I recently read this excellent personal essay about transness and how alienated one closeted trans woman feels from feminist discourse, and it has me thinking about discourse norms.
Social justice tends to emphasize people’s beliefs coming from their position in society. The previous belief tended to be that people of color, women, disabled people, LGBA people, etc. were biased, because they were involved in the issue, while white people, men, abled people, straight people etc. could have an objective view on things. Of course, no one has an objective view on anything, all our viewpoints are inextricably linked to our positionalities, and we just have to muddle along as best we can to get at objective truth. (The anti-social-justice reader who is about to object to this paragraph should reflect on how many of their beliefs are a product of having the positionality ‘human.’)
At the same time, marginalized people have access to a certain kind of knowledge that privileged people do not. There are quite a lot of cis academics who have a better understanding than I do of the etiology of transness, trans people cross-culturally and in history, the causes of transphobia, etc., but not one of them has felt the icicle-in-the-heart of being thoughtlessly misgendered. Of course, it is quite possible to have experienced that and also be wrong about things– just as it is possible to be an expert in the neuroscience of gender variance and be wrong about things– but just like it would be a mistake to leave neuroscientists out of the discussion of transness, it is also a mistake to leave trans people out. For these reasons, social justice tends to prioritize the opinions of marginalized people.
On the other hand, the sensible viewpoint that marginalized people’s opinions should be prioritized can create a culture of obligate self-disclosure. Marginalized identities are often a source of great pain. For many marginalized identities, such as abuse survivor or intersex person, disclosing your marginalization can mean disclosing private information that people feel uncomfortable sharing with strangers. In many cases, such as mental illness and queerness, a person may be a member of a marginalized group and not know it themselves. And of course being publicly a member of a marginalized group sets you up for all sorts of bad experiences, ranging from familial rejection to harassment to well-meaning people attempting to keep you from going to hell.
So what does this mean?
- Any person you talk to about homophobia could be a closeted gay or bisexual person.
- Any person you talk to about poverty could be poor or have grown up poor.
- Any person you talk to about transphobia could be trans, whether stealth or closeted, or a non-transitioning gender dysphoric person.
- Any person you talk to about sexism could be female. (And for the MRAs in the audience, they could be male too.)
- Any person you talk to about disability could be disabled– whether neurodivergent or a person with an invisible physical disability.
- Any person you talk to about race could be a mixed-race or white-passing person.
- And online, any person you talk to about any subject could be anything. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
Now, you might be thinking, “Ozy, does that mean I am not allowed to criticize anyone for being oppressive?” Of course you can, because marginalized people are routinely oppressive to other marginalized people. You can even criticize them in a snarky or vicious way, if you think that tactic is warranted: it is perfectly reasonable to be snarky about Debi Pearl’s misogyny, in spite of her being a woman. However, it seems wise to me to direct snark at people with stupid ideas, and not people with privileged identities. The ideas, after all, are the bad part.
There are certain tactics I would advise avoiding in one-on-one discussions. For instance, do not tell people what they did or did not suffer; it’s rude and always an asshole move. People can suffer things they don’t tell you about, and being told you didn’t suffer something you did feels like shit. Similarly, don’t tell someone they couldn’t possibly understand X experience because they are privileged; even if they’re not closeted, a lot of experiences are shared across marginalizations anyway. It’s probably wise to avoid speculating about the group membership of people you don’t know very well; there have been far too many awkward cases in which the privileged neurotypical turned out to be a mentally ill person. In general, whenever possible, stick to arguing about facts and evidence, instead of exploring why the person you’re arguing with believes the thing they believe; the latter often winds up condescending.
On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to give everyone the same treatment you would to a person you know is a member of a marginalized group. Think about neuroscience. In general, people will give more weight to the same neuroscience claim coming from a neuroscientist than they would coming from a layperson. Of course, neuroscientists can still be wrong, and non-neuroscientists can still lay out citations to peer-reviewed papers that show their claim is correct. But if you wanted to not disclose that you’re a neuroscientist for some reason– perhaps this identity is the one you mostly use for writing very embarrassing fetish porn– then you’re not going to get the respect people give to neuroscientists. Similarly, people give more weight to the same claim about what being trans feels like when it comes from a trans person, as opposed to a cis person. But if you are not out as trans, you cannot expect to be given that benefit of the doubt.
(The anti-social-justice reader who is about to object to this paragraph should reflect on how many of their beliefs are a product of having the positionality ‘human.’)
