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Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
I use two different definitions – sociological and interpersonal.
Sociological – A woman is an adult human viewed by society as belonging to the social class of people who can get pregnant. A man is an adult human viewed by society as belonging to the social class of people who can impregnate others. I use this definition to think and talk about feminist theory, because I’m a radical feminist. The word radical comes from radix, which means root. The root of women’s oppression comes from the desire to control women’s reproduction. Since the Neolithic, society has been set up to ensure that women’s bodies remain under control of their fathers, who then transfer that control through marriage to women’s husbands. If a woman is property of one man, that man can know that he fathered her children and can pass power down to his sons. This is where the term patriarchy comes from – rule of the father.
Today, some of the most important issues women face are related to their having uteruses – abortion, access to menstrual products, not being fired for getting pregnant, etc.
Women who don’t have uteruses – intersex, had a hysterectomy, MtF transitioned etc. – are treated the same as women who do in most circumstances. A man who doesn’t want to hire women because he thinks their periods make them crazy and they’ll just quit when they get pregnant isn’t going to bother to ask job candidates if they have uteri before sticking their application in the circular file.
Interpersonal – A woman is someone who wishes to be seen by others as a woman. A man is someone who wishes to be seen by others as a man. I use this definition to decide what pronouns I use for people. People with dysphoria are going through a hard enough time as it is. I can make their day a little less hard or I can be an asshole. Why be an asshole?
I also use trans woman, trans man, etc. when I’m talking about trans issues. I say “trans women who isn’t out” instead of something like “dysphoric male” because, again, why be an asshole. Those terms communicate my meaning without hurting or alienating people. Anyone who doesn’t think biological sex is real has written me off as a TERF anyway.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
This is a problem because different people are working from different definitions. Most trans women and their allies see the cotton ceiling as the idea that trans women are inherently ugly and undesirable, that a cis lesbian who sleeps with a trans woman must not be a real lesbian, and that a trans woman hitting on a cis lesbian is just as out of line as a cis man would be. They see fighting against the cotton ceiling as upholding trans woman as beautiful and desirable, running sex ed workshops and writing erotica, supporting relationships between cis lesbians and trans women, and explaining why its inappropriate for a cis lesbian to respond to a trans woman who propositioned her with “Eww, I wouldn’t sleep with you – I like real women.”
Most radical feminists see the cotton ceiling as the idea that lesbians have the right to choose and reject partners based on sexual desire and pleasure instead of guilt, pity, and the desire to be a good ally, and that it’s totally normal for lesbians to be sexually attracted to vulvas and indifferent to or grossed out by penises. They see fighting against the cotton ceiling as telling lesbians who are sexually attracted to vulvas that they’re disgusting fetishists who see women as walking genitalia, telling rape survivors that they need to unlearn their hateful transmisogynistic fear of penises, and if they absolutely can’t sleep with a trans woman with a penis without a panic attack that they can always enter into a sexless relationship and hook up with cis women on the side for sexual fulfillment.
I think the term “cotton ceiling” is terrible because it positions women’s panties as a barrier to be broken through. I also think trans women and their allies need to do a lot more to call out the kinds of predators who tell thirteen year olds that they’re bad people if they don’t want to take dick, and they need to stop setting up a dichotomy between good and virtuous lesbians who sleep with trans women and bad, close-minded lesbians who don’t. However, all the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph is worthwhile activism.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
There’s a mix of reasons I can think of, but I’m guessing, because I don’t know any trans women programmers. Most of the trans women I’ve known have been sex workers.
A) Trans girls and women who aren’t out and are seen as boys by the people around them are a lot more likely to be encouraged in STEM.
B) Trans women have a hard time getting hired and tend to face discrimination at work. Programming is a job that lets people get hired online and work from home.
C) The internet is a good way to get away for people who don’t fit in.
