I remember when I was a young trans person and it was still acceptable to refer to oneself as “female-bodied” or “male-bodied”. Unfortunately, way too many people were saying things like “I don’t want male-bodied people in my bathroom!”, and we lost this valuable and useful term.
Then, everyone collectively switched to the much more awkward “people with” language. Unfortunately, people took this as an opportunity to start saying things like “people with penises can’t experience multiple orgasms!” (actually, many trans women and some lucky cis men can) and “people with penises can’t understand how degrading some of these sexualized depictions of people with vaginas are!” (because trans women are known for never experiencing degrading, sexualized depictions in the media).
I have heard murmurs declaring the “people with” language to be problematic. While on one hand I’m happy (dear God that language was awkward), on the other hand I fear that we may soon lose any language to talk about biological sex at all.
“Assigned male at birth” is another repeat offender. One’s birth assignment refers to the social process by which one is declared a male or female at birth. While certain sex characteristics are limited to people of certain assigned sexes at birth (while a few people assigned male at birth have uteruses, none of them function), people of a particular birth assignment can have a wide variety of different sex characteristics. A person assigned female at birth may have a penis or a vagina; they may have a uterus, may have had it removed, or may never have had one at all; they may have a testosterone-dominant or estrogen-dominant system; they may be fertile or infertile.
You may say that these people are outliers. However, there is already a word if you wish to talk about assigned female at birth people without including outliers. That word is “woman”.
“Assigned male at birth” is useful terminology for discussing certain social experiences, such as experiences of sexism in childhood and the pathologization of gender nonconformity among those assigned male at birth. It is not useful for discussing sex. It is also not useful for discussing many other social experiences, such as street harassment, for which the terms you want are “men” and “women.”
Some people understand that you are not supposed to refer to trans men as women. However, instead of understanding the actual differences, they proceed to ctrl-F their vocabulary and replace “woman” with “person with vagina” or “assigned female at birth”. Once enough people do this, then trans people (quite naturally) start objecting to it, and then we can’t say sentences as natural as “I loathe my female body” without someone stopping by to point out that our body is male because we identify as male.
I really, really wish we could stop playing Misgendering Whack-a-Mole. Unfortunately, that’s not going to stop until certain people stop misgendering trans people. Seriously, guys, cut it out. Think about what the words you’re saying actually mean instead of doing cargo cult political correctness, and maybe someday we’ll have useful words for biological sex again.
Thing of Things 
::threadjack::
What gives some trans women multiple orgasm capability that cis men usually lack? Is it the hormone treatments?
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Basically, yes. It’s technically possible without the hormone treatments, but they result in a major reduction of the difficulty and change the nature of orgasm, make most of the things we associate with “female orgasmic patterns” true also for a trans woman. Yes, the way you experience your orgasm is influenced more by hormones the nerves are drenched in than the configuration of nerves themselves. Who would have guessed?
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Cis men can have multiple orgasms. However, multiple ejaculation is much more difficult (if not basically impossible for most men). Furthermore, cis men often equate arousal with erection. However, it is difficult to maintain erection after ejaculation. So in the end, a cis man will have an ejaculatory orgasm, after which he soon loses his erection, and then — well, here is where we get to a big gender battle, you big ol’ sleepy bear why are you rolling over it’s not sleep time I HAVE NEEDS!
cough
Anyway, after ejaculation cis men usually stop trying to experience genital pleasure and instead do something that does not involve their genital pleasure.
Trans women are more complex. We don’t always get erect. We don’t always ejaculate. In fact, some of us never do either. However, we are still orgasmic. When this happens our arousal patterns more resemble cis women than cis men. Of course, some trans women do have erections and do ejaculate. When we do, our arousal patterns are more of a mixed bag. Personally, even when I do achieve erection, I’m still more sensitive to bodily touch than when I was pre-HRT. Likewise, I seem to have more diffuse erogenous zones. For example, touching my neck. In my dudely days, it was nice but nothing special. Now —
— there are not words no words there have never been words.
Of course, some of us can do each at different times, depending on {stuff}. I’ve had multiple orgasms. I can still sometimes achieve erections. I kinda-sorta almost ejaculate (although the volume is low, and it is clear as there is no sperm).
Each body is different. Experimentation is fun.
I can full-on with a Hitachi on my junk and go for hours. In my dudely-days, I think that would kill me. I doubt I could take full Hitachi treatment for even a few seconds.
There is one thing we miss out on, however. For cis women, the clit is a rather large internal structure. You know how your penis throbs during orgasm. The clit does that — on the inside!
On the inside! Imagine!
I don’t have a clit on the inside. I’ll never feel that. So it goes.
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Related from the other side of things: I used to be multi-orgasmic before I switched to a higher dose of testosterone. Now simulation immediately following orgasm is unpleasant, verging on painful. Refractory periods are also a thing for me now.
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Wow, that should say ‘stimulation’. I’m not having virtual sex.
Yet.
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You can thank the trans community for enforcing the “cargo cult political correctness”. I don’t blame cis people at all for trying to avoid the blowback from using the wrong word. The arguments from trans people usually amount to a criticism of a particular word at all, not using that word under the wrong circumstances.
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The problem is that some people want to have a word for { cis women , trans men } and another word for { cis men , trans women } so they try to grab a phrase like AMAB or male or “people with penises” for that set, instead of acknowledging that the idea that those are meaningful sets is transphobic, so any phrase for that set used as a general, normal case, is also, necessarily, transphobic. The result is that every phrase used by non-transphobes for the specific, narrow cases where those sets are useful (like trans men or non-binary AFAB people complaining about the body-type that is giving them dysphoria) gets hijacked by transphobes and comes to be heard as a phrase that is transphobic in itself.
