A lot of people talk about “gender identity”, but I think it makes more sense to talk about “gender feelings”. I can’t really define it in an intensional fashion, so I will have to define it extensionally and hope that this manages to transfer over the thing I mean.
I do not mean feelings along the lines of “menstruation really sucks” or “I feel upset that people keep harassing me on street corners.” Those aren’t really about gender. They are about other perfectly reasonable preferences (not having strangers shout crude things at you, not bleeding from your genitals) that happen to be unfulfilled because of what gender you are.
Gender feelings can be about behavior, whether it’s behaving in a way expected of your gender or behaving in a way not expected of your gender. To be clear here, I don’t mean to say that every person who likes doing something gendered is having gender feelings about it. If I said that, given the number of things gendered in our society, everyone would be forever going about having gender feelings constantly. If you like being submissive to your husband because you hate making decisions, not gender feelings. If you like being submissive to your husband because it connects you to your essential femininity, gender feelings. If you like wearing a dress because when you spin it does the thing, not gender feelings. If you like wearing a dress because of an incomprehensible longing deep in your soul to wear dresses, gender feelings. If you like riding motorcycles because going fast is fun, not gender feelings. If you like riding motorcycles because it makes you feel like a badass dude, gender feelings.
Gender feelings can be about biological sex: many trans people whose bodies feel ‘wrong’ are in this category, as are many cis people who consider their manhood or womanhood to be deeply connected to their physical embodiment and their sexual characteristics. Gender feelings are often linked to clothes, perhaps because clothes are the primary way we signal genders to each other. Gender feelings are commonly linked to one’s sexuality: sex advice aimed at non-feminist cis straight men and women often advises one to “make him feel like a man” or “make her feel like a woman.” A lot of kinks are connected to people’s genders: for instance, a lot of male doms feel their dominance is connected to masculinity, and a lot of male subs eroticize femininity.
Gender feelings aren’t necessarily connected to a particular gender identification. Alison Bechdel is on the record as saying she would have been trans if she were born today. I don’t know the lady, but her memoir Fun Home depicts someone without any gender feelings about whether she’s considered a man or a woman, coupled with strong gender feelings about being masculine. Naturally, a person with the same gender feelings might identify as a butch woman in some circumstances and a trans man in others.
Many people don’t have gender feelings at all. They are simply assigned a gender and then they go along with it because they have no particular reason to make a fuss about the subject. I typically term them cis by default. While cis by default people are obviously men and women in a sociological sense, they’re not men or women in the psychological sense I’m talking about here, since they have no related feelings.
(If you’re objecting to not being considered a man or a woman because you’re cis by default, congratulations, you just found your gender feelings.)
It is sometimes argued that most people are nonbinary. I am uncertain about whether this statement is true. On one hand, I have certainly been to parties where less than a quarter of attendees were willing to consider themselves “definitely cis”, which suggests that a trans-positive environment leads to a significantly higher rate of trans people. On the other hand, my friends are outliers on a whole bunch of dimensions, and if most people wanted to be nonbinary you think they’d have made a nonbinary gender role by now. This argument is often proffered as an anti-nonbinary-acceptance argument, which I think is quite silly; if the average person can get as much benefit from identifying as nonbinary as I can, creating a nonbinary gender role is probably the single best intervention you could do for people in the developed world.
I don’t know what causes gender feelings; I don’t know that anyone does. Probably, like most complex behaviors, it is a combination of genetics, prenatal environment, post-birth biological influences, interactions with family and friends, societal influence, and a whole bunch of other factors I don’t know enough about to write about. I would be extraordinarily surprised if there turned out to be a single cause of gender feelings; I expect a wide variety of different influences can make people trans, cis, cis-by-default, or floating weirdly between the categories.
Many people, particularly trans-exclusionary radical feminists, argue that gender feelings are solely a product of sexism. However, many early trans-exclusionary radical feminists had obvious gender feelings: for instance, Mary Daly described hers in her characteristic fashion as ‘gynergy‘, and Janice Raymond wrote an eloquent book about how women’s gender feelings are expressed through intense friendships with other women. Even today, many trans-exclusionary radical feminists seem to experience gender feelings about their physical bodies, connecting their womanhood to the physical realities of menstruation, pregnancy, and breastfeeding.
A lot of people have what Julia Serano in her book Excluded calls gender entitlement. Essentially, gender entitlement is when you assume that the feelings you have about your own personal gender must apply to everyone else, and you will spindle, fold, bend, and mutilate other people’s experiences to get them to fit.
For example: it is totally valid for your womanhood to be related to the immense complexity of your reproductive system and the miracle that you can create a life inside yourself. It is extremely rude for you to decide because of this that other people who can create lives inside themselves have to be women, or that it’s wrong for other women to be horrified by the idea of carrying around a bloodsucking parasite for nine months. It is totally valid for your womanhood to be expressed by wearing a dress, but it is extremely rude for you to decide because of this that the drag queen down the street has to be a woman too, or that other women are betraying their femininity by wearing pants. It is totally valid to want to feel feminine during sex, but don’t go around being a dick to people who don’t share your kink for gender.