Tautological statement is tautological.
At the same time, marginalized people have access to a certain kind of knowledge that privileged people do not.
Which is fine, in as far as that knowledge has anything to do with anything. I think what drives anti-SJ sentiment are things like the explosion of post-Pulse statements like “the shooting is the result of republicans and christians! Don’t you tell me I’m wrong because I’m trans!”
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Exactly. I’ve never seen anyone dispute the claim that, say, trans people know more about what it feels like to be trans than others. The dispute, when it comes to statements like this…
…is whether one person’s experience of having been thoughtlessly misgendered ought to outweigh someone else’s better understanding of the causes of transphobia and so on. Whether experiencing the symptoms of a problem is necessary and sufficient to qualify someone as an expert in diagnosing and fixing it.
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Jacob Clifton wrote a piece making a related point a few years back – arguing in part that you shouldn’t necessarily assume that someone disagreeing with you on the internet is a straight white male and can therefore be ignored in discussions relating to SJ.
http://www.tor.com/2014/02/18/geek-love-if-u-cri-evertim/
Clifton is a sly writer, so after I got over my initial gasping about “how dare you assume that straight white males can be ignored,” I guessed he was probably saying they shouldn’t be.
I think almost everybody here is on the same page, so there may not even be much point in saying it, but IMHO there’s obviously a potential value to everyone’s inputs, including Moldbug and Arthur Chu and Amanda Marcotte, and it doesn’t do much to say “I’m going to ignore Moldbug or Chu because he’s a SWM/SJ.”
(There may be other good reasons to ignore them, but like Chesterton’s Gate, until you learn the reason to ignore that specific person, you don’t know them.)
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On the subject of ignoring people: I’d say it’s always valid not to spend more time than you want on particular *ideas*, or to reject ideas for being terrible or because the evidence is that the ideas are wrong.
I mostly wanted to make the distinction between ignoring people and ignoring ideas. Any combination of “incorrect idea,” “hurtful idea,” “unpleasant person” and “member of bad group”, and the negations of each, is possible. (They may be correlated, but not absolutely).
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Yeah, there’s a difference between
(1) I’m tired of CSWM stating their opinions in class and
(2) the particular argument you just made – “hey, how am I privileged if I grew up in a poor single parent home and never met anyone who had been to college outside of my teachers” – has been discussed many times before and the arguments on both sides are well known.
There’s a danger to categorically ignoring even arguments you perceive as #2, but it’s more intellectually defensible, less dependent on stereotypes, and more likely to lead to some kind of growth than #1.
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Yeah, it’s having to disclose why you are not Horrible Privileged Group member in order to be given basic courtesy, and if you don’t at first lay out why you are entitled to express that opinion and your opponent is shitty and then you say “actually I am not [neurotypical/cis/whatever]” getting the “well it’s your own fault for not telling me that in the first place!”
Why should I have to show off the sources of my pain to get you to be courteous?
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And if you are neurotypical/cis/whatever, you can’t even do that. There’s nothing you can say to be given that basic courtesy; you’re just dismissed.
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Are you asserting that cis people aren’t ever thoughtlessly misgendered? I don’t think there’s something fundamentally different happening when I get addressed as male versus when a trans woman does. I would guess that it might be more unpleasant for the trans woman, because she has to deal with it more often, and her femininity is probably questioned more than mine is, but I don’t think there’s a major difference of kind.
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First, I don’t think there is a big bright line between trans and cis. It’s always a spectrum. But all the same, sure, cis folks get misgendered sometimes. Obviously. When it happens, we can ask, “Hey cis person, how did that feel to you?” and then we can listen to their answer.
In my experience, cis people don’t experience gender stuff quite the same way I do. A cis person, even a gender non-conforming cis person, usually won’t quite relate to my struggle. I know this because I listen to them.
I’ve walked this path for years. I’ve tried spending time in cis dominated spaces, including “queer positive” spaces, even “trans accepting” spaces, but never have I found a space that quite understands me the way other trans women do. There is a kind of immediate, effortless understanding. I cannot explain it.
Is this “inside me” stuff or “outside me” stuff? I don’t know.
Being trans, I have to find a way to make my life work. I have to find a way to operate in a hostile world. This is not unique to trans women, but there are specific contours to being a trans women that differ from the specific contours of other things.
