If there’s one thing I love, it’s answering strawmanny questions. Gender critical philosopher Kathleen Stock wrote an article in which she provided several questions that she felt anti-gender-critical feminists should answer. I will do so to the best of my ability.
- What, metaphysically speaking, is gender identity? What ensures that when Person 1 identifies as X and Person 2 identifies as X they are identifying as the same thing?
The concept of “gender identity” is unnecessary for transness to be a thing. For example, one might argue for a principle of “consensual gender” or “gender exit rights”: if a person dislikes their current social gender, they should be allowed to have a new one. Under this principle, it would not matter why a person chooses to transition.
Observably, nearly everyone who transitions does so because of a deep-seated desire to be a different gender. There is often a physical aspect: there’s a longing for the primary and secondary sexual characteristics associated with a different sex. There is often also a social aspect: there is a longing to be seen as a different gender, to be referred to with an appropriately gendered name and pronouns, to wear certain clothes, to be treated as that gender even in the ways which are generally awful. (There is a very common trans girl experience of being street-harassed for the first time and going ‘I passed!’ Street harassment is, obviously, stressful and frightening for cis and trans women alike, but for trans women it is often mingled with the deep-seated desire to be properly gendered.)
You can characterize this phenomenon as a “gender identity” if you like. I personally prefer the “gender dysphoria” terminology. We don’t know yet why people are this way, but clearly they are.
2. Do you think that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ gender stereotypes are bad and should be changed and/or reduced? If so, do you also think we should accept an account of ‘woman’ that ties womanhood to a feeling that the gender stereotypes typically associated with being female apply to oneself? Do you see a tension there? How does this strategy avoid conservatively reinforcing the association of womanhood with femininity?
Many transgender women are not feminine; many transgender men are not masculine. It is not at all uncommon for a transgender man to want to be a feminine man such as David Bowie; it is not at all uncommon for a transgender woman to listen to Ring of Keys with longing in her heart.
Asking this question implies a profound disconnection from transgender experiences. A trans man does not want to be a masculine woman, he wants to be a man. A trans woman does not want to be a feminine man, she wants to be a woman. As your very own analysis points out, these are different things.
Do some transgender people articulate their desire to be a particular gender as a desire to be feminine or masculine? Of course. It turns out there is actually no Feminism Test to be allowed to transition. Just as many cis people articulate their understanding of their genders in sexist or regressive ways, so do many transgender people.
Whether or not femininity and womanhood are necessarily linked, they are certainly linked in our culture. A person who desperately wants to be a woman will often desperately want to do things our culture associates with womanhood: to wear dresses and skirts and makeup, to watch My Little Pony, to work in a predominantly feminine occupation, to be allowed to cry. While there is no necessary linkage, that doesn’t mean there is no linkage at all.
3. We think that patriarchy is, definitionally, a system which structurally oppresses females, on the basis of their sex. What do you think patriarchy is? If you think patriarchy is not as we’ve described, do you think there is any system in the world, such as we have just described, whether or not you would call it ‘patriarchy’? If yes, do you think the recognition of this system is politically important? If no, on what grounds do you deny the existence of any such system?
I like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s description of patriarchy in The Woman That Never Evolved as a patrilocal, patrilineal society with male-biased inheritance and an ideology of male authority. (This, of course, means that our society is not precisely a patriarchy, but rather a non-patriarchal society with certain ideological elements carried over from when it was a patriarchy.)
Of course, the “male” in patriarchy is not precisely the same thing as the biological sex male. Many patriarchal societies had third-gendered people who were not treated the same as men or women. Intersex people were generally classified as either male or female.
I believe our society is currently sexist in ways that harm women and ways that harm men (although in general sexism tends to harm men less severely than it harms women). Some forms of sexism, such as discrimination against pregnant people or the understudying of conditions that affect female-sexed people, affect people based on their sex. Some forms of sexism, such as sexual harassment or most forms of job discrimination, affect people based on the gender they are read as. Some forms of sexism, such as shame about being ‘slutty’ or socialization not to speak up about your preferences, affect people based on the gender they are socialized as; the way gender socialization affects trans people is complicated, as many trans people internalize norms applying to their identified gender rather than their assigned gender. I believe ignoring any form of sexism tends to harm your analysis.
4. Do you think facts about male physical development and gendered male socialisation have any causal connection to male violence patterns? If so, do you think this connection generally ceases to operate in the case of late-transitioning trans women? If so, what is your explanation for this fact? Is this an empirical question, in your view?
Sort of baffling that “men are inherently more violent because genetics” is a feminist position now but okay.
Transgender people’s gender socialization is complicated, as I said above. Many transgender people internalize the norms of their identified gender; of course, they are also affected by being raised as their assigned gender. As Stock acknowledges with the phrase “late-transitioning”, many transgender people have lived decades as their identified gender and were socialized as that gender. I believe it is most accurate to characterize trans women’s socialization not as male socialization but as transgender female socialization.
Biomedical transition affects a person’s sex. To the extent that men’s propensity towards violence is caused by testosterone, trans women on HRT would not be affected by it. Surgery which removes the testicles often leaves trans women with lower testosterone levels than cis women. Of course, to the extent that it’s caused by some other factor– a Y chromosome, early-life exposure to testosterone– it would not be affected.
Of course, this is an empirical matter. But the studies need to be conducted carefully. Trans women are a marginalized group; trans women are discriminated against in the workplace, are more likely than cis women to use drugs or do sex work, and experience violent crimes at an elevated level. If not carefully done, studies would show nothing more than the fact that drug addicts, sex workers, and people who can’t get legal jobs do more crimes.
5. If you think that the existence of people with Differences of Sexual Development (sometimes “disorders of sexual development” or “intersex”) shows something about whether trans women are literally women, what is it? Please lay this out clearly, in stages, with no skipping.
Human sex is bimodal. Most people are pretty easily classified as “male” or “female.” (Of course, even people who are unambiguously male or female pretty often have sex characteristics associated with the other sex: dyadic cis women of some ethnicities and with certain medical conditions grow facial hair; some dyadic cis men have breasts. These conditions often cause shame, and people with sex-nonconforming bodies are pressured to change them, often in ways that are expensive or painful. One would hope a gender-critical feminist would be sufficiently concerned about these unfair beauty standards to pause before making fun of the idea that a woman would have a beard.)
However, some people are not easily classified as male or female. We call these people “intersex.” They have some sex characteristics associated with one sex and some sex characteristics associated with a different sex.
Intersex people tend to complicate simplistic definitions of sex. For example, some people believe that a person with no Y chromosome is female, and a person with at least one Y chromosome is male. However, for many purposes, it makes sense to classify an intersex person as a member of a sex different than their chromosomal sex. In some cases, it is best to classify them as a member of the other primary sex: for example, an XY person with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) needs to be screened for breast cancer, just like an XX woman, and the vaginal tissue is elastic, like an XX woman’s. In other cases, it is best to classify them as their own thing: for example, unlike both male-sexed and female-sexed people, people with CAIS are infertile and should have their gonads removed to prevent cancer.
