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How do you define woman/man?
A woman is someone with a female gender identity. A man is someone with a male gender identity. Gender identity is your innate sense of what your gender is caused by changes in certain regions of the brain, and has nothing to do with gender roles and only a correlation with biological sex (though when gender identity and biological sex don’t coincide, that tends to cause no end of grief in the form of gender dysphoria).
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
The cotton ceiling – the phenomenon where trans women are discriminated against in lesbian spaces – is a genuine problem that has to end.
TERFs obsess over the idea of ‘male socialization’ in trans women as a dog whistle for their transmisogyny. The idea that WLW (women-loving women) are ‘more like men than women’ is a lesbophobic stalwart that’s especially sad when it’s being espoused by actual lesbians, who should know better, and the behaviours they claim are symptomatic of male socialization/privilege are just as stereotypical as the idea that butch women aren’t really women either – besides, how is it ‘entitled’ for a member of an oppressed group to vent her sorrow that she faces discrimination?
Most arguments against the ‘cotton ceiling’ also rely on misunderstandings about what trans WLW want out of their relationships. Trans WLW don’t always want to use their pre-op/non-op genitals (though some do, and some cis lesbians are fine with this), and the ways hormones change them means they usually can’t engage in PIV sex anyway. Plus, asexual and post-op trans WLW exist. TERF arguments in favour of the cotton ceiling usually come from the idea that trans women must want to have PIV with them (which, again, some do! And there are cis lesbians who want that!) and that saying cis women should sleep with trans women is ‘another form of conversion therapy’ – brave move coming from people who call transition that.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
Trans girls raised as boys will usually be pushed into masculine hobbies, and the most unisex ‘masculine’ hobbies by far are the nerdy ones. Further into adulthood, nerdy men don’t have as high an expectation of masculinity upon them as ‘alpha’ ones. Of course we’re going to see a lot of nerdy trans women.
Plus, how are we so sure it’s disproportionate? If there wasn’t an invisible filter against women in STEM, we’d see at least as many cis women in the field.
Why do many trans women experience sexual fantasies about being or becoming a woman?
It is really, really socially unacceptable for a ‘man’ to say ‘he’ ‘wants to be’ a woman, and testosterone and repression are both a hell of a drug.
If you’re pushing your true self so deep within you almost forget she exists…you’re not going to be able to actually pull that off. She’s going to remind you, no matter what you do. If she can’t remind you through any other possible route, she’ll remind you through a sexual one. Besides, being transgender is (increasingly less, but still) taboo anyway – it makes sense for those who peddle in the taboo to hijack the whole experience.
The fact these sexual fantasies drop to zero in almost every trans woman who takes estrogen shows they’re just the result of high testosterone levels in a female brain. (Probably. Let’s get some studies on detransitioned women who used to be trans men!)
I guess there are also a few genuine fetishists who go too far, but I don’t think they make up the majority of trans women the way Blanchard wants you to think, and they would detransition quickly once they realize what they’ve done to themselves. Gender dysphoria is not fun.
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The first item on the poll refers to what side you think the author of this post really believes, while the second item refers to what side you believe. 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 not convinced by this one. The answer to the first question sounds stiff and rote. The answer about the cotton ceiling sounds like an imitation of the sort of Bad SJ that I don’t expect readers of this blog to actually endorse. In general, the author doesn’t sound very convinced of their own arguments – they sound like they’re trying to paper over inconvenient facts because they don’t think Gender Identity holds up against them.
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This is what I’d expect a TERF to model the GI position as, but I think an actual Blanchardian would deal with it differently (not sure how exactly, but that’s my intuition). I could also see an “AGP” trans woman writing it, though I think in that case she probably hasn’t participated much in debates on GI.
I’m voting GI. If I’m wrong, I predict that I’m also going to be wrong on this person’s post in favor of BB.
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If you were forced to figure out exactly what the difference between the TERF and Blanchardian views of identitarian positions are, what conclusion would you probably come to?
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That’s a hard question, and I can’t really answer it.