I would never say “A cis person cannot possibly understand me.” There are billions of cis people in the world. Surely some of them will have sufficient empathy and sufficient perspective to see. However, I have not yet met that person.
Maybe I have, but I could not see it. Perhaps. All I can say is, in good faith, it does not seem that way. Make of that what you will.
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I agree that it’s fucked up to make people express their personal pain in order to be listened to. I support the overall point.
But I think the argument, taken further, undermines whole practice of using people’s identities (instead of their experiences) to decide who’s worth listening to.
Marginalized groups are marginalized because their members are more likely to have experienced various bad events.
But “more likely” is not certain — there are outliers to everything. And “more likely” is typically not “exclusively at risk for”.
One privilege checklist says that male privilege is, in part, ‘[being] more likely to be congratulated for having lots of sex, rather than shamed for it’
That’s probably true for population averages. It’s true for future expectations.
But you can’t use probability when talking about a specific person’s actual experience.
Joseph Provo — hypothetical ex-mormon — doesn’t use probability when deciding if he was shamed for his sexuality. He just remembers. Maybe an aged bishop made him detail his masturbation habits before sending on a mission. If the event happened, it happened.
Weighting people’s voices based on their identities (rather than their experiences) leads to the perverse outcomes.
But forcing people to disclose their experiences is also fucked up for the reasons laid out.
So, I think your theme is right that, in the end, 1-on-1 discussions really need to come from a place of empathy. Even if the person isn’t part of a marginalized group, they could be coming to the conversation having experienced the bad events anyway.
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“Of course, no one has an objective view on anything, all our viewpoints are inextricably linked to our positionalities, and we just have to muddle along as best we can to get at objective truth.(The anti-social-justice reader who is about to object to this paragraph should reflect on how many of their beliefs are a product of having the positionality ‘human.’)”
I don’t know how you personally define “objectivity” but the whole point of objective knowledge is that their is knowledge that exists outside of ones personal experience. Now you can argue the extreme post modernist stance that there is no external reality and everything is subjective. But unless your willing to argue that the world can be round, flat, or cone shaped based on someones race. I do not believe that is a viable stance.
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I think the idea is not to deny that there is such a thing as reality. (Maybe the most extreme post-modernists do. Ozy, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the intent of the post was much less drastic.)
I actually believe something much like (my understanding of) that paragraph. There is a real world out there, but we humans can only see it through perceptual filters, so to speak. Our sense organs only detect limited aspects of the world, our brain is built to process it in certain ways, etc. On top of this, we only interact with a small part of the world, ie our immediate surroundings. What this means is that while, yes, there is a reality that goes on existing even if you don’t believe in it, individual people cannot perceive it directly–at least not all of it. I don’t have an experience of what it’s like to, say, try to smuggle oneself to Europe on a boat. A person who has done so does not have an “objective” view of the situation, of course–their view is colored by their experience, and by the same self-serving bias all humans have. But a similar thing can be said for, say, people in the receiving country who welcome more immigration, or do not, or want specific immigrants and not others, etc.
For social justice issues, people often describe society as divided into “oppressors” and “oppressed” along the axis being discussed, with no possibility of being outside both groups at once. If you’re a member of one group, you will naturally have a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be in your group than in the other group, and you may be biased in your group’s favor. There is some reality of the world, which people see through their own fallible perspective, but which might be accessible from some hypothetical “God’s-eye view”–but we mortals cannot look out through God’s eye directly. Thus each of us will have a better understanding of the whole picture if we listen to people describing different perspectives in addition to our own.
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Playing amateur internet philosopher, I say this:
There is a base material world, which is the world of physics. It is in fact quite real and prior to anyone’s opinions. Likewise, it is best understood through empirical science.
However, the base material reality is utterly meaningless, just matter in motion. Human brains, which themselves are made of “physics stuff,” are what experience emotions and meaning. In fact, they ascribe meaning.
But brains do not exist alone. Each brain participates in a shared system of meaning, in fact, in shared systems of meaning, plural. These are social reality.
So we have three realities: the base material reality, our psychological reality, which supervenes on the first, and finally our shared social reality.
Ideas of justice largely exist in terms of our shared social reality. It is unlikely anyone could have an understanding of such that is not shaped by their individual psychological reality. Likewise, while we can use the empirical sciences in many ways to approach social reality, there are limits. It simply is not the same as studying physics and chemistry. For example, dialectic approaches don’t help much in the natural sciences. For approaching social understanding, however, they are often quite fruitful.
