This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Like most people I keep multiple different definitions in my head. Eg a grandma is someone with grey hair who is retired, loves cooking and spoiling her grandkids and all the other stereotypes, and a grandmother is someone whose children have children of their own. So Tina Turner is a grandma even if she doesn’t act grandma-ly.
In the case of woman/man, I generally go with what people tell me about what they are. However, I am well aware that historically, being a woman or a man was about external body parts, and if you got classified as a woman you were subject to various social definitions, if you got classified as a man you were subject to the draft or press-ganging, personal identity had nothing to do with it, barring some exceptional cases. So I switch between meanings depending on context.
I also am well aware that a binary definition does not cover everyone, some people identity as genders other than the binary, some people physically are inter-sex. I don’t think we will ever have words, or even short noun phrases, that cover every single possible case.
What’s your opinion of the cotton ceiling?
I think the cotton ceiling was the unfortunate intersection of two principles, both good in themselves. One, that people should avoid prejudice and discriminating on irrelevant grounds, and the other, that anything remotely like shame in relation to sexual preferences should be avoided. Sex should be about fun and pleasure, and violent language like “breaking down barriers” only used where both parties want it.
If you look at what advertisers do, they present their products as fulfilling existing needs or wants of the people they’re selling to, not as the needs or wants of the seller. A much better approach to trans women’s concerns would have been to focus on telling stories, and encouraging key idea makers, to produce stories, about trans women in happy romantic relationships and as attractive partners, and criticising only people who dispute others’ claim to be lesbian or whatever because they’re in a trans-relationship. There’s nothing sexy about obligations.
On the other hand, there was definitely ridiculous overreaction by radical feminists to the cotton ceilings, which should not happen, and is terribly abrasive to the public discourse.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
A combination of factors I think. Programming is something you can do without navigating social situations. (I got into it when I was forced to spend weeks as a kid off school lying down with my foot elevated.) So it’s a natural place for kids who get bullied, and kids who get bullied tend to have something odd about them (as a kid, a lot of other kids tried to bully me).
It’s also a good career for people who can be happy inside their heads, which goes with a strong inward focus, and perhaps also the willingness to take on prejudice that transwomen face, or have faced. It’s easier to defy social norms if you don’t face them all the time.
And, it’s intellectually demanding of precision. “feelings” that some code is wrong or something have their place, but feelings don’t debug code. Working through implications rigourously is important.
So several reasons.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
A full explanation of the whys of trans men of course depends on proper research being carried out. But in the meantime I will speculate. There’s nothing I can think of in the laws of the universe that says that women (in sense 3) can’t be auto-androphilic, nor that they can’t find transitioning to men (in sense 1) attractive for social reasons.
There are more social advantages to people who are perceived as female to transition to male as well in our often sexist society. Which is another incentive for trans men to transition.
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Women are adult female humans. Men are adult male humans. Not that complicated.
Now, “female” and “male” are not absolutely rigid descriptors. Sexual differentiation begins at a very early stage of embryo development, and a lot of things can interfere with the process. Some people get an extra sex chromosome. Some people with XY chromosomes have a metabolism that does not respond to androgens. Or they could have 5-alpha- reductase deficiency (5-ARD) which causes them to appear female from birth until puberty hits and they suddenly masculinize. If you’re reading these threads you’ve probably heard of a dozen intersex conditions like this. (The term hermaphroditic, alas, has long since met its grisly death in the gears of the euphemism treadmill.)
In the last few generations, children born with ambiguous genitalia or other intersex conditions were surgically ‘corrected’ (where applicable) and raised as one or the other. Some of these individuals who found out came forward to say that this compromised their right to autonomy. (Not all of them find out, and there are surely plenty among us living, for now, in blissful ignorance.)
For the most part, I’m a fan of autonomy. If an intersexed person decides that they align more with men, or with women, or somewhere in between, they should be welcome to figure it out on their own and stick with what makes them more comfortable.
But that’s not who we’re talking about. No, we’re talking about chromosomally normal men, and chromosomally normal women, apparently fertile and healthy, who decide that they were meant to live as the opposite sex. (There’s a handful of individuals who want to identify as some kind of neuter, androgyne or ‘non-binary’ being, but that’s getting into the margins of an already very small niche.)
With today’s resources, it’s possible to manipulate the body’s chemistry, or, more crudely, its anatomy. Drugs can suppress hormone expression or launch it into overdrive. We can manufacture artificial hormones and administer them. We can cut into your body and twist it with a scalpel. Can we turn men into women, and women to men? Well… soooorta. MtFs can never bear their own children, and FtMs can never sire them. Which flies in the face of what males and females are supposed to be for. But that huge caveat aside, the best luck and medical science looks capable of “really” changing one’s sex, at least to the point where only a philosopher with a medical license would be qualified to argue.
Some people go for it. The reigning orthodoxy is that we have some kind of inner brain-to-body map, usually said to be molded by pre-natal hormones, and that trans people ended up with the wrong one.
But color me skeptical. I don’t ‘feel’ like a man. I am one. It’s a physical attribute, like having two arms or wavy hair. “Man” is a category defined by my presence in it, not vice-versa. Sometimes I like that I’m a man. Sometimes I don’t. But usually it doesn’t even cross my mind, because my sex is completely irrelevant to most of life’s endeavors.