Why is gender entitlement harmful? Because other people’s feelings about their genders are actually different from yours. Don’t fall victim to the typical mind fallacy; human brains are quite diverse. With a complex social system like gender, you are not going to find anything that describes everyone’s experiences 100%.
Because of their gender feelings, some people identify as a particular gender. A lot of people don’t make a distinction between gender feelings and gender identification, but I think that those are actually two different things.
Think of gayness as an analogy. Some people experience attraction to people of the same gender but not to people of other genders (analogously, some people experience gender feelings). Because of this, they may identify as gay (analogously, some people identify as men, women, or nonbinary). It’s possible for a person to be mistaken about whether they’re gay; there is a fact of the matter about whether they’re attracted to men or women. You can guess that certain people might be mistaken about their sexuality. Your friend who insists he’s gay might be all over women whenever he gets drunk. Your friend who insists she’s straight might have some closeted lesbian opinions about the repulsiveness of kissing men and how the feeling she gets in her stomach when girls hug her must mean she’s sick. But, ultimately, the only person who has access to whether someone is really gay is that person; from the outside, the only difference between “bisexual” and “lesbian who struggled with compulsory heterosexuality” is which group the person says they’re in. For that reason, we respect people’s opinions about what their sexual orientation is (even if we privately think they’re being ridiculous). Similarly, we respect other people’s gender self-identifications, even if we privately think that this person is such an egg.
Thing of Things 
I can’t know what other people feel, whether they are a cis woman, trans person or another cis man, so my base assumption is that people are best at knowing how they feel.
However, I also noticed that some people have some very weird conception of gender, which means that they express the way they feel about themselves in nonsensical ways. This means that while I cannot dismiss their feelings, I can consider their labeling to be nonsensical.
An example is people (actually women, I’ve never seen a man claim this) who claim to gave ‘episodes’ where they feel like the other gender, evidenced by acting in accordance with the male gender role (dressing like men, doing things stereotypically considered male, etc). This seems to be nothing more than dislike of gender role policing, not actual gender dysphoria. So I think that these people use a misleading label when they declare themselves ‘gender fluid’ or such.
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I think Ozy’s essay makes a very good case for why this labeling is *not* nonsensical. If these people get gender feelings from dressing like men, then the label “gender fluid” makes perfect sense. Also, I don’t think this phenomenon is unique to people with XX chromosomes, it’s just that there is a stronger stigma against men dressing as women than against women dressing as men.
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@Vadim
I don’t get the impression that they get gender feelings (at least, no more than any role playing gives you). From what they say, I get the impression that they dress up as men to get away with male stereotyped behavior, more easily.
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Yes, I agree with Vadim.
If they dislike gender policing, why wouldn’t their dislike of gender policing be consistent across time? It is very weird to only dislike gender policing sometimes.
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Dislike of gender norms depends greatly on what one wants to do. If it’s summer and very hot, I feel restrained by the gender role that disallows wearing shorts to work. There are also times when the male gender role is a benefit, like when shopping for certain products.
If I had an (uncursed) Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity, I would (after some experimenting) probably choose to present as female in some situations and male in others. It seems like these people pretty much do the same thing, benefiting from their androgynous looks.
Of course, this doesn’t help the many people who don’t have this option.
I never claimed that they like gender norms, but more that their attempts to avoid/seek certain gender norms seems to be very dissimilar to the gender-body dysphoria experienced by trans people.
People will also react differently to me depending on whether I wear a suit or casual clothing. I choose to wear a suit when I want people to react to me in a certain way. That doesn’t mean that I am ‘clothing fluid.’
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I think that you might be overinterpreting from external evidence. A dislike for gender policing vs. genderfeels of male-ness might look exactly the same on the outside, but likely feel extremely different from the inside. Concluding that what looks like simple adherence to masculinity/femininity must be motivated by a dislike for gender roles and policing assumes too much.
It is also how you get people saying things like, “You can’t be a woman just by putting on a dress!” or “I can’t believe that you think you’re a man just because you like basketball”.
If you accept that binary trans people aren’t just mimicking the outwards trappings of a binary gender, then it doesn’t particularly make sense to suddenly apply this reasoning to genderfluid people.
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I’ve seen very different reasoning from trans people and ‘gender fluid’ people, where the former seem to express dysphoria with their (former) body, while the latter focused exclusively on how other people relate to them.
I’ve not come to this working theory merely based on their behavior, but on how they explain themselves (and that ‘gender fluid’ seems strongly linked to certain politics, which is not true for trans).
Why can’t two different things coexist?
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So if I’m reading your argument correctly, it is that genderfluid people express certain preferences about how people relate to them, while non-fluid trans people express preferences about their bodies; and this is the difference that shows that genderfluid people are just expressing hatred of gender roles, while non-fluid trans people are real members of their gender.
1. I think that you should be careful of selection bias. Genderfluid people and non-fluid trans people have a wide variety of different experiences, and perhaps you have only met biased selections of either for any number of different reasons.
In the examples that I have given, non-fluid trans people are also shown to be concerned with how other people relate to them- for example, a trans boy might get very upset if he is forced to wear a skirt as part of his school uniform, despite the fact that that is unrelated to his physical body. Or a trans woman might feel extremely happy about the fact that she was called “ma’am” at a store, despite the fact that that says little about her physical body.
