Guest post: So used to living in boxes
Guest post by Tigger the Wing.
I would be very upset if people as intelligent, thoughtful and educated as Josh and Ophelia were to stop discussing this extremely important topic because a tiny minority of people are loudly bullying anyone who dares to broach it.
This is happening in meatspace, too, and it is the older people who are being silenced yet again. Just one person can ruin an entire organisation by making it just too uncomfortable for anyone else to say anything.
And they are ruining things for trans people.
Just as we had been making headway, getting laws changes so that we didn’t have to conform to the gender stereotypes of a particular psych gatekeeper in order to be allowed to transition, because wider society is slowly coming around to the idea that gender expressions and restrictions are largely societal constructs (whereas being drawn to a particular gender performance, or repelled by it, seems to be a matter of personality) they decide that we can’t be allowed to discuss the very gender norms that we are trying to subvert.
Honestly, if I look at a crowded street, the most common clothing is a variation of T-shirt-and-jeans. Make up is more likely to be seen on apparently female people than male, but over here it’s not particularly prevalent. Hair length doesn’t map very well to gender, nor does jewelry. Perhaps that is at least partly why Ireland passed the gender recognition bill shortly after the marriage equality referendum.
We don’t want to go back to the mindset of the late 1940s, when governments realised that telling women to leave the workforce and become housewives was likely to create less of a violence problem than not having jobs for millions of returning soldiers. That, to my mind, is how recent the gender barriers were erected. Up until then, women worked.
In the 1950s, my mother had to fight to stay in work when she married, but did indeed give up when she had me and didn’t do paid work again until we had all grown and left home. She’s probably the only one of my maternal ancestors who didn’t work while raising children. Fragile femininity seems to have been if not exactly invented then certainly raised to a ridiculous level during the 1950s and 60s.
Why can’t we discuss this? Is it because the people raised in an era when many of the equality battles seem to have been won can’t see how vulnerable those gains are? Are they so blinded by the recent pinkification of everything that they cannot see what is lying behind it?
Don’t they see that questioning the premise of gendering of presentation and performance is NOT rejecting the rights of people to perform and present however they like, rather the opposite?
People have apparently become so used to living in boxes that they cannot see that what is important is the place that the box occupies; remove the boxes, the walls, and we don’t remove the places; we make it so that people can freely wander into any place they desire.
Bravo
Brilliant. I appreciate this so much.
Thank you TtW, for this wonderful comment.
And thank you Ophelia for maintaining a blog where thoughtful comment on and discussion of gender issues can take place.
Well said.
I dont think the people on the other side actually disagree with what you are saying.
The difference seems to be (as Ophelia pointed out too) – that they are insisting the questions be answered in a legal (should trans women have the same legal rights as women) or behavioral (should Trans women be treated the same as women) sense – even though thats not the question they actually asked or could have clarified and asked it in a more reasonable manner.
Thanks.
Of course ‘fragile femininity’ was deliberately re-introduced after the War. Which is a terrific demonstration of the point, that recent gains can be reversed with disturbing ease.
Of course no one used to worry about the fragility of poor women in coal mines or cotton mills. ‘Fragility’ was the backhanded privilege of the upper classes.
“Don’t they see that questioning the premise of gendering of presentation and performance is NOT rejecting the rights of people to perform and present however they like, rather the opposite?
People have apparently become so used to living in boxes that they cannot see that what is important is the place that the box occupies; remove the boxes, the walls, and we don’t remove the places; we make it so that people can freely wander into any place they desire.”
This is so true thank you for saying this. I am what many would consider ‘a known TERF’ though I would obviously reject that description. My firm belief (like most women labelled ‘TERFs’) is that all gender non conformity by anyone is a positive thing because it’s an oppressive system that subjugates women and people should just be free to be themselves.
I think the problem comes when a person decides because they want to live/behave/feel like/conceive of themselves in a certain way they must be (or not be) a man or a women. Because there should be no deterministic feelings/behaviours etc attached to these categories. They should remain as they are currently understood, descriptive categories of material reality.
So I totally agree with what you are saying. Let’s smash those boxes together.
Just in case there’s a language issue here, I’ll state the definitions I’m using (which I think are generally accepted):
Gender = Feminine / masculine = social roles/stereotypes/behaviours
Sex = Female / male = biological reality
Man/men = adult human males Woman/women = adult human females (akin to sow/boar, mare/stallion, doe/buck in other animals)
I second FeministRoar. I too have been ostracized by many people for centering women in my analysis of gender There are gender rules but they are entirely culturally maintained and are therefore shifting and fluid and therefore fail as classification. It’s what’s mapped onto sex as appropriate behaviours.
We have biological sex, and that’ a fact, not a role, not a performance. It’s a fact.
Men are not women. They will never be women. They are male/men.
You know, after being ostracized by so many, I found I wasn’t alone and that women all around the world were suffering from not being able to speak because men were yelling ‘TERF’ and ‘transphobe’ at them to get them to shut up. And that’s exactly what those terms mean.
I asked a guy just yesterday to define gender for me because he accused me of not knowing the difference between sex and gender. His definition was ‘it’s how people present themselves and they can be what they want.’
Sure, but it doesn’t mean wearing a dress makes you a woman any more than wearing pants makes a woman a man.