Yet I’ve heard stories from trans people so caught up in their ‘body map’ that they tried to cut off their gonads or crush them with rocks, or bind them or tuck them or whatever and it makes me think gaahhh what the fuck that’s your OWN BODY what in the hell is WRONG with you? And we’re to believe this is a normal thing that could just happen to anybody? Look, if the theory is true then everything has a body map, there should be dysphoric lab rats and wolves and monkeys trying to chew off their sex organs. And we don’t see it.
I don’t think transness is about becoming something you are. It’s about becoming something you aren’t. And for a lot of MtFs it’s about becoming a fuckable woman.
I have no reason to believe most men would mind being a woman. I wouldn’t. Obviously it’s not something cis people bring up for conversation, but in certain contexts (describing the clownfish, say, or a hermaphromorphic android shell in an RPG) my guy friends have hinted or said outright, apropos of nothing, they’d totally be down with that. (As one put it, “I’d never leave the house!”) And these are guys on the normie side of nerd-dom, not the kind of weirdos who hang around the LWsphere. The horror cis people are supposed to feel just isn’t there. Cis-by- default is the default.
But I should confess to something. I’m egg-mode trans. Probably. Because I’m part of Rashey Tumblr and plasticbrainy as fuck. And because for as long as I can remember, I’ve been getting my rocks off to TF-TG fetish shit on DeviantArt. Comic strips and dirty stories of men turning into women. Not just any men, and not just any women. Miserable unattractive gawky men, and gorgeous young nymphs whose self-esteem and sexual appetite runneth over. And Christ on a bike, are these forums crawling with dysphoric dudes. I would not be at all surprised if at least half of the artists and their clients were trans. In the better part of a decade I’ve seen… at least six?… TF artists announce their transition. In journals and comment chains, you see a lot of wobbling. Once they tip, they never return.
Their creations don’t always show people fucking, but all of it’s porn. It exists completely within a sexualized context. There are no illusions from anyone involved about why the artists are making it or what their audience is coming for.
A few ‘plotlines’ show up over and over. Best friends become romantic partners. Bullies become fawning groupies. The self-insert ‘victim’ of some curse is transformed utterly, their memories erased, reality itself re-written – and everything about their new life is inexplicably more fulfilling or promising than their old one. (Of course, they find time to fuck or masturbate.) The person they used to be is simply erased like they never existed; no one ever mourns their loss.
…Kind of fucked up, don’t you think? Fantasy is fantasy, but are you so surprised that people aren’t tripping over themselves to validate someone trying to make this degenerate affectation real?
“My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.” – Woody Allen
Still, nobody would do that just for a boner, right? I know what you’re probably thinking about me right now – ‘poor sad sack, he’s just trapped in the closet.’ Yeah, no – I don’t believe gender identity works like that, I doubt that anyone is inherently that attached to their ‘nads. Here’s a verbatim excerpt from a 2012 entry in my private journal (three months before “Cis by Default” was published, and years before I’d ever heard of it):
“Maybe I just don’t feel these things on the ‘deep’ level that some people do. I can’t imagine clinging to a self-label of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and pursuing it like a manly-man or a feminine woman or transitioning transsexual. I’m male because that’s simply what I am, and have always been.”
But you’re right – no one would transition just for a kink. You’d have to be crazy.
My incredibly volatile, politically incorrect hunch is that transitioning is a way to kill yourself without actually having to die. A mixture of suicidal ideation and putting the pussy on a pedestal. Don’t take my word for it: the metaphors are EVERYWHERE in the community. The new name and signifiers. “Look at it this way, you’re losing a son but gaining a daughter.” The dreaded faux pas – “deadnaming.” The butterfly iconography. Referring to the untransitioned as “eggs” – lifeless things that just haven’t hatched yet. THE RAMPANT SUICIDAL DEPRESSION.
You know how rich white people kill themselves more often than poor black people, even though it seems like their lives couldn’t possibly suck as much? But I bet poor people who are stuck in shitty situations think, ‘one day I could have money, and this will all be a bad memory.’ Their privileged counterparts feel like they already have everything – so they don’t have anything left.
If you’re a dude with this kink and you hate yourself, you’ve got one thing left. Hope they’re right when they say it works.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
Dysfunctional SJ power dynamics are the whole reason it exists in the first place. Looks like nobody wants to sleep in a bed that they’ve shat in.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
Programming is an attractive pastime for nerds. Nerds like abstract systems with lots of variables that can be tweaked to produce predictable, yet distinctively unique and complex results. It’s why they’re also disproportionately likely to take up an interest in fantasy worldbuilding, game rule systems, time travel, alien planets, and shape-shifted sex.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
And here we get to what’s supposed to be the other side of the dichotomy – trading ‘cis and gay’ for ‘trans and straight.’ Unlike the AGP side, I have no particular insight into the seedy underbelly here. I only know one or two (pre-anything) AFAB trans people, and I’m not sure what distinguishes them from butch lesbians other than their desire to have a penis. Which I suppose is all you really need, if you want it enough, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t.
Probably it’s just the mirror-image of what non-AGP MtFs experience. I disagree that non-AGP trans people are always gay (because clearly, some of them aren’t), but they definitely appear under-masculinized if AMAB and vice-versa. In my experience non-AGP transness tends to be co-morbid with a bunch of cluster A or cluster B disorders. (The LW- sphere suggests a connection to autism as well.) Honestly it doesn’t surprise me that much. Transness just compliments the rest of the badbrains. This is where the ‘trans-trender’ stereotype has the most play, I think; people who fit this umbrella tend to clump together and experiment with radical politics or psychoactive drug use, and it’s also where you get the peculiar group dynamics that reward the most outrageous or outré persona you can get away with.