Biomedical transition is an artificially induced intersex condition. Just like naturally intersex people, we complicate a simplistic definition of sex. I have had top surgery and am on testosterone. In some ways, I am best classified as a woman: I can get pregnant. In other ways, I am best classified as a man: I am at very low risk of breast cancer. In still other ways, I am best classified as a third sex: I am at elevated risk for ovarian cancer, and my diabetes risk is between a male-sexed person’s and a female-sexed person’s. I am not literally the same thing as a cisgender man, but for many medical purposes I am best classified as a cisgender man.
6. Do you consider the question of the organisation of public spaces where people get undressed, sleep, or are otherwise vulnerable to aggression: a) a moral question of desert/ rights; or b) a practical question about how best to avoid violence and harm to members of certain groups?
I am unclear on the distinction you are making. Morally, people have a right to use public accommodations, such as bathrooms, hostels, and dormitories. People have a right to be free from violence and fear of violence. People also have a right to keep their private medical information private.
In some cases, these rights may trade off against each other. For example, a woman may be frightened when she sees a butch cis woman whom she reads as a man in the women’s bathroom. However, the butch cis woman also has a right to pee somewhere, and may herself be afraid of using the men’s restroom; she may also find it embarrassing and invalidating to use the men’s room due to her gender presentation.
Similarly, a woman might prefer not to share a locker room with a person who has a penis, even if that person is consistently read as a woman and changes in a stall. However, if the person with a penis used the men’s room, it would reveal to everyone private information about her genitalia and which surgeries she has had performed.
I believe the best way to manage these tradeoffs is to say that (a) everyone is entitled to use public accommodations and (b) people should, in general, use the public accommodation which causes the least trouble and disturbance for everyone involved. In general, this suggests that trans people who are pre-transition or very early in transition should use the accommodations associated with their assigned sex; those who pass more consistently should use the accommodations associated with their identified sex. Trans people should be mindful of the risk of harassment and violence they face in men’s accommodations; this may justify use of the women’s accommodations even if one is regularly read as male, for both trans men and trans women. People should avoid thinking about complete strangers’ genitalia, as that is creepy and invasive. I believe this is a sensible policy and one which was generally followed without problem before the invention of “bathroom bills.”
7. Do you think all spaces such as bathrooms, dormitories, hostels, showers, and prisons, should be completely mixed-sex? (i.e. that there should be no spaces from which trans women and “cis” men can be excluded, in principle?). If not, explain why “cis” men should be kept out of these spaces but not trans women*.
Providing information to complete strangers about your private medical history should not be a requirement to pee. Trans women who are consistently read as female and trans men who are consistently read as male exist. Therefore, at least some trans people should use the public accommodations of their preferred gender.
(Other cases, of course, can be handled on a case-by-case basis, as I suggested above.)
8. If you prefer to advocate for public policy which allows trans women into women-only spaces, rather than advocate for additional, third spaces — on what grounds do you think the former is a preferable option to the latter? Please try to give some consideration to religious women and women who are survivors of male violence in your answer.
Which trans people should be included in a women-only space depends on the purpose of the space. For example, one might create a woman-only munch, which is intended to include the sort of people lesbians would like to have sex with; this space would include cis women, trans women, and trans men. One might create a polycystic ovary syndrome support group, which would include cis women and trans men. One might create a group for people currently living as women, which would include cis women and trans women (and presumably some pre-everything trans men who would be asked to leave once they started to transition). One might have a women’s clothing swap group, which would include cis women and trans women. One might create a support group for cis women unlearning transmisogyny, which would (of course) include only cis women.
There is no substitute for thinking carefully about why a space is women-only and how including trans people would affect your space’s dynamics.
Some survivors of male violence may find penises or people they read as male triggering. However, most survivors of male violence do not. The physical features they find triggering may include certain accents, hair colors or styles, clothing, or physical builds. Is there a reason that the procedures used for women who are triggered by certain physical builds can’t be used for women who are triggered by people they read as certain sexes?
As I discussed above, some cis women are read as men. I myself pass as a man despite being, by Stock’s definitions, a woman. Are all women (or “women”) occasionally read as men to be excluded from women-only spaces that cater to survivors? I feel this is not very supportive to gender-non-conforming cis women or intersex people.
Religions may, of course, create whichever policies they like about transgender people. A space may consider welcomingness to religious people as one of its considerations when deciding what “woman-only” means in its context; this may mean transgender men are excluded from certain polycystic ovary syndrome support groups, while women of certain religions are excluded from others.
I am not aware of any religion that forbids peeing in a room in which people with penises occasionally also pee, but I believe (like kosher laws) perhaps society should not take on the burden of accommodating this.
Thing of Things 
I have no reason to disbelieve Ozy or others who have testified to the truth of this statement, but it still seems deeply strange to me.
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There was a King of the Hill episode that involved one.
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I think some of it is the expectation that women not wear the same piece of formal or semi-formal clothing in front of the same audience. My wife and I go to a particular dance most years, and it’s not a big deal if I wear the same suit, but she likes to wear a different dress, so some years, she borrows something from a friend.
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What about it is strange? Lots of people do not wear out their clothes but still like to buy something new occasionally. Then there are changing job requirements/dresscodes, weight gain and loss and general permanent changes of shape after things like pregnancies or menopause. Clothes swap is ideal for people who don’t follow the latest fashions – you can turn the deadweight in your wardrobe into functional stuff for free while allowing others to do the same! Win-win! Like a thrift shop without the actual shop.
Of course, these are clothes swap meets where you go with, say, 10 old pieces and try to find 10 new ones to keep forever. Not ‘yay we’re besties who wear the same size so let’s raid each other’s closets before a night on the town’.
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Weight changes make sense to me, but seem infrequent/unpredictible enough that I wouldn’t think to form a group around a response. As far as general wardrobe changes, I generally add things without removing clothing that’s already there, and if I remove stuff, it’s generally because the clothing in question is pretty much no longer wearable, or not wearable in public. It’s very rare for me to say, “I have no interest in wearing this shirt, but it’s still something worth gifting to someone.”
Thrift shops and the like seem perfectly sensible to me, but there’s an implied centrality or social element to the clothing swaps that have come up in the past here that is just very foreign to me.
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@gazeboist
There seems to be a pattern where women are more likely to do things with female friends/co-workers that don’t necessarily need that, for example:
– going to the bathroom together
– going shopping together
– exercising
– tupperware parties and modern equivalents that only seem to target women
There is a large difference between men and women (on average) when it comes to system- vs people-orientation. Perhaps this explains it, where women are more likely to combine socializing with other things, while men tend to be more purely task-oriented.
