This is the dumbest article about transness I’ve seen linked by smart people, and so I have decided to write this blog post so I can stop making thousand-word Facebook comments about how terrible it is and just link this post instead.
First, Reilly-Cooper appears to be confused about what the word “spectrum” means. She believes:
Many proponents of the queer view of gender describe their own gender identity as ‘non-binary’, and present this in opposition to the vast majority of people whose gender identity is presumed to be binary. On the face of it, there seems to be an immediate tension between the claim that gender is not a binary but a spectrum, and the claim that only a small proportion of individuals can be described as having a non-binary gender identity. If gender really is a spectrum, doesn’t this mean that every individual alive is non-binary, by definition? If so, then the label ‘non-binary’ to describe a specific gender identity would become redundant, because it would fail to pick out a special category of people.
That is not what the word ‘spectrum’ means. Gender identity is a bimodal distribution; the modes are “male” and “female”. People refer to sexuality as a spectrum, but accepting the existence of the Kinsey Scale does not mean that I have to stop believing the plurality of people are Kinsey 0s. People refer to political allegiance as a spectrum, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as a Republican or a Democrat. Biological sex is a spectrum (Anne Fausto-Sterling has a bunch of great diagrams about it!), but that does not mean that everyone is intersex.
She continues:
If gender is a spectrum, that means it’s a continuum between two extremes, and everyone is located somewhere along that continuum. I assume the two ends of the spectrum are masculinity and femininity. Is there anything else that they could possibly be? Once we realise this, it becomes clear that everybody is non-binary, because absolutely nobody is pure masculinity or pure femininity. Of course, some people will be closer to one end of the spectrum, while others will be more ambiguous and float around the centre. But even the most conventionally feminine person will demonstrate some characteristics that we associate with masculinity, and vice versa.
No, they aren’t.
David Bowie was feminine. I do not think anyone had any particular difficulty in identifying David Bowie as being a man. Similarly, outside of Judith Butler’s wet dreams, I do not think anyone watches RuPaul’s Drag Race and is shocked and horrified that these people are men and then suddenly transform into women. A man who puts on false eyelashes and lipstick and lip-syncs to It’s Raining Men continues to be a man.
You can say “oh, they’re recognizing RuPaul and David Bowie’s biological sex!” But every intersex person is recognized as being either a man or a woman, in spite of the fact that their biological sex is intersex. Social gender exists. An intersex woman who fixes motorcycles in her leather jacket still has F on her fucking driver’s license.
You would think that Reilly-Cooper would be aware of this, because she literally talked about it earlier in the essay:
At least, that is the role that the word gender traditionally performed in feminist theory. It used to be a basic, fundamental feminist idea that while sex referred to what is biological, and so perhaps in some sense ‘natural’, gender referred to what is socially constructed. On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary characteristics.
Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity above femininity. Individuals are born with the potential to perform one of two reproductive roles, determined at birth, or even before, by the external genitals that the infant possesses. From then on, they will be inculcated into one of two classes in the hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are convex, the inferior one if their genitals are concave.
As I am sure Reilly-Cooper is aware, this is not about femininity or masculinity. A man can stay home to raise his children, cry at the drop of a hat, and wear nothing but pink frilly miniskirts, but he will not magically have the female externally opposed set of norms applied to him. He will have the male externally opposed set of norms applied to him. His behavior will be punished in a way it wouldn’t be punished in a woman, because he is failing to conform to gender roles.
Reilly-Cooper is very concerned about the concept of ‘innate, essential gender identity.’ She feels that people do not have one, for reasons that she never really makes clear. I don’t love ‘gender identity’ as a framing; I tend to prefer a ‘gender dysphoria’ framing myself, which offers more opportunity for choice and less pointless introspection about what you Really Really Are Deep Down. (Ms. Reilly-Cooper uses ‘dysphoria’ once in the essay, to refer solely to physical dysphoria, because apparently bothering to look at the DSM is too much research for your article at aeon.co.)
Anyway: some people have preferences about what sexed body parts they have and what their hormone level is. Some people have preferences about which of the externally opposed sets of norms apply to them, completely separately from how they’re treated. (More on that later.) Observably, there is a high correlation between these two sets of preferences: it is very rare for a person to be extremely distressed at being identified as male, but to prefer to have a 100% male sex. Therefore, we can refer to those sets of preferences bundled together as “gender identity.” Often, those preferences are associated with a deeply-held feeling that one ‘really is’ that gender, regardless of one’s sex. As best as I can tell, these preferences seem to be ‘set’ early in life and to be terribly difficult to change, thus the ‘innate’ part.
Reilly-Cooper is vaguely aware of the concept of ‘social dysphoria’ but is extremely confused about it:
This desire not to be cis is rational and makes perfect sense, especially if you are female. I too believe my thoughts, feelings, aptitudes and dispositions are far too interesting, well-rounded and complex to simply be a ‘cis woman’. I, too, would like to transcend socially constructed stereotypes about my female body and the assumptions others make about me as a result of it. I, too, would like to be seen as more than just a mother/domestic servant/object of sexual gratification. I, too, would like to be viewed as a human being, a person with a rich and deep inner life of my own, with the potential to be more than what our society currently views as possible for women.
The solution to that, however, is not to call myself agender, to try to slip through the bars of the cage while leaving the rest of the cage intact, and the rest of womankind trapped within it. This is especially so given that you can’t slip through the bars. No amount of calling myself ‘agender’ will stop the world seeing me as a woman, and treating me accordingly. I can introduce myself as agender and insist upon my own set of neo-pronouns when I apply for a job, but it won’t stop the interviewer seeing a potential baby-maker, and giving the position to the less qualified but less encumbered by reproduction male candidate.
Let us assume for a moment– I know this is a reach, but maybe you can follow me– that nonbinary people are not complete and utter morons. We know that you cannot identify your way out of being subject to sexism. We like… experience sexism. In our day-to-day lives. While being nonbinary. The only thing nonbinary identity does with regards to sexism is make your life more difficult, because a bunch of people are making fun of your pronouns and condescendingly informing you that no one will ever respect your gender and trying to talk to you about what your genitals look like all the time.
So there are two explanations you can have here. One, you can conclude that nonbinary people are so stupid that we do something that is supposed to make us experience less sexism, actually experience more sexism, and completely fail to notice this for a period of years, even though we’re like constantly bitching about cis privilege on the Internet. Two, you can say it is not about sexism.
i really, really don’t want to be put in the ‘man’ category or the ‘woman’ category. I don’t care that this will cause people to treat me worse. If someone was like “everyone will see you as nonbinary, but you have to be punched in the face every day for the rest of your life,” I would stock up on bandages and icepacks. I agree that this is a silly thing to have a preference about. I didn’t pick it. Empirically, being treated well as a man makes me feel worse than being treated terribly as a nonbinary.