You might say, “The trans boy is just upset because the skirt would accentuate his hip dysphoria”, but then you would also have to accept that a genderfluid person might be upset at a skirt accentuating their (shifting) hip dysphoria as well.
The tendency of non-fluid trans people to adopt the outwards traits of their identified genders is well-documented, so much that “you’re just adopting the outward traits of your identified gender to escape gender policing” is a common failure mode of TERFs and social conservatives alike.
You should attempt to avoid this failure mode in a similar situation; that was what I was trying to point out in my prior post.
2. You ignore other factors that might create this divide, if there is indeed such a divide. Maybe non-fluid trans people have physical dysphoria, and so that leads them to be more drawn to a binary gender than fluid trans people. Maybe genderfluid trans people have physical dysphoria, but their political ideologies use language that frames it as frustration with gender norms. And so on.
3. Practically, it makes little difference whether someone sees themselves as gender nonconforming or trans; these are map, not territory. The only difference is whether someone is happier conceptualizing themselves as trans or gender nonconforming. So this seems like a very strange debate to have.
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So what makes it a gender feeling as opposed to a feeling about gender policing/stereotypes. For us to even understand this distinction (since you claim it can’t be cashed out in external behavior) one must tell us what it is experientially that makes something a gender feeling (examples with descriptions of what makes that kind of feeling count are fine).
As far as your other argument:
I’m not sure it is wrong to think that gender trans people’s concern about their gender isn’t ultimately a reaction to gender policing/stereotyping (not necessarily a dislike as one can want to be seen through a certain stereotype as well).
I doubt that we would see almost any identification as binary trans or sex reassignment surgery if we lived in a society where everyone always wore burkas and allowed no open acknowledgement of which sex anyone was except in narrowly allowed dating and sexual contexts. If the absolute only thing you know about gender/sex is what your sexual organs look like and what those of others look like it is difficult to see what one could even have gender feelings about.
I think this gets at a foundational issue as to whether there is really a difference between having feelings about the way gender is policed/stereotyped and having gender feelings. After all if the feelings we call gender feelings wouldn’t exist in a society without gender policing at all how are they really different?
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Many trans people report that they have strong preferences about their sexed bodies, even separately from how people see them and view them. As a very obvious example, I know several asexual trans people who have sought bottom surgery, even though no one can tell what they have in their pants and they have no intention of ever showing their genitals to anyone, because having a particular set of genitals caused them visceral distress. Similarly, trans men routinely get hysterectomies, even though no one can tell whether you have a uterus or not.
Hormones have effects on one’s brain chemistry. Empirically, many many many trans people report a significantly increased level of happiness when they have their preferred hormone balance. I see no reason to believe that in Burka Land these effects would stop existing.
While it is possible that transness would not exist in a society without gender policing, it really seems like this is the sort of claim you need to show with evidence instead of blatantly asserting.
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Obviously, deciding the question of whether trans ppl would exist in a society without gender policing requires evidence. That’s the whole point. No one can simply presume the answer so we can’t assume that there is a clear distinction between feelings about gender and feelings about gender policing. The thought experiment is revealing a lack of clarity as to what we are talking about.
Yes I understand that many trans people have strong feelings about their genitals. Part of the problem in giving a clear understanding of the term is that not everyone we classify as trans does.
Is there really a single concept of gender we are talking about if we take one kind of experience (discomfort at having a certain. Kind of genitals) as well as totally different ones (feeling just fine or even liming genitals traditionally associated with the other gender but wanting to be treated like or express behavior traditionally expressed by the other gender) and call them all identifying as the other gender?
Indeed, I think this illustrates the problems with tying philosophical and psychological views with practical and political issues. People are really complex and it’s hard to know if we’ve chosen the correct way to describe their behavior. Indeed I think it likely that it will turn out there is no monolithic concept gender because there are multiple notions hiding under the concept including both feelings about one’s body and feelings about social role.
Unfortunately the issue has become politicized so taking as given there is one coherent concept of gender is equated with support for ppl who have feelings that don’t fit into our stereotypical assumptions in some way.
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It actually seems very common for people identifying as cis male crossdressers to have loads of gender feelings when presenting feminine – apply a lot of effort to pass, pick a consistent female name for this alter-ego, go by female pronouns, etc. I think in a counterfactual universe, where AMAB people would be gender-policed less aggressively and violently, they could have totally come to identify as gender-fluid.
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I call myself “definitely cis” when asked directly (though it feels weird) and I still have some incongruous gender feelings, so this is a useful concept, thanks.
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Ozy, I’m curious as to how this relates to your other posts about gender abolitionism and that sort of thing. What changed between then and now?
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I am only gender abolitionist sometimes. (I was very clear about this in my old posts.)
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I think I should thank you for clarifying, but I don’t want it to sound facetious.
Please take this post as a thank you for clarifying. 🙂
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” It is extremely rude for you to decide because of this that other people who can create lives inside themselves have to be women, or that it’s wrong for other women to be horrified by the idea of carrying around a bloodsucking parasite for nine months. ”
This is one of the many areas in which we ought to restore the distinction between the personal and the political.
Politically, publicly, there is nothing wrong with it. In a liberal society, your life is your life and none of my business. If you think of a fetus as a bloodsucking parasite that’s not my business either.