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@gazeboist,
Apparently, most people only wear 20% of their clothes? People gravitate to only those clothes that really suit them or are really comfy and the rest just languishes. (I don’t understand that either, but I’m atypical and I know it. Still, even for someone with a very small wardrobe, I do have a lot of clothes that I don’t wear – usually gifts of new clothes from my mom who likes to buy clothes and then not wear them.) The advantage of a clothes swap over a thrift shop is that you don’t just get to take home new stuff for cheap, the deadline of the swap also gives you an impulse to sort through and get rid of the things you have but don’t wear.
A friend of mine attends clothes swaps a lot (she has a LOT of clothes and has gained some weight over the years, so the stuff from 10-15 years ago doesn’t fit right anymore – weight gain does tend to go in one direction for most people). They’re not really a social thing per se – you spend time looking for clothes, not chatting, and you don’t really know everyone there. They did start in a social group (in her case, the social dance group she attends), but the idea is to invite people in your own social circle with roughly the same taste in clothes (in this case, alternative-ish rather than business formal or preppy) to maximize the chance of everyone finding something.
I don’t know what they do with the leftovers but I assume donate to a thrift shop. So a clothes swap is basically a thrift shop with a deadline and higher chances of success. Clothes swaps are thriving in this age of decluttering.
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@mircea that makes more sense than the way I was thinking about it, thanks.
@aapje – That reminds me of an odd thing I’ve noticed about myself: I (male) tend to look for excuses / reasons / things to do when I want to hang out with friends, evenif all I really want to do is spend time with certain people. With male friends I basically always do this, and I do it more with female friends than they do it with me. It’s not a matter of me wanting a thing to do; I’m perfectly happy to spend a few hours in a semi-private place chatting about whatever happens to come up, and that’s often what I’m really seeking when I set up social things. Rather, especially with other men, I feel like there needs to be some organizing principal to what we’re doing or … I don’t know. Or else, to be dramatic about it.
This is about the only thing I’ve noted in my own life that seems like a real difference between genders, or in how I relate to people of different genders, as opposed to a rate difference (eg I expect more ment than women to show up to a boardgame event, but I expect them to be fundamentally the same when they get there).
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Aapje —
If you really want to dig into why women do this, it would also be necessary to ask questions like “why do people go to each other’s houses and eat, why don’t they just eat the easiest-to-prepare food at home?” The answer is that activities can have both a practical and a social element, or they can be normally practical but occasionally done in a social manner, also. The real question may be why it’s not socially acceptable for men to turn necessary shopping into a social activity under nearly any circumstances.
Also, sometimes social shopping and serious shopping are entirely separate, or only slightly overlap, and don’t tend to resemble each other. When my friends and I go shopping*, I have little expectation that I’ll get any serious shopping done. Maybe buy something nice that I semi-“needed” if I happen to see it (perfume, a dress, etc), but nothing particularly practical that I would necessarily have on a “shopping list”. Except in a conceptual sense, e.g. say I was going to my cousin’s wedding, “helping qty-pls pick a dress to wear to the wedding” would be a fun element to the shopping.
On the other hand, all of my grocery shopping (as well as pharmacy, etc), and most of my shopping for workwear, is done in a largely practical way. Often online (inc. groceries) if it’s not clothes, otherwise in person with a shopping list. Sure, you don’t know exactly what clothes the shop will have, and you might buy something unexpected, but with a list like “two pairs of slacks for work, jacket, approx. six additional pairs of socks”. Mostly I do this by doing one “pass” of the store or mall trying things on, then sit down, think/decide, and go back and buy the best things (unless one particular item is obviously perfect in all respects, in which case the search is over early and I buy it).
As I have never seen my friends buy stuff like socks, work slacks, etc. on our social shopping trips, I assume that they also do this individually and in a similarly practical manner.
*For some reason, I mostly do this with my old high school friends even though we are relatively unfeminine — I’d say it’s a throwback to when we were in HS and would just walk around Kmart playing with random sports equipment or trying on clothes for fun, because we had no money to do actual social activities like go to the movies, or we HAD gone to the cinema in the mall and wanted to keep hanging out for longer.
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gazeboist — I’d say your concept of needing/wanting to do something to have an excuse for socialising, is quite similar to the reason why women “go shopping together” (and then end up talking for ages either while they’re doing it, or after adjourning to a mall cafe). The idea of a social event explicitly geared around and intentionally designed to be sitting and talking may be intimidating to many people, perhaps unconsciously, leading to these pretexts for socialising.
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What are the reasons one have to believe that ? And what are the reasons one have to believe that this matter enough to have it as a core tenet of a political ideology ?
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My intuition is that this is true, but I’m not sure how you could possibly measure it.
It’s probably best to say “both have been harmed” rather than to get into a fight over who has been harmed more.
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My view is that this is comparing apples and golf balls* (is a lack of intimacy worse or not as bad as excess and unpleasant sexual attention?), with a hefty dose of uncertainty. For example, does the average, more stoic man suffer less than the average, less stoic woman? Men report less suffering, but it matters a great deal whether this is denial that nevertheless results in despair and pain, or whether stoicism actually works well to reduce suffering.
So I see the claim that men or women suffer more as ideologically motivated, where it typically exemplifies a ‘grass is greener’ fallacy. You see this on both sides, with the issues of men and women, respectively, being dismissed as being relatively inconsequential compared to their privileges.
* Apples and oranges are far too similar
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This seems to be trying to sneak in the Problem of Other Minds.
If 2 people claim their favorite color is red how can we be sure they’re talking about the same color!!!?! [dramatic music intensifies]
I’m willing to bet there’s like an entire church worth of born again trans people somewhere who are massively big on transmisogyny.
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Sure, but they’re definitionally not cis, and thus plausibly have different transmisogyny-related needs compared to cis women.
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If 2 people claim their favorite color is red how can we be sure they’re talking about the same color!
Ask them to each pick their favourite colour on a computer screen, note down the RGB values and calculate the squared differences? (You’ll never be sure of course, but you can increase your confidence levels).
Words are meant to convey information that is useful to both the speaker and the listener. Some sort of agreement about what words refer to is therefore useful, even if you can never be totally sure it’s shared.
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Eh, I still think you’re dodging the hard questions around #2.
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Quite a few of those answers had nothing to do to the questions which they followed.
However, I’m assuming that since Ozy considers the questions strawmanny, they have no problem with strawmanning them right back.
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I found this a frustrating post. I had read the original question series when it first came out (linked through other trans advocates’ responses) and I was happy to hear Ozy was tangling with it. But I don’t think anyone would really call most of these “answers”. And having seen Ozy’s ability at writing elsewhere on the blog, I wish Ozy had been more direct–these responses seem pretty dodgy.