Can we also acknowledge that everyone is prone to think the grass is greener? Especially in today’s fucked up climate. Who wants to be one of those unlovable, predatory, oppressive men? Who wants to be one of those objectified, victimized, defenseless women? It’s a miracle everybody hasn’t gone screwy. Maybe they have.
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Woman – An adult human assigned female at birth.
Man – An adult human assigned male at birth.
Saying that being a woman or a man is a feeling or state of mind implies that women’s and men’s mindsets are inherently different. The whole concept of gender identity is sexist. “Oh, I like pink, and makeup, and giggling, that’s what women like so I must be a woman.”
It also ignores that for 99.99% of human history and for most people today except a privileged few, there is no changing the categories. If a teenage girl in Somalia really, strongly, identifies as a boy and has done so all her life, that won’t save her from FGM and an arranged marriage.
Even for people who can transition, gender socialization starts at birth. There’ve been tests – parents underestimate their girl babies’ gross motor skills and overestimate for their boys, and assume that a crying girl baby is scared and a crying boy baby is angry. No matter how strongly a man wants breasts and a vagina, it won’t change the fact that everyone around him all his life has treated him as a man.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
The transwomen who push the idea of the cotton ceiling are sexually entitled male predators. Lots of the anti-cotton ceiling arguments I’ve heard could come from any frat boy. “If you like strap-ons, why don’t you like dick?” “If you like butch women, why don’t you like men?” The most similar concept is the friendzone. There’s no difference between “Women owe me attention and sex , why won’t they give me a chance, if they reject me they’re entitled bitches who hate nerdy guys,” and “Cis women owe me attention and sex, why won’t they give me a chance, if they reject me they’re transmisogynists.”
Lots of these people act like being attracted to women is being attracted to long hair, high heels, dresses, and makeup, instead of being attracted to the female body. They have a femininity fetish and say that women who like vulvas are the ones with a fetish.
Even the ones who accept that lesbians don’t like dick insist that they have to like neovaginas. A surgically created pocket that doesn’t smell or taste anything like a real vulva and is filled with hairballs and E. coli isn’t something any lesbian wants on her face.
On behalf of their enablers, it’s a mix of straight and bi lesbophobes who are thrilled to have a SJ-approved excuse to attack lesbians, bi people who Do Not Get the concept of preferring one set of genitals over another, and self-hating lesbians who attack other lesbians to hide the fact that, deep inside, getting within three feet of a penis makes them want to vomit.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
Because socially awkward boys who are bad at performing masculinity tend to be drawn to programming. Lots of these boys socialize with other nerdy boys in sketchy places on the internet and get drawn into various anti-feminist ideologies. They look at feminism and think “I don’t have any privilege because I’m not an alpha male, I get bullied, and I can’t get a date.” Some of them become MRAs or join the Alt-Right. Others find transgender ideology. They learn that the fact that they don’t fit in with the popular guys at school and like lesbian porn means they are really lesbians. They are the most oppressed. The girls who won’t go out with them are transmisogynists. Everything fits.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
They fit into two categories, just like trans people assigned male at birth.
A) Female people who transition because they don’t want to be women any more. Women and girls who have been hurt and feel like being a man would protect them, or who hate their bodies because of sexual assault. Butch lesbians who face a lot of homophobic harassment and rejection, and who feel like society doesn’t have a place for them but it’s made for straight men, or who hang out in radiqueer communities where everyone assumes gender non-conforming woman = “masculine of center” = trans or nonbinary. GNC women who’ve absorbed the lie that real women don’t have masculine interests. This is a really sad thing when these women transition and then detransition and have to live in their bodies after testosterone and mastectomies.
B) Female people who transition because of autoandrophilia or a desire to be special. Straight slash fangirls who want to be pretty gay boys like in their favorite yaoi. Lonely teenage girls who hang out on Tumblr where everyone talks about the Evil Cishets and how glad they are to be in the Mogai community which is a 24-7 awesome rainbow party and also gives them a bunch of SJ persecution points they can use to win online arguments. Anyone who’s already listed all the fictional characters she’s kin with and her 17 different self diagnosed personality disorders on her Tumblr About Me and is desperate for more ways to make herself special and unique. This is really sad when these women transition, which is why it’s a good thing that they mostly don’t.
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Humans are basically sexually dimorphic. There are edge cases, but there are also two mostly distinct clusters, one containing people who typically have XX chromosomes, vaginas, etc., and the other containing people who typically have XY chromosomes, penises, etc. The first cluster is “women” and the second is “men”.
Of course, all the controversy is over what to do about the edge cases. Some people are intersex – they’re naturally between the clusters, or just at the edge of one. Others are trans – they’re in one cluster but they want to be in another, or they have taken some steps to actually move to the other cluster, which might land them between the clusters or possibly within (but still towards the edge of) the other cluster. I think that the best way to categorize a particular individual is to see where they are in this hypothetical graph with the two clusters. (This does mean that for certain people, it won’t be reasonable to put them in either category.)
I do think that when one is in the midst of transitioning, or if one has completed the steps of transition without actually landing in their desired cluster, as a courtesy we can use the pronoun they want. But the categories that *matter* are mostly the physical clusters.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
I think this is an absurd term for a real struggle.
Trans people who want sexual and romantic partners really are in a difficult situation. But… this situation is sort of a natural consequence of choosing to transition.