But privately, I’m horrified by that thought. A fetus is a human being. Or almost a human being. Or almost almost a human being. The disagreement I have with someone who would describe such a thing as a “bloodsucking parasite” is nontrivial. It is indicative of a profound difference in values.
The distinction between public and private allows people who hold values that are deeply offensive to each other to live and work and cooperate respectfully in the same society. This used to be called “religious toleration”, and it was an important feature of liberal civilization.
We are currently in an era where the values people find most meaningful are again inextricably linked with public institutions. Our laws have to deal with the question of when a fetus stops being tissue and becomes a person. We have to decide as a society where the line of demarcation is between the public and the private. The available Schelling points are birth and conception; both obviously ridiculous and unacceptable.
The pro-choice side argues in the most bitter, angry terms that late term abortions are absolutely all medically necessary, that they are wanted pregnancies gone wrong, that government has no business butting into the woman’s decision, that a fetus has no rights until the moment of birth.
The pro-life side suspects that some of the women that the pro-choices want to give unilateral power of life and death to are the same people who would describe an unborn baby as a “bloodsucking parasite”.
The pro-choice side suspects that the pro-life side is more attached to religiously dogmatic deontology than they are to the life of the woman.
Both sides defend their own (obviously unacceptable) Schelling fence to the death. They will not accept reasonable encroachments on their Schelling fence because they rightly fear the other side will use any encroachment as the thin end of the wedge to push as far as they can towards the opposite extreme. Trust is impossible, compromise is impossible, and the personal is the political.
The same dynamic is at play with gun control, and also with freedom of speech and the values of free expression.
This is one of the dynamics that has made our politics so dangerously divisive. We need to find a way through it to a place where the line between the personal and private is stable again. I don’t know how that can be done, but I believe it is the most important political challenge of our time.
We don’t need to approve of each other, but we do need to find a way to tolerate each other.
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I don’t think “personal” vs. “political” is really the right distinction here.
After all, whether one is allowed to get an abortion in a particular situation is both. It profoundly affects one’s personal life, and it is also subject to politics.
I think the right distinction here is values vs. actions. We should absolutely not try to enforce not having the right beliefs, but we should try to enforce not taking actions which we collectively decide are terrible (as long as we can do that without making things worse).
I guess there’s also the issue of “my coworker has done things in their personal life which I believe are terrible but I need to keep working with them, how”, but I don’t think “personal vs. political” is a very good framework there either because this would arise whether the particular disagreement is political in nature or not.
Though maybe I just don’t understand how you’re using “personal” and “political” here. Certainly you’re not using those words the same way as me.
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The analogy I have in mind is the history of the reformation in England. At that time the values people found most meaningful in their personal life demanded that they seize control of the critical institutions of society, the church and the crown. The conflict reached it’s height with the English civil war, and was ultimately resolved by the Glorious Revolution in 1688, and the subsequent development of religious toleration.
Religion went from being a dangerously polarizing political issue to a private one.
Now too, we have a bitter, uncompromising struggle for control of the critical institutions, this time in the form of the law, the Supreme Court, and the universities. Again it is driven by personal values that cannot tolerate compromise over control of the public institutions. What we require is a new kind of liberal settlement that allows for toleration and peace, rather than total victory for either side.
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I doubt that such a solution is available here.
Suppose that the issue at hand was murdering innocent non-fetuses. There was a large and vocal segment of the population that was in favor of murdering innocents anywhere, and a large and vocal segment of the population that was not okay with the murder of innocents happening anywhere. I can’t really think of a good solution here that results in both sides getting what they want.
But maybe the solution here could be that the murderers establish a society of their own, and the non-murderers establish a society of their own as well. This has the obvious issue that neither the murderer nor the non-murderer children have consented to this, but in general children do not consent to living in the societies that they do. In general, children absorb the values of their society and parents, so probably the children will end up making the same decisions as the parents.
This has obvious applications to the abortion situation. Only the fetuses which would have aborted fetuses in similar situations to themselves are aborted, and only the fetuses which would not have aborted fetuses in similar situations to themselves are not aborted.
Eugenics through abortion is sort of a major problem in this solution, as are other edge value differences. Also, there is the issue that murdering innocents is still bad (I mean, probably?) even if those innocents are predicted to also murder similar innocents in similar situations.
Practically, this would probably be aided by going down a meta-level. If murdering innocents is bad, then we should take actions that discourage murdering innocents, even if this upsets the would-be murderers of innocents.
I’m all set up here to say, “ABORTION IS EVIL AND WE SHOULD BAN IT”, but on the other hand implementation is a problem, as are other meta-level values like bodily autonomy. It’s like how, for example, preaching Nazism, is terrible, but restricting free speech is even more terrible, and so we choose one tradeoff over the other.
*Please note that these comparisons aren’t in degree, but rather in concept. I don’t mean that abortion is as bad as preaching Nazism, nor that abortion is as bad as killing innocents, although it might be.