A handful of individuals are apparently permitted to opt out of the spectrum altogether by declaring themselves ‘agender’, saying that they feel neither masculine nor feminine, and don’t have any internal experience of gender. We are not given any explanation as to why some people are able to refuse to define their personality in gendered terms while others are not, but one thing that is clear about the self-designation as ‘agender’: we cannot all do it, for the same reasons we cannot all call ourselves non-binary. If we were all to deny that we have an innate, essential gender identity, then the label ‘agender’ would become redundant, as lacking in gender would be a universal trait. Agender can be defined only against gender. Those who define themselves and their identity by their lack of gender must therefore be committed to the view that most people do have an innate, essential gender but that, for some reason, they do not.
The explanation is that… some people have an innate, essential gender identity and other people don’t? It is not that complicated! You just said it!
I don’t really love ‘agender’ as a category, because I think it mixes up two distinct experiences. Some agender people have a very strong sense of “I don’t want to see or be seen by gender, I do not want you to interact with me in a way influenced by gender at all.” (Again, this is not about sexism! In fact, for the agender people I know, feminists having woman-only spaces and designating people women in STEM is often way more dysphoria-triggering than sexism.) But some agender people are what I called cis-by-default— they don’t have the preferences about group membership and their sexed body parts that other people do. There’s a distinction between “no gender identity” and “I have a gender identity and it’s NO”.
And, yes, it’s possible that the majority of people don’t have any sort of gender identity. It’s possible that no one except trans people have gender identities, although I don’t think that’s particularly likely, as many cis people I know have reported having gender identities. That doesn’t mean anything about whether transgender people exist, because we do. Whether cis people have gender identities or not, trans people’s experiences still exist.
But anyway:
Many people justifiably assume that the word ‘transgender’ is synonymous with ‘transsexual’, and means something like: having dysphoria and distress about your sexed body, and having a desire to alter that body to make it more closely resemble the body of the opposite sex. But according to the current terminology of gender identity politics, being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to change your sexed body. What it means to be transgender is that your innate gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. This might be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess. You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another.
I am now going to blow Reilly-Cooper’s mind: did you know that there are nonbinary people with physical dysphoria and who have physically transitioned? It’s true! One of them is writing this blog post you are reading this very moment! Did you know that there are binary trans people with pure social dysphoria, many of whom have transitioned and have had happy lives in their identified genders for decades? Also true! You know what there is between whether your dysphoria is social, physical, or both, and whether you identify as nonbinary or binary?
According to Nonbinary.org, one of the main internet reference sites for information about non-binary genders, your gender can be frost or the Sun or music or the sea or Jupiter or pure darkness. Your gender can be pizza.
But if this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense or adds anything to our understanding to call any of this stuff ‘gender’, as opposed to just ‘human personality’ or ‘stuff I like’. The word gender is not just a fancy word for your personality or your tastes or preferences. It is not just a label to adopt so that you now have a unique way to describe just how large and multitudinous and interesting you are.
I would like to explain to Reilly-Cooper two strange concepts that she may not have heard of before. One of them is a ‘joke’. A joke is when people say something absurd in order to trigger the human emotions of ‘amusement’ and ‘laughter’. Jokes are often a method of coping with difficulties in one’s life: for instance, if one has a deep-seated desire to be put into a socially constructed category that doesn’t exist, one may cope with this by absurdly declaring that one is now a member of some completely unrelated category. The second is a ‘metaphor.’ Humans often describe things through comparing them to other things, particularly when the person they’re communicating with isn’t familiar with the thing they’re trying to describe but is familiar with the thing they’re comparing it to. For instance, if one is trying to convey one’s emotion, one may say “it’s a sort of cold anger.” One cannot argue with this by pointing out that emotions do not really have temperatures, because it’s not supposed to convey that emotions have temperatures, it’s supposed to convey that one’s anger is in a certain sense similar to coldness.
In fact, none of us was assigned a gender identity at birth at all. We were placed into one of two sex classes on the basis of our potential reproductive function, determined by our external genitals. We were then raised in accordance with the socially prescribed gender norms for people of that sex. We are all educated and inculcated into one of two roles, long before we are able to express our beliefs about our innate gender identity, or to determine for ourselves the precise point at which we fall on the gender continuum.
As best as I can tell, Reilly-Cooper’s argument appears to be that no one was assigned a gender (not gender identity, the phrase is not ‘assigned gender identity at birth’), on account of people were instead assigned a gender.
A problem emerges only when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you start demanding that others call themselves cisgender, because you require there to be a bunch of conventional binary cis people for you to define yourself against; and when you insist that these cis people have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the conformist binary people, while nobody really understands just how complex and luminous and multifaceted and unique your gender identity is. To call yourself non-binary or genderfluid while demanding that others call themselves cisgender is to insist that the vast majority of humans must stay in their boxes, because you identify as boxless.
No, I’m not. I am firmly of the opinion that you can trans if you want to, you can leave your cis behind. If you, Reilly-Cooper, wish to socially or physically transition, I will be right there 100% behind you all the way. If 100% of people started identifying as nonbinary, I would be really happy, because that means that every problem that is a product of me being nonbinary would be solved. We would probably even have better transition tech.
But nevertheless there is this thing that radical feminists like a lot, I think it is often referred to as ‘the material reality of oppression’, which means that my experience is different from the experience of a person who is nondysphoric but would be nonbinary in Nonbinary Gender Utopia.
Because, like, about that structural advantage and political privilege that cis people have over us… well, I hate to be that person, but have you looked at the statistics lately? (Note for the confused: nonbinary people were referred to as ‘gender non-conforming’ in this study. Not the word I would have picked, but there you go.)
- 83% of students who were out as nonbinary have been harassed at school for being nonbinary; 27% have been physically assaulted, and 10% have been sexually assaulted.
- 15% have lost a job for being nonbinary; 32% have been discriminated against at work for being nonbinary; 20% have been denied a promotion for being nonbinary. 38% are underemployed. 16% have been employed in illegal fields such as sex work or selling drugs.
- 6% have been refused health care.
- 33% have experienced familial rejection.
- 46% have been denied equal treatment in public accommodations; 60% have been harassed.
- Of nonbinary people who have interacted with police, a third have been harassed for their gender, 6% have been physically assaulted, and 2% have been sexually assaulted. 12% of nonbinary people have been jailed; 4% have been arrested or jailed due to bias.
In short, being nonbinary puts you at higher risk of harassment, unemployment, poor health care access, familial rejection, discrimination, imprisonment and hate crimes, even compared to being a cisgender assigned female at birth nontransgender whatever-word-Reilly-Cooper-finds-politically-correct woman. It’s not just about the illegibility of our genders– although that hurts, and you can guess how much by the number of nonbinary people who are willing to put up with prejudice to be nonbinary, and the number of nonbinary people who encourage others to transition because even despite the discrimination it’s totally goddamn worth it. It is about the actual, material, structural ways that nonbinary people are harmed just for being nonbinary.