D) Social contagion. Trans women tend to make friends with other trans women online. If a teenage trans girl has a lot of older trans women friends she looks up to who are programmers, she’s a lot more likely to look into programming.
Why do many trans women experience sexual fantasies about being or becoming a woman?
I think its obvious why a trans woman would fantasize about having breasts and a vagina during sex, but a lot of trans women have fantasies that go a lot further than that. Sexual fantasies come from things people have strong emotions about, and those emotions get swirled around in the id with all the patriarchal messages put out by our culture, and then a bunch of really weird shit comes out. This goes for cis women as well. I guarantee that right now a cis woman is rubbing one out to the thought of herself as an inferior set of meat holes.
Also, a lot of young trans women want to look for porn they can in some way relate to, and end up finding sissy transformation fetish stuff by actual autogynophiles. Getting off to stuff rewires the brain by associating a stimulus with pleasure – one ill-advised late night trip to 4chan can leave someone with all kinds of kinks.
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When taking the poll, if you can POSSIBLY round yourself off to Blanchard-Bailey or gender identity, please do so. Please do this even if you have major disagreements with the side you are leaning towards. Only use “neither” if you really really really cannot in good conscience round yourself to either.
Thing of Things 
I’m fairly sure that this writer is sincere. Man, I really hope that none of the wrong people find this and threaten her or anything. It’s interesting to observe that radical feminist beliefs are still sometimes more easily reconciled with the gender identity position framed here rather than the specificities of the Blanchard Bailey.
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Huh. I have no confidence in my judgement of these, but the previous ITT gave me greater respect for the ability of some people around here to do these, and in light of that my own gut feeling is skilled fake. But I couldn’t give any principled reasons for that reaction.
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I think it could be either with almost equal probability, but my policy is to vote sincere in this situation because I think at that point the author deserves to pass the test.
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The phrase “actual gynophiles (sic)” seems to me like something most gender identity proponents would be unlikely to use, which makes me think this is a Blanchard-Bailey writer’s work, as does the discussion of TERF-accusing. It’s just small nuances of wording that give me this feeling. But there’s a reasonable wealth of evidence on both sides, and I haven’t made the effort to displace this conviction by seeking out phrasings that are more likely to indicate honest belief in this response.
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I take back what I said last time that I had 80% confidence the writer was a specific person. I have much higher confidence that the specific person in question wrote this one, and I don’t think she’s doing a particularly good job of putting her views in an identitarian framework. (Which is not to say I don’t think she believes almost everything she’s written — I’m confident she does — but that she’s not coming at it from that angle.)
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I was hoping a radfem would enter this! I was really interested in which they would round off to, as well–this made me happy to read. I can’t wait to read her submission for BB 🙂
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Fake. The several paragraphs laying out a definition of “woman” focused entirely on the ability to have babies and the phrase “actual autogynephiles” obviously come from a BB-believing TERF. Bad fake.
The “interpersonal gender” idea seems so obviously tacked on. “Of course, a woman is someone that other people think can get pregnant, about which I can write several paragraphs. But I also use people’s preferred pronouns, even though I obviously don’t care about this definition at all and just want to talk about how women have uteruses and having a uterus is the only important thing about being a woman.”
It’s a TERF who’s claiming she lies to make people feel better. The writer says people with gender dysphoria are hurting, not that they’re actually the gender they think they are.
Obvious fake. Does this person ever even claim to believe in an innate gender identity, or just in the fact that trans people feel bad?
TERF/BB with a transparent veneer of the most superficial and meaningless trans-positive catchphrases.
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Well, Ozy’s instructions for the test defined this side as “trans people are motivated by identity and/or dysphoria“, so this doesn’t totally require believing in an objective, let alone innate, gender identity.
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Wait, I believe trans people are motivated by dysphoria. Does that mean I should stop rounding myself off as B/B and instead vote in the GI group?
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@tailcalled
I think if you roughly agree with BB it still makes more sense for you to be in that category than not?