It’s more like reading a political debate, where the moderator asks “do you think we should build more nuclear power plants or not?” and the respondent starts talking about the wonders/horrors of capitalism without ever saying “yes, we should” or “no, we should not” as an opening.
Also, addressing some other commenters here: the fact that a question is HARD (which is to say it points out a logical or moral problem that backs you into a corner) or that it asks you to temporarily agree to use certain lingo,does not make the question unfair/straw/etc.
Asking a pro-lifer hard questions which tie together abortion rights and care for actual infants is hard, but fair. Right? It’s a real-life issue. Sure, pro-lifers usually don’t like getting into the details, but so be it, it’s not my job to solve their moral conflicts. Same with the reverse.
So it seems to me that someone is on the trans-access-everywhere side, or the self-ID-only side, they have some obligation to answer the hard (fair!) questions about how that will work. So do the no-trans-access and no-self-ID folks.
I don’t see Ozy doing that here very well.
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How is it dodging the question?
The answer is that it’s not relevant. It may be harmful to define ‘woman’ in a way that ties womanhood to femininity, but that doesn’t matter because trans people are not defining ‘woman’ in a way that ties it to femininity. Or, at least, many of them aren’t, and such a definition isn’t necessary for ‘transgender’ to be a meaningful concept that describes some people, so we can reject definitions that tie womanhood to femininity but still have a definition that allows for trans women to be women and trans men not to be women.
(Actually, scratch that. Is a definition of ‘woman’ that ties it to femininity bad? Yes, it’s bad for trans people, it’s bad from a trans rights perspective, because such a definition fails to work for stereotypically unfeminine trans women and stereotypically feminine trans men, and encourages people to reject trans people’s transness on account of them not following the stereotypes of their gender identity, while also perpetuating misconceptions about what it actually means to be trans and what trans people actually need (misconceptions that lead to people thinking, say, that the concept of ‘transgender’ perpetuates gender stereotypes).)
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I don’t understand this or don’t agree.
It seems to me that trans people tend to play into or against masculinity or femininity to get or not get gender stereotypes applied to them. The most basic is when people dress in a way that gets certain pronouns applied to them.
Every time a trans person puts on a dress and demands that they should be called ‘she’ for doing so, she works to reinforce the stereotype that a certain form of femininity (wearing a dress) is linked to womanhood.
Others, who demand being gendered differently from the easily changeable feminine/masculine signals they send, are anti-social, in my view, as they work to make stereotypes less useful (and thereby increasing the cognitive load on others), but without actually abandoning them: “I demand you stereotype me, but I won’t comply with the stereotype.”
This is anarchist behavior: “I don’t care about the upsides of existing society, let’s burn it down and hopefully from the ashes and skulls, something better will arise.”
It seems to me that the only people who truly separate gender and femininity/masculinity are those who:
– tell people their gender in non-feminine/masculine ways, for example by wearing clothing that says: “I am a (wo)man” or
– demand non-gendered pronouns & do not demand gendered privileges
This…does not seem that common.
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Well, gosh, then I must have hallucinated all the heartfelt articles by trans women about how they always wanted that ‘perfect Wendy Darling childhood’ instead of having to wear baseball pyjamas, or how they love dresses and makeup and long hair and all the rest of looking like a real woman, or all the ‘I’m having implants and the hormones are definitely making my skin softer’ talk.
Maybe it’s the wrong kind of trans people I’m reading online? You know, who talk about hating to have to play sports and wear boy’s clothes and be called a boy’s name when they really wanted to grow their hair and wear dresses and play with dolls as kids? It certainly looks like “being a woman” is strongly associated with a particular image of femininity for them, but what would I know?
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For one thing, that has nothing do with definitions. If someone feels they’re a girl/woman for reasons that have nothing to do with being stereotypically feminine, and also has particular ideas about feminine traits being associated with femaleness, they might end up wanting those traits, but that’s one possible consequence of being a woman, not a part of the definition. Some might also be stereotypically feminine if that’s the only way to convince people who don’t understand what it actually means to be trans, but instead have the incorrect woman = feminine definition, that they’re women, but, again, that’s a consequence of being transgender, and also a negative effect of people defining “woman” in terms of femininity.
For another… yes, maybe it is the wrong trans people you’re reading about. What you said doesn’t really sound like most of what I’ve heard from trans people, though I’m sure there are trans people like that somewhere. But what about the trans men who ask things like “I’ve always wanted to be a man, but I liked girly things like dolls as a kid, does this mean I’m not trans?” What about all the people who claim that geeky trans women aren’t really trans because they have supposedly “masculine” interests? What about the people who mostly experience physical dysphoria and can’t relate to all the social stuff (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one comment from such a person on this blog a while back)? Even if some trans people adhere to stereotypes… there are plenty that don’t.
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OK. Let me lay out the argument a bit more explicitly. Note that I’m going to present a fairly minimal version leaving out what I personally actually think. After all, Stock appears to be some sort of radical feminist, which I very definitely am not, so I don’t know that we would agree on much even if we could both be labeled “gender-critical”, and I’d like to focus on those parts I would expect Stock would be likely to agree with, rather than my own personal elaborations.
So, I think you’ve ignored the hard part of the last question. You’ve just sort of assumed that you can get everyone to accept these particular notions of male/female. But the hard part of the question is, what happens if you fail, and how likely is that scenario? What will your efforts actually generate?
These particular notions of male and female that are pushed by the transgender community have one glaring barrier to acceptance: they’re not grounded in anything. They’re just… floating concepts. People expect words to mean things, to be grounded in things. Now it’s probably true that most people are likely to accept a floating concept, a circularity, if the loop has sufficiently many steps; but that multiplicity of steps is distinctly lacking here.
So — if I were to play devil’s advocate, and attempt to provide a better answer to the question than I consider Ozy to have done, even as in reality I’m more on Stock’s side on this particular question — I would say that any answer would have to begin with, well, we’ll have to make explicit the idea of a floating concept and get people to accept that it’s OK.
(One reason I respect Ozy so much is that they’re generally quite willing to make explicit such often-implicit notions — and then explicitly bite the bullet on them — and I don’t think they succeeded at that here.)
But, back to arguing my own side — why do I say that an answer would have to include that? What happens if you don’t? (Which people mostly aren’t?)
The thing is, if someone has an implicit assumption, it’s hard to get them to question it unless you challenge it explicitly. If you merely say things that don’t jibe with it, well, people will attempt to make it jibe all the same.
So. Like I said. People expect words to mean things. For concepts to be grounded. What can the notions of “male” and “female” be grounded in?
Well, they could be grounded in physiology. Or, they could be grounded in behavior. That’s… pretty much all the options. If there are others (that are actual groundings and not circular!), they’re a hell of a lot less salient. These are the two that people will think of.