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“People who have a cervix should get regular pap smears as part of their health maintenance routine” – meaningful set, practical application.
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Right. Don’t blame this shit on the “trans community.” We got our problems — and how! But transphobia is the big-bad-terrible. If that went away, then what would we even be discussing here?
It’s obviously correct to use terms like “person with penis” when discussing medical stuff.
Duh.
When someone puts “I only date AFAB femme people” on their profile — different story.
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@ninecarpals Yes, I thought some more about that and realised I hadn’t quire hit the point I wanted. You have to use a (different) phrase for each case; you can’t have a general-purpose word or phrase for “people with a cervix” and “people with breasts” and “people who can get pregnant” because those three are not the same set; you can have any of the eight possible combinations (well, I assume you can’t get pregnant without a cervix, but all the other six combinations are certainly possible).
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Remember that time SSS said this?
“It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say eloquently and openly what I’ve always secretly suspected them of believing. ”
You just explicitly endorsed a strategy of controlling what thoughts people can have by policing the words they are allowed to use. You know, the thing the bad guys did in 1984.
If you think it is transphobic to use the concept { cis women , trans men } to interact with a particular social context, say that. Don’t wage linguistic warfare against the concept itself.
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@Lawrence D’Anna
Do you think there are *some* concepts that are basically harmful such that we’d be better off not using the words that refer to them? (Various slurs come to mind; on the other hand, I also often hear complaints about hostile-ish SJ-ish terms like “mansplaining”.)
I don’t really see the difference between saying a phrase/sentence is transphobic and saying a word/set phrase is transphobic – words and set phrases can absolutely encode concepts complex enough to be problematic.
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@tcheasdfjkl:
I don’t, myself. The inability to think clearly about reality doesn’t make reality less harmful, it just leaves you more open to bad ideology designed to leverage chinks in the armor of your perception-reaction loop.
The reality is that {cis women, trans men} and {cis men, trans women} are useful sets. The problem here is politics, I think; there are a large collection of statements which are mostly true of {cis women, trans men} and which are almost all true of {cis women, pre-surgecy-and-HRT trans men}, but there can’t be an armistice around the idea “Trans men are men, but many statements which are generally true of women are true of trans men, and many statements which are generally false of men are true of trans men.”
But war is apparently being waged between the side which disagrees with the first statement, and the side which considers the second set of statements unspeakable. And, as ninecarpals says, I think it’s the second side that is doing the word-ruining here.
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Except that any word can be deemed offensive by someone. For every trans woman who says “Just say ‘woman’, that’s fine, don’t exclude me by making a list of exceptions about ‘people with penises’ etc.”, some other trans woman will say “You must acknowledge that some women have penises! And if you don’t, you are making cis the default!” Some trans people will say it very much matters that they are trans not cis and they want a term used (whether it be CAFB/CAMB or whatever) to emphasise that, some trans people will say they are women or men and just use that term and don’t make a fuss, and whatever you do, you will get someone scolding you for it.
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@ tcheasdfjklsaid
Slurs are an interesting case, but I think they’re highly non-central. A slur’s denotation is just a group of people. If you call someone a “wop”, it literally just means that they’re Italian. The only concept you’re using a the word “wop” to denote is “people from Italy, or who’s ancestors are from Italy.” If I object to you saying “wop”, it’s not because I don’t want you to be able to talk about the category of people from Italy, it’s because the meaning of the word is more than its denotation.
The connotation of a slur is a message of contempt or hatred towards the people the slur names. That meaning is invoked any time you use a slur out of quotation. Just using the word expresses the contempt. So objecting to slurs is an objection to expressions of hatred or contempt, not objecting to the mere naming of a concept.
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However, there is already a word if you wish to talk about assigned female at birth people without including outliers. That word is “woman”.
Sorry, Ozy, going to disagree with you here. I’ve seen one too many rebuke comment threads where someone has made the horrible disgraceful dreadful offence of talking about, say, menstruation and mentioning “women” and then being hauled over the coals for not adding on the laundry list of “assigned female/coercively assigned female at birth/female identifying/trans men/trans women/people with uteri/people with penises/non-binary persons” and whatever else is the new term du jour for that to work, and if you don’t immediately grovel with “So sorry, I never meant by saying “women” to deny that persons with penises etc. are women.”, then you get the calling-out for being a transphobic piece of shit trying to enforce biological determinism and social gender roles.
It wasn’t cis people who decided firstly that the properly inclusive term was “trans*” and then secondly that using “trans*” instead of “trans” was objectionable, phobic, exclusionary, offensive and deliberately degrading those about whom it was used.
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Aren’t you ignoring the “without including outliers” which is the whole point that Ozy was making?
I think the people you describe are objecting to the exclusion of outliers, but that problem is hardly solved by using “afab” to describe a group which in fact excludes outlying afab people and includes outlying amab people.
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But the outliers are the cases where people will complain. “Oh, so you’re fine with calling some femmey appearing person a woman, but what about me?”
What is the basis for “I am a woman because I feel I am a woman and not the gender assigned for me at birth?” If gender is a social construct, then why not argue for re-structuring gender so that “gender assigned at birth” can include all the behaviours, appearances, and feelings of that person without them needing to switch identities? It’s the effects of foetal oestrogen exposure on the brain? Ah, but that’s biology, and someone will bring up “biology is not determinant because intersex people! and chromosome syndromes!” and then we’re no better off than we were before. If your chromosomes are not to be considered for deciding gender, why should what hormones you have circulating in your bloodstream, whether by nature or by taking them as medication?