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I agree more with BB than GI as I understand those two theories, but I’ve just looked up Ozy’s definitions in the beginning of the Turing test, and according to those my beliefs seem more like GI than BB…
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I don’t really understand much about gender, but it’s always seemed to me like the BB and GI are talking about mostly orthogonal things. GI always felt liie “this is how to not be a dick to people”, while BB looks like “this is how people experience this thing”. And either of those can be wrong, but they’re pretty independent. But like I said, I don’t really understand gender, and that creates a barrier for me when I try to understand GI people when they make claims about reality as opposed to givng interaction scripts. Kind of. This is hard to express.
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@gazeboist
Both theories are about how people experience the thing. GI people generally disagree with BB’s claims about trans people’s experience.
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I think GI might overestimate how much they disagree with the BB claims. The whole “tear down the classical trans narrative” thing that has been going on recently seems to be interpretable as “start centering “AGP” rather than “HSTS” narratives”.
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I don’t think I agree either of those narratives does a really good job explaining trans women’s actual experience and motivation, though.
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Right, so I don’t fully believe the BB theory. From my perspective, classical BB went too far in a “it’s all sexual” direction, but in terms of the actual characteristics of the groups it’s talking about, the newer trans narratives seem more similar to the “AGP” group.
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@tailcalled:
Blanchardians believe trans people are motivated by dysphoria unless you’re going for a really classic/weird/extreme/??? variant (as in, ‘a variant even Blanchard-Bailey-Lawrence would strongly disagree with), but disagree on why that dysphoria exists.
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It is actually kind of hard to write definitions of things! I was trying to be inclusive of people who are like “what’s a gender identity, I just feel really unhappy about my biological sex”, but as you point out Blanchardians also believe in dysphoria. Bleh.
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Maybe I should just post a sketch of what I believe and hear how people would categorize me.
A lot of stuff about transness makes little sense without thinking about the “AGP” / “HSTS” categories of BB. On the other hand, the dynamics of those categories (e.g. etiology) described by BB don’t seem to quite add up.
I tend to approximate “AGP” to “body dysphoric” and “HSTS” to “socially dysphoric”, so I will use those names instead in the rest of this post. It should be noted, though, that body dysphoric trans people can experience some social dysphoria (though it might usually be caused by their body dysphoria?), and vice versa for socially dysphoric trans people.
It is possible that erotic target location errors can cause body dysphoric transness, but there are a lot of anecdotes that suggest it is causally impossible (because the dysphoria came at young ages, before the sex drive), so I don’t believe it (!!! important disagreement with BB !!!). If there is an effect along those lines, I think it’s more likely that it “awakens latent transness”, which could also be awakened by other things, such as talking a lot about gender, being gender nonconforming or dating a trans person.
Another place where I disagree with the classical BB framework is that I don’t find it entirely obvious that the two categories are discrete. It obviously follows from them having two completely different etiologies, but I don’t quite buy the proposed etiologies. There may be a spectrum, and they may be correlated in the general population. (If you restrict yourself to the trans population, you run into a statistical paradox that reduces the correlation. If you have two variables (body and social dysphoria), and you condition on their sum (total dysphoria) being at least $somenumber (enough to transition), then that will usually reduce the correlation, and it can make the correlation negative.)
The BB theory may be correct that most trans people are in what I classify as body dysphoric. However, I also find it plausible that most trans people have elements from both. IIRC, BB suggest that social transition in the AGP category is because of stuff like behavioral AGP, but I think it could *maybe* be that a degree of HSTS / socially dysphoric transness is common in the AGP / body dysphoric trans population.
Many things make more sense in this BB-derived framework. One example is the change of standard narrative that I mentioned earlier. I can’t give a comprehensive overview without making this post very long, so if you want details, I recommend you just start reading things written by Blanchardians.