So, if you tell people it’s not about physiology, they’ll conclude it’s about behavior. And if you tell people it’s not about behavior, they’ll conclude it’s about physiology. Sure, you may try to say it’s about neither, but (without an explicit challenge to the idea that concepts must be grounded) people won’t accept that. They’ll slide towards one or the other. And since the transgender “it’s not about physiology” messaging is much more visible and central, and the things that you want to claim it is about are… kind of confusing but are more easily misunderstood as behavior than as physiology, it’s clear what the overall effect of the message will be: Gender is about behavior. A message which, as has been noted, reinforces stereotypes, in a number of ways, all of which are bad.
As I said, I want to stick to claims that I expect Stock would also agree with, so I’ll stop there rather than get into my personal thoughts on the matter or attempt to elaborate the argument further. But that’s the minimal form of the argument — that, sure, the way transgender activists are defining male/female may not reinforce stereotypes if properly understood, but what happens if it’s properly understood doesn’t matter, because it isn’t going to be properly understood. You have to consider the results of how it will be understood, not how you intend it to be.
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@sniffnoy
There is also the issue that for most people, if not nearly everyone (including very many feminists if you look at actual behaviors), gender involves a set of rights and obligations. Then it’s important that people have a relatively fixed category to which they belong, both to prevent profiteering, where people pick the gender that is most convenient for the occasion, but also to clarify to others what obligations and rights they have when interacting with the person.
After all, in a social contract, one person’s right is often another person’s obligation and vice versa.
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@sniffnoy:
There can be definitions of gender that are grounded in physiology but aren’t the same as physiology (and therefore can accept trans women as women and trans men as men), things along the lines of “what sex one would prefer to be”, and that sort of definition is what I prefer. Even social dysphoria can be defined in terms of physiology, in that people want to be treated as if they were a particular sex, or are uncomfortable with anything that happens because they’re a particular sex, or something of that nature. (I think this better explains things like dysphoria over pronouns or being included in “Women in ____” groups or which bathroom they use than a definition grounded in masculine/feminine behaviors would.)
(My preferred definition is “What sex a person expects to be”, but that’s because that’s what I think the underlying cause is (approximately) like. I have reasons that I think that, but it’s possible I’m wrong, so it might not be good as a definition.)
I don’t like floating concept–based definitions for reasons similar to what you talked about in your comment. When I first heard about trans issues, I only came across floating concept–based and behavior-based definitions (and definitions that were too vague to even tell), and at the time I was extremely anti–gender role and anti–gender stereotype, so the behavior definitions felt like they were assuming the validity of and/or reinforcing stereotypes, and I want words to mean things, so the floating concept definitions felt circular and nonsensical.
There’s another reason that I didn’t like those definitions, which is that it made it hard for me to tell what my gender is. If you say “A smeerb is someone who identifies as a smeerb” (and I’ve never heard of smeerbs before), that doesn’t help me determine whether I should identify as one; if you say that “woman” is not “person with a vagina” (so presumably it’s instead some new concept that I don’t yet know about), then “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman” puts me in that same position as I would be with “smeerb”. Behavior definitions weren’t helpful either, because no one ever said which behaviors (or thought patterns or whatever) made someone male or female. (I assume that if there are differences between genders, at least some gender stereotypes are either wrong or purely due to society enforcing them, and there are probably at least some subtle differences that society hasn’t explicitly noticed. There are differences ≠ the differences are exactly what society says they are.)
This made me uncomfortable around discussions of trans issues for several years, until I encountered various descriptions of what trans people experience that suggested the sort of grounded-in-physiology-but-not-physiology definitions I discussed above, at which point I was like, “Oh, that makes sense. …maybe I’m trans.” (except over the course of a couple years).
And this is why I think we need more “It’s not about behavior” messaging, and why I sometimes reply to comments that seem to be assuming it’s about behavior with, essentially, “no, you’re wrong”.
(Also, regarding your last paragraph: It’s entirely possible for the truth to be hard to understand, or hard to explain in ways that don’t cause misunderstandings. Just like how people, say, misunderstanding evolution in various ways doesn’t mean evolution isn’t real, people misunderstanding gender doesn’t mean gender isn’t real. Perhaps there should also be more “gender isn’t something you already know about” or “gender is unintuitive” messaging.)
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It may be harmful to define ‘woman’ in a way that ties womanhood to femininity, but that doesn’t matter because trans people are not defining ‘woman’ in a way that ties it to femininity
But language is a social construct. No one gets to define what a word means to other people independent of all other understandings. “Man” and “woman” already have meanings, ones tied to biology and social roles (e.g.. masculinity/feminity). Now some trans people want to both take away the biological meaning and the social one. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to ignore all the other meanings. (And, if you want words that doesn’t imply biology and doesn’t imply social gender, why on earth pick existing ones? There’s trans people who say they feel terrible if someone calls them the wrong word, whuch seems pretty implausible if this is just some floating word with no attachment to either biological or social meanings).
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> And, if you want words that doesn’t imply biology and doesn’t imply social gender, why on earth pick existing ones? There’s trans people who say they feel terrible if someone calls them the wrong word, whuch seems pretty implausible if this is just some floating word with no attachment to either biological or social meanings
Like I said in my previous post, I’m not treating it as a floating word with no attachment to its biological meaning.
For me, personally, my main issue is that I know that I’m not supposed to be a person with a penis, with masculine facial features, who can grow facial hair, etc., and part of that is that I don’t want to be called any word that means a person with those features, no matter what that word is. I associate the word “man” with certain physical features, and when I imagine a “man”, I know that isn’t me. For me, it makes sense to say that I’m using the usual, physical definition of “man”, but disagreeing about what is “me”: a man is a person with a penis, and there is a penis hanging off of this body I’m inhabiting, but that penis isn’t mine, this body isn’t mine. I’m a person with a differently-shaped, more feminine body, but somehow that body doesn’t seem to exist, at least not yet.
Other trans people have different feelings, and I’m sure there are trans people for whom a floating word or social/behavioral definition would work better for expressing how they view their gender. I do know that being called the wrong thing does cause dysphoria even for people who don’t see gender the way I do, but I’m probably not the best person to explain why; I know my own experiences best. (I have my suspicions that something like what I described in the previous paragraph is going on subconsciously even for people who don’t consciously see it that way, but I’m not sure about that.)
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@chridd: that’s all very well for you, but language is a means of communicating between people. If a significant number of people want to talk about the cluster concepts that make up biological sex, they’ll come up with words to do so, which presumably will make you feel the same way as “man” does when they’re used in a way that includes you. If said people want to talk about the social expectations that tend to go along with the biological sex clusters, they’ll again use words to do so. These may involve shifting the meaning of existing words in ways unintended by the subgroup who formed the existing words initially. In other words, that you want a word to be used in a certain way doesn’t mean that that will happen.