Thing of Things 
A decent number of people who claim to be non-binary don’t appear to have gender dysphoria, but simply reject some of the gender roles. IMO, by doing so they are abusing trans acceptance for a different agenda. I think that this hurts trans people, as it’s already hard enough as it is to convince people that trans is not a delusion, but rather a born-with trait. It also hurts cis people, because it effectively means that one abandons the fight against gender norms by claiming special status. ‘Oppress those people, not me, because I am an Oompa, rather than a Loompa’ is not very nice.
IMO, cis vs trans is one thing and being gender-conforming or not is another thing. Mixing these up with unclear language creates confusion that hurts the cause.
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How can you tell apart a person who is nonbinary because they reject some gender roles from a person who is nonbinary because of social dysphoria, but because of the pressures of a cissexist society justifies their nonbinary-ness by pointing to their gender-non-conforming traits– or, hell, a person whose explanation of their social dysphoria is “men and women are different and I am between them”? Answer: you can’t. All this particular instance of policing nonbinary identity does is require trans people to have good gender politics for their genders to be legitimate– something that is never demanded of cis people. (No one makes Doug Wilson articulate a feminist deconstruction of masculinity before they agree that he is a man.) By all means, educate people about the harmfulness of gender roles and the fact that most people don’t fit into them. If some people detransition because of it, then I’m glad they found a gender that is more comfortable for themselves. If others transition because of it– “I thought that I was female because I conform well to gender roles, but now I see my gender identity is nonbinary and my gender conformity doesn’t have shit to do with it”– that’s fine as well. But policing gender dysphoria– something that is by its nature unprovable to people other than the person experiencing it– never helps trans people in the long run.
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You are making the assumption that I would want to judge these people, but I want to challenge these people to critically assess themselves, which is something very different.
As I explained, I disagree that this is justified. You haven’t explained why this would be so.
Ultimately, what I know is that I am cis and I greatly dislike some aspects of the male gender role, but I don’t experience gender dysphoria in a way that would make me trans.
Now, if I had an androgynous body and could dress up in a non-gendered or other-gendered way, I could perhaps avoid some parts of the male gender role, yet this would not solve anything for people who don’t have this option. Opting out is ultimately just an attempt to get special privilege, not an attempt to solve the problem for everyone (note that this criticism is not targeted to people with gender dysphoria!).
Furthermore, I wonder if it’s even a good solution for them, since they will probably end up just getting policed by a different gender role.
You need good gender politics anyway, if you are going to convince a majority of people. My point was that it’s way harder to convince skeptical people when different things are labelled the same. They will start doubting that label when the instances are different, the explanations are different, the science is different, etc.
I don’t see how I’m policing, but rather educating (or rather: debating to get people to think, ‘educating’ sounds too dogmatic to me). Frankly, you seem to apply bad faith assumptions to me and good faith assumptions to yourself, where your critical notes are considered helpful and my critical notes are considered policing.
I find that very unfair and merely conductive to creating echo chambers, where one person’s truth is taken as gospel and someone else’s truth is not considered on its merits.
A question to challenge you: do you think it would help or hurt trans people if everyone would call themselves trans?
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Okay, look, if people are constantly telling you “PROVE that you’re nonbinary, I don’t believe you!” and it is very important to you to be nonbinary, then you’re going to try to prove you’re nonbinary. Because you live in a sexist society, the primary tools you have for proving this are, well, sexism. This is obviously not a great situation, but the primary malefactors here are not nonbinary people. The primary malefactors are the people constantly trying to get us to prove an unprovable feeling. If you cleared that problem up, the second problem would be fixed quite rapidly.
First, no, you wouldn’t. People would read you as male still, and subject you to sexism, or they would read you as female, and subject you to sexism, or they would read you as a freak, and subject you to worse sexism than either other group. There is no option where you don’t experience sexism, except not living in a patriarchy, a goal which I very much hope we will someday reach. Second, do you know what gender dysphoria is? If a person wants to be treated as a nonbinary, and wants to be a nonbinary, and is distressed by not being able to reach those desires, that qualifies them for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria according to the DSM. It says nothing about “and your desire to be treated as a different gender is sufficiently politically pure.” Your statement does, in fact, apply to gender dysphoric people, or else it is utterly meaningless.
Third, I find your beliefs about transition utterly repulsive. If a person’s life would be improved by transitioning, I would suggest they transition. Suffering because other people have to suffer is sadistic and I will have none of it. It’s literally Ayn Rand villain logic. I might as well starve myself because other people are malnourished. The thing that improves people’s lives is, you know, activism, which one may do as any gender one pleases. Refusing to transition is a purely symbolic gesture of little benefit to anyone. Furthermore, your suggestion applies disproportionately to those already marginalized by sexism, which makes it even crueler. It’s bad social justice to give the marginalized a disproportionate burden.
Okay, then, start with gender-conforming cis people. I am sure that the average gender-conforming cis person has spent much, much, much less time thinking about gender, so you are much more likely to tell them something enlightening. They feel validated in their gender by the entirety of society already, so you do not risk causing harm by making them feel misgendered. And they are responsible for the vast majority of the statements of the form “I know I’m a woman because of my fondness for babies and high heels”, if for no other reason than that they are the vast majority of the population. Feel free to write as many blog posts as you like about how cis men should only identify as men if they have carefully examined themselves to ensure that it has absolutely nothing to do with believing they must be men because they like pants and action movies, and how essentially all cis men are abusing cis acceptance for their own agendas. I would appreciate links to these posts! Until you’ve done that, I must question your prioritization skills.
If they don’t transition physically or socially, then that is unnecessarily confusing and we’d need a term for people who transition physically and/or socially. If everyone socially and/or physically transitions… help? I mean, obviously? No one’s going to be a transphobe if everyone’s trans, and probably everyone would have a much easier time using gender-neutral pronouns, and we’d have a way to legibly signal nonbinary identity, and transition tech would become way cheaper and covered by insurance and probably a lot better. Might cause some problems in terms of perpetuating the next generation, though.
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I can’t speak for Ozy, but it seems to me that in order to know “a decent number of people who claim to be non-binary … simply reject some of the gender roles”, you would need some actual mechanism for acquiring knowledge about this.
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I don’t believe that anyone’s true desire is to be called by a label, but rather to benefit from the social consequences of being grouped a certain way. For example, when you call yourself trans, it leads to people no longer making certain wrong assumptions about you (like that you are cis), it enables you to benefit from medical treatment for trans people, it gives you a community of people who have similar issues that you can get support from, etc, etc.
Every label gives a set of benefits and downsides that you have to weigh. If you think the overall effect is positive for you, you adopt the label, if you don’t, you reject the labeling.
When the real motivation by people to adopt the label of ‘non-binary’ is to avoid certain gender norms, criticisms can be made that the label is a poor way to achieve that goal and/or that alternative strategies are better.