Most people’s attraction to others is heavily gendered, and the ideal of an attractive man is very different from the ideal of an attractive woman, which makes androgynous people unattractive to many. And unfortunately current transition technology does not let all trans people look like their preferred gender. Also unfortunately, SRS is relatively expensive, so many trans people don’t get surgery – but many if not most people do in fact care about their sex partners’ genitals.
I’m not saying that trans people who don’t pass can never find love (clearly there are people who do find androgyny attractive, though this is not the norm) and I’m also not saying that transphobia plays no part in this (some people who are attracted to trans people are too ashamed to date one). But you’ll never get rid of the inherent disadvantage that trans people get in dating.
(I’ll note, btw, that though androphilic trans women have a disadvantage in dating compared to straight cis women, they’re still in a better position dating-wise than they’d be sans transition, since they tend to specifically prefer straight men.)
Also if your activism focuses on getting into someone’s pants, you’re doing activism wrong. Sexual pressure continues to be wrong if it’s perpetrated by a disadvantaged person.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
Depends on who you’re comparing them with.
One reason trans women are more likely to be programmers than cis women is that the set of trans women contains the set of autogynephilic trans women, and autogynephilic trans women basically have typically male interests (and typically male socialization, which unlike androphilic trans women* they actually tend to absorb as kids).
The question of why trans women are overrepresented in programming compared to cis men is more interesting – if autogynephilic trans women had purely male-typical interests while androphilic trans women had purely female-typical interests, you would expect trans women to end up somewhere between men and women in programmeriness. I don’t think we know the full answer to this, but this too is clearly driven by the autogynephiles – androphilic trans women mostly have relatively female-typical interests and occupations. Trans people seem to be unusually likely to be autistic, so this is likely to be a factor; other than that, I don’t really understand this myself. This is definitely an area for further research.
*”homosexual transsexuals” is the technical term, but I disagree with Blanchard’s choice of terminology here – I think when you’re talking about trans people, using their own sex/gender as a reference point is going to be confusing for people who aren’t sex researchers. I also think that when we can use non-inflammatory language without sacrificing truth, there’s no reason not to do that (I’m trying to do so in this entry, for instance).
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
This is woefully understudied, so I can’t do much more than speculate.
It seems plausible that a similar two-type situation could exist for trans men, except that there should be very few autoandrophiles because women generally have less intense sex drives than men and paraphilias in general are much less common in women. (Here Blanchard and Bailey both kind of fuck up – Blanchard says autoandrophilia doesn’t exist at all, Bailey says paraphilias are exclusively or almost exclusively experienced by men – but, well, I’ll just say that based on my observations both of these claims seem really unlikely. Women with very high sex drives & weird sexual preferences do in fact exist, they’re just rare. I think this is an excusable fuckup since they both primarily study male-sexed people.)
Gynephilic, masculine trans men should thus be the majority of trans men (and indeed Blanchard has a study that shows just that). This group would be analogous to androphilic trans women – they would naturally fit into society better as men and more easily be able to find straight, feminine female partners. (In a sense this is just a variant of butch lesbians who are into femmes – I think very butch lesbians are more common than very feminine gay men because gender-variant behavior is punished less for women than men; this would also predict fewer trans men than trans women.) Then there should be a few autoandrophiles – trans men who are into men and don’t seem that different from women, other than an unusually strong sex drive and, obviously, autoandrophilia & therefore a desire to transition.
Non-binary people don’t seem to fit neatly into either group – the first group wouldn’t fit because nobody becomes non-binary to *fit into a social role better*, and the second group would seem not to fit because, like, auto*andro*philia. But actually I do think it could be autoandrophilia. Consider that non-binary people frequently modify their bodies to become less like their birth sex and more like the other sex, and that even if they most prefer gender-neutral pronouns, they tend to prefer the pronouns of the opposite sex over the pronouns of their own sex. “Partial gynephilia” is in fact a thing – that is, some people have an attraction to themselves with some male and some female traits (e.g. breasts and also a penis). What if non-binary-ness is the same thing, conceptualized differently?
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
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1. How I Define Men And Women
Let’s start off by conceding a completely irrelevant point: intersex people exist. I mean, yeah, they do exist and deciding whether an intersex person is male or female is complicated and there’s nothing wrong with letting them pick whichever they want so they can put “Mr.” or “Ms.” on forms instead of explaining their complicated medical situation to everyone they meet. There’s no god to tell them what they really are. It’s sort of the parable of bleggs and rubes. When you have a purple cuboid thing with rounded corners that’s furred on one face and smooth on the rest, you admit that you have to make a judgment call. You know what you don’t do? You don’t decide that you’ll never be able to tell whether a blue furred egg is a blegg because of the existence of edge cases… unless you’re politically motivated, that is.
I have to start with this long, irrelevant digression because otherwise the entire transgender community will remind me that intersex people exist—not that they actually care about intersex people who were sterilized against their will and without medical need, intersex people who are taught to be ashamed of their bodies, intersex people who exist in real life in contexts besides transgender arguments—and pretend that’s a knock-down argument that we can’t define men and women at all.