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chridd: So, finally getting back to this — and now speaking for myself rather than Stock —
That’s an interesting approach, and I agree that, postulating that it works, it addresses (or at least mostly addresses) my concerns. (I haven’t actually stated all my concerns, seeing as I wasn’t quite writing for myself above, but I’ll skip going into that for now.) Problem is, I don’t think that postulate holds. I do not think it is actually the case that transgenderism can in general be glossed as wanting to be of a different sex; if that were the case, the world would look substantially different. I agree that there are transgender people who fit that minimal description, but it seems that there is a large fraction for which it really is primarily a social matter, who really do have and accept this floating-social-gender concept, and who really are interested primarily not in altering their body but rather how they are thought of and referred to. Which seems to put us back to square 1, unfortunately.
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@sniffnoy:
(Most of my comments here, including this one, have been speaking for myself.)
“What sex one would prefer to be” was just an example of the sort of thing that I meant by “grounded in physiology but not physiology”; an actual definition would probably be more complicated, especially since it would have to account for both trans people who experience only physical dysphoria and trans people who experience only social dysphoria. (Possibly too complicated to try and work out in blog comments, but that’s not going to prevent me from trying;)
Perhaps a definition in terms of social dysphoria would be something like “prefers to be put in the same category as most people of ___ physiological sex”, which is also not a floating concept and is defined in terms of physiological sex. (Note that the category of people who want to be in a particular category ≠ the category they want to be in; it may be that the latter category is a floating concept and the former category isn’t. That the categories are different is basically the same as saying that people sometimes misgender people.)
These would need to be combined somehow; the simplest way would be “prefers to be ___ sex and/or be put in the same category as people of ___ sex”. (Maybe something like “prefers things to be more like they would be if they were ___ sex” could cover both? Though that might also incorrectly identify e.g. cis female feminists who want less sexism as trans.) These definitions allow for various causes (e.g., one can prefer to be a different sex for social reasons).
Regarding possible cause-specific definitions, I also have a more complicated one that I suspect might be a closer approximation to how it works than the previous one I gave: “instinctively puts oneself in the same category that they instinctively put people of ____ physiological sex”. If all instincts remain intact, this is the same as “instinctively thinks of oneself as ___ sex” (≈ “expects to be ___”), but perhaps it’s possible to partially or completely override the instincts connecting physical sex to categories, leaving those categories as floating concepts for those people. (This might happen if they observe e.g. their instincts tell them only men grow facial hair, they’re a woman, and they’re growing facial hair, so something must be wrong; which part of that they identify as wrong determines if they have physical dysphoria or think of gender as a floating category.) (Again, people with the instinct ≠ the categories the instincts refer to; the latter may be a floating category for some people, the former isn’t.) (This is still fairly speculation-y.)
(One of my issues with the floating concept model is the question of how a person learns the name for a floating concept—i.e., if you feel “I am [floating concept]”, why would you associate the word “girl” with that floating concept? The model I just talked about answers this by saying that the concept was originally at least partly grounded when the person learned the word.)
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What is the hard question in 2?
you think that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ gender stereotypes are bad and should be changed and/or reduced?
Sometimes, yeah. They’re obviously important categories culturally and biologically (kids in the 3-5-year-old range generally go completely overboard with their gender presentation before they learn nuance, a drive that’s probably innate) but parts of them are damaging to either the people pointed at by the stereotype or to everyone else. I personally don’t mind the existence of stereotypes (like it’d be possible to do away with them altogether), but there’s a difference between ‘this person wears a dress and has long, well-groomed hair, so is probably a woman’ and ‘you are a woman so you should have long, well-groomed hair and wear a dress.’
If so, do you also think we should accept an account of ‘woman’ that ties womanhood to a feeling that the gender stereotypes typically associated with being female apply to oneself?
I don’t even know what that means. If there’s a person saying ‘I love floral-scented shower gels over ocean-scented shower gels, and that’s how I know I’m a woman’, I’d see that person as naive, shallow and ill-considered and would hope they weren’t going to base any big life decisions on that throught process alone. But so many people base big life decisions on naive, shallow and ill-considered ideas that I don’t think this is a special category. Just general all-purpose human stupidity.
Still, if you’re a cis girl and you love dolls, princess dresses, playing house, braiding hair, singing and dancing, glitter, cooking and pretty things and you want to be just like mom when you grow up (never mind that mom probably works outside the home and doesn’t spend all that much time wearing princess dresses, singing and dancing or covered in glitter), people will tell you ‘that’s because you’re a girl.’ Culture tells us to derive information about our gender identity from stereotypes (plus some biology, but that’s not what gets reinforced), so it’s a bit twee to suddenly look askance at trans people who do the same.
Do you see a tension there?
Not really. If all trans people were going to go full stereotypical lady/gentleman and then proceed to ‘kick out’ cis people from ‘their’ gender category, that might be a source of tension. But they don’t; there’s lots of variety among trans people and I’ve never been treated differently just because there exist trans women who do the whole ‘woman’ thing better than I do. Trans people aren’t in power here. Besides, since passing is kinda important for trans people who want good treatment from society (or rather, not passing can be bloody dangerous), it’d be weird if they didn’t try to pass or even overcompensate.
How does this strategy avoid conservatively reinforcing the association of womanhood with femininity?
What strategy?
It’s not trans people who are driving the association of womanhood (sex) with femininity (gender). It’s everyone. Regardless of what it is that makes trans people trans, they’re just taking their cues from wider society.
(At least, I imagine that a trans woman growing up in a society where women shave their heads and butcher animals and men wear elaborate braids and do caregiving for elders will long for that day when she can finally shave her head and take up the knife.)
There are many ways to be a woman. There are slightly fewer ways to be a man, but personally I think that’s one of those harmful stereotype elements. Just like the cissest of cis women doesn’t make my life as a nonconforming cis-ish woman more difficult as long as she doesn’t try to enforce her particular variety of womanhood, a trans woman who vows to only wear dresses until the day she dies doesn’t affect me either.
Ozy, side question – you say you’re probably best considered a cisgender man for medical purposes. Do you know if there is any research into how transness affects things like cardiovascular symptoms and risk of autoimmune disease? (If men generally get the ‘shooting pain in the left arm’ as a symptom of impending heart failure and women just feel like they’re coming down with the flu, where would clusters of trans people fall? I’d have no idea if that depends on current hormone status or prevailing hormone status before/during/after adolescence or the XX/XY body plan or something else altogether.)
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Telling trans people that they need to carry out individual assessments of whether their presence in a gendered washroom might disturb the cis users more than it would help them avoid harassment/dysphoria seems like exactly the sort of bad thinking Kelsey talks about in Meditations on Boundaries.
Consider: it would have been shortly after desegregation—and still is now—unreasonable to ask black customers to altruistically consider the disturbance they might cause in a white-dominated restaurant and weigh it against the benefit to them. Cis people should learn to deal with people who don’t look like them in public bathrooms.