Unfortunately, many people conflate a single solution with the problem, so if you question their solution, they think that you question or deny their problem. I think that this is an anti-rational reaction that ultimately hurts people by making people refuse to critically assess solutions and improve them or replace them by better ones.
I think it is highly simplistic to simply blame the evil ‘others.’ People frequently struggle with making sense of their own feelings, which are hardly clear cut. So it’s perfectly valid to debate frameworks that people (can) use to classify themselves and/or which society uses to classify them, to make it easier for people to make sense of who they are and to improve their ability to help themselves.
You are painting a black & white picture where a certain framework is unquestionably 100% right and criticism is wrong by virtue of going against dogma, not by virtue of arguments. It’s actually quite ironic that you have such binary thinking about non-binariness.
That’s actually what I said and is actually one of my main objections (transitioning doesn’t really solve the unfair nature of gender norms, you merely get treated unfairly in a different way), so I don’t understand why you think that you are disagreeing with me.
I believe that I am correct when I make a distinction between gender-body dysphoria and gender-culture dysphoria. The first is a disconnect between the mind’s conception of the corporal entity and the corpus itself. The second is a disconnect between desired behavior and what society allows.
You’ve so far given no argument to justify conflating these, aside from arguing that (semi-)transitioning can solve both. This is like arguing that erectile dysfunction and pulmonary arterial hypertension can be conflated, because both can be treated with Viagra. Just because a similar treatment exists, doesn’t mean that the problems are the same.
Again you are making a statement that I agree with and yet claim that this somehow goes against what I’ve said. It doesn’t.
Let me give an analogy to clarify my position:
Imagine an evil company dumping toxic waste near a pre-industrial village in the forest. The villagers get sick and develop a theory that their village has become cursed by the gods and they move a bit to an alternative spot which lacks some of the resources that the original village had. This improves their health, but costs them some quality of life and… they still ingest some toxins since the waste is still being eaten by the animals they hunt.
Then a person comes along that realizes the truth and he tells the villagers to sue to company to clean up the toxins. This would improve their health even more, lets them return to the better spot and also helps non-villagers who don’t know about the ‘curse’ and could accidentally expose themselves to the toxins. Unfortunately, the villagers get angry: “you are denying our religion. Because you don’t accept our framing, that helped us, you clearly want us to be sick”
I assume that you can figure out who I believe to be who, in this scenario.
That’s not how it works. You actually need the people who do care a lot about these issues to have good theories, because the average person looks at the dominant narratives and chooses to accept those if they are convincing. This is how you get an idea accepted by the mainstream:
1. Convince a group of people who care a lot and have multiple people work on that idea from different angles
2. Become recognized as experts on the topic and push your ideas into the Overton window
3. Use social shaming to paint the old idea as morally wrong and your idea as morally right
This is not how it works:
1. Be right and write your theories down
2. Tell a lot of people who don’t feel strongly about the issue and can’t be bothered to check if those new beliefs are better than the old beliefs.
A lot of cis people actually do have gender-culture dysphoria. This statement proves my point for me, because your failure to distinguish between the two kinds of dysphoria leads you to make a statement that is valid for the one kind, but not valid for the other kind.
Exactly! So we agree that there should be different labels when there are substantial differences. The disagreement seems to be that you don’t see the substantial difference between gender-body dysphoria and gender-culture dysphoria that I see.
I would argue that your ‘transness’ might color your perspective here as you never could experience the one without the other, while as a cis person, I can and do.
I should probably have been clearer, the premise is that nothing changes besides (self)labeling.
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Ok, I don’t even remotely have the energy to reply to this entire thing but I think I can clarify one potential misunderstanding here:
I suspect that you’re conflating a dislike of gender policing with social dysphoria here. Having your gender policed, or having stereotypes of your gender forced on you are extremely uncomfortable experiences, but that is not what social dysphoria is. Social dysphoria is what happens when someone incorrectly genders you, not when they use you correct gender against you. A cis woman could experience social dysphoria if someone read her as man, for instance, but suffering from sexism is not social dysphoria. Both are uncomfortable experiences, but they are different things.
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Kasey,
I have given my definitions. You can accept them or not, but it’s not very productive to argue that I should be talking about something different than what I want to talk about. I wasn’t discussing people who call themselves non-binary due to being misgendered, but rather people who call themselves non-binary to avoid social norms.
I also wonder if mislabeling is truly a substantial issue by itself. The only reason why I would care about being labeled a certain way is when it is accompanied by policing. If a person calls me a ‘stone,’ I will think that they are weird. If they start arguing that I don’t have human rights because I am a stone, then I suddenly get a big incentive to deny that labeling. Only when there are repercussions beyond just language, the labeling becomes a real issue.
Anyway, this goes back to my observation that many people incorrectly equate a certain (limited) solution with the problem itself. Especially in social justice there is a strong tendency to tone police, where along the way people who don’t have evil ideas or goals get attacked for their choice of words, while people with extremely bigoted ideas and goals get ignored because they cloak their ideas in politically correct language.
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Why are the only options “delusion” and “fundamental, in born trait”? Are people with PTSD delusional?
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The word ‘delusion’ is a emotional weapon that you wield against me to discredit my opinion, not an accurate description of my opinion. So don’t push your straw man on me, please. I didn’t say that they were delusional, I said that people are conflating two different things under the same label, which has negative consequences for various reasons.
Your second question doesn’t actually make much sense as a criticism of my actual position, since you are not giving an example of two different things that are labeled the same. I’ll use PTSD to explain myself again: take a person with brain damage acquired during birth, which makes him respond violently to sometimes, just like a person with PTSD might react violently to certain stimuli. Would it be correct to say that this person has PTSD? No, because the cause is different and most likely, the symptoms are somewhat different. Conflating the two will be confusing to the person him/herself and to other people who will hear people claim that PTSD is caused by two different kinds of mechanisms. Any term that has competing definitions leads some people to doubt the validity of the label. If scientists start doing science over groups that have both people who suffered trauma and those with brain damage during birth, these subgroups will likely give different outcomes, but this difference will be hidden by virtue of these people being mixed in one group, rather than studied as separate groups. So you get bad (medical) science, which then leads to bad treatment and a lack of understanding.
So IMHO, it would be objectively bad to use the label ‘PTSD’ for these different groups, just like it is bad to use non-binary for people with gender-body dysphoria and people with gender-culture dysphoria.
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The best part of this is that you assume all cisgendered people are the same, because people don’t label themselves as some ridiculous term they’re a stereotypical Mary Sue or Gary Stu. I don’t see why you feel the need to call yourselves whole mew genders just because some things you do don’t fit the stereotype of a man/woman from the 50’s, which don’t even apply any more. I sware non-binary people are at least 60 years in the past mentally, because you think you need to call yourself something new, otherwise everyone will. assume you are straight and comfortable with being whatever you were born as.