Men are men. They have XY chromosomes, broader shoulders than hips, beards, flat chests, testes, penises, more testosterone and less estrogen. Women are women. They have XX chromosomes, broader hips than shoulders, no beards, breasts, ovaries, vaginas, more estrogen and less testosterone. What about people with XX and SRY translocation? Judgment call. I say they’re men. Better question: does anyone identify as a trans woman due to getting a karyotype and finding out that they have this condition? If not, then why bring it up? It’s irrelevant and it’s a distraction. I’ve never heard anyone say “I am really a woman because I have gynecomastia” or “I am really a woman because I’m shorter than the average height for a man of my race” so it seems to me like this is all irrelevant. Everyone knows a man with SRY translocation is actually a man. No one is actually confused about this.
I’m not going to come up with one single thing that all men have and no women do, but I don’t need to. We all know what makes someone male or female. I’d like the transgender community to stop pretending to be confused now.
2. The Cotton Ceiling
People who want to be seen as women more than anything else, enough to rearrange their entire lives to achieve it, who especially want to be seen as women in a sexual way, feel bad when people just won’t see them that way. They want to be attractive women whom people attracted to women want to have sex with. Not being able to get what you want is disappointing. It’s even more painful when you can’t be what you want to be than when you just can’t have what you want to have. Admitting the problem is inherent in you is extremely disheartening because it means giving up hope. This is why some transgender people look for a way to blame their rejection on other people. It’s true that transgender people are at very high risk for assault; transgender people take this as evidence that they’re an oppressed minority. Once they already believe in “transphobia” as a social ill like racism, they can attribute all sorts of things to it.
Of course trans women are at a massive disadvantage trying to look like attractive women. They’ve had all of adolescence to grow into adult men. Some can still manage to look feminine enough to attract partners who are attracted to women, depending on which aspects of womanhood they’re attracted to and that’s lucky for them.
There’s a reason the cotton ceiling is mostly about lesbians and that’s because it’s later-transitioning, more masculine autogynephiles who want to be seen as women and desired as women and want female partners. Earlier-transitioning, more feminine homosexual transsexuals are able to pass better and don’t have this concern to the same degree, which is why there aren’t similar complaints about straight men. Further, more feminine homosexual trans women are more feminine (and tautologies are tautological) and more accommodating. Autogynephiles, who are very masculine, are more willing to demand that other people make them happy.
It’s not PC to say it that way. It’s not even nice. I do agree, in general, with the idea of talking to the person in front of you rather than a statistically average member of the same group as the person in front of you, but when you’re actually asking about the reason for general trends in group behavior, then you’re just going to have to talk about statistical tendencies and not that one autogynephile you know who’s a total teddy bear and would never hurt a fly.
3. Trans Women Programmers
Most trans women are actually more masculine than the average man. That is, autogynephiles are. Even a normal male sex drive isn’t intense enough to make someone risk losing friends and family and undergo painful and risky surgery just to live out a sexual fantasy; autogynephiles are more sexual than the average man, probably because they have even more testosterone. They’re even more inclined toward traditionally male pursuits like sports and programming than the average man is.
Besides, programmers are pretty autistic and interested in what you do, not who you are. I bet it’s a welcoming field for anyone who can do it.
The statistics are different for homosexual trans women, but they’re a minority of trans women.
4. AFAB Trans People
There’s nothing hard to explain about this. Paraphilias are less common in females than in males, which explains why trans men are more rare, but just because they’re less common doesn’t mean they never happen at all. There are also homosexual trans men who are attracted to women and generally more masculine than women. There are probably about as many of these as there are homosexual trans women who are attracted to men. What’s so inexplicable about that?
5. Transgender People Being Wrong About Their Own Experiences
The questions didn’t include this, but I thought I should mention it. One of the things that really seems like it bothers the transgender community is being told that they’re wrong about their own experiences. A lot of autogynephiles say that their experience isn’t autogynephilia at all. Some of my “side” (I’d really like to think we’re all on the same side, though: Team Help People Live Comfortable Lives) thinks they’re lying but I don’t think so and I think it’s horrible that that’s anyone’s first idea.
Everyone here reads Thing of Things, right? So we all remember Ozy’s post about feeling shame instead of sadness for losing time to depression. I love that post and it helped me a lot. I’m the exact opposite of Ozy! I used to feel guilty for everything. I thought I had a scrupulosity problem because I would feel so guilty all the time. Except, the weird thing is, it didn’t help to realize that I wasn’t doing anything that went against my values! I figured out eventually that I wasn’t guilty. I was scared everyone in the world would hate me! I don’t think I’m bad at introspection and I don’t think Ozy’s bad at introspection, so I don’t think it says anything mean about transgender people to say that they can’t always figure out their own motives. People can’t always figure out their own motives. Ozy thought they were ashamed of their depression. I thought I felt guilty whenever I did something that anyone in the world didn’t approve of. Most transgender people think they’re experiencing “gender dysphoria” when they want to transition.
“Gender dysphoria” isn’t a worthless model for homosexual transsexuals, either. That works with the analogy, too! Some people do have scrupulosity problems. Some people do feel ashamed of their mental illnesses.
Transgender people tell the truth about their beliefs about their experiences and their mistakes aren’t stupid or obvious. It took a lot of research the state of available evidence to a point where I feel comfortable saying that most transgender people are actually experiencing a sexual fetish. If you don’t have multiple studies behind you, it’s probably a bad idea to say you know someone’s experiences better than they do. I agree with that. People know their own experiences better than they know other people’s. I could be more cynical and say people are even more wrong about other people’s experiences than their own. It should take a lot of evidence to decide someone is wrong about their own feelings, but sometimes you have that much evidence. Check out Kay Brown’s blog, sillyolme.wordpress.com, because she understands the science and explains it better than I do. She has some great posts laying out the evidence. People usually can’t do better than just believing other people about their own feelings, but usually isn’t always.