But yeah, quick summary:
Body dysphoric trans people are less likely to conform to the gender roles of their desired sex, are more likely to discover their transness later, are less likely to pass/care about passing, are more likely to care about their the sexed traits of their body for their own sake (independently of how others read them), are more likely to be gay (relative to gender identity). Socially dysphoric trans people are the reverse of all that. Basically, all the standard Blanchardian stuff.
The most accurate body dysphoric narrative would be something along the lines of “I’ve wanted to be a woman since I was 12 and I hate my body”, whereas the most accurate socially dysphoric narrative would be something along the lines of “I have always felt closer associated with women and being a woman is simply the most natural for me”. Like many Blanchardians, I suspect body dysphoric trans people copy parts of the socially dysphoric narrative for status-related reasons.
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I’d round you to Blanchardian. You seem to understand the position better than some people I’ve met who hold it (though as Blanchardianism is not far enough in the Overton window to see mass dissemination yet, most people who hold it have thought it through pretty strongly to prevent stuff like that).
I’m not 100% sold on ETLEs as usually presented, in that I agree there are ‘people more autoerotic than average in specific ways that cluster’ so the number of AAP furries I have met is not a coincidence, but that people can be more autoerotic than average and also transsexual without their transsexualism being due to A*P. (You will see this more on the FTM end, in that, yes, it’s more common for men to be sexually unorthodox. (I have met more than one AGP trans man for each FTM etiology.)) I am, however, completely unconvinced by the ‘I had it before puberty so it can’t be sexual’ argument — are we denying that children experience sexual attraction now? Hell, there are case studies of prepubertal boys engaging in things-that-only-make-sense-when-you-call-them-AGP, most famously the boy in Richard Green’s cohort who was probably the one that grew up to be a crossdresser.
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The writer believes that people can identify however they want and should be addressed accordingly. Why does it matter why she thinks this address is appropriate? What is the meaningful distinction between “bad feeling” or a metaphysical soul?
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It matters why because we’re playing a game where we figure out what this person really thinks. That’s all.
The writer makes a lot of fact-claims generally associated with radical feminism and BB. That womanhood is defined by whether people believe you have a uterus. That autogynephiles exist and it’s easy to find them.
They advocate doing what the gender identity faction usually argues for, but the gender identity faction usually argues for doing those things because they follow from fact claims.
“Just call people what they want to be called, don’t be an asshole” is something that usually comes up in (supposed to be) persuasive arguments aimed at people who don’t agree. Talking to other people who believe in innate gender identity, it’s always about how calling people what they want to be called is factually accurate and people really are what they feel like they are. Someone who thinks that someone who believes in gender identity would say “just call people what they want to be called, don’t be an asshole” to a mostly trans-positive audience while talking about what they think is true, or basically any time except trying to convince someone to stop being rude and insistently misgendering people, has probably spent a lot of time arguing with people who believe in gender identity and not a lot of time listening to what they say outside of arguments.
It just seems like TERF definitions and ideology and BB object-level beliefs about trans etiology, with some arguments that you should act like people who believe in gender identity want you to act tacked on.
But tcheasdfjkl points out that this technically fits in the category and I just remembered that Ozy wanted unusual or bizarre views, so now I’m less confident.
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Sorry, I’m a bit confused by the poll wording.
Does it mean this piece leans toward gender-identity/BB and I (meaning the author of the piece) lean towards gender-identity/BB or does it mean I guess the author leans toward gender-identity/BB and I (meaning ME) lean towards gender-identity/BB?
In other words is the poll supposed to be in the author’s voice?
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The poll is in your voice. For instance, my answer was “this piece was most likely written by a Blanchardian, I am also a Blanchardian”.
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I’m pretty sure the author is NOT representing their true views here. Their little aside about being a radical feminist at the beginning is full of little definitions that sound like someone just looked them up to write the piece. I hope no person who took that view seriously would have such an openly silly transition from identification as a radical feminist to what the root of women’s issues are.