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Also, tailcalled, I don’t have an openly-trans Reddit account so this seems like the best place to comment:
I don’t think the criticism of this was necessarily for the reasons you said it was on /r/GCdebatesQT, though I guess I might have missed those in the 4chan thread where you posted it (though I was a part of that thread, and have since concluded from half of your posts on that sub that there are even fewer active /tttt/ posters than I thought). The criticisms I saw and made were along the lines of:
1. Definition of ‘cis’/’trans’/’male’/’female’ — /u/demastro shouldn’t be counted as cis male, Quinby Stewart shouldn’t be counted as trans male, Danielle Muscato shouldn’t be counted as trans female
2. Definition of masculinity/femininity — this was an especially legitimate criticism on the third row down. The argument could be made that the x-axis was ‘gender conformity in natal sex’, but as written the x-axis was simply ‘masculinity vs femininity’, and Blaire White clearly occupies a different point there to Rain Dove.
3. Massive jumps between categories — this works both vertically (White vs Dove) and horizontally (Stallone vs gay cosplay dude), but much moreso horizontally. You needed either much smaller transitions or twenty more divisions. For the first three groups the worst jump was between the first and second, but for cis women it was between the third and fourth.
4. Reliance on outliers — especially in the cis categories. For instance, if I were making it myself I’d cut out the first two cis women and make Dove the most masc end of that spectrum, and cut out the last two cis men and make the most fem cis man something like circa-2008 Chris Crocker (who himself was the type of person Kay Brown called an ‘inbetweenie’, someone at a point on the HSTS spectrum where transition and repression are about equally viable — Blaire White is also someone at this point, and made the unusual decision of someone there who’s upper-middle-class in an individualist society to transition).
5. Trans people who have not medically transitioned — ties in with #1 and #4. Stewart, Muscato, and forgot-his-name-but-I’ve-read-his-blog (second to last trans male) shouldn’t have been on there at all, because their lack of medical transition interferes with their placement. This is obviously not much of a factor for Muscato or Stewart, but a pretty significant one for the other guy, who is now a fairly typical gender-conforming heterosexual man. The trans categories should have stuck to people who were at least on hormones for meaningful enough periods of time to be perceived as their transitioned sex.
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That’s the criticism from the 4chan thread, not from my friends. I don’t spend all my time on 4chan. 😛
It’s not meant to be a super serious thing, just a thing I made for fun, so the reliance on outliers and similar is fine IMO.
Some notes: Stewart is on HRT, and so is second-to-last trans man (though not in that picture).
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Oops, misread your last objection. Thing is, if you consider the fourth cis man, then he has a female-typical hormone balance (because of complex intersex stuff). I wanted to make left half “male-typical hormone balance” and right half “female-typical hormone balance”, but I ran out of pictures.
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The hormone balance thing makes the chart make much, much more sense. I (and I think everyone else who read it) interpreted the relative axis as gender conformity. Though I think Slav Strasko had been on HRT for some time when that photo of her was taken (Stewart was about five minutes on T when theirs was so doesn’t count).
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*relevant, not relative
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To be precise, the ideal for the x-axis that I went for was
[masculine build & male hormones] – [androgynous build & male hormones] – [androgynous build & female hormones] – [feminine build & female hormones]
However, there are lots of arbitrary exceptions and dubious choices because it’s surprisingly hard to make such a diagram.
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I feel like this would be really hard to do due to the postmodern-inspired rhetorical style that is super common in radfem communities. You can read their things and they will be saying that trans women are literally (implied consciously) agents of the patriarchy engaged in some kind of conspiracy to put their penises in lesbians which will somehow both actually and symbolically destroy lesbianism which is both a sexuality and a political philosophy or something.
But then if you try to nail this down as any kind of actual theory they will equivocate between what’s actual and what’s symbolic and what’s conscious and what isn’t and what any number of the words in any of their sentences actually mean.
I guess what I’m saying is that TERFism, by virtue of a specific kind of discourse culture it gets from radfem in general, doesn’t have definable opinions the way BBism does. Or at least, if it has any you will never really know what they are.