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In this context, I think Ozy is suggesting that some people use “objective” to mean “relatively disinterested or outside the immediate problem” and “subjective” to mean “in the middle of the problem.”
So to take some of the most recent police shootings, you can put together a continuum:
– one one far end, you have the shooting victim and the officer who shot him,
– a little father over, you have their families, friends, coworkers, etc.
– a little father from that, random Americans who weren’t involved but have a strong opinion about how the country should run,
– then Europeans who have an opinion but don’t plan to live here, and so on
– and at the far other end, you have hypothetical alien archaeologist/historians who uncover the records of the shootings among the remains of human civilization, millions of years in the future.
As you go more into the “involved/subjective” direction, you get very important information about how it FEELS to be a suspect or an officer in that situation, or to live in those towns, or to live in America, etc.
But as you get more into the “uninvolved/”objective” direction, you may get more critical perspective – will convicting a random officer help, even if he’s maybe not guilty? Which of the initial facts turned out to be true, and how does that affect the analysis? What’s a rule of justice that citizens would like generally? Which policy initiatives are most likely to help?
To your question, I’d argue that all of our viewpoints are subjective based on our own interests and experience, so there isn’t a truly “objective” experience available. That doesn’t mean that one viewpoint should necessarily be privileged – there are situations where disinterested viewpoints are particularly valuable, and where interested ones are, and most situations probably benefit from some of each.
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Agreed.
I would argue, tho, that “how it feels to be” is a really deep question, which determines far more of our “reality” than many people give credit to.
And yes, this makes “social stuff” really hard. Which, it is indeed really hard.
But the outside, “disinterested” view is seldom actually disinterested. After all, we all color the reality we see with our own preoccupations. If something catches our interest, it does so for a reason. That reason is something relevant in our lives. In other words, no matter how “far” we are from the situation, as soon as we make value judgements about, or ascribe meaning to, a situation, we are laying our stuff on that situation.
Whatever drives our interest is something subjective, something situated in our own limited experience. So it isn’t enough to establish that someone is “outside” of a situation. They must also establish that their point-of-view is on the whole more informed.
But that’s quite difficult, because a “value neutral” viewpoint is raw physics. It’s “matter in motion.” In other words, the rocks and trees don’t care about us. As soon as you care, you care as a situated human with bias. So it goes.
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This particular article, of course, brings up a lot of tricky aspects of personal experience, namely the fairly negative reaction the piece got among many “out” trans women, including me. The thing is, there is an enormous difference between, on the one hand, a random cis person on the Internet lecturing trans women about our lives, based on their reading a few crappy articles about autogynephilia or whatever, and on the other hand, actual trans women responding to an egg. Yes, this woman is an expert on her own life. Indeed, she has the final choice on if she transitions. But the fact is, to a fair degree, I’ve walked the path she is on. The things she is saying, many of them, the reasons she gives for not transitioning, those are the exact reasons that I gave. Take away the anti-SJ content of the piece, and it could have been written by me fifteen years ago.
I am so much happier now. Will she ever be?
I don’t know, of course. But I know very well the yawning pain of egg-hood. It is unbearable.
It is also incredibly lonely. The fact is, transition is currently well within reach of many people. Thus strongly dysphoric people will tend to transition. Thus, when we encounter an egg, there is really only one thing we can say, “Yeah, it sucks. Take hormones.”
I’m honestly not going to invest much further effort into someone who wants to make a lengthy argument why they cannot. If they cannot, then they cannot. But I got nothing else.
In an ideal situation, that would be that. However, in reality, it is hard for me to imagine spending much time with a highly dysphoric person, giving them support, when I am on a path that they are refusing. It’s just, it feels as if there is an inevitable personal barrier that is nearly impossible to negotiate.
In practice, I find that those avoiding the path must invest significant energy in avoidant behavior. This is understandable. These days, depending on their social circles, they probably encounter numerous “out” trans women who are pretty and happy and totally making it work. To believe you cannot have that, it must be soul crushing. How much effort must it take to suppress that pain?
(The bad side is, after a few years of this, we often find a person who is actively hostile to transition in general, for me, for everyone. In other words, they dive fully into ressentiment. I have nothing for such people.)
We do support eggs. Of course we do, but we do this by showing them the path. It is a good path. The other choice, avoiding the path, is the yawning chasm of an empty life, half-lived.
