware of it. And they were against it. And they wrote it anyway.
I am trying to educate myself on how, given that all those pieces were in place, the exact lines that canonical gender outlaws were using back in the day to talk about liberation has in many cases now been rendered unacceptable and presumptively TERF-y, and about what the acceptable ways to invoke this part of the canon and its ideas are. Neither you nor anybody else owes me any kind of answer.
But you keep volunteering unsolicited replies to my questions related to this that don’t seem to shed any light on the matter or even to engage with what I actually said. This is probably my fault, as I am not at my clearest, but that is all I’ve got. I am sorry for any misunderstanding. If you have any insights that actually bear on these questions, I would welcome them. If not, I thank you for trying to help.
But I feel like since your first unsolicited comment you’ve been yelling at me for saying things I didn’t actually say. I don’t know what you think you’re engaging with, but it doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to what I’ve been saying, and that makes it hard to be productive.
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fjvfjfh said:
Stuart, veronica just said thah she is not interested in talking to you and that there are other activists who wozld agree with you, so don’t worry too much. It was not that hard to understand.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
If she’s not interested in talking to me, then why does she keep doing it?
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
And what in the above means “I’m not interested in talking to you”. All I see is the “I’m not going to justify …” bit, and since I never asked her to justify anything, how is that relevant? I mean, honestly, I’m not interested in talking to her either, but since she keeps replying to me I have to assume she has something she thinks is relevant to say, and the polite thing to do seems to be to try to figure out what that is.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
I mean, I don’t really want to keep talking to her either, as she mainly says stuff that I can’t figure out the relevance of, and she seems convinced that there is something of substance we disagree about, but I can’t figure out what it is, and she keeps attributing various positions to me that don’t seem to be anywhere in what I said.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
So, looking at the replies I got, it is pretty clear that I screwed up in terms of calling attention to my main question.
Here is an undirected attempt to correct that, in case anybody wants to reply.
So, it seems to me that there was a time, not all long ago, when something very close to “gender abolition” in the sense Ozy has in mind was regarded as a legitimate, positive, empowering thing by a major segment of orthodox trans activism.
Now, most of them wouldn’t call it “gender abolition” today, because the TERFs took over that phrase and ruined it for everybody.
So, let’s put aside the phrase, and call “gender abolition” in Ozy’s sense, not to be confused with “gender abolition” in the TERF sense, something else. I’m going to gall it “post-gender utopian awesome funtimes”.
Okay, so, questions that seem worth asking:
What are the objections to post-gender utopian awesome funtimes? They are presumably different from (though they also presumably overlap with) the objections to TERF-style “gender abolition”.
How does one, hypothetically, advocate for post-gender utopian awesome funtimes, of the sort that, e.g., Ozy seems sympathetic to, without being labeled as a TERF? I mean, using phrases “gender abolition” and “abolish gender” and especially “gender critical” is clearly right out.
As a meta-conversational issue, how do we synchronize what people are talking about, with in the scope? Like, recently-ish, I encountered two different very thoughtful posts about “gender abolition” by two very thoughtful trans women, one of which was positive about the idea and one of which was pretty negative about it, which seemed to think it involved completely different things:
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/08/bringing-end-to-end-of-gender.html
It *looks* like existentailorchid (as reblogged by radtransfem) is advocating for something like post-gender utopian funtimes, and which explicitly wouldn’t need to exclude anybody, say, dressing all girly when they felt like it, while Serano is engaging with a version of “ending gender” that involves ending specific personal behaviors that are, in our current society, considered gendered. But they’re using the same vocabulary to talk about it. Now, The project of trying to prescribe standardized language for this stuff is not overly likely to meet with any kind of success, but, at the very least, it seems like we could try to achieve tools to allow people advocating for specific things in this domain to try to reduce the risk of being misunderstood, and for people trying to read specific authors in this domain to try to suss out what is actually being advocated for.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
“with in the scope” should be “within this scope”. sorry everybody. i suck.
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JME said:
I feel like I agree with you on every point, but I wonder how many trans people would actually characterize this as “trans-positive.”
I get the impression that many trans people want to be understand as truly being their gender, in some deep ontological sense.
The dialog as I’ve seen it often goes something like, say, this:
Cis-woman: I accept that you use “she/her/her/hers/herself” pronouns, I’m fine with you getting breasts and taking hormones, etc. However, do I think that you are, really, truly, deep down inside, a woman, in some ontological sense? No. Then again, I don’t think I’m a woman truly, deep down inside, in some ontological sense either. If I don’t think that being a “true woman” is a real thing that applies to cis-women, you can’t expect me to apply it to trans-women, can you?
Trans-woman: Okay, I understand your view, and I get that you aren’t consciously trying to invalidate my experiences, but frankly, I don’t think you understand the extent to which gender is a very real thing. You’re like a rich kid saying that you’d be happy even if you lived in dire poverty even though you’ve never lived it, and I’m telling you “hey, I’ve been in desperate poverty and it sucks.” I know that gender is real, I know that I’m a woman, and I know just how bad it can be trying to say “gender isn’t important.”