Because if we invent a word “fabicidupapp” for “persons who wish to identify as such” with no gender roles/biology attached, sooner or later there will be “fabicidupapps behave like/look like/are interested in” since that is what humans do: we create sorting based on clusters and label those clusters.
Going back to the “not all people who menustruate or can get pregnant are cis women” thing – it’s not cis people in general who write enraged and offended comments. “There are cis women who don’t menstruate! There are trans men who do! So don’t use ‘women’ to mean ‘people who menstruate’!” is much more likely to come from a trans person (or a very officious ally) than a cis person.
I’m a cis woman who no longer menstruates. I would not feel “writing a ‘hey girls, I want to share some information on menstruation’ post ignores or denies my identity as a woman”. And yes, I am aware that is cis privilege.
But it’s not cis women “taking away your useful words” by demanding “You must say ‘AFAB/CAFAB/people with uteri’ instead of ‘women’ otherwise you are a transphobe and a ha8r”.
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Half the issue here is that people can’t actually agree on what certain words mean. When somebody with a beard that puts mine to shame insists I use feminine pronouns to refer to her – I have no issue with not causing needless harm, but we have a fundamental disagreement on what those pronouns actually mean, and her definition matches mine not in the least.
I could call her “him”, if we insist on using words to mean what they mean. It would match what I actually refer to by the words, which is biological sex rather than gender, as personally I think gender is an absolutely terrible model for reality. But I doubt you’d agree with my meaning, and thus you wouldn’t agree with my usage.
But arguing that your meaning is correct, and mine is wrong, is linguistic prescriptivism – and that’s another thing we’d disagree about, because I’m a descriptivist, and we’re not getting anywhere there. As a descriptivist, I find the entire argument about language to be wrongheaded, because, first, it’s mostly about controlling what other people think in a distinctly Orwellian kind of way, and second, because we don’t actually have agreement on what the words mean in the first place.
And I’m all for harm avoidance, but either we have words for biological sex or we don’t, and as soon as those exist, those of us who don’t have “gender” nodes in our maps of reality are going to “misgender” people because we’re going to insist on the words that actually have a place on our map.
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Do you feel like (your best estimate of) someone’s biological sex is relevant in most social contexts? E.g.,
“I was shopping at Walmart the other day. And the cashier — who had ovaries, as far as I could tell — miscounted my mangos!”
Seems a bit odd to me.
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There was a time when I tried to replace most pronouns with “they”, because I didn’t feel like the other information was relevant, but I discovered it made people suspect there was meaningful information I was deliberately concealing, making gender a more relevant consideration in their minds, so I stopped doing that.
Which is to say – the approach which creates the least relevance is the default. Relevance is a product of mutual communication, it isn’t unilateral.
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I mean, the gender identity of the cashier is just as irrelevant.
Gender identity is relevant in other social contexts but only really in a self referential way, in determining what pronouns to refer to people with.
Personally I think I might start using they for everyone for consistency.
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That seems rather bizarre to me. If your model of reality does not include gender, then it is going to fail to predict people, which is a flaw in the model. You wouldn’t say “well, centrifugal force doesn’t exist, so I can build something that spins and not have to worry about it flying apart.”
Also, you denounce prescriptivism while also basing your argument on words having defined meanings. I suspect that, rather than prescriptivism, you’re talking about different models of reality to which the words in question refer. It is perfectly permissible and not censorship in the slightest to argue in favor of a particular model of reality.
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Shoes are more useful than gender in telling you who somebody is. (I used to rely on shoes. Now I rely on more subtle things like diction and sentence complexity. I and my current partner are the people my social group comes to when trying to figure out who somebody is, at least in part because we don’t rely on oversimplified models for people.)
And I denounce prescriptivism in that it says there is a correct and universal definition or set of definitions. That’s not how language works, and pretending everybody has an agreed-upon definition for words is the fastest way to cause miscommunication.
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Yes, there are a lot of other factors which go into determining who someone is, and these generally have a larger effect on a person than gender does.That doesn’t mean gender doesn’t exist. If your model of the world does not include gender, it will still make incorrect predictions (for one thing, it will completely fail to predict the existence of trans people).
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Beards are tricky, Orphan. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is a condition affecting women (since we’re all agreeing we should say “women” and not “people with ovaries”, correct?) and one of the effects of which is increased hair growth, including facial hair.
Also post-menopausal women who have reduced hormone levels can experience stronger facial hair growth.
So a person with a moustache and/or beard could indeed be a cis woman 🙂
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>It is also not useful for discussing many other social experiences, such as street harassment, for which the terms you want are “men” and “women.”
What about pre-transition trans men and women? Are you saying they’re not … whatever? ‘Female-presenting‘, please!
>“people with penises can’t understand how degrading some of these sexualized depictions of women are!” (because trans women are known for never experiencing degrading, sexualized depictions in the media).
Ah, to be fair, this is fighting the hypothetical of “people can’t understand anything that happened to me, personally.”
>I fear that we may soon lose any language to talk about biological sex at all.
I have truly boundless faith in the human capacity for stupid euphemisms.
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>Unfortunately, way too many people were saying things like “I don’t want male-bodied people in my bathroom!”
Other than the fact that this expresses a view that you may disagree with, what’s the problem with this statement?
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Male-bodied is not a well-defined set. Does it mean “has a dick”, or “is physically capable of having heterosexual sex with a woman” or “looks like a dude” or what?
Does someone with a vagina, no tits, a beard, male-pattern baldness, and a masculine musculature qualify?
Does someone who appears entirely female externally, apart from a small dick incapable of getting an erection, qualify?