I lived that half-lived life for decades. I know certain things.
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Remember that time some woman on tumblr told a man he was right to feel bad about being male, and then a bunch of other people blew up at her for shitting on a trans girl? That was a fun time.
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I remember it well. Here was my response: https://veronicastraszh.tumblr.com/post/131490719836/snow-anne-filthdyke-transgirlnausicaa
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Ok that is you. That’s the link I remember seeing, but I never saw it connected directly to you in a way I was sure of.
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To me this attitude seems far more patronizing than supportive. Like… imagine being a formerly overweight person, who’d applied a huge effort, and managed to lose a lot of weight, and telling people who are complaining about the fatphobia they’re facing the following:
Even if accurately represented your experience, and the experience of a sufficient number of other people to conclude that it generalizes well, it wouldn’t be helping, and probably would only make the situation worse. I don’t know what the best way to help people make the choice that’s best for them and then have strength to proceed with it is, but being dismissive of their concerns and arguments probably is not. Just like “you’ll understand when you grow up” is probably not the best thing to say to people even when it’s true. That’s, by the way, is also a reason why I don’t like this commonly used in the Discourse egg metaphor. Sure, it’s witty, and I can totally see how it would be helpful with dealing with the feeling that the thoughts of one’s past self were silly, but I don’t think it’s a nice thing to say to other people about their current state.
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@Maxim — Fair enough. You have every right to ignore someone who is condescending. Likewise, yeah, being right is not always the same as being helpful.
That said, right now I’m trying to be right. If I am also helpful to some people, then yay. If not, then so it goes.
Myself, I wouldn’t make a very good therapist. That said, sometimes people do come to me for advice. When that happens, I tell them straight up what I think. I suspect that the sort of person asking me for advice is the sort of person who wants that.
When I was boxing, I wanted a coach who pushed me hard. I chose that.
There is an enormous difference between weight loss and gender transition, in that HRT demonstrably works for many (probably most) people who seek it out. Dieting, on the other hand, does not reliably work, at least not from a public health perspective.
From a personal perspective, I have also lost a fuckton of weight. I went from “fat person” to “not-fat person,” maybe even “kinda almost thin person.” It’s really nice. I’m really happy.
I do not push dieting to people. Instead, I advocate healthy eating combined with moderate exercise, to the degree that a person can. At the same time, I advocate body acceptance. I agree with the broad points of the “fat positive” movement.
The reason is simple: there is nothing wrong with having a “roundish” body rather than a “vee-ish” body, or whatever. Your body shape is fine.
Your health — that’s your business, not mine. The health effects of weight versus dieting are complicated.
In general, I don’t need to point out that life is much easier when you are thin. We all know that. (I’m mentioning that now only by way as example.)
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Regarding “egg discourse,” I don’t know what people expect from the trans community. The fact is, gender transition can be really hard, but mostly because of external transphobia. However, we are already fighting as hard as we fucking can to end transphobia, like OMG! We cannot give more. We have given all.
Gender dysphoric people who choose not to transition do so for many reasons. Personally, I find it tragic, because those reasons are almost always “outside stuff” and “culture stuff.” So often it is the fear that they will fail at transition, never pass as a woman [1], never feel womanly, never like what they see in the mirror, etc, etc, etc.
No one needs to justify their reasons to me, but all the same, when I hear their reasons, I know what I know. I see what I see.
I’ve been there. I believed that same stuff for years. Then I finally stopped fighting it.
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It person chooses not to transition, and if they are personally fine with that choice, and if they totally respect my choice, I doubt I’d ever get in an argument with them. What would we argue about? If they say, “I’ve made my choice. It works for me. I’m happy this way, but I’m happy for you also” — welp, that seems fine. Rock on!
This is not what happens. Instead, I encounter “broken eggs,” embittered from years for their own internal fight to deny themselves what they know they need. The result is, they turn this internal fight outwards, and hold deeply transphobic positions. I’ve encountered such people numerous times, to the degree I can recognize them usually from reading a few sentences.
We know the pain of deep self-denial. It is unbearable.
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This is not one person’s experience. This are so many of us. This is not one young and skinny and gorgeous trans woman who passes perfectly. This is also me, who does not pass for shit, and who, when she began transition, was a fat and hairy 40+ nerd.