Maybe this is only a certain (to some extent, rather traditionalist) subset of trans or gender-nonconforming people, and there a significant fraction of trans people who are okay with gender abolitionism. (Trans people are not a monolith and all that.)
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ozymandias said:
IDK I think I would be pretty upset about someone informing me that I am not a nonbinary deep down in some ontological sense. I mean, if we were having a discussion of the metaphysics of gender, sure. But in the vast majority of cases where me being nonbinary comes up, the metaphysics of gender is not relevant (as, indeed, is true of the vast majority of cases in which cis people being their genders comes up) and mentioning the topic seems rather like an excuse to be like “well, you’re not REALLY nonbinary.”
You might think I’m being paranoid here but it’s truly astonishing how many people are deeply invested in trans people’s genders being UNREAL in some way that cis people’s genders aren’t.
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
There are also the people who insist that nonbinary people’s genders are UNREAL in some way that binary trans and cis people’s aren’t, right?
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JME said:
So, what’s the cis woman in my dialog saying that’s different from your vision of trans-positive gender abolitionism?
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veronica d said:
In the first few chapters of Feyman’s *Lectures on Physics* he points out that a chair is in fact just a pile of atoms. Which it is. And tons of ink is spilled through the ages as philosophers try to reconcile this fact with another fact: it’s really darn useful to talk about chairs.
Gender is like waaaay more difficult than chairs.
We are a sexually dimorphic species and there is probably a fuckton of stuff going on in our brains that is kinda-sorta gendered. Some of it might not even look like gender.
(Which by the way does not justify crappy essentialist sexism, for at least two reasons: 1. we don’t really understand this stuff so pretending you do and in just the way that back up your sexism is motivated reasoning and total BS, and 2. in any case just cuz we’re bimodal does not mean their isn’t a ton of overlap in the distributions and anyway, things can be “gendered” but not bimodal. Maybe some aspects are tri-modal or whatever. We don’t know. It’s complicated.)
Anyway, brains are fairly plastic and culture shapes us tons so probably we can reshape gender in cool ways, maybe, but then maybe we just fuck it up instead and make shit worse.
My point is, when people talk about gender like they know what they are talking about they are mostly full of shit. Including me.
Take small steps. Listen to people. Trust autonomy. Reduce harm. These things are my feminism.
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veronica d said:
@JME — See, the conversation looks like this:
Gender Abolitionist: We’re going to get rid of gen—
Me: BUT MY MINISKIRT!
GA: No, no! We just mean the *bad parts* of gender, like the oppression and stuff.
Me: But — uh — like, isn’t that more or less all of feminism?
GA: Yes, but we’re gonna do it by getting rid of gen—
Me: BUT MY MINISKIRT!
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R Stuart-Cohen said:
As a gender nonconforming person, I find people are constantly telling me things I can’t do because I don’t have the right “real” gender, and my gut response is to say “well you don’t either now let me do whatever the fuck I want”. I do not feel like our society’s obsession with “real” gender has made living trans lives, or at least any but a very narrow subcategory of trans lives, easier. I feel like it has just created another ephemeral and unmeasurable thing that trans and gender-variant people are constantly asked to prove. So the idea that gender-realism is somehow a trans-friendly concept is something that I have a hard time really internalizing.
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Army1987 said:
Aren’t there perfectly good reasons for people without penises not to use urinals ?a
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ozymandias said:
1) Stand-to-pees.
2) It is my understanding that people with penises also shit, and therefore their public bathrooms contain toilets, which people can use regardless of genitals.
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Neike Taika-Tessaro said:
(Late comment, sorry about that.)
I suspect you’re already well aware of this, but there’s an interesting transhumanist society Greg Egan sort of casually describes in his novel ‘Schild’s Ladder’ that still has he/she gender pronouns, but completely personalised – and fluid! – sex. I consider it notable because it’s Not A Big Deal in the book at all. It’s just a given.
(There’s some exploration of the subject in a few brief scenes, but one of them is effectively about puberty and the other is an acorporeal who wants to know what the big deal is. And none of this is what the book is about.)
Anyway, in that society, ‘she’ and ‘he’ are gender-neutral (they’re arbitrarily used from the perspective of said society), so I feel this comes quite close to the gender-abolitionist trans-positive scenario you’re describing. At least it was my first association! 🙂
For completion’s sake I need to add that it’s nonetheless also quite different, because dysphoria is not really something they experience; between the lines, it’s quite clear that sort of instinct, in the broadest sense, was edited out of their psychology. Since they’re potentially changing their whole bodies quite frequently, this is also quite necessary.
The sort of hardware the mentioned transhumans run on would also have a bit of a problem with polyamoury; but that’s digressing in at least two different ways, so I’ll take that as a sign that this comment is now officially too long. 😉
Thanks for the article!
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Lucas Nahuel Cerante said:
I mostly agree with you, except for the first assumption that basically all gender-abolitionists are transphobic, which in my experience is absolutely not true. Maybe it’s because I live in the year 2018, but most gender-abolitionists I know agree with all your points and actually use them to defend gender abolition.
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