What about someone who appears entirely female externally, but use to have a dick and has had surgery to create a neovagina?
What about someone with XY chromosomes but AIS and a female-appearing body from childhood?
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I was assuming it meant something along the lines of ‘looks like a dude’.
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The rhetorical strategy I see-
1. Declare “trans women are women” to be a shibboleth.
2. Refuse to define “are women.”
3. Police people for whether they distinguish between trans women and non trans women in ways you don’t want them to.
4. Interpret this as transphobia and a denial of “trans women are women,” and try to use social pressure to stigmatize saying or thinking the thing in question.
Note that this only works because of (2). And that’s why the terminology always changes. Because terminology always gets you closer to defining “are women.” And if you define “are women” then people will just say “ok, I agree, let me express myself in terminology compatible with that.” But that was never what was wanted. What was wanted was (4).
I doubt anyone remembers, and it may not have been on this blog. But when the gender bread man rose to prominence, this was the model I relied upon in predicting it would swiftly be disclaimed by certain elements of trans activism (not all! I can literally click on a different link on my phone and end up on a site that is about 30% trans in community where no one cares, but the cultural markers differentiating the two sites are clear). This model hasn’t yet done me wrong.
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The deifntion of gender does not seem that unclear to me. My position, which I tihnk is shared by many people. is that the only way to determine your gender is via introspection. In practice someone is a woman if, after long deliberation, they conclude they alieve themselves to be a woman. It is possible to be wrong about being a woman. A person is only wrong about being a woman if, given suffient time and clear thinking, they would eventually stably conclude they are not a woman. It is also perfectly possible for someone to lie about their gender. However it is difficult or impossible for someoen else to know whether a person is lying or not. (Though this is not a physical impossibility. Brain scans might be able to detect lying in the nearish future).
It is obviously theoretically possible for a person’s introspection to not lead to a stable gender as time goes tro infinity. however the trans community has already handled this by introducing the notion of genderr-fluid and agender. If a person’d gender feelings converge to “no strong feelings” they are agender. If someone’s self identified gender flucuates in time they are gender fluid.
An objection is that this notion of gender is not grounded in any concrete biological facts. But again many people have already considered this criticism. The standard opinion is that gender is fundamentally socially constructed. Which makes sense since the description of gender I gave only really makes sense within a social contect.
So I strongly disagree that “woman” is not defined.
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I’m not saying that no one anywhere has articulated a definition of “is a woman.” I’m just saying that there’s a particular community that does not and cannot stably accept a definition, including yours, because it pushes them out of a rhetorical stance they’re trying to maintain.
There are definitely a lot of people who have accepted your definition. But not the ones I’m talking about.
If self identity was the end of things and everyone accepted that without further qualification, the debate over whether it’s ok for straight guys to categorically not date trans women would not exist. Because no one’s sexuality triggers off other people’s self identity.
In fact, there’d be virtually no debate over anything at all except whether people buy in to using that terminology.
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I usually don’t comment on this topic here in order not to offend anyone, but what you are describing sounds truly horrifying to me.
What you describe fits in with the model of society, where everyone picks all the parts of his/her identity and identity is the one social capital. If you don’t play this game of constructing an interesting identity for yourself, you’re inherently worthless.
This should scare anyone a lot who just wants to go on with ones own life. Sadly, modern society is already like this to a large extent.
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A purely recursive definition is not a definition, it’s just a reminder that Russell’s paradox isn’t merely academic. Note that “A Foo is a person who strongly considers themselves to be a Foo” is isomorphic to “A Bar is a person who strongly considers themselves to be a Bar”. If you don’t add some additional information you can’t even tell which gender is meant by which definition, but if you *do* add some additional information (whether explicitly or implicitly via prior word denotations or connotations) then it gets harder to feel upset with people who decide to just use that information alone.
But frankly, I thought the ability to get upset was kind of the point. If we give people “useful words for biological sex”, then a lot of them are going to use those words in contexts where we really wanted them to use self-determined gender instead, the ensuing insulting connotations are going to make us want to throw those words away, but then we’ll occasionally again find ourselves in real need to invent more useful words for biological sex. You can’t escape the euphemism treadmill without changing how people think, which seems to determine word connotations far more heavily than vice-versa.
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@The smoke
I agree views like mine are trans issues are closely correlated with some rather troubling views. Mostly I tihnk these ideas have to do with the notion of “privilege” which, imo, is on average a very toxic concept. However I do not see why someone cannot, more or less, agree with the SJws on the best definition of gender while still disagreeing with them theories relating to privlege.
@Roystingnr
The following may or may not be a good defintion but it is surely a defintion: “A Bar is a person who strongly considers themselves to be a Bar”. If you assume people will not lie it is trivially easy to determine if a person is a bar or not according to the definition. You just ask them if they strongly feel they are a bar. If they say yes they are a bar, if not they are not. There is a law of excluded middle. Either you feel you are a bar or you don’t! (I assume by this definition almost no one in modern societyy is a bar).
There is no Russel’s paradox involved here at all. Imo the correct objection is to ask “That definition of a bar does not provide logical reasons for deciding yourself to be a bar.” Which is perhaps a reasoanble complaint but it is a very different complaint from saying the deifnition is logically inconsistent. However this is a non-issue in the case of gender. People, including the people who accept “my” defintion of gender, do often have strong feelings on their gender. The reasons people have these feelings is not really understood (perhaps it has to do with hormaonal balance in utero but who knows).
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Who what? What is this?
#####
I’m actually very curious about the relationship between “outsider” culture and the mainstream, for it seems like there is this pattern, where the “outsider” is in some ways hated, but in other ways adored. It takes time. It doesn’t all happen at once. But at one point Jazz is mostly a black thing, with a few intrepid whites (mostly musicians) getting in on the fun. Decades later, it is mainstream. How does this process work?