I’ve told my story before, but briefly: In the final years before transition, I was sublimating my dysphoria into writing, where I could be a woman by way of my characters. I did not believe that social transition was possible for me. I was too old, too ugly, I would never pass, it would be a disaster. However, I read on a trans woman’s blog, about the effects HRT, namely that it causes psychological changed in addition to physical changes. From the perspective of a writer, I wondered, would having an estrogen-brain would allow me to better write from a female perspective? In fact, I had always felt a bit phony writing as a woman, with a women’s penname, etc. But on the other hand, it felt so right to me. I “lit up” the first time I used a women’s name online. So, could estrogen give me a bit more authenticity?
I sent a long, rambling email to Zinnia Jones explaining my situation. She wrote back: you can take hormones and not socially transition. You might grow breasts, but you can probably hide them. It will change your brain. It will ease anxiety. Go talk to the doctor.
I talked to the doctor. When I told him my plan, that I did not think I could “present,” he said, “You have no idea how you will feel when you present.” That is all he said. He did not push me. He just said, “You have no idea.” Those words stuck in my head. I thought about them.
Both Zinnia Jones and my doctor were absolutely correct. The night after talking to my doctor, I decided for full transition. I felt suddenly overwhelmed with relief. I stayed up all night feeling bliss. It was the best decision I ever made.
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This is not just my story. There are many stories. Some are nicer than mine, some quite a bit harder. Some end in suicide. Most do not.
No one will promise anyone paradise. The person who transitions might not pass. Their dysphoria might never totally go away. In fact, it probably won’t. A small number of people who choose social transition later choose to detransition. Usually this is because they cannot deal with the weight of transphobia. So it goes. No promises.
But HRT works. It manifestly eases the pain of dysphoria. This is supported medically, with better odds than antidepressants and (overwhelmingly) for dieting.
Social transition is more complex. It is highly dependent on one’s social environment. The amount of control someone has to choose their social environment depends on their situation. Some people can do much, some can do little.
On the other hand, our social reality and our personal psychological are deeply entwined. I don’t dismiss the weight of social disapproval, inasmuch as I know quite well what facing transphobia is like. But I also know quite well how much transphobia found in a mirror. In so many ways, one’s “inside thoughts” shape how they experience the “outside.”
It’s complicated.
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[1] Or man or enbie or whatever. I tend to write from a trans woman’s perspective. Obviously other kinds of trans folks should be acknowledged.
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Is transition really well within reach of many people? It depends entirely on what you mean by transition. Transition-related procedures such as breast augmentation, facial feminization surgery, laser hair removal, electrolysis, hair extensions, transplants, etc., are prohibitively expensive and rarely covered by health insurance. Sex reassignment surgery is just one part of the transition process, and not all transgender people elect to have it (for a whole variety of reasons). No, transition is not necessarily “well within reach” of many people, and this was one of the underlying themes of the article.
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@Samantha — I have no idea how to quantify this. I can say, it is far easier today than it was twenty years ago. Likewise, it could be much easier than now.
We’re working hard to make it easier. Please help.
I know many, many trans people, some of them legitimately poor, like really actually totally poor. Like my ex-g/f. She works a shit job in a crappy bar, gets a bit of public assistance, and (luckily) has access to Massachusetts health care. So yeah, she gets hormones covered. In theory they cover other stuff, but the waiting list is years. So she struggles and gets by.
They don’t cover laser hair removal, which she really, really wants. She’s been saving, but can never quite make it work. There is always some disaster that drains her funds. So it goes.
My current maybe-kinda g/f is young. She left a (sexually) abusive home. She works fast food, scrapes by. She’s on HRT, but nothing else. Fortunately for her, she is young and naturally gorgeous. So yay her (and yay me).
I have money and good insurance. But I’m middle-aged and have to work to be even halfway okay looking. I do what I need to do.
We each walk our own path.
It’s hard, but HRT is in reach for many of us. Likewise, LGBTQ+ acceptance is much higher than in previous decades. You don’t have to “pass” anymore, not necessarily. You don’t need “all of it” to make it work.
I don’t have “GRS.” I never got my face done, although I expect it would help me. I’m 48. I recover slowly from injury, so I don’t want to go through a hard surgery. That is my choice.
Last Friday I got an orchi. I am still home recovering. This is likely the only surgery I will get. That is my choice.
Twenty years ago, I could not have done this. Back then, the doctors wouldn’t even let you transition unless they thought you could totally pass. They do not require that anymore.