It’s easy to think someone else reasons via pun/word association but most people don’t do so openly. Someone who took this seriously might say something like I’m a radical feminist and that MEANS such and such but wouldn’t claim to be a radical feminist and then shift to some associated word meaning with no further claim.
Then again it’s possible the piece was simply hastily edited and I’m reading too much into that quick transition. But other parts of the piece suggest I’m not. Like the complaint about “cotton ceiling” positioning panties as a barrier to be broken through. Yah, it’s something someone might seriously say but it’s exactly the sort of thing someone who was trying to fake a viewpoint might offer. All in all it feels like it half captures the sense in which people can be deeply concerned about language use but doesn’t quite include the feeling of it mattering in some larger sense.
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“It’s easy to think someone else reasons via pun/word association but most people don’t do so openly. Someone who took this seriously might say something like I’m a radical feminist and that MEANS such and such but wouldn’t claim to be a radical feminist and then shift to some associated word meaning with no further claim.”
I have seen a very, very large number of radical feminists explain that ‘radical’ means ‘root’, not ‘extreme’, and that this is the reasoning behind TERF* views. I would expect someone trying to explain her views to a non-radfem audience to refer to it at least once.
*all TERFs are radfems, not all radfems are TERFs; as noted before I’m very confident I can place the commenter that wrote this, and while she is a radfem I am not sure she can be realistically called a TERF
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I find it’s fairly common to see radical feminists say “X word means Y, and THEREFORE”, so I don’t find that part jarring. The more out-there a radical feminist’s views, the more likely there will be appeals to word definitions.
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The “barrier to broken through” is such an obvious reference to the hymen and is thus a pluperfect blend of literary/pomo-based political thinking and Dworkin/Mackinnon/Ferrelian “sex IS violence.”
Whether or not the physical author is a radfem, the literary construct represented here definitely is.
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Yeah, but while this is certainly a thing that some radfems do, it’s also very high on the list of things that critics of radfems pick up on and get massively annoyed by. So one would expect it to be present both in genuine radfems and in attempts to imitate radfems.
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“Pomo”?
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“Pomo” = postmodern. As more of a modernist myself, I’m not a fan, but I also think a lot of criticisms of pomo are based on straw men. My own main criticism of pomo is that they are not as original as they think they are, and in particular most of their good ideas can already be found in modernism if you look. Their effort to conceal this contributes to their tendency to look silly, because they don’t feel the need to emphasize the ideas that they share with their predecessors (and in fact try to avoid those, in order to enhance the appearance of originality), so one who isn’t very familiar with what’s going on can get a very distorted picture of what their priorities are.
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Is there a way to see which side the writer is trying to support? It is really not clear to me. I guess this one is anti-BB?
Also, it’s too late now, but if we wanted an ITT about the Blanchard-Bailey theory, there really should have been a question that asks exactly that: “Do you believe the Blanchard-Bailey theory is mostly correct, and why/why not?”
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It’s in the title. Of the two essays this author wrote, this is the one they identifies as having a gender identitarian perspective.
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I think I’m a little closer to getting it – is this close, and can people correct me where appropriate?
Blanchard-Bailey proponents believe that for the most part, there are various differences that correlate with whether transwomen are primarily attracted to men or not. I know some of the purported differences from the Wikipedia page, but I’m not sure if B-B believes there is clinical significance on who is likely to be helped by transition, etc. Gender identitarians believe that these differences either are not correlated enough to be meaningful or are irrelevant, or that the question is offensive, and that all transwomen should be understood as having a female identity that requires transition.
In practice, people believe that B-B believers are more likely to deny transwomen full categorical status as women (possibly because people who already do so are more likely to be attracted to B-B?), and therefore (1) more likely to answer question one in a way that does not fully include transwomen as women and/or saves some persion definitions that exclude them; (2) more likely to answer question two in a way that is less sympathetic to the cotton ceiling proponents; (3) I don’t know on question three; and (4) more likely to make the B/B distinction in answering question four?