So much of contemporary dance club culture was originally gay. Do people even know this? How many people know the connection between Madonna and the black/latin@ queer underground?
Blah blah blah. I remember in my later high school years. I had been, until that point, this lonely-weird geek kid who hung with the roleplaying crowd. But then — I dunno — I just kinda broke, lost all my friends, and went through some really dark times. When I came out on the other side, I was a punk.
Well, I was a middle-class suburban mall rat with a skateboard, lotsa west coast hardcore albums, and a mohawk — but I so wanted to be punk. I dunno. We have words like “poseur” and “wannabe” for a reason. Deep down I was still a fucking nerd.
I’ve moved on from there.
#####
So here we have some joker all hurt that he doesn’t get to have a “cool gender” like me. OMFG! Get over it dude.
One day everyone decided that gays were cool, except I have friends who have been beaten and stabbed for being faggots. All the same, we love our photogenic queerbos on television. They’re so skinny and lovely and watch them dance!
Or something. Whatever. Round and round it goes.
You will in fact have to construct an identity for yourself, and people will like you or not depending. Welcome to hell.
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I wasn’t trying to reference privilege.
Also I think man and woman still refer to sex and not gender? Though I am not up to date with the english language. If this is transphobic I am truly sorry, maybe I should stop visiting this blog anyway.
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“In practice someone is a woman if, after long deliberation, they conclude they alieve themselves to be a woman”
I think this must be incomplete as a definition, because like you pointed out it’s structurally the same as a “Bar”. But nobody cares in the slightest about who is or isn’t a Bar, and people do care very much about who is or isn’t a Woman.
If two terms have the same impredicative definition, they might not be equal, because impredicativity, but they should at least be isomorphic!
I think in practice what you’re doing when you “define” Woman in that way is not defining a concept, taking an ethical stance that says “all the edges that connect Woman to other concepts in the social world should be accessible to anyone if they make a free choice to adopt the identity of Woman”
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‘Because no one’s sexuality triggers off other people’s self identity. ‘
Er, hi. (I exist here to disprove generalities.)
Also, I think it still would exist? Because people would probably still insist that it was okay to categorically not date trans women, and other people would point out that there are very few traits that you can assume /all/ trans women to have and /no/ cis women to have, and that most of those merely the fact of being amab, and so on and so forth. I don’t see how that would disappear with an acceptance that gender is self-identity.
(Like, sometimes people are like ‘well a trans woman couldn’t have a kid!’. Great. Neither can I. And yet you’re not saying that you couldn’t possibly date infertile cis women. And so on and so forth.)
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On the kids thing, as I suggested in the other thread, there is a big difference between saying, “I kinda want genetic kids, and thus that would make me less likely to pursue a relationship with a trans woman, since clearly that is impossible for her,” and saying, ”the requirement for genetic children is a bright-line limit and I will date no cis women who cannot prove to me she is fertile.”
Which is to say, one can imagine someone saying, “Hey, I want genetic kids,” but then a few years later meeting some woman with whom they fall hard in love, but then discovering she is for-certain infertile — so now what? How shall you walk life’s path? With stubborn refusal to adapt, to change, to grow into your life as the opportunities arise?
I dunno. That kind of recalcitrant position seems obviously foolish, so that makes me wonder, are these people really telling the truth here, or is this motivated reasoning?
Can they not imagine meeting a cis woman so perfect for them, and loving her, but she cannot have kids. If this happens, do they really imagine they could not live without genetic children? Does that sound impossible? Then why not say the same for trans women?
“I want kids a lot, so I don’t really imagine myself with a trans woman. On the other hand, anything is possible” — if they said that I’d be, yeah, that makes sense.
In any case, I hope that such people find a wife that shares their desire for family. I hope they find love and have a metric fuckton of awesome kids. Cuz why not have more happy, satisfied people in the world?
But why slam doors? A happy life for you might be on a very different path from what you expect. Mine was.
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@Veronica
I’m actually really trying to fit things like trans-issues into my worldview, which so far hasn’t worked out at all with regard to language policing, but otherwise pretty well.
So please don’t read stuff into my posts and use that to stereotype and insult me.
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@The Smoke — I’m going by what you wrote. There seems to be a long history of tension between, on the one hand, people who deal with social stresses by being — for lack of a better term — colorful in how they engage with the world, and on the other hand, people who are not so colorful. It’s not that I think anything is particularly wrong with the latter group. They don’t bother me. But I guess — well no one likes to feel invisible. When you wrote what I quoted above, plus this,
well you sound a lot like that.
So fine, I’m pattern matching. But you seemed to fit the pattern really well.
“All these ‘cool’ genders suck. I just want to be.”
So go be. I’m not stopping you. What have I taken from you? Attention?
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I’m not attacking you on anything. Also you are mistaken to think I am offended by you living your life the way you want.
I was expressing the fact that the way stargirlprincess would define the words would be very hurtful to me, maybe in the way the traditional usage is hurtful to you? It would definitely make it less possible to just roll with the default, so that would be taking something from me. (This doesn’t mean that I oppose addressing trans people with the gender they prefer or anything.)
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How specificially are you being hurt.
@The Smoke
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In practice someone is a woman if, after long deliberation, they conclude they alieve themselves to be a woman.
And that is the elephant in the room. What are the qualities by which someone determines they are a woman?