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Personally, I think the problem would be vastly mitigated if fricken’ STALLS were a more universal social/architectural norm. I don’t particularly want to see the naughty bits of any of my fellow gym/pool/whatever users of any gender, and I don’t particularly want any of them to see mine.
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Yeah, and I’m not sure what the hell people who aren’t consistently read either way are supposed to do under this model.
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@loving-not-heyting
One of my objections to individualist, ‘free’ society without clear norms & rules is that it it leaves people without guidance of what is OK. Ironically, this benefits the privileged the most. They can get away with making up impromptu self-serving rules on the fly, while the less privileged can’t get away with this. The latter also have no recourse to objective authority to prevent others from making up oppressive rules or to be able to enforce rules that are in their favor.
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I never could understand what all the various fussing over bathroom laws was about. The only way most people are going to go “Hey, this is the ladies, you’re a bloke in a dress” is if you really do look like a bloke in a dress. And the few examples of people complaining about trans people in the wrong bathroom I’ve seen have been the “bloke in a dress” kind, not the “looked perfectly feminine until we dragged ‘her’ into the bathroom and stripped ‘her’ naked so we could tell” kind. And there have been some really shitty perverts trying to manipulate their way into women’s bathrooms via the “oh but I’m really trans, honest!” angle. (This is also the person who brought suits against 16 women in Canada for refusing to wax this person’s genitalia after this person clarified that they still had male genitalia).
If you do look like a bloke in a dress, then campaigning for laws about gender neutral spaces or making biological sex of origin an illegal category for designating areas are going to make it legal for you to go into the bathroom you want, but it’s not going to make anyone go “This person looks like a bloke in a dress but I’m convinced they’re really as much a real woman as I am”. I honestly don’t care one way or the other re: gender neutral bathrooms (except if there are urinals keep them out of line of sight), but even if we get every bathroom gender-neutral and anyone of any gender can use them, it’s not going to make non-passing people pass, and I don’t know how that will help them or not.
Though if it helps someone to go “Well I can legally use the ladies, so I’m a real lady!” while all the other women are thinking “Hmm, bloke in a dress, must be trans”, then fine, if it helps, it helps.
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Are you…under the impression that the only or even the main reason a trans woman would want to use the women’s bathroom is because it affirms her gender identity? Like, do you really think that someone who gets read as a “bloke in a dress” would be better off using the men’s room? That that wouldn’t be at all unsafe for her?
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I don’t think race maps well to gender. Even the most thorough misogynist/mysandrist has a father and a mother, and society contains numerous parents who adore their offspring of the opposite sex. Not to mention all the heterosexual people out there: as the old saying goes “The trouble with the Battle of the Sexes” is all the fraternising with the enemy”. Society isn’t going to rip itself apart over sex.
Not to mention that in your analogy, where does this leave trans people themselves? If other people shouldn’t care about whether someone is a man or a woman, why should anyone expect someone to take notice of their transition? “My feelings about my gender are deeply important and should be respected. Yours are prejudices that you should be ashamed of. Get over them.”
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Sort of baffling that “men are inherently more violent because genetics” is a feminist position now but okay.
As someone who was involved with Radical Feminism since before you were born, this position has been around since at least the Reagan administration, and the variant sans “because genetics” I’m pretty sure has been a feminist position since the invention of feminism.
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Andrea Dworkin certainly was arguing against it in the late 70s.
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Of course, since her brand literally forbade anything except politics as existing. If you read that letter, she specifically notes the ubiquity of the biological determinism within the membership’s paradigm and criticizes it not because it is untrue but because it is impolitic.
Biological determinism is “dangerous and deadly,” not false. Truth and falsity aren’t actually things that can be said to exist or used to evaluation. What can and must be utilized are the political implications, and since biological determinism is intrinsically tied to patriarchy, it must be rejected.
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The existence of people who consider themselves “gender abolitionists” but also think it’s really important to maintain institutions based on strict sex-based social segregation continues to be fascinating.
(Me, I bite the bullet: I am a (trans-friendly) gender abolitionist and because of that I really do think that all spaces such as bathrooms, dormitories, hostels, showers, and prisons should be completely mixed-sex AND completely mixed-gender, and furthermore I think segregating those spaces ultimately puts women in danger, as it’s one important way society constantly sends men and boys the message that they aren’t expected to behave themselves around women in these kinds of spaces.)
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The existence of people who consider themselves “gender abolitionists” but also think it’s really important to maintain institutions based on strict sex-based social segregation continues to be fascinating.
It’s actually pretty straightforward. Remember that the Radical in Radical Feminism isn’t a synonym of extreme, but a signifier of its relationship to Marxist politics. Just as a totalitarian stare is a prerequisite for the state to wither away after the taint of capitalism, So too is an absolute class segregation needed for women to develop into free beings.
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Reblogged this on Random Me.
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Yeah, I’m going to stop right there. If there isn’t a notion of gender identity, of “They say I’m gender A but I know I really am Gender B (or C, or ABC, or whatever”, then what is all the trouble about?
I have a particular blood group but I certainly don’t have any concept of “blood group identity”. However, if I went around wishing I was really O-, insisting to everyone that I was indeed O- and that biology didn’t matter, if I felt real hurt and pain and suffering over not being recognised as O-, underwent multiple blood transfusions and wanted bone marrow surgery so I could have ‘real’ O- blood of my own, and wanted everyone to introduce themselves with their blood group so as to avoid “mistyping” people…
… then I think most people are going to say “yeah, you know what? there’s a really strong concept of blood group identity going on there”.
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I also found this answer completely unsatisfying. “Gender identity” is the idea that trans activists push; it’s the one that will be taught in schools; it’s the one that everyone else is being told they must accept or face social and employment exclusion. Answering a question about it with “it’s unnecessary” seems really inadequate.
It’s almost as if Ozy agrees with the critics of trans activism. “Gender dysphoria is a thing, but gender identity is not a necessary or important concept” sounds more like the general viewpoint of critics of trans activism, not trans activists themselves.
I appreciate that Ozy’s views are often not precisely in line with either side of the overall culture war. But I interpret the intention behind this post as their attempt to represent anti-gender-critical feminists overall. Such an idiosyncratic answer seems to conflict with that intent.
The answer is just really confusing to me.
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I interpret it along the lines of “We should support trans rights regardless of whether gender identity exists”. It’s fairly certain that gender dysphoric people exists and that allowing them to transition both medically and socially will help them. It’s less certain why gender dysphoric people exist; it could be because of gender identity, it could be something else, but regardless of what it turns out to be we should still support people’s right to self-identify and transition. Does that make sense?
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@chridd: My criticisms are not that the answer, or your interpretation of it, are untrue. I’m not commenting on the truth or falsity of either. My criticisms are that Ozy’s answer a) does not answer the question and b) does not serve as a trans activist rejoinder to critics of trans activism, since trans activists consistently push gender identity as a true idea that their opponents and skeptics must accept.