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I may be grasping at straws here, but I do see possibilities for compromises to some culture ware issues that might be acceptable enough to both sides to defuse the polarization. If we could get there from here.
for example:
Abortion: The hard core of pro-life that really thinks a human life begins at conception is a minority. They don’t hold up pictures of zygotes at their protests. Perhaps we pick a gestational age at which “abortion” is flatly illegal, but in the interest of body autonomy premature medically induced delivery is legal. Many of the resulting premature babies are going to be profoundly disabled, or even incapable of any meaningful human experience. So we will need to develop ways to respond to that and deal with it. There’s issues of custody, and who will pay the medical bill, and at what point a life of pointless suffering is bad enough to be unjustified, and who decides. But maybe those issues are actually easier to agree on than the abortion issue.
Guns: Replace all state and local gun laws with a nationwide regime that includes background checks, training and safety standards, but is done on a shall-issue basis and who’s overall regulatory cost is affordable.
Free expression: I’m fucking stumped.
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Abortion: I agree with that idea, but it sounds painfully cost-prohibitive and difficult to coordinate. It also introduces another problem: the fact that this would force people to have medically induced deliveries, which are likely highly unpleasant.
Also, I suspect that we lack the technology to safely take care of premature babies on such a large scale. It would probably be confined to third-term babies, and I understand abortion is already illegal at those times (?) in the US.
Guns: Again, I’m skeptical that the government could actually do coordinate this. It seems like handing over a lot of power to the federal government, more than it probably deserves.
Free expression: free expression is already the compromise, right? I am definitely in favor of free expression as it stands right now.
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@Elzh
Free expression does not stand right now. It is one of the hottest faults in the culture war. I do not think Trump could have been nominated if a large fraction of the right did not feel that the left was relentlessly hostile to free expression. Of course the left would object to that characterization, but that gulf of perception between the two sides is itself a symptom of the extreme polarization that we’re currently living with.
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I would also like to point out that thinking of fetuses as bloodsucking parasites does not require having abortions or even being pro-choice. There are many other ways to avoid pregnancy, such as not having PIV, the implant, an IUD, and a hysterectomy.
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@Lawrence
Hi! I arbitrarily changed my name, but it’s the same person.
Oh, that’s true. I thought you were referring to the legal component of freedom of speech, rather than the social component.
I think it’s somewhat erroneous (predictably, as a member of the left) to characterize the social as an issue of freedom of speech. It’s not so much an issue of freedom of speech as it is a conflict over where the Overton Window falls. The left is trying to introduce new cultural values, such as using people’s preferred pronouns, objecting to racist jokes, and in general politically correct views, and the right sees this as an attack on freedom of speech.
But the left’s view on what the left is doing is more logical, in my opinion. There have always been limits on what is couth and what is uncouth. Sixty years ago it would have been acceptable to rail against miscegenation on the public stage or at a college; one hundred years ago it would have been acceptable to rail against Jews. The most recent attempts to move the Overton Window aren’t attacks on freedom of speech; they’re attempts to delegitimize and redirect pre-existing stigma towards speech the left doesn’t like.
Stigma on certain types of speech is indeed stifling to de facto freedom of speech, and I appreciate the chilling effect of social norms. But, unless you are willing to denounce any kind of social stigma on speech as undesirable – and, if so, it is admirable, but probably impossible – then the majority of the left’s actions (excluding things that aren’t linked to political positions, like doxxing) cannot fairly be characterized as opposition to freedom of speech.
I would actually be in favor of denouncing any kind of social stigma on speech as undesirable, since people should not be coerced into believing things. But I think that it is important to oppose legitimacy for opinions I find damaging- for example, if someone was able to publish a study purporting a causal connection from vaccinations to autism in a reputable journal today, citing debunked statistics and spurious evidence, I would want there to be some kind of opposition or public outcry.
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@ozy. good points.
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@silver and ivory
I draw the line between organic social stigma and deliberate attempts to silence. There’s a difference between the natural judgments we all make when choosing who to associate with and organized attempts by third parties to put pressure on those judgments in order to control what opinions are allowed to be said.
If Bob is interviewing for a job and Alice googles him, and she thinks he’s a bit of an asshole, that’s organic. A hashtag based outrage campaign to write letters to Alice exhorting her not to hire Bob because he is an asshole is deliberate silencing. If Alice decides she just don’t like Bob because he’s a democrat, that’s a grey area but I’d hope Alice would choose to deliberately look past it. If Alice argues to her coworkers not to hire Bob because he’s a democrat then it’s silencing.
Of course all of this is my opinion and even if I convinced everyone to adopt these kind of standards it would always be an informal standard that has to be applied by each individual and organization as they see fit. Any attempt to codify this kind of thing into law would be disastrous.
I denounce any deliberate attempt to silence people. Any attempt to get someone fired, kicked out of school, blacklisted, banned from social media sites, etc for expressing an opinion, I denounce it. It is all McArthyism. It is all thuggery. It should all remain legal of course, but we should call it out whenever we see it.
Exceptions: actual harassment or doxing. Editing and moderation on media that publishes it’s own content from its own point of view.
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@Lawrence
I actually don’t think that people should be able to legally fire people for their political views.
I generally agree with the rest of your points. The things you list as silencing *should* not be happening at all, for any reason.
But I also think that the only difference between what has already existed and what the left is agitating for, is that it is an active, intentional attempt at deciding the boundaries of speech, rather than Just What Everyone Does.