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Biologically. Most animals are described accurately by saying that an individual is genetically and in terms of primary and secondary sexual characteristics either biologically male or biologically female. Intersex individuals definitely exist and may be neither precisely biologically women or men.
There is no gender identity, there is only biological sex and gender role performance. Stating that gender identity exists and is separate from biological sex requires accepting a mind-body duality; I do not accept this. People sometimes discuss the inner sense of oneself as belonging to a particular gender and claim that this is entirely separate from either the body or performative gender roles. I have always found this unconvincing; discussion of transgender life focuses almost entirely on the individual wanting to perform the gender role of the target sex and have this performance socially accepted. Indeed if the issue were an issue of inner and inherent “identity” then the social performance would be at most peripheral, since an inherent sense of oneself as fundamentally female or male or neuter cannot be changed by the perceptions of others, any more than an inherent sense of oneself as any other kind of person can be changed by the perceptions of others.
Because there is no gender identity inherent to a person (rather a series of variously preferred actions that together are gender role performance), gender identity, gender dysphoria, and related hypothesis about the underlying cause of transsexualism are also rejected.
*None of the above (or the following) addresses or is intended to address cases of body dysmorphia or other disorders on the OCD spectrum, which can cause presentations that look similar to being trans but which resolve with appropriate treatment for the OCD spectrum disorder.*
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
I didn’t know what this was, I had to look it up. I hope I found the definition in the sense that you mean, which is that although assigned-female-at-birth homosexual women may be friendly and socially accepting towards trans women, they will not necessarily desire or be willing to have sex with trans women.
I do not belong to either category, so my opinion here is basically not important. But because you asked for my opinion, it seems to me that assigned-female-at-birth homosexual women have every right to pursue or refuse sex with other people according to their desires (but not to be mean about it), and trans women have every right to feel sad about that to the extent that they are excluded from sex they would theoretically like to have (but not to pressure anyone to change their minds about having sex).
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
This is a really interesting question and I don’t know the answer. The following is a guess:
I think the most likely answer is that programmers as a group are likelier to not care at all what their coworkers are like. That sounds like I’m saying they’re not judgmental, but what I’m actually trying to say is that in my experience programmers in general (with plenty of exceptions, but still) don’t notice the people around them because they’re not interested in people. There are also proportionally many fewer assigned-female-at-birth programmers around to either police the femininity of the trans women or to be a source of sad self-comparison. This is probably a more restful environment overall for not only trans women but also a variety of other people who prefer not to perform expected social norms for whatever reason.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
Although this hasn’t to my knowledge been described in the literature, I think that the phenomena of trans men and also people who choose nonbinary presentations are explicable using the same model, which also may explain why there are proportionally fewer of these than of trans women.
People-assigned-female-at-birth have an easier time in modern western society with nontraditional gender role performance than people-assigned-male-at-birth. It is inarguably true that it is far more socially acceptable for a woman to act in performatively masculine ways (employment in traditionally male sector; “butch” presentation; interest in performatively masculine subjects like sports, hunting, cars; etc.) than it is for a man to act in performatively feminine ways (staying home with children; employment in traditionally female sector; “femme” presentation; interest in performatively feminine subjects like fashion, scrapbooking, flower gardening, romantic comedies; etc.). This being the case, it makes sense that there would be relatively fewer of the “homosexual transsexual” category among people-assigned-female-at-birth than among people-assigned-male-at-birth, since in most cases transitioning to living as a man would not be expected to make it much easier to find romantic partners, desired employment/career, or social acceptance.
The other category would be autoandrophilic or …autoudéterophilic? rather than autogynephilic. This means affectionally attached to the idea of oneself as a man or as nonbinary. I prefer to use the construction “affectionally attached” rather than something like sexually attracted because I think it is both more correct and less restrictive. “Affectional” includes not just sexual or erotic but also romantic orientation. An under-appreciated and under-discussed part of relational orientation is the self. When a person conceptualizes their own erotic/romantic activity, it’s not just the other person’s role that is important but also their own role in the relationship – defining oneself as a lesbian is not just about accepting that the other person in the relationship is female, but also about imagining oneself as a woman who is romantically involved with women. So we can hypothesize that there exist people-assigned-female-at-birth who are erotically and/or affectionally oriented in a way that includes imagining themselves either as a man or as a nonbinary person.
(It is almost never the case that transitioning to living as a nonbinary person would be logistically easier in any way, so I would expect to find the category of “assigned-either-sex-at-birth but transitioned to nonbinary, and not autoudéterophilic” almost entirely unpopulated.)
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Oh, this is a fun one.
I have managed to construct two definitions that are not mutually inclusive and yet are simultaneously equally true.
The first definition, which I think I’m moving away from somewhat, is that a man or a woman is someone who needs to have the sexed body associated with that gender. This definition makes it very clear that gender dysphoria is ideally the prime factor in transition (regardless of exactly why that dysphoria exists, neuromasculinization/feminization or a certain sexual orientation) while kicking out all those people who claim to be dysphoric but apparently do not need to transition, and simultaneously accounts for people who have not yet transitioned.