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I am going to spare you my opinion and instead express the wish that people refer to me as ‘they’, since any singular form is insufficient to capture the colorful and diverse different aspects of my identity.
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Okay! I’ll make a note of it and edit comments that refer to you with a gendered pronoun, until you decide to socially detransition! 🙂
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To be clear, are you asserting that all those people who claim absurd genders are joking? Because that’s not the impression I’ve gotten.
This definition quoted in the article, for instance, doesn’t seem like an attempt at humor:
Yet I think it backs up the article’s position that “gender” is being used in this context as “a fancy word for your personality”.
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Some instances are jokes. (For instance, ‘Gender of the Day’ is a joke.) Others are not. You will notice I said two strange concepts that Ms. Reilly-Cooper appears to not have heard of, the other one being ‘metaphor’. If someone seriously identifies as robotgender, I suspect it is generally a metaphor. (Unless the person is a species-dysphoric otherkin; otherkin have weird relationships to gender a lot of the time, and they might be saying they’re a robot otherkin who doesn’t identify as a gender because robots do not have your human genders.)
Janegender seems like a perfectly reasonable way of referring to the gender possessed by Jane, particularly if Jane is part of a culture that doesn’t have a word for her gender. I mean, I have occasionally referred to myself and been referred to as “Ozygender”. Do you believe that I am saying that my gender is a fancy word for my personality?
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But this just forces the question, what does it refer to?
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Well, look, if someone comes up with a functional more-than-three-gender system that the rest of society is willing to accept, then I am sure nonbinary people will be happy to identify within it. Until then, “my gender is the kind of gender I have” is a reasonable way to go about things given the complete illegibility of nonbinary genders and the lack of useful vocabulary for discussing them (which is a consequence of the former).
And besides, I have gotten some people to mentally add a third category such that people are divided into male, female, and Ozy. “I see you as Ozygender” seems like a reasonable way to describe this not uncommon situation.
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“Janegender” seems like a non-answer, like saying her height is “Jane-height” or she’s majoring in “Jane studies”. It conveys no information, apart from the fact that she’s chosen not to convey any information.
In some situations, it could mean “I don’t know” or “go away, I don’t want to answer”. But if she’s trying to get “Jane-height” printed on her driver’s license, or petitioning the dean to grant her a degree in Jane studies, then either she’s really dedicated to comedy, or she has a different purpose in mind than the people asking about her height and major.
If Jane’s culture lacks a word for her gender, she can go ahead and coin one. If she wants to name it after herself, well, that seems a little arrogant, but OK. But Janegender still needs to be defined somehow, and broadly enough to be a useful category.
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@taradinoic
Exactly, the value of a label is classification by an accepted standard. When I tell you a story about tripping over a rock, you have an idea what I tripped over, despite the category of ‘rock’ being rather broad. That rock could have been small or huge and in various shapes. You don’t know these specifics unless I clarify further. But ‘rock’ being a spectrum doesn’t mean that the word is useless, it merely doesn’t describe all aspects of the thing. However, all classifications merely describe some aspects, since language _is_ generalizing and finding a common frame of reference by doing so.
The point of communicating is to find that common ground and to convey relevant information, rather than data. Data are mere facts, while information is data in a meaningful form. The goal of communication is to convey information.
Janegender is non-communication. It’s no more than a refusal to use a shared vocabulary to convey information and (passive aggressively) tells the other person ‘you can’t understand me because you are not me.’ While it is true that the tragedy of the human condition is our inability to convey our inner world accurately, refusing to share any information out of fear of being misunderstood is not the answer. It just leads to less understanding between people. When everyone or everything is unique, there is no common ground, no room for working together.
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Such non-communication can potentially be useful, though, if, say, actual communication would take too long, or require elucidating things that the speaker themselves doesn’t have clear.
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@Sniffnoy
Even when non-communication is the best option, “I’m Janegender” is still a flippant and confusing way to do it, compared to “I can’t explain right now”.
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@Sniffnoy
In those cases there is a better way to do it. “Not now” is far clearer and can be said quicker than Janegender. “I am not sure what my gender is yet” is far clearer than Janegender. “I don’t cannot express my gender in words yet” is far clearer than Janegender. The word “Janegender” is so uninformative that even statements with very little information in them are already better.
I can’t come up with any example where Janegender couldn’t be replaced with a statement that communicates better in all ways.
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That said… I was kind of horrified by the article. I felt like I was watching someone calmly explain that, no, Stonehenge wasn’t built by aliens, that’s unscientific nonsense and you should really check your facts; everyone knows it was really built by Monsanto and the Illuminati to cover up the Kennedy assassination. It’s not the first time I’ve seen the claim that the concept of gender is some kind of international conspiracy, but I still can’t get over it.
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I find it really interesting how she is super bent on the idea that the existence of nonbinary people is reliant on the existence of cis folk.
“If we were all to deny that we have an innate, essential gender identity, then the label ‘agender’ would become redundant, as lacking in gender would be a universal trait.”
Yes, if there was a world where everyone had a common trait, they would not normally make a point of labeling themselves by it. That doesn’t prove anything about the label ‘agender’, though.
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She’s not saying that the idea of the existence of nonbinary people is reliant on the existence of cis people. She’s saying that gender is a lie we tell ourselves, and that by separating out a group of people as distinct on the grounds that they don’t have gender, you’re implying that everyone else does have it. And she sees that belief as deeply harmful.
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Except that literally everyone who doesn’t have a gender has the option of “seperating” themselves out as such. It is not unreasonable to assume that if they claim to have a gender (i.e. if they identify as women and men), that they do in fact have a gender. Maybe agender people are a secret majority; that would be fine. But no one is forcing anyone to pretend they have a gender. We are simply trusting in their self-identifications and I really don’t see how that is damaging, even those identifications are by default. They can change them if they don’t like them! That’s the nice thing about it!
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You wrote that it is not unreasonable to presume that if someone claims to have a gender, they do.
Can you perhaps see why *gender critical* radical feminists might not see eye to eye with you on this?
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I think you are failing to fully separate gender identity in the sense of how one thinks about oneself, gender in the sense of how one presents oneself, gender in the sense of how others react to you, and gender in the sense of what you actually and empirically are.
As the article makes clear, radfems acknowledge physical sex, then use “gender” to refer to a caste like system of oppression that trains and forces women to be subservient and men to be dominant. In fact this view extends substantially past radfem borders, though they’re definitely more deeply into it than others.
This leads in a very direct way to their response to gender and gender identity issues. They see self identification as male or female in terms of either an acceptance of ones role in an oppressive system, or, as a factual acknowledgement of the political faction into which society sorts us, perhaps coupled with a statement of solidarity for the rest of that faction.
If a radfem says “I am a woman” that doesn’t necessarily- in fact almost certainly doesn’t- mean that she self identifies with woman-like personality traits. She might be more gender non conforming than the most extreme trans activist you can imagine. What she almost certainly means is that “woman” is the side of the oppressive system society’s mechanisms try to shove her into.