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I’ll agree with you on a).
b)… I’m … not sure where you’re coming from?
Not everyone on any particular side of an issue necessarily agrees with everything people on that side say. Ozy is writing about their own views on the issue, and it seems they don’t agree with some other pro-trans people on how important having a concept of “gender identity” is to trans rights. (If it were me, I think gender identity does exist but my views on what it is would probably be controversial among pro-trans people.)
I don’t think that people answering questions like this need to be representing the typical view of their side. If multiple people answer the questions (which I assume is the intent), and they each answer with their own views, then you can get an idea of what sort of variation people on that side have, and common opinions will likely get represented somewhere.
And having and expressing views on one side of an issue that don’t rely on particular points made by that side is a good thing, since if it turns out that gender identity doesn’t exist, the important parts (access to transition, right to self-identify, bathroom rights, etc.) can still stand; and it means that you might be able to convince some people who you couldn’t convince that gender identity exists that trans rights are still important.
Considering other views is also helpful in finding out what’s actually true, since the truth might be more complex and nuanced than the common position of either side.
Also I’m not sure why you’re so concerned with activists in particular… it’s entirely possible that typical trans activist views aren’t representative of typical pro-trans views or typical views of trans people. (Maybe not on this issue, but on some issue.)
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Well, as a not very gender-conforming cis woman, gee thanks for your sweet concern, but in my own case I’d rather not be used as a figleaf for “and since I’m a bloke in a dress, you have therefore to give me the exact same rights as a cis woman since gender non-conforming cis women and intersex people exist!”
I suppose my greatest problem with the whole “I’m a trans woman which is precisely the same as a cis woman because I’ve always been a woman and even if I never transition I am a woman” thing is the sort of drag queen notion of femininity that accompanies it; to be a woman is to ape the attributes of the gender role apportioned to women at this period of time, so – long hair, slim attractive body, boobs and hips, show off your legs, wax to be hairless as possible, makeup and jewellery and perfume and high heels, sexy little bits of clothing, etc.
Some can pull it off better than others: if you’re young and reasonably slim and not too ugly as your original gender, you can fake it better (as well as that particular voice which some can pull off and others just sound like ‘guy trying to sound like woman by going high pitched’).
But as a not very gender etc. I don’t think that my not wearing high heels, sexy little bits of clothing, makeup and so on has much of anything to do with my womanhood. Now, sure, for trans women trying to pass (and we’ll keep any kind of psychoanalysis about autogynephilia out of it), then wearing the attributes coded “female/feminine” in our society will help them pass, but that’s not what being a woman is.
And the wistful memories of “when I was (forced to be) a boy, I wanted that Wendy Darling girlhood” simply evokes in me “I didn’t have that Wendy Darling girlhood, a lot of women didn’t have it, you’re chasing something that never existed”.
So, yeah. I don’t know. You want to roleplay as a woman or a man or as both/neither/inbetween, okay. Live and let live. But insisting I believe in my innermost being that “we have always been at war with Eastasia, you have always been a woman and there’s no difference” – no. Not me. Maybe the new generation will take to this like a duck to water, but I can’t pretend a stone is a leaf.
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“For example, one might create a woman-only munch, which is intended to include the sort of people lesbians would like to have sex with; this space would include cis women, trans women, and trans men.”
This does seem like an accurate description. I prefer partners who are into men, to the point where I cringe hearing about how some lesbians like trans men. But I can manage this discomfort by not going to women-only sex munches, I guess. I don’t have to get all “the myth of consensual lesbian/trans guy sex”. (“Isn’t there someone you forgot to ask”, etc.)
(Though I think some people underestimate the frequency with which compatibility issues arise in lesbian/trans guy relationships. But honestly if you are in such a relationship and it works well for you, cool.)
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Sort of baffling that “men are inherently more violent because genetics” is a feminist position now but okay.
This is being a little uncharitable. Saying that men tend to be more violent due to genetics, is a long way from the nonsensical claim that men are inherently more violent (whether because of genetics or not). There’s a big difference between a claim that something is has biological factors as a cause, vs the claim that it’s nonsensical “inherence”.
(OK, I guess really this is just Ozy misusing the word “inherent”, but, I think this is worth being a stickler about. 😛 )
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What doesn ‘inherent’ mean, anyway?
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Arguably, some enculturated behavior can no longer be changed and has become inherent.
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I mean to my mind, to say something is “inherent” means it’s, um, basically magic. That there’s no causal chain, that it’s just part of the thing’s essence (essences don’t actually exist, in case that’s not clear). If we say, for instance, that A is inherently more violent than B, that means that it doesn’t matter how much violence B actually comments, or how little A does — A is just inherently more violent. It’s part of A’s essence, you see.
Is this a stupid way of thinking about basically anything? Yes! So what’s the point of the word then? Well, because essentialist thinking is very common despite how stupid it is (I mean, it’s kind of built into our brains). So I think we should allow “inherent” to mean that, even though inherence doesn’t occur, because I think people really do think it occurs.
I mean I guess the notion of inherence is maybe fine for cases like, say, inherent angular momentum. But above the level of fundamental physics, things don’t inhere.
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@sniffjoy
Inherent means “existing in something as a permanent, essential, or characteristic attribute.”
None of that prevents the existence of a causal mechanism nor does it make the cause of the inherent attribute unknowable. It also doesn’t require presence in all members of a group, if one used the ‘characteristic’ meaning.
Of course many people make the mistake of thinking that many things are more permanent, essential, or characteristic than they are, but many people also make the opposite mistake (blank slateism).
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But a social gender is a social construct: for someone to change their social gender requires other people to change too. And gender is an important social construct: should, say, a police officer who says that they identify as female therefore be therefore allowed to strip search women in police custody? Or let’s say that George W. Bush suddenly came out as a trans woman. Would it be informative to describe him as the first woman President of the USA in line with how Margaret Thatcher was the first woman Prime Minister of the UK?
blockquote>People should avoid thinking about complete strangers’ genitalia, as that is creepy and invasive.
On the other hand, flashers are a thing: there’s a non-zero number of men who want to show their genitalia to complete strangers. I presume you would agree that it’s hardly invasive nor creepy to think about a thing that has just been deliberately thrust into your visual field.
I think for me with bathrooms and other intimate spaces: who gets the benefit of the doubt? If two people come running out of the women’s changing rooms, one accusing the other of flashing, and the other making a counter-accusation of transphobia, and there’s no witnesses, what happens next? You yourself state that trans people are at greater risk of being harassed if they use the men’s bathrooms or changing rooms, and it doesn’t take a complete cynic to believe that some men will take advantage of different social mores to move that harassment into the women’s. (And if men aren’t more prone to violence than women, why should trans people be mindful of the greater likelihood of violence in men’s accommodations?)
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