Biology? We’ve thrashed that out that it doesn’t count. Foetal brain scans about “male” and “female” brains are not helpful because if we say there is such a thing as a biological male and a biological female brain, then by the same token we are re-opening the door to the old “men are logical, women are emotional” and “men are soldiers, women are nurturing” gender roles we’ve spent a huge amount of time over-turning. To say “a female brain in a male body” means – what, exactly?
Likings, behaviours, feelings? A lot of those are socially determined and really do not have any gender connotations at all (I am not being sarcastic here, I really agree with this). You want to wear a dress not trousers? You like pink? You prefer cooking to sports? Makeup, jewelry, long hair?
None of these have anything intrinsically female rather than male to them. In different cultures and societies at different times, men have worn ‘skirts’ or ‘dresses’ (that is, clothing that is socially coded ‘female’ by our mores), makeup, long hair, high heels, jewelry, etc.
Sexual orientation? Nothing at all to say “I am sexually/romantically attracted to men/males, therefore I am a woman/female” instead of “I am gay/bi/pan/man who has sex with men etc.”
Dysphoria? “This body I have isn’t the right fit”? And how much of that is existing physical/mental condition versus discomfort with social gender roles? If we created a new society in the morning where males could wear ear-rings and lipstick and play at being stay-at-home parents with their dolls, and still be considered males and not sissies, effeminate, gay, faggots, you insert the slur here – would that help you?
In order to say “I am not a this, I am a that” and point at a group you consider to represent “that”, we need to have some common characteristics of what “thatness” is, and we are sawing off that branch while sitting upon it.
“You’re a woman if you believe you are and you have a female body because it’s your body and you’re a woman” is circular reasoning, because if there is nothing to define what “woman” is. then you are not being anything in particular other than the entity you are in the corporeal form you possess.
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“I think in practice what you’re doing when you “define” Woman in that way is not defining a concept, taking an ethical stance that says “all the edges that connect Woman to other concepts in the social world should be accessible to anyone if they make a free choice to adopt the identity of Woman””
This makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know if that framing would make any progress with the Red Tribe, but I think it’s a huge improvement to this Grey Tribe mind. If a social movement wants to persuade non-post-modernists of ethical truths, not undermining mathematical logic is a prerequisite.
You could even demote that ethical stance to a mere definition and still have a useful result. “A Woman_newdefinition is someone who strongly desires to fit into many of the social roles previously prescribed for Woman_olddefinition”, perhaps? That would at least lead to clearer conversations. It doesn’t beg the question about what is best to do about that desire, but it also lacks the unfortunate implications of any non-recursive definition based on alief alone.
My only concern is that this seems to address transitioning exclusively as it addresses social dysphoria and not body dysphoria. It was my (perhaps ignorant?) understanding that trans people could be motivated by either or both.
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@roystgnr
You’re right, that framing would make zero progress with Red Tribe.
If Red Tribe is in the room then everything we’re talking about here falls under the narcissism of small differences, and what’s at issue is whether any deontological moral foundations specific to sex and gender exist.
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@Stargirlprincess
Veronica states being transgender is not a game where you get to choose your favorite, cool gender but you just feel a certain way about your identity. No one disputes that.
However, if you define gender in your way, you inevitably turn it into a game that everybody, including me, has to play. Furthermore, now my viewpoint that I am male because that’s just my sex becomes invalid, so now you are questioning my gender identity (and no, this isn’t repairable by saying that I am a man since I already think of myself as a man, since how do I know I really feel that way). Sure, if gender didn’t matter at all in the society I wouldn’t bother, but then we wouldn’t have this discussion anyway, right?
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@The Smoke — Okay, that sounds more reasonable.
The thing is, I don’t think we really know how gender works. Like, it obviously rests in some way on physical sex — but physical sex is really complicated. Yes, humans reproduce sexually. Likewise, we are sexually dimorphic. Some people have uteruses, ovum, and vaginas. Others have testicles and penises. This is true. However, the biological world does not create “natural kinds.” It does not make things that are ontologically primary. Sex is an emergent property of a very complicated system, and it can take all manner of twists and turns.
The point is, most people have a legible sex. But some people do not. Furthermore, the boundaries of legibility can change according to culture.
In other words, how we make babies is determined by the body, but the social meaning of these facts can change.
Gender is just a word we use for the social/psychological parts of the sex/gender system. It’s really complex. Clearly it is as least partly neurological — which I hope by now the existence of trans people demonstrates this. Much of gender is probably “learned,” meaning it is transferred the way culture is transferred. Much of gender, it seems, is not.
There seem to be no neat boundaries between the “cultural stuff” the “neurological stuff” and the “psychological stuff.” It’s just one big sex/gender stew. Anyone who tries to fit a precise model around it is sure to erase real things. To me, it seems more wise to say, “I don’t know.”
This subthread began with someone asking, “What is a woman.” The answer is, I don’t know. None one does. All we have are various groups who are wrong in different ways.
Furthermore, words don’t really work this way. Natural language has never fit rigid analytical models. After all, it’s really hard to define “chair” in a way that captures everything called a “chair” and nothing that is not. Approaches such as prototype theory and other models from cognitive linguistics try to capture how we actually use words, (instead of how analytic philosophy wishes we did). None of them are perfect. In the end, meaning is determined use the rich cognitive capacity of the human brain. It’s not going to fit a nice, easy-to-understand decision tree.
In any case, it is possible to define “woman” in a way that excludes all trans women and includes (almost) all cis women. But so what? At some point this looks very much as if it is motivated by a desire to exclude trans women instead of a desire to describe the world.
Hint: an argument that begins by demanding precise definitions often ends up in a place quite distant from real life. Words don’t work this way. Legalistic approaches tend to be clumsy and cruel.