As such telling her that you would support her in transitioning is completely beside the point. From a radfem perspective the difference between a nonbinary person assigned female at birth and a radical feminist is minimal at best, particularly with respect to the gender role issues most salient to her. Your recitation of stats on the treatment of non binary persons will be similarly uncompelling as her political faction is entirely on board with opposition to discrimination against women (and men when they can be bothered) for declining to perform their gender.
There are a few other places where your response appears to be a bit off. Your response to her in which you claim that some people have innate gender identities is likely to be rejected on the grounds that her entire political ideology is premised on the idea that even if one might have an innate sense that ones body ought be otherwise, “gender” literally describes a set of socially constructed and more importantly contingent traits. On this view the idea of innately being male makes no more sense than the idea of innately being the pope (innately being better suited to a male body would be compatible with her view). Further, the issue she raises with respect to the way popular discourse conflates body dysphoria and rejection of social role is far more difficult to reject than you seem to feel. To illustrate, imagine someone who rejects the “female social role” and the “recognition by society of female status” as thoroughly as you do, but who feels or has felt no body dysphoria, and to the extent xir body causes others to treat xir as female blames others and not the body.
If that’s hard to imagine, well, go lurk radfem blogs for a while. That’s where people who feel that way reside.
I’ve stopped lurking those places because I feel like I *get* them enough that I’m not going to learn anything new. But I’ve observed people discussing, to give just one example, wrestling with anorexia because gaining breasts meant they were an awful, horrible, despicable WOMAN, and they wanted to stop them from growing. I’ve heard them discussing puberty as their body’s betrayal, in which it sprouted all the things that in their view made society push them into the role of an oppressed and despised caste. One might interpret this as them being trans or non binary and not having an understanding of that fact, but these people were adults now and, in their view, had come to terms with themselves, their bodies, and the social realities in which they live.
That’s the context in which this discussion is taking place. That’s the context for how this author probably views “non binary” status. As something almost exactly like the common experiences of her community, but slightly different in a way that fails to challenge the underlying concept of gender, which her ideology teaches to be one of the most vile of human social inventions in the history of our species.
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This has many problems, but one of them seems to be a failure to recognize the fundamental ambiguity of spectrum analogies that is so helpfully illustrated here:
http://hedgehogs.odj.me/post/47905937959/edit-240414-whoah-this-is-still-getting
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The more I read about gender issues, the more I think that the only even vaguely true thing one can ever believe about gender/sex/orientation/etc. is “Whatever you think you know about gender/sex/orientation/etc. is ALWAYS WRONG!”
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I think you’re doing her a great disservice. First of all she’s coming from a cis gendered point of view. Secondly, her commentary is not so much trans based, but at least is educating the culture of cis that sexuality and expression is on a continuum. That’s a very good thing overall. I think that’s what she means by non binary, that gender is fluid among all people. A healthy mix of male and female, masculine and feminine. Thirdly, trans folks are even a smaller population along the spectrum. So to have described everything as if we’re solely for that smaller population doesn’t address what a bigger population feels about the issues. I think for tight now it’s more than good enough to get people off the binary thinking of this OR that. If we can get through to most on this I think that’s a true win, to then move onto the next part. OTOH, I understand that activists don’t see it moving fast enough. That’s always the case.
But I am cis, and yet know I’m not binary. I incorporate way too many feminine characteristics be completely binary. I am straight too, but again, by my expression I could see that people might think I may be. I’ve never been dissed for it because maybe I look just enough cis to have them question. But frankly I’d love to have people understand I’m not binary, that my beingness is non binary, and give them leave to be as non binary as they’d like to be. That might give them a lot more to think about and change the way they address all sexuality and gender constructs. Would that be so bad? I don’t think so.
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Yes. Men and women aren’t magically homogeneous, and they don’t magically fit into the socially prescribed boxes of manhood and womanhood. But the difference between men, women, and non-binary people, is that men and women identify as such, and non-binary people identify as non-binary. I don’t know what the difference is between those experiences, because my experience is only that of a non-binary person, but I trust that there must be a difference, otherwise either I would identify as a binary gender, you would identify as non-binary. I don’t know why you are cis, any more than I don’t know why I am non-binary, but it really has nothing to do with simply not fitting the ridiculous sereotypes of the binary genders, since no one really does.
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Personally I think we all have an issue with language. People say this or that and then there are a bazillion interpretations of that. Especially in and around a topic such as this that wasn’t talked about at all 5 years ago. Many people don’t even know what cis, or gender non binary is in the first place.
Which is one of the reasons I think the original author should be praised for her work in even getting this far. Let’s all assume that people want to be decent. I think that’s fair for the majority. But if they don’t understand where you’re coming from then it’s all Martian to them, they get frustrated wrapping their heads around it and eventually dismissing both the message and the messenger.
So cis. What is it? I think it’s a person like me that at least physically looks like the stereotype of what a male looks like. Shorter hair, wear men’s clothes, body and movement is typically male. But I also shave my legs and wear my toes polished. That throws folks off. I find my body cooler and feels cleaner without hair. I just don’t like body hair. My toes are the only decoration I put on it. Other like tattoos and piercings. I don’t want anything permanent. Or stuck in me. I’m diabetic so stick myself more often than I want to. I like pedicures. Who wouldn’t? But no one ever asks me about my feelings about body hair or paint. So they just assume different, but have not gone too far out of line. That’s cis to me. That others will see me as they want with a few minor transgressions, but overall i still fit in their mind.
In my mind I have no idea of I’m non binary. I’m still a man , my chromosomes say I am, and my feelings of myself are too. But I also know that in my mind I’m a human first and so therefore on the continuum of gender behavior somewhere. Probably more than the others would assume, given my shaving practice and polished toes. I’m hetero but that’s nobody’s business but my own. I know that I’m not agender, that term makes no sense to me. Asexual I get. Agender not so much, but I suppose there are some that all the time feel no gender at all. But I do think that’s very very rare. One day you dress to pass as the opposite sex, the next day as your given. But either way you feel at least something of gendered behavior.
So I’m all in favor of a discussion and acceptance of the continuum as being the most rational and logical for culture to get a clue as to how individuals are just that and accept them as they are. You want to call it non binary, then have at it. Or agender you’ll never get the vast majority of people, at this time to grasp that concept in this culture. You’ll just look like a bit bag mental problems. They already keep saying this about trans and that’s still just a minority of the continuum population that have the courage to do that. How do you explain you’re in the wrong body and not sound like a bit bag to those who’ve never considered anything but the binary? I mean that completely with no disrespect. I just think it messes up the whole point of it all. It’s splitting hairs, and dancing on the head of a pin.