I’ve found myself moving away from this definition because as I get increasingly spooked/redpilled on the very concept of gender at all (it’s funny how being a Blanchardian ends up making you look strikingly like a Tumblr genderqueer kid), and part of this is realizing that there is nothing that fundamentally distinguishes trans and cis people, that there are a lot of lesbians doing the exact same shit I am and a lot of men-in-female-bodies who aren’t. Especially the former. There are a lot of guys on 4chan with a greater or lesser degree of AGP who have decided transition will solve all the problems that led them to 4chan to the point we call it ‘falling for the transgender meme’, and only some of them actually should transition by any reasonable definition of ‘will this improve this person’s life’ (including subjective definitions), but they all feel a lot better about having tits than I did. There is no other meaningful behavioural difference between myself and those guys – if I don’t have a female brain, they sure as hell don’t either. (That’s before we throw in the other phenomenon on Tranny 4chan of people who outright identify as cis men and still medically transition, but a good few of those people are blatantly, unquestionably HSTS trans women who have gotten way too deep in repression.)
Still, I go back and forth on if I’m actually that spooked or just a crazy postmodernist. I don’t like postmodernists much, so I don’t see myself aping their style for too much longer, and as the last sentence of that paragraph showed I think there are at least some people-who-are-unambiguously-transsexual and some people-who-are-unambiguously-not.
My other simultaneously-held definition is that a man or a woman is someone who lives in the social role ascribed to people of that sex. A man is called ‘he’ and is assumed to have a penis, a woman is called ‘she’ and is assumed to have a vagina. I’ve found I like this definition, but I cannot unquestioningly use it as a primary one.
The first issue is that this definition makes gender look like a much more fluid thing than it is, and I know very well by my experiences with definition #1 that gender is not fluid. There are also (in certain contexts) four genders by this definition rather than the actual two, in that men who are assumed to have vaginas and women who are assumed to have penises are treated very, very differently than those who are assumed to have genitals matching their genders.
My second issue is that by this definition, I am the only trans man I know who is actually a man. I would not like suggesting this to my trans male friends.
As a result, I’ve combined the definitions in an attempt at covering the massive, all-
consuming gaps in each. This is still better than anything else I’ve found.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
Having stricter standards than would make you happy and calling people bitches for not sleeping with you are routinely agreed to be bad things by, interestingly enough, the exact same group of people.
I have become so removed from everything involving feminism as an ideology over the past few years that I can no longer say I have ‘an opinion on the cotton ceiling’. It would be great if more people were willing to sleep with transsexuals, in that I would probably not be a virgin if I had better options than Tumblrinas. This is probably vaguely ‘I think the cotton ceiling is a bad thing’, but in reality I’d just be killed by both groups for not wanting to sleep with Tumblrinas.
(The transbians for having standards as an abstract concept, and the cisbians for being a gynephilic natal female not attracted to people who look like them.)
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
A G P
G
P
Shitposting aside…
My anecdotal observation is that A*P (wildcard asterisk because the association is incredible for both autogynephilia and autoandrophilia) is heavily associated with nerdiness, and I am far from the only person to make this observation. Male nerds become coders/game developers/channers. Female nerds become fujoshi/YA authors/tumblrinas. Guess where I’ve met a lot of trans people.
On the other hand, I don’t think the association is solely with AGP, because I’ve met HSTS trans women (the immediate associations being Kay Brown/Candice Brown Elliott and Blaire White) who work or study in IT fields. (And in turn I’ve met a lot of trans men of both types, myself included, whose thing is writing.) It’s a strong, strong association…but men and women who are transsexual are more likely to enter literature- or computer- related paths respectively than those who are not no matter their apparent etiology.
So here’s my tentative answer for what the typology doesn’t cover: Trans people are weird.
If you’ve met enough of us, you’ve probably figured that one out by now.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
Roughly half are autoandrophilic, the other half fit the HSTS profile. Blanchard really dropped the ball on this one.
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Humans come in two major clusters, based on some biological characteristics: one where people have penises, testicles, flat chests, testosterone-dominant hormone profiles, XY chromosomes, and other related traits, and another where they have vaginas, ovaries, breasts, estrogen-dominant hormone profiles, XX chromosomes, etc. Men are those humans that belong to the first cluster, and women are those that belong to the second.
Some people do not fit perfectly into either cluster, of course. A woman with a flat chest is still a woman, and a man who undergoes an orchiectomy is still a man, but there can be more complicated cases that are not trivial to classify. Indeed there’s no reason to think everyone fits in one category or the other, but the overwhelming majority of humans do.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
The cotton ceiling is the complaint by autogynephilic transsexuals that lesbian women don’t consider them viable sexual partners (the woman’s panties being a barrier they are not allowed to get past). People’s right to choose their sex partners should be absolute and not subject to guilt tripping about how ‘if you really saw me as a woman, you’d want to have sex with me’; the cotton ceiling is an attempt to use queer politics to control women’s sex lives.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
For the same reasons men are. I’m agnostic on whether male brains are somehow ‘better suited to programming’, or cultural messages aimed at boys make them more interested in computers, or some combination of similar factors is at play, but it’s not remarkable that transsexuals with male brains who were raised as boys have the same range of interests as ordinary men.
It’s also possible that programming has a stronger appeal to people who are social outcasts in some way, which transsexuals frequently are (cf. the nerd stereotype of a man with poor social skills and great technical skills). Spending more time at home, on a computer, for fear of social repercussions could be a factor.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
It’s possible that some female transsexuals are the symmetric case of homosexual male transsexuals, i.e. masculine lesbians who prefer lives as straight men; as far as I know autoandrophilic transsexuals are not a group of any significance.