The point is, trans people exist. In particular, trans women exist, a group that includes me. (Others can perhaps speak to the other various gender identities.)
Are we “really” women? I dunno. Is a cis woman who was born without a uterus “really” a woman? Is a woman with a hormonal imbalance and masculine features “really” real? This has less to do with my reality and much to do with how you choose to define realness. If anyone acts like they are just drawing principled boundaries, then they are full of shit. There is just no way they can have learned all subtle textures of a gendered life.
The real question is, why do they need such legalistic boundaries around gender and sex? So far as I can see, that is where the burden of proof should lie.
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Regarding you? I dunno. If you like being a man, then say “I a man.” I’m not going to argue with you. Regarding people engaged in an arms race of colorful gender, yeah that might happen. But so what? If they aren’t doing that, then instead they’ll get into an arms race of underground music or goth-er-than-thou fashion or who-gets-seen-by-whom-at-the-cool-obscure-clubs. The point is, this shit is endemic. It has always sucked to be a weird-nerd.
It seems to get better as you get older. With age you figure shit out. I suspect the gender-tribes won’t be much different. Good luck.
(I’m kinda guessing you are young. Maybe you are not. In any case.)
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@ The Smoke
It sounds like you might be “cis by default” (term coined by Ozy). Does that help?
I don’t have very strong genderfeels, myself. Although living with the (biological and social) limitations, peculiarities and advantages of my body has had a certain impact on my personality.
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Patrick, you seem to be implying that the refusal to deny “are women” and “are men” is a cynical rhetorical tactic designed to allow people to bully others. But I think there is another, more charitable interpretation: There is no possible definition of “are women” and “are men” that can fit the experience of all transpeople.
Most transpeople’s desires can be translated into concrete things. A desire to have a different hormone balance. a desire to have different genitals, a desire to perform a different gendered social role than one is currently assigned.
But there’s apparently also something Ozy has called “social dysphoria” which is unrelated to all of that. Social dysphoria seems to consist of identifying with a gender separate from any of the traits associated with a gender. This sounds incoherent, and it probably is.
I think that social dysphoria is partly caused by the common error of treating a category as if it is a real concrete thing, rather than a collection of traits. It’s caused by the same cognitive flaws that causes questions like “”Is Pluto a Planet?” to sound coherent, even though they’re not. If you read “How An Algorith Feels from the Inside” on Less Wrong, social dysphoria is basically treating the central node in Network 2 as if it is real.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that social dysphoria is a cognitive error and that it will go away once transpeople understand how to think better. Ozy understands how categories work, however they have reported that this knowledge does not make their social dysphoria go away. If someone with as brilliant a mind as Ozy’s can’t do it, no one can.
What I am saying is that it is impossible to define “are women” and “are men” in a way that will fit all possible transpeople, because there is one aspect of dysphoria where people assign value to the category completely separately from its definition. Attempting to define “women” and “men” will leave these people out.
I also don’t want to imply that this kind of social dysphoria is unique to some transpeople. Lots of people have it. There are people who want to be seen as Catholic, but don’t agree with the teachings of the Catholic Church. There are people who want to be seen as Republican, but don’t agree with much of the Republican party platform.
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meant to write ‘refusal to define “are women” and “are men”’
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> Patrick, you seem to be implying that the refusal to deny “are women” and “are men” is a cynical rhetorical tactic designed to allow people to bully others. But I think there is another, more charitable interpretation: There is no possible definition of “are women” and “are men” that can fit the experience of all transpeople.
I don’t think the motivation is to bully. I think the motivation is to taboo any thought which treats the category “trans women” as meaningfully separate from the category “women who are not trans.” I think the bullying comes in because of the rhetorical strategy for doing so: trying not to actually say that, and instead just trying to come up with some set of definitions that makes it impossible for people to express any such idea. But that doesn’t work no matter how many times you change the terminology, because, as Ozy is noting here, people will just adapt their speech.
Its a fun irony. Its literally because of people’s desires to accommodate trans interests that they adapt their terminology, but because the underlying argument is essentially “I conceive of my gender identity in a way that requires that your conception of your own sexual orientation and sexuality die in a fire,” and no one is going to accommodate that (for reasons this very blog has outlined in other contexts), that’s never good enough.
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My position is that is a bad idea to use any term that implies there is anything intrinisically male/female about a transwoman/transman. Referring to a transwoman as being “male bodied” seems to me to be an extremely odd choice if one is pro-trans. Saying a woman is “male bodied” sounds to me like saying a woman’s body is not a “female body” which seems like a contradiction! People can call themselves what they want but “male/female bodied” seems like a terrible language choice.
Using assigned sex at birth imo is ok. Your “assigned sex” is purely a social fact and does not imply anything intrinisc about the person. In addition anyone who is pro-rans genuinely alieves that ASAB can be very wrong.
I disagree that cis people are “taking away the terms.” I tihnk many in the trans community more or less agree that terms like “female bodied” when applied to a trans man are inherently offensive. The most common positon imo is this: “A trans man is a man. Therefore they have a male body. Full stop 100%”
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What’s the correct term to replace ‘female bodied’? Given that I want to talk about people who have the physical characteristics traditionally associated with women and who would be identified as women based solely on looks, what’s the appropriate term to use that won’t be offensive?
Ozy seems to suggest using ‘woman’ in the context of discussing street harassment, but that seems likely people who don’t identify as female but are at risk of street harassment due to others perceiving them as women.
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In that circumstance I would use “parsed as female”.
Although I think ‘female-bodied’ is more often used to mean ‘has a uterus and vagina (possibly also and breasts)’, which is obviously a different set.