I imagine some differences would be:
* Like GI, TERFs wouldn’t accept or place any importance on a distinction between two kinds of trans person. Even if a transwoman isn’t trying to shag lesbians, ‘he’ is still a man colonising the female identity with his maleness and appropriating femininity, and therefore bad.
* BB people seem to accept varying degrees of sincerity in transwomen’s claims of feeling like they are women – so, the internal experience of ‘having a gender identity’ – depending on categorisation. TERFs frequently talk as if it’s all a cynical plot.
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First instinct is false for the same reason as #3. As I read on I got more uncertain. Still voting false, though.
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Nevermind –– I guess I *do* have a list of shibboleths:
“Plus, how are we so sure it’s disproportionate? If there wasn’t an invisible filter against women in STEM, we’d see at least as many cis women in the field.”
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What about that reads as shibboleth-y?
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I read it as a claim that the STEM gender gap is mostly due to discrimination. It felt disingenuous because, although this corner of the internet has spent an absurd amount of time discussing the STEM gender gap, the author didn’t even give a nod to the fact that it’s complicated and reasonable people disagree.
That said, ‘shibboleth’ is probably the wrong word. This is still an argument from tone.
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I’m voting false but could also be a real who genuinely doesn’t quite understand what the cotton ceiling thing refers to?
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The writer seem to understand the referent correctly, they just choose to focus on one facet of it to the exclusion of everything else. (Insert extensive discussion about whether this is a signal of something, or deliberate misinformation, or a second-level reverse-psychology double-fake, or…)
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On the one hand they literally defined it as ‘the phenomenon where trans women are discriminated against in lesbian spaces’, but on the other hand I recently learned from a video that the idea that not wanting to do a group of people necessarily and uncomplicatedly equals discrimination is alive and well in non-strawman individuals so you may be right.
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“If there wasn’t an invisible filter against women in STEM, we’d see at least as many cis women in the field.”
Just a quick note: If trans women are disproportionately like to be programmers relative to AFAB people, then this would be a possible explanation. If they’re disproportionately likely to be programmers relative to all AMAB, then it would explain at most part of the effect.
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I voted BB for a slightly different reason that the people who commented seem to have:
This person seems a little too… invested in BB dichotomies? for a GI person. I was unsure through the first few answers but the last one really strongly struck me as odd. It takes for granted that fantasizing about oneself is odd at all, it seems to think of a gender identity as a second personality when I’ve never once heard an actual trans person refer to their gender identity like that, it seems to take for granted that those fantasies drop after HRT, it seems to think that “genuine fetishists” aren’t trans and it refers to them detransitioning in a pretty matter-of-fact way.
(For reference, my own answer to the final question would be “Because almost all women, including cis women, tend to fantasize about themselves. For that matter many men do as well. It’s very common to believe that you are sexy, and as part of that belief to be attracted to yourself.”)
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“it seems to think that “genuine fetishists” aren’t trans and it refers to them detransitioning in a pretty matter-of-fact way.”
That assumption seems more GI than BB to me?
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Yeah I think the position expressed by people such as Ozy of ‘any reason for transitioning is fine and you are still valid’ is a position wherein the holder might round themselves off to GI, but it’s not a mainstream GI position.
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@loki:
Specifically, the most common identitarian narrative I’ve encountered is something along the lines of the following:
People are born with their Magical Innate Gender Identities that could not possibly change under any circumstances. Magical Innate Gender Identity (MIGI) is independent of natal sex, sexual orientation, and gender conformity. Someone who has a MIGI that does not conform to their natal sex is 100% going to be dysphoric and 100% guaranteed to either transition or commit suicide. Someone who transitions when their MIGI conforms to their natal sex is 100% going to develop dysphoria and 100% guaranteed to either detransition or commit suicide. If someone is actually a fetishist, as opposed to a victim of Bad Wrongthink, that means their MIGI conforms to their natal sex and transition is categorically the worst idea possible and they will detransition or kill themselves when they develop dysphoria.
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