I sometimes wonder if in fact this goes deeper than the corporeal. I believe in reincarnation for a variety of reasons. Not to go into that here. But what if you had many incarnations as an opposite sex being? What if you got so many reinforcing experiences that these carry over, and in this life for example it does feel weird because you’re so used to the other that you can’t relate to this one very well. I think that’s as plausible as merely saying my mind view and body view is 180 out. Just as weird maybe others can accept the new training easier. I have no idea. So I’d be happy with just being somewhere on the sliding scale and just being accepted.
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So I get thay you are being kind to Reilly – Cooper, but the thing you are missing is that her entire argument is set up to invalidate non-binary people, both implicitly and explicitly. She is basically arguing that our identities are a cop-out, as if being non binary is somehow easy, rather than something based in a very real experience that is different from binary people’s (though if that is the case, I don’t get why she doesn’t identify as non-binary?).
It isnt ok for her to speculate about non-binary people in invalidating ways. We are not a grand thought experiment. We exist and we can speak for our fucking selves.
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She’s supporting non binary through a lens of cis. You guys are so heavily invested in it you can’t really see it. I’m not disputing your experience at all. Not one bit. But it’s to me the languishing were not yet there with. Not the individual experience at all. Culture is made up of lots of a collective thought. Quite frankly, you’re a slim majority. No disrespect to you. But the collective thought ain’t there yet, no matter how much you want it to be so. I don’t know if I’m not non binary. I don’t know if I believe in binary or not. Maybe binary in sex is fine. But in gender or sexuality or behavior it’s not. This is an important distinction we’ve not yet scratched the surface. Yet want it to be accepted flash news. It ain’t gonna be for awhile. Just being realistic here but no, I don’t think she’s being disrespectful, nor irrational at all.
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Btw. I think she really is saying that everyone is in fact non binary, because of that continuum, and therefore she thinks she is too. Therefore, there is no such thing as non binary because everyone is non binary and ergo binary really doesn’t exist in the first place. That’s what I think y’all are missing here. You’re so wrapped up in being different from a norm that doesn’t really exist in the first place that you just can’t see it. You’re buying into what THEY say it is, no matter that THEY have no clue. The norm is YOU, to whatever a degree.
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So, um, I know that I am not significantly definable different from lots of binary identified people (both men and women). I know those categories tell you almost nothing about the individuals that inhabit them. Yet many people still choose to inhabit them and I do not. That is what makes me non-binary. *shrugs*
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Well Kasey, I just don’t see it that way. I think again it’s mainly language and misunderstanding. You can call yourself non binary, because you understand what it means. I can too for the same reason. But the vast majority of people have no clue as to what it means because they don’t grasp the concept of the continuum in the first place. They here non binary they think gay at best, maybe just queer, maybe trans, and at worst you have a mental disorder. If everybody did, understand the continuum they’d realize they somewhere on that and the strict delineation of binary would go away completely, in my view. They realize non binary is what humans are, and therefore normalize the individual expression.
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Ok. I see kind of see? For me this is the political aspect of being openly non-binary and of actively embracing and heightening visibility of the identity. Because you’re right, everyone would benefit from questioning these silly boxes – and in a world devoid of gender policing maybe these identities would mean nothing. But we don’t live in that world, we live in this one. And in this one more options and raising awareness of them is a good thing
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Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. I don’t mean to make this about me, but I do show my non binary-ness publicly too as an educational opportunity, more so than a political statement. People see it, they can question me all they want, I’m not defensive about it, assuming they don’t get all judgy with me from the get go. We can have a nice conversation and see different points of view. I think in that way we can do far more positive impacting in the larger scheme of things. But it’s not gonna happen overnight. But if more people can show their non binary-ness more, in public, whatever that looks like to you, and not make it an in your face kinda thing, I do think more people exposed to it will accept it as a reality. But you will have to have a thicker skin without going all ballistic about it. It’s just a thing. Your thing as an individual. They don’t like it, don’t look.
Trans though to me is another issue. For the individual who is I think it great they have the courage to live their life as they wish. Whatever makes them truly happy. But I’m not sure this is, or is not the same part of the continuum that we’re talking about here as being the norm. There maybe way too many other factors that are influencing that very far end of the bell curve tail. Hormones, neural pathways, medications taken during pregnancy. I simply don’t know, nor do I think there are any experts out there who have a clue either. So at this point I think it’s rational to just let them live their life as they choose to be happy. Ain’t hurting me. I do think that when Caitlin Jenner transitioned it jump started a whole new era in thinking about this. I think this was a good thing, and I really hope it continues to be for her.
This has been a very good conversation, and lots of thoughtful comments.
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Who is going ballistic? I think it is pretty clear that we agree generally, but are seeing different thing in Reilly – Cooper’s argument – she seems very clearly to be trying to make a deliberate point that somehow people who actively identify as non-binary are somehow bowing out of the battle against gender policing (slipping through the bars of the cage as she puts it), when we are I’m fact simply trying to show people how many doors there are to walk through if they want. She is accusing non-binary people of hurting the cause, and that is what I am objecting to. There is also a strong undertone of invalidating of non-binary identities throughout her writing. It is there whether or not you see it, and my and Ozy’s acknowledgement of thay is not us being too sensitive or going ballistic. It is us being bored with yet another cis person just starting to understand the complexity of gender and using their basic knowledge to undermine and invalidate trans people, instead of taking some time and learning a little more before deciding she knows what she’s taking about.
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I wasn’t talking about YOU going ballistic at all. Sorry you got that out of it. But maybe that sensitivity is something you might want to consider. Personal attachment does have a tendency to cloud hearing other points of view. I know it does with me. I can’t imagine others are much different.
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I find it odd that she seems to feel that non-binary people are forcing her and other people to identify as cis. Like, no, she can identify as non-binary if she wants. But presumably she doesn’t want. Or maybe she does want but feels she can’t, and maybe that’s why she wrote the article.
Urgh, I find gender so confusing. I wouldn’t believe it existed at all if it weren’t for trans people, who, at the very least, clearly do feel it exists. The idea I’m now trying to understand is that there are cis people out there who actually identify as a man or a woman, who can say “I am a man/woman” and apparently it means something to them, like, it twines down into the centre of their being and helps define who they are. Or something. Or maybe it doesn’t. Who knows.
(my gender identity: I still haven’t figured out what we’re actually talking about)
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I think the point is we don’t have to have gender. We are humans first. Who says we have to fit into tiny little narratives of anything? If you do buy into it you’re buying into their version of the life they want to live. That makes absolutely no sense to me. I’m a man. I’m hetero. I’m sensitive. I incorporate some further aspects of femininity. No I’m not a cross dresser. But I’d have no problem in general if I did. The fabrics and colors are way more interesting. But I’m basically cis. I’m good with that. If I were trans maybe I’d have more issues with myself in a culture that tells me I’m wrong. But I can’t possibly be more wrong in my life than anyone else is in theirs. So that’s why I appreciate that the conversation is going away from the binary to a more realistic one. It may not fit everyone yet but it’s a start. Which is a lot better than wherever were even 2 years ago.