In the 1960’s, homeless youth found ways to “live trans.” They scrambled and scraped and got “grey market” hormones. They stole clothes. They made it work.
It is easier now.
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The money quote from the written piece above is, in my opinion:
And in any case, the only case I’ve seen people use the “Listen to these groups!” claims is tactically. Feminist women do not, in my experience, shut up and listen to the men in the room when the topic turns to, e.g., criminal conviction rates, street violence, or the general treatment of men in the feminist movement.
Either we listen to everybody, and recognize that nine people failing to see a problem that is obvious to the tenth can be either supgrouping or the tenth person being actually wrong, or we’re just setting up Marginalized and Oppressed as “Has social power in this space.” and “Lacks social power in this space.”, with no meaning beyond that. A trans person almost certainly knows more about being trans than a random person. They almost certainly also are having non-representative experiences of the world in general, however, so if you want to know questions about most of the people in the world, you should give their opinion less weight.
If you want to know “Does life suck for this group?” you can get away with asking members of that group only. But if you want to claim that a group is marginalized, you need to establish the truth and experiences of the central cases. In a hypothetical world in which almost everyone experiences gender-based fuckery to the extent that they do not perform as Belle or Gaston, but in which It Has Been Decided that misogny is a serious problem, then women will be labeled as a marginalized group despite the fact that they are not having things worse than men, and this will be sanctioned, because everyone listens to the women and takes their claims of gender-based fuckery seriously, and no one listens to the men.
I don’t think we live in this world, but not for lack of trying on the part of some bad actors.
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There are certain tactics I would advise avoiding in one-on-one discussions. For instance, do not tell people what they did or did not suffer; it’s rude and always an asshole move. People can suffer things they don’t tell you about, and being told you didn’t suffer something you did feels like shit. Similarly, don’t tell someone they couldn’t possibly understand X experience because they are privileged; even if they’re not closeted, a lot of experiences are shared across marginalizations anyway. It’s probably wise to avoid speculating about the group membership of people you don’t know very well; there have been far too many awkward cases in which the privileged neurotypical turned out to be a mentally ill person. In general, whenever possible, stick to arguing about facts and evidence, instead of exploring why the person you’re arguing with believes the thing they believe; the latter often winds up condescending.
It winding up condescending is hardly the worst problem with it! The more pressing problem is that, if you are arguing about a particular statement, then what matters is the truth of that statement, and things that bear directly on it; how your interlocutor came to their belief is, most of the time, a distraction. Hug the query! (Not to mention that doing this is exactly the sort of thing that can blind you to the question of whether you’re actually wrong.)
And when the time does come to raise that question, you certainly don’t want to go asserting why the other person believes what they do; not just because it’s condescending, but because you can’t actually know. Similarly, telling people what they did or did not suffer isn’t just an asshole move, it’s also just kind of stupid if you want to learn.
What’s wrong with currently-existing-feminism’s norms of discourse isn’t anything complicated. It’s not even something one needs to read the Sequences (or the many sources they copied from, or anything similar) to correct (which would still not be anything complicated, honestly). It’s just a failure to stick to the already well-known but constantly underappreciated fundamentals that allow a group to be self-correcting.
I guess this article is a better go-to on what exactly goes wrong when you cease to be self-correcting rather than my old example, which just got people arguing over the correctness of the example rather than the actual underlying problem. We can hope people will make that mistake less with this one!
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On a related note this is one of the reasons I detest r/science flairs. Expert opinion is the **lowest** tier of evidence, the only thing it beats is utterly unsupported layperson opinion. The moment someone brings actual evidence to the table of any kind that flair is outranked.
I qualify for some flairs on there but they’re utterly anti-science and I refuse to take one. A well supported, well referenced, argument should always win vs someone with a chip on their shoulder and a flair lacking any supporting evidence other than their opinion.
It’s not supposed to be about who you are.
Even if that post has literally been composed by an unusually bright dog it should be argued down on the basis of the evidence supporting it, not on the basis of who’s bringing it to the table.
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So, it beats 99% of typical reddit comments? Sounds pretty useful.
Check out these fresh r/science threads — more than 70 comments each, and hardly anyone is referencing anything:
reddit.com/r/science/comments/4wr95a/mutation_that_made_it_easier_to_ride_horses/
reddit.com/r/science/comments/4wqt1d/mosquitoes_dont_like_the_smell_of_chickens/
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