“We evolve to truly claim gender markers as our own”
A friend pointed out this set of tips by Katie Dupere on how to be a good ally to trans people.
It’s irritating stuff, of course, but it very quickly goes from merely irritating to reversing everything we’ve learned about the hierarchical system that is “gender” over the past few decades.
For the merely irritating –
For those in socially disempowered positions, being able to define how you’re spoken about can be really powerful, Stryker says. But in addressing language that can be non-inclusive, it is important to move toward a goal of education — not alienation.
“It’s about creating a space so you can go deeper into the issue, rather than trying to police speech in a way that shuts down learning and awareness,” she says. “The ally has to not be defensive. They have to say, ‘Oh, I just said this thing that othered you. It’s interesting that I enacted my privileged position. I just learned something — thank you.'”
Give me a break.
I can see “oops,” I can see “oh, sorry” – assuming the “educator” is not an asshole, which is a risky assumption in situations of this kind. But I can also see “the language keeps changing, I can’t keep up,” with laughter or annoyance or both. I cannot see “Oh, I just said this thing that othered you. It’s interesting that I enacted my privileged position. I just learned something — thank you.” Anyone perfected enough to utter those three sentences is far too perfected to other anyone or enact a privileged position even by accident. No one else on the planet would utter those three sentences.
Number 1 is about pronouns – the word “preferred” is out, because it’s not about preferences, it’s about what people really truly literally are, absolutely, no ifs ands or buts, unequivocally, no more to be said, don’t you dare pause to think about it, shut the fuck up, die cis scum.
Number 2 is where we breezily throw feminism overboard and proceed on our voyage into the paradise of True Gender.
2. Saying someone was “born a boy/girl.”
No matter how old a transgender person is when they come out, it’s important to acknowledge they may feel their gender has always been the same one they are just now publicly claiming. To explain this concept, Stryker quotes Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Stryker explains that nobody is truly born a boy or a girl; rather, we evolve to truly claim those (or other) gender markers as our own. Saying someone was born a boy or girl suggests they were inherently one gender, but chose to be another.
“We are all assigned male, female, or intersex at birth, and become the people we are,” Stryker says.
See what she did there? One, she completely reversed the meaning of Simone de Beauvoir’s line, and two, she said we all claim gender markers as our own. That is such a crock of shit I can hardly believe my eyes.
This isn’t being a “good ally,” this is trying to be more Catholic than the pope.
Good grief. Reading that silliness gave me a rash.
Number 2 is incoherent.
(Emphasis added.)
We evolve to become (or “claim the markers of”) what we always were. A deepity.
The reversal of de Beauvoir is annoying. Or should I say offensive.
The nerve. Also the contrived bullshit, but the *nerve*.
Could someone explain their irritation at that quote use? I’m not familiar with it.
@Holms, re de Beauvoir:
https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Becoming_A_Woman_Simone_de_Beauvoir_on_Female_Embodiment
Put more simply: femininity is a social construct. Girls and women learn and are coerced to enact the category, “woman.” Being female does not mean one inherently is interested in one’s appearance, in personal matters, relatively passive and gentle and quick to defer to others, or whatever it is one’s culture deems womanhood to be.
Stryker claims we “evolve” (somehow or other) to “claim” gender markers as our own; de Beauvoir’s point was that “womanhood” (the construct) is pretty much forced on females. It’s not innate and it’s not a free choice.
I didn’t understand it at first, either, Holms, but after poking around online for a couple of hours, I figured out that it’s exactly what Lady Mondegreen describes. That when Simone de Beauvoir says that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”, she was saying that being put into that role was not an autonomous choice that is taken freely, but rather a heteronomous one that is forced by society, regardless of what the individual wants for herself. So by using that quote in the opposite sense from which it was originally made is pretty damned arrogant and presumptuous. Or ignorant. And you’d expect a “director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona” not to be ignorant of her field of study. I mean, we can have the debate about whether gender is innate or a social construct or somewhere in between (as indeed we have and continue to have), but at least don’t distort the meaning and context of a writer’s quote like that. As Josh said: the *nerve*.
Stryker seems to be saying that ONLY trans people have an essential ‘born to it’ gender. Everyone ELSE is just ‘growing into culturally assigned roles.’
Obviously feminism has to be cut away for this position to look tenable for even a second. That Jenner’s sense of ‘femaleness’ is somehow, retroactively, assigned by god or nature, just can’t be treated as a serious idea. Not without a lot of threats and shouting.
A hate it when someone cherry-picks something that another person said or wrote, in order to support an argument that is the exact opposite to the one that the quoted person was making. That, to me, is fraud.
It is unbelievably smug to suggest that everyone should use exactly the language that the author is using today, or else be a ‘bad ally’. My best allies are the people who (a) don’t care who I am or what I’m doing enough to want to pass laws to stop me and (b) care enough to change the laws that restrict me. I honestly couldn’t care less which words are used to address me, as long as it is done with affection.
Our sense of ‘self’ is generated by whatever it is our brains are doing the whole time we are alive. It is my understanding that the sex of our brains is determined by hormones in utero as much as at puberty, but our behaviours are heavily influenced by our upbringing.
The kind of behaviour expected of people born with a particular set of genitalia is something imposed by tradition, and children are trained, from birth onwards, away from ‘inappropriate’ and towards ‘appropriate’ behaviours. Small wonder that many (most) people feel more ‘comfortable’ with the set of behaviours that got encouraged from an early age, and ‘uncomfortable’ with behaviours that were discouraged. In that sense, I suppose, we can ‘grow into’ a set of behaviours – ‘markers’ – that are gendered, but the very fact that some of us go directly against that conditioning means that there is something else going on.