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I think there are some things that (some of) the SJ left is doing these days that go further in inhibiting freedom of expression than a mere exercise in moving the Overton window:
– The aforementioned pressuring of employers, or potential employers.
– Agitating to have school or university students disciplined or expelled.
– The two above in the context of public universities or public institutions, which thereby becomes on attack on the legal notion of free speech, not just the social notion.
– In countries where legal protections for free speech are less robust (i.e. everywhere but the US), passing various levels of “hate speech” laws that forbid some speech outright.
– Through anti-discrimination laws and their “hostile environment” doctrine, producing the same effect in many contexts in the US.
– Agitating for outright hate speech laws in the US.
– Expanding hate speech laws to effectively mandate certain kinds of speech (e.g. proposed legal requirements to use preferred pronouns).
– Opposing disliked speech with disruption and shouting, attempting to produce a heckler’s veto.
– Trying to drown out speakers with chanting, white noise machines, etc.
– Falsely pulling fire alarms or calling in hoax bomb threats to prevent speeches or gatherings from taking place.
– Opposing disliked speech with in-person physical violence such as shoving, stealing or breaking cameras, hitting, throwing piss, snatching signs, etc.
Of course, every side has its extremists, but what worries me the most is the support and normalization of many of the above actions even by many who would not do such a thing themselves. Referring to certain speech acts as “violent” appears to justify retaliation with actual violence. Then the violence happens, and we see descriptions of the event that refer to the speech as “violent” but refer to the actual acts of violence not at all.
I find all of the above terrifying and greatly disagree with it, even though I largely agree that some speech should be outside the Overton window and likely even on many specifics.
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Good point, and I concur in finding all of these disturbing and sometimes tyrannical (especially the legalized pronouns thing, which is completely counterproductive).
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I just wanted to go back to the abortion issue for a moment:
In my country the pro-life side knows that they have lost and they seek to limit abortion law, by appealing to things that many on the pro-abortion side can agree with (education about the possibilities, waiting times, no late abortions in non-emergency situations, etc).
In the US there is the state vs central government issue, which makes it harder to come to compromises IMO, as there are often a state where hard line standpoints can achieve results.
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As for the free speech issue (or other intolerance), I think that the SJ side has a tendency to redefine their intolerance as protecting people.
A major difference in world view is that a lot of SJs seem to see people as extremely fragile. So they take the liberal: ‘you are free to do anything unless it hurts people’ and expand the latter part so much that very few things actually are allowed.
A major disagreement between liberalism and (religious) conservatism is that the former believes that hurt feelings are not an actual harm suffered. This is why some anti-SJ people use the term ‘regressive left,’ as they see strong similarities between conservatism and SJ in this respect.
I also want to point out that protecting people is often done very selectively/hypocritically as well. If ‘calling out’ is targeted at SJ values, it is seen as offensive behavior that needs to be stopped, but it is considered a key tool to attack non-SJ values with. Of course, this hypocrisy is noticed by some SJ people and then we see rationalizations like ‘punching up’ where certain groups are judged to be mentally resilient merely by virtue of their race/gender/etc. Anti-SJ people like me see this as racism/sexism/etc.
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While it is certainly true that there are always shifts in norms and we come to view different things as unacceptable to say (hurtful/racist/etc..) it is important to remember that many things that are viewed as terribly wrong (racist/etc..) are only so bad *because* using them despite the social norm against it very strongly implies a lack of respect or care.
If you transported even someone with a saintly concern for offending unprivleged groups forward in time from the 1950s and handed them a dictionary there would be no way they would avoid saying very offensive things. One can easily imagine a world where instead of being seen as the polite way to refer to blacks ‘african-american is seen as a racist attempt to imply that blacks are African first and american second. One can easily imagine that if things had gone differently rather than being seen as being an anti-racist thing to say suggesting we should “celebrate our differences” or defending affirmative action by appealing to diversity (rather than reparations) could have been seen as suggesting important racial differences. Conversely, it actually is true that “having many black friends” is evidence against a claim of racism it’s just that it’s not convincing and came to be associated with people who didn’t have any other defense.
This isn’t a bad thing…language partly takes on meaning because of the role it has taken on in our culture not some essential meaning.
However, if conservatives don’t see themselves as part of the conversation that decides which terms end up being seen as appropriate versus inappropriate this perfectly reasonable evolution will appear to be an arbitrary and elitist imposition and an excuse to condemn them for beliefs they hold with good will.
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I also think a fetus is almost a human being, but I have great sympathy for women who consider fetuses to be bloodsucking parasites. Pregnancy is horrifying; it’s one of the most difficult physical things a person can do, certainly the most difficult physical thing people routinely do. Things often look different when you’re the one looking at nine months of fatigue, frequent urination, nausea, vomiting, constipation, heartburn, indigestion, excess saliva, flatulence, bloating, vaginal discharge, headaches, dizziness, varicose veins, nosebleeds, nasal congestion, ear stuffiness, gum bleeding, foot swelling, hemorrhoids, mood swings, stomach pain, backache, leg cramps, stretch marks, forgetfulness, bizarre dreams, Braxton Hix contractions, leaking nipples, pelvic pain, shortness of breath, clumsiness, and irritability– concluding with eight hours of labor which even today can result in death.