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If you want to talk about how people are treated as a result of other people’s perception of them as a woman then say “people perceived to be women”.
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I think “people perceived to be women” is a great term for this. Good suggestion po8crg! This does not nescessarily imply anything about a person’s gender. Just about how that person is perceived.
The term is general enough to even be applied to cis individuals of the alternate cis gender in some cases. For example in the Odessy Achilles pretends to be a woman to get out of fighting the Trojan war. One could easily say he was perceived to be a woman during that period. (correct me if I am wrong but I do not remember any evidence of Achilles being trans. ) Similar real life exmaples are not hard to tihnk of.
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What about ‘female-looking’ people? I don’t mind ‘people perceived to be women’, but it’s a bit clunky, and it also has some connotation that the category is based on mistaken perception. Rather than indicating ‘these people are mistakenly perceived as women’, I’m trying to indicate that ‘these people are correctly perceived as having XYZ traits that are traditionally possessed by women’.
I’m mostly interested in this as a category used to express sexual orientation. If we’re going with a definition of gender that’s divorced from physical characteristics, we need categories to express common groups of people that might be attractive to people of a particular orientation. For instance, the set of people I’m potentially attracted to includes cis women, pre-transition trans men, post-transition trans women, and probably a variety of nonbinary people. I’m not sure, but I would guess that there are probably a large number of straight/bi men and lesbian/bi women who have roughly the same set of people they might find attractive.
I’m trying to find a name for this set that doesn’t imply that we’re incorrectly perceiving a trans man as a woman, but still indicates that he’s part of the set of people possessing characteristics that are attractive to people who might identify as ‘attracted to women’. I don’t know if that’s possible, but that’s my aim.
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I don’t think there is a non-clunky way to describe that set. And unfortunately, any coinage to do so would just end up on the euphemism treadmill before long and become something that people get offended by.
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I’m cynical in that I’m fairly sure if in the morning all cis people agreed to use neuter pronouns to refer to everyone, and did so universally, someone would come out with “You are denying my femininity/masculinity!” and this would be taken as yet more stealth transphobia and attempting to deny that trans men are really men and trans women are really women by calling every human being “xu” – it’s sneaky transphobic cis bigotry at work!
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I am sure someone would yes. However I think most trans individuals would be fine with neutral pronouns applying to everyone. The trans community certainly seems reasonably interested in gender neutral pronouns like xie/xir/etc.
What is not ok is using gendered pronouns except to people you think are cis and “gender neutral” pronouns to refer to people you think might be trans.
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I think part of the problem here is that most of the time, you can just use “woman” and “man” with the usual definition (everyone is what they alieve themselves to be and we should normally operate on the assumption that people alieve what they say). When you can’t, because of a specific situation, people want to have a general-purpose word for { trans men , cis women } that they can revert to. But that general-purpose word will inevitably be used by transphobes to imply that is a general-purpose category – because that then implies that trans men are women. So any general-purpose word will be tainted by that transphobic use.
I think the solution is to recognise that the cases where a term is needed vary, and therefore you need to use a phrase suited to the individual case. People perceived to be women and subject to street harassment is not the same group as people capable of becoming pregnant (relevant to either contraception or abortion). Sure, they have a massive overlap (fertile cis women), but they’re not the same group, so we shouldn’t use the same phrase.
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maybe someday we’ll have useful words for biological sex again
But the argument that I have seen pounded away at, time and time again, is that biological sex doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, can’t be used to identify what someone’s gender orientation is, and possesses no useful traits when talking about is someone a man or a woman or nonbinary or whatever.
You can’t have it both ways. Either a term for biological sex is necessary, will be used, and may be misused, or biological sex is unimportant as talking about eye colour and then the circumlocutions have to be used.
Look at “they’re not the same group, so we shouldn’t use the same phrase” in po8crq’s comment above; this is on the “biological sex is less important” side. So using “woman” or “female” is going to be perceived by somebody as offensive or phobic in that context, and that spills over into other contexts, where using “woman” or “female” without a string of qualifiers is seen as negatively affecting someone.
I have to say that I don’t think this is up to cis people to fix; trans people have to decide what are the appropriate terms to be used and then use them consistently (even if that is a different term for different contexts). Blaming cis people because Susie wants you to acknowledge and use a term indicating she was AMAB and Malinda wants you to simply say she’s a woman, and if you use Susie’s preference Malinda will be offended and if you use Malinda’s preference Susie will be offended is not the result of an evil cis conspiracy to deliberately misgender and insult people.
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That seems to work under the assumption that there is The Objectively Correct Transgender Experience, and everyone who disagrees has internalized transphobia or something. Someone with strong physical dysphoria may perceive themselves as being born in a wrong body, and assume that it’s only natural for people of either binary gender to have a body typical for cis people of this gender (and perhaps even that everyone without strong physical dysphoria isn’t really transgender).
At the same time, if someone has strong social dysphoria, and physical disphoria only inasmuch as people refuse to perceive people with certain bodies as a given gender. These people would likely subscribe to the idea that all people of a given gender already have correct bodies, and if they want to change their bodies – no big deal, but that’s not a special case fundamentally different from other forms of body modification, and it’s only frustrating that the society more or less mandates this particular type of it. For these people it’s gonna be obvious that any assumptions about the links between gender and (preferred) sex are transphobic.
It sort of seems to me that the traditional transgender discourse was more about the former narrative, and the new school is more about the latter. I sorta suspect both just throw different subsets of trans people under the but in order to push their preferred narratives.
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I have no problem with a dude who says that his body is a male body because he is male. Good for him. I have a lot of problems with the idea that clearly articulating my sex dysphoria is internalized transphobia.
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