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I came across an article making some similar arguments earlier today. http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2016/06/grammatical-gender-and-transgender-identity.html
I need to reread the article, but I get the impression that he is focusing too much on the words themselves as opposed to the lived experiences they attempt to signify. Spiting gender off from bodies and the way they are treated would seem to treat gender as subjective set of aesthetic preferences.
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I think I may have said this before, but I don’t think your two definitions of agender – cis-by-default and I-hate-being-seen-by-gender – are really that different. It took me a long time to sort out which I was, and honestly I’m still not sure, because the concepts seem to overlap quite a bit.
I mean, I present as a kinda-tomboyish member of the gender to which I was assigned at birth, and I’m mostly pretty ok with that, so probably cis-by-default, right? Sure, I hate the idea of anyone taking gender into account in the way they see me as a person. But from inside, that doesn’t feel like a part of my personal individual identity so much as a reasonable preference based on the fact that gender is clearly objectively terrible. I mean, why would anyone want to be defined by something they don’t have, or be sorted into a social caste based on their body type? And I don’t experience physical dysphoria…much…I mean, obviously if I’d gotten to design my body from the ground up I’d pick something stronger and more androgynous, but again that basically just seems sensible…
So I guess I’m agender in the I-hate-gender sense…or maybe in both senses. I’m really not sure they’re different. My suspicion is that a lot of the time, and maybe all of the time, they’re just two different ways of describing the same basic experience, and the cis-by-default people are just the ones that are more successful not thinking about it most of the time.
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I really do think that even the most stereotypical cis gendered folks would certainly express differently if they had the social freedom to do so. Gosh, I didn’t even consider it to be an option until 10 years ago that I could paint my toes if I wanted. Then it took me another couple to actually do it because I wanted to. That’s how ingrained that box was. Women have it a bit easier to do a lot more of what they think would be fun. And of course that’s another conversation that they’re not being taken as seriously as men. They are allowed goofiness kinda like children. Sad but true. Not all of course would want to, or even consider it, but I I think ALOT more than you’d think would do so.
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I am mostly put off by your title and tone in this article. You are very condescending toward the person who wrote the article you are critiquing. People deserve to have an intelligent discussion on this subject matter without being called stupid because their perspective and experience is different from yours.
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i have to agree with Maria above. the article struck me as neither dumb nor as remotely unsympathetic with trans people or their political difficulties or with women and their political difficulties. that you start by calling it “dumb” and “stupid” makes me ask who is really disrespecting whom here. her point that virtually nobody could be said to occupy the poles at either end of the spectrum (if there is one), and yet only transgender people “get” to label themselves as “fluid,” is a very concerning one. either gender is fluid (for *everyone*) or it isn’t. that doesn’t mean in any way that some people aren’t trans; it means that the stark division between “trans” and “cis” *as if their entire relationship to whatever that thing is called “gender”* is something to think very hard about, because it may do some really bad political work.
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I don’t understand this whole debate. Isn’t the attribution of certain personality traits, abilities or interests to a certain gender the product of cultural and societal norms and in reality no attributes should ever be seen as “feminine” or “masculine”? As such the very notion of being triggered by someone assuming your gender, or rather the very notion of a “gender identity” is not natural. I am a human. I am who I am and I am unique. I identify with my interests, hobbies, abilities, personality traits. Those make my identity. But gender has nothing to do with that. Gender should have no influence on identity. As such I see everyone who proclaims to be outraged to be “assumed” to be a certain gender because they have a “non-binary” gender identity to be a hypocrate when it comes to equality, because they themselves to attribute certain traits to a gender, which in itself is not equality or political correctness in any way. What world do we live in?
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…no?
Sex has a dramatic influence on the way the human body develops and works, affecting everything from reproductive organs to height to muscle mass to senses to alcohol metabolism. Isn’t it kind of unlikely that it affects everything except the brain?
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Biological sex does, creates the influence on body difference. But the way you view yourself in terms of hobbies.interests, fashion etc is a blend of external observations on how to fit into this society of others observing us. Example. I develop physically as a male. I’m stronger, taller, more hairy etc. That’s biology. But my thoughts are not in congruence with how I observe other stronger, taller and hairier people I observe around me. So I may choose to hide that incongruence to better fit in. Or express it because I’m more courageous in being myself. And just because I also developed a penis biologically does not mean I automatically like vaginas.
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In part, sure. But what makes you so sure none of that stuff is influenced by biology?
Not for 100% of people, but it does mean that for the vast majority of people — being interested in women is as much a biological consequence of being born male as being tall and hairy is. Some guys are short and can’t grow a mustache, but that doesn’t mean there’s no connection.
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I didn’t say NONE of the concept of gender was biologically based, but it’s pretty clear in the development of personality, likes and dislikes it’s more socially driven. And if not 100 percent then that means it’s not based solely on biology and physical development. Although to be fair, there’s probably a biological component in hormonal influence in the development of the brain. But equally is clear that in the absence of females, most animals including humans will equally engage in same sex relations as a second choice, even if they are straight outside of that restriction. Otherwise they’d clearly resort to self pleasure as the only other option.
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But again, what makes you so sure?
We can see sex-linked behavioral differences in other species, where the only explanation is that they’re mostly (or entirely) driven by biology. When we observe similar differences in humans, why should we assume they’re mostly driven by culture instead?
Agreed — but it doesn’t have to be.
X claimed that “the attribution of certain personality traits, abilities or interests to a certain gender [is] the product of cultural and societal norms and in reality no attributes should ever be seen as “feminine” or “masculine””.
But a trait doesn’t have to be based solely on biology in order for us to consider it “masculine” or “feminine”. Lots of men don’t have beards, and some people with beards aren’t men, but beards are still a masculine trait. Labels are fuzzy, and there are always exceptions; that doesn’t invalidate the labels, it just means we have to interpret them like humans and not like robots.
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Just adding my two cents, but I do believe there is a difference between trans people with physical dysphoria and trans people who only experience social dysphoria (not saying someone cannot experience both).
That gender is a social construct is pretty much undeniable.
In an ideal, utopic society who didn’t include a social differenciation from female and male anatomy (and those in between or with both), people wouldn’t experience social dysphoria based on misgendering since gender wouldn’t even exist (or maybe the only gender would be “human”?) and there wouldn’t be different expectations or treatment based on some defined category.
But gender and anatomy being two different things, trans people experiencing physical dysphoria would still exist since the body they are born with is the real problem.
Of course it would be very difficult to achieve given human’s natural obsessiveness for categories and structure.
Just to say, I believe people under the trans umbrella because of solely their social dysphoria are a byproduct of a gendered society. But I also believe that they are essential to challenge the binary gender structure to eventually tear it apart.
And sorry if my english isn’t the best..
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