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Opinions about pregnancy and opinions about fetuses are not the same thing. I am considerably more comfortable with a man who says “marriage is a horrifying, soul-sucking experience” than with a man who says “women are soul-sucking parasites”. And while I do have a lot of sympathy for the circumstances that would cause one human being to be tempted to talk about another this way, it doesn’t negate the harm.
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@argentc
Well, that would be hurtful because we expect women to behave in a moral way (i.e., not to act like soul-sucking parasites), so saying that implies that women neglect their moral duties — in other words, that women are bad people.
But no one expects a fetus to refrain from diverting its mother’s blood vessels to itself and leeching calcium out of her bones, right? They don’t choose to do it, they couldn’t exist in any other way, and many people desire pregnancies despite knowing that their bodies will be used that way. In contrast, I don’t think anyone wants to acquire a “soul-sucking parasite” as a partner.
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And then there’s Eliezer Yudkowsky, who, in the spirit of trolling everyone at once, says that humans reach the level of development when they become morally relevant sometime after birth, not before, and if not for all the negative externalities, it would have been a-OK to kill babies.
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Lol. I think all he does is troll these days.
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…this is probably a highly unpopular sentiment, but I, too, would agree with Yudkowsky’s statement, as long as it only applies to lives and not, say, torture or child abuse.
But in real life, someone killing babies or advocating for killing babies is an excellent sign that they are Bad News, and I would like to keep this as a good heuristic for Evilness. I also think that, in practice, not treating babies as morally relevant will end up hurting the most vulnerable and devaluing their lives. So. Oh well.
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I think it’s a surprisingly popular sentiment among rationalists.
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Pretty sure this is just EY taking Peter Singer seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_euthanasia.2C_and_infanticide
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FWIW, most of the actual pro-choice people I know in real life only believe that late-term abortions should be legal only if they’re medically necessary, and think that viability outside the womb is a perfectly good Schelling point for determining when abortion should be illegal. I actually suspect that’s one of the most common positions on abortion among Americans (when Gallup broke it down in 2012, they found that 63% believed that abortion should be legal in the first trimester but only 14% thought it should be legal in the third.)
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You obviously are a cis male. It is completely understandable for a dysphoric trans man to view a fetus as a bloodsucking parasite. My first memories were two thoughts: “I’m a boy” (I was assigned female at birth) and “babies are disgusting”.
Most of the other dysphoric trans men I know remember being disgusted by babies or baby dolls at a young age. And then, once the horrors of puberty hit, absolute repulsion at the very idea that our reproductive organs exist for growing humans, rather than for delivering a pleasurable orgasmic jolt of semen and then doing what we please, unbothered by the agonies of a colonised embodiment.
But please, cisplain to me about how terrible of a person I am because I am not willing to accept my masochistic role as ordained by my assigned sex at birth. I’m sure, had you been born in my situation, you would not be signing up for the nine month tour of vomit, swelling, pain, and bloody expulsions. You would be first in line at the gender clinic as an FtM as well.
And if you wouldn’t, you are either low-empathy and cannot imagine yourself in my shoes, a biological determinist who believes you were “born male!” for a reason ( like all the religious Jewish men who Thank God every morning they were born male) or a trans woman in deep denial who cannot imagine femalehood as misery because, for her, maleness is misery.
I highly doubt the latter.
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Note: I know the OP is not a trans man, btw
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Actually, both of the people I know who are most strongly tokophobic are cis women. I think that gender dysphoria is a very good reason to be tokophobic, and it’s very possible that trans men are more tokophobic than cis women, but there are lots of reasons why one might be horrified at the prospect of pregnancy.
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“If you like wearing a dress because of an incomprehensible longing deep in your soul to wear dresses, gender feelings.”
This comes off, I think, as saying that dresses are inherently gendered – i.e. if you want to wear dresses for some specifically stated reason, then that specifically stated reason should be considered accurate, but if you want to wear them and you don’t know why, then that reason defaults to being gendered. This seems faulty to me. You could just as easily call it a “neurodivergence feeling” because some people prefer dresses for sensory reasons. There’s nothing *inherent* that the desire to wear a dress must correspond to deep down.
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I see what you’re saying, but I want to acknowledge that gender feelings often don’t come with an explicit “I want to do this because it is female” label. In fact, it’s quite common for e.g. self-closeted trans women to crave wearing makeup and dresses without having any sort of understanding that that’s linked to gender dysphoria.
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I agree, but I think some further clarification would help. *Might* the desire to wear a dress be gender feelings? Certainly! But not necessarily.
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I’m cis, and therefore male.* There’s a particular sort of male body that I want to have (and a particular male way that I carry myself, and so on and so forth). Were I female, I would (a) still be cis and (b) seek a female body quite different from the male body that I like. Where do you fit me into all this? I feel like I have more generic “body feelings” than “gender feelings”, but I don’t know whether that’s actually different from the feelings of someone who would say they have gender feelings. I usually conceptualize transness as an unusually politicized** preference over body types, but I often worry that there’s something I’m missing.