Non-lesbian female transsexuals are more likely to be motivated by social/political concerns like avoiding misogyny or protesting gender roles or the concept of gender binaries (women are more likely to be involved in the social justice movement than men, and more likely to identify as nonbinary or genderqueer).
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
How do you define woman/man?
Where it does not hopelessly impede the clarity and elegance of my writing, I concede man and woman to the more modern usage, in exchange for keeping male and female to refer to the physical sexes normally present in humans. For me a person’s sex can only refer to physical reality, which includes but is not limited to chromosomal sex or sex at birth. A lot of people on my side of this debate might insist on calling a committed transsexual woman – that is, a person born male who has altered themselves to have feminine features and hormone levels – an altered male, and while that’s true in one sense, in another it might be more accurate to consider this to be a type of intersex. It’s a kind of intersex condition that’s been deliberately induced in adulthood, instead of arising naturally at birth, but intersex is still the best way to describe someone whose physical and medical realities will not fit the typical model of either sex. A person needing both breast and prostate cancer screenings, for instance.
So a woman would be a person, whether originally male or female, who is honestly and consistently presenting in a feminine manner and generally living life as a woman.
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
Here’s where I have to admit that the internal discourse of the lesbian community is not an area where I have great expertise. It does seem natural to me that lesbians wouldn’t have any real interest in penises, and indeed the lesbians who talk about such things with me online tell me that they are also far less interested in the plastic strap-on kind than pornography or pop culture would have you believe.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with a lesbian choosing to involve herself with an autogynephilic transsexual if she chooses to, but as a lover of clarity in definitions, I can also see how the traditional female-attracted lesbian may not consider her a fellow lesbian.
I also think there’s a little-addressed practical reason for lesbians to resist this redefinition of their brand. Lesbians enjoy a degree of immunity from being seen by males as a potential sexual conquest. This is good for them, because typically male and female people want different amounts of sex and to approach sex in different ways, which creates a lot of conflict among heterosexuals.
(Here, just for ease of grammar and to avoid that awful nature documentary-esque tone, I will return to using ‘men’ and ‘women’; please understand that that what is true of ‘men’ below is true of males in general.)
The usual imbalance is that men want more sex than women, and they want to jump through as few hoops as possible to get it. As women are the ones choosing (as with many species) they can get a lot of what they want, which is why heterosexual and lesbian relationships look fairly similar – most people practice serial monogamy of varying levels of commitment, with some couples for life and some casual sex. We can see how different things would be if men had their way by looking at gay male relationships – even today, men who have sex with men report far more casual sex and higher numbers of partners than other groups.
But, while straight women do for the most part get their way in that college campuses are not the bathhouse orgy editorialists like to depict, they are still beset with more male sexual attention than they would like. Internet discourse concerning feminist groups taking issue with this aside, most women seem to accept this as the price of having sex with men.
Or, with males (I’m switching terminology again now). This is what lesbians, in staking their claim to a legitimate, non-negotiable sexuality, have just started to be able to avoid. If a small subset of lesbians who are interested in transsexuals begin to send the message that lesbians are not off-limits to all males after all, they lose this precious immunity.
This doesn’t have to be the classic slippery slope, by the way. I’m not saying that if men see lesbians having sex with women who were once male, they will assume that they are in with a chance as well. I’m saying this could happen even if the only males who consider themselves in with a chance are transsexual women. They still (generally, some autogynephilics are functionally asexual) have male-typical sex drives, and while I don’t have the numbers, it seems like it’s a minority of lesbians who are open to their advances. This would mean a lot of unwanted advances, something a lot of women find troubling to deal with.
It seems rational, to me, for lesbians to want to preserve their label as indicating that they are not open to the sexual advances of males.
Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
I think I remember reading that autogynephillic-type trans women are, but not homosexual-type. This would make sense, given that the research suggests that autohynephilic-types have more usual male attributes, and that males in general are more likely to be programmers.
Though, if I recall correctly, the number of trans women in programming is even disproportionate relative to men. I don’t know why this is the case, but I do have a couple of theories:
a) Nerdy types are more accepting of less feminine women, as well as people who are outside the norm a bit in other ways
b) Programming jobs in the US, where this info is from, are heavily clustered in very liberal areas. It would make sense, if you were or wanted to be transsexual, to go to these areas, and if you were going there, it would make sense to learn to program.
Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
I don’t know the answer to this one and admit more research needs to be done.
On the surface, there seems to be something of an analogue with the homosexual transsexuals in Blanchard and Bailey’s work.
I would certainly admit to finding it difficult to tell apart butch lesbians and trans men. I’m told many of the latter start out as the former. And (anecdotal, I know) I don’t know, nor do I even ever recall reading about, a trans man who was exclusively into men.
What does differ here is that B-B’s homosexual-type trans women were typically into straight men, while female-to-male trans people (again, anecdotally and from what I happen to have read) typically seem to date bisexual or even lesbian women.
The figures often claimed as historical examples of the female-to-male phenomenon generally seem to have been rationally adopting the male role to escape the limitations placed on women. But, if this were the reason, one would expect this to have been more common in the past and less common today, while I think the opposite is likely true.
So again, my instinct is that this might be something to do with a kind of extreme butch lesbian thing that is somehow analogous to homosexual-type transsexual women, but the real answer is that as far as I know, no one has studied this enough to know the answer.
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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.
This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a gender identity theory supporter believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
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.