In my completely unqualified opinion, you could be a B/B proponent because your anecdotal experiences or your reading of the data support B/B and still hold trans-supportive opinions on all four questions. On the other hand, if you support B/B because you see transwomen’s and cis lesbian’s interests as being in conflict and B/B supports your preferred outcomes, your answers to these questions will probably reflect that.
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Note that question 4 is different for the two sides – BB essays are instead asked to explain AFAB trans people.
I roughly agree with your characterization, except that question 4 for the GI side does, I think, actually get into the factual difference between the theories and is less about values.
There’s also the thing where the BB theory says that trans women’s motivations are primarily sexual in nature, which a lot of people find insulting firstly because it doesn’t match how their experience feels to them, and secondly because weird sex things are generally culturally stigmatized. So the BB side has a mix of people going “ew trans women are disgusting perverts who transition for sexual reasons” and “why are you offended, sex isn’t shameful!”.
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You’re pretty much right.
“I know some of the purported differences from the Wikipedia page, but I’m not sure if B-B believes there is clinical significance on who is likely to be helped by transition, etc.”
Blanchard-Bailey-Lawrence are strongly on the ‘all trans people are helped by transition’ side (Lawrence is herself a trans woman with an AGP etiology). This is what makes the typology historically significant even if you disagree with it, in that it is the only typology (there are a lot of typologies, most of which are near-identical to Blanchard’s) that was created for the purpose of ‘here are the differences between the transsexuals we have seen, all of who should transition and are equally valid’ rather than ‘here are the REAL TRANSSEXUALS we have seen as opposed to the FAKE TRANSSEXUALS who MUST BE GATEKEPT’.
Of course, Blanchard’s gender clinic was a gatekeeping clusterfuck for everyone, but by 1980s standards that’s practically informed consent.
“In practice, people believe that B-B believers are more likely to deny transwomen full categorical status as women (possibly because people who already do so are more likely to be attracted to B-B?), and therefore (1) more likely to answer question one in a way that does not fully include transwomen as women and/or saves some persion definitions that exclude them; (2) more likely to answer question two in a way that is less sympathetic to the cotton ceiling proponents; (3) I don’t know on question three”
This is mostly in the form of ‘TERFs really like cherrypicked versions of Blanchardianism because it fits their ideology’, which is not something I like much as a Blanchardian who a) has very good reasons to dislike TERFs (I am the exact kind of person they are trying to save from himself) and b) had a very long and complicated process of becoming a Blanchardian because of how deeply it conflicted with my ideology and yet completely matched and explained every experience I have ever had. Those things sort of feed into each other and eventually trans women decide all Blanchardians are TERF-aligned because there aren’t that many other people who constantly talk about autogynephiles. So yeah, pretty much.
(A good friend of mine — a trans girl — responded jokingly over Skype to the questions when I linked her the original post with ‘penis/vagina, because they’re men and rapists, because they’re men, and because they’re men’.)
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Thought this was a real Blanchard-Bailey at first, but the last paragraph gives it away as a fake.
Specifically the “actual autogynophiles” and “4chan” parts. Very few outside of trans people who visit 4chan know that parts of 4chan function as a trans-support group. I would be very surprised if 4chan was the go-to example for anyone who hasn’t actually used it. An actual B-B believer would never mention it, but the author gives a sort of “I-tried-4chan-and-found-it-wanting” kind of vibe.
The section about trans-women and their allies needing to behave better comes off as TERFy at first. Upon closer inspection, though, it looks more like a person criticizing their own ingroup behavior than a person angry at an outgroup.
Overall, I’m seeing a lot of TERFy stuff in this, but there’s no emotional force behind it. There are also several signs of the author being a gender-identity supporting trans person, and those DO have emotional force behind them. Fake B-B.
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This submission is for the gender identity side.
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“An actual B-B believer would never mention it”
Haha well
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