* Similarly, I am gynosexual in about the most literal way possible: when I have sex, I want there to be a vagina involved. I don’t really care who it’s attached to or what we’re doing with it (within some straightforward limits) but it needs to be there. This happens to make me heterosexual, given that I am male, but were I female it would make me bi.
** In the sense that it has somehow become an issue other people need to have an opinion on, not that trans people themselves are being needlessly political about things.
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I’m confused by what you say about how you would be cis even if you were a woman. Do you mean this as a hypothetical? (E.g. supposing that I were a cis woman, I would want a “female” body). Do you mean that you generally want the body that generally corresponds to the gender you were assigned at birth?
And yes, I think that some people conceptualize bodyfeels as genderfeels, yes, but for me the two are definitely separate but related.
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Yeah, hypothetically, if I had two X chromosomes or CAIS or something (but had the same or similar higher-level thoughts), I would be a cis woman, instead of a cis man. The “assigned” terminology doesn’t fit my feelings, though; if my parents had decided “nope, this one’s a girl” when I was ten minutes old, I think I’d be pretty annoyed. But I’d still consider myself a cis man. I want the gender that corresponds with my body (whatever that might be), not a body that corresponds to any particular gender, despite my aesthetic feelings on what sorts of body I’d like to have, given various genders.
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Huh, that’s interesting.
(Intersex people don’t often fit exactly into either cis or trans due to intersex-specific experiences they tend to have. But I think it’s okay for the purposes of discussing your gender to talk about it this way.)
So you would consider yourself a cis woman if you had XX,47 chromosomes and CAIS? You also say that you would want the gender that corresponds to your body.
I am kind of skeptical as to if you would have a female body if you had CAIS. I think that you would have an intersex body, and the gender that would correspond to that would be intergender. Would you still want to be a woman, or would you want to be intergender?
Also, is this due to a sanguine assessment of risks and societal norms, or is it a more in-depth kind of thing?
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This created a lovely image in my mind of you (well arbitrary man) having sex with another man while they both have a chat with a giant talking vagina.
I presume you really mean that a vagina attached in a normal fashion to a human body must be sexually significant.
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And to the other comments here, yes it is totally plausible that one would be cis if one’s body was swapped with one of the opposite sex. Many people (incluiding myself) just don’t have anything like those strong kind of feelings.
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Sorry, meant to add:
It’s not that if I was switched to a girls body at 10 I would start having ‘cis feelings’ about being a girl. No.
Rather, it’s that I just don’t have any particular feelings that go beyond convenience about having a body that has these genitals and this look or those genitals and that look.
Possibly one reason this seems odd to people is that the roles they see for themselves in their dreams (or fantasies) depend on being seen as having a particular sex (or having it). If you really like the idea of being seen as a great, nurturing *mother* rather than merely very nurturing (because you like the idea that it would be fufilling your biological purpose or that people with gender stereotypes would respect you for it) that will cause you to care more about your sex.
Of course I’m just spotting off random theories here in the hope that someone will say “yes, I care about what sex my body is and I do/don’t comport with those claims
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I think you are too quick to dismiss that argument. It obviously doesn’t support non-acceptance in the don’t let people use the restroom they want sense but I think there is a serious criticism buried in this issue. I’m not claiming what I write below is true or even what I believe but putting forward a plausible argument.
In particular, I think the following sketch illustrates an argument along those lines. What is satisfying about claiming a nonbinary gender in part comes from the fact that society gives a certain level of importance to gender facts. It wouldn’t be satisfying to make up a new word xender and claim to have a non-binary xender since it would lack the social role of gender.
The fact that many people don’t really feel a strong association to their gender suggests that what grounds the apparent importance of gender to society is really merely something like ‘compliance with sex stereotypes’ or some other property which is inherently binary.
In other words nonbinary gender claims rest on a fallacy that something can simultaneously have the social importance given by other people caring about the distinction while admitting more than two genders.
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I don’t believe this but I think there is a cognizable argument here.
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Ohh and I feel there is a bit of tension between the claim that there is a definite thing “gender feelings” and that one can’t assume that other people’s gender feelings are like ones own.
The reason we have a concept ‘gay’ is because we believe there is a class of people whose feelings towards members of the same sex involve fairly similar feelings we would identify as sexual attraction. The very use of the word gay/bi/straight implies that ones feelings towards members of the same sex fall within a certain range of variation. Even though I’m completely straight I understand what it is to be gay in terms of someone having feelings broadly similar to those I experience as sexual attraction direction toward the same gender.
For there even to be something referred to by ‘gender feelings’ there must be some basic similarity to them. This doesn’t mean there can’t be people who have very different feelings but that they just aren’t what we mean by *gender* feelings.
For instance what is it about “[liking to wear] a dress because of an incomprehensible longing deep in your soul to wear dresses” a gender feeling? (I doubt you literally mean that even in isolated tribes in the amazon who have never heard of a dress or associated it with women someone who had such a longing would be having a gender feeling). If I had a deep incomprehensible longing to have green skin or a tail would those be gender feelings? What if I lived in a society where women painted themselves green and sported fake tails?
I’m seriously uncertain what you mean by gender feelings since you don’t point to anything and say “it’s a feeling generally like that.” This doesn’t restrict the range of variation in any fashion, it merely specifies what part of the variation we mean to refer to when we use the concept “gender feeling.”
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