“The vast majority of cis-women do not act feminine”
I’m hoping this post is off-the-charts atypical. It’s from a transgender dating site, TransSingle. The post is titled Why Get A Transgender Girlfriend.
The modern cis dating market is almost a Mad-Max Thunder Dome dystopia. Anyone who has been in the cis dating market for some time finds to his dismay that cis-women in the modern dating market have more issues than Time magazine. It is a ruthless winner-takes-all-situation. Cis-women are hyper judgmental beings, and men have been reduced to being circus performers who have to constantly entertain the cis-women non-stop or face rejection.
Wow. Talk about Assumed Male.
It starts with the cis dating market, as if the subject is dating from all points of view, but then we realize with a jolt that it’s solely from the male point of view – and the “cis” male at that. The “anyone” at the beginning of the second sentence turns out to be male halfway through. So it’s not “anyone” after all, it’s any man – but the author apparently doesn’t even notice the difference between the two. And then, moving briskly on, we get to the part where we hear about how awful “cis” women are…but not, oddly enough, anything about “cis” men. Cis women are mentioned repeatedly, but cis men, never. Trans men are not mentioned either. For some reason men are taken for granted, without being labeled cis, but women are not – men are men, but women are cis women. Why is that?
And, furthermore, cis women are terrible while men are just folks, just like the rest of us, just good people looking for relationships. It’s almost as if the author of this post detests women.
And then there’s the substance of the complaint – women are judgy demanding bitches, and men have to keep them entertained every second. Hmm. That sounds more like MRAs on speed than trans dating advice.
But it gets worse.
Modern women have a plethora of issues which make them caustic; it can even be argued that modern cis-women would not get any male attention if the almighty love hormones were not at play. Add to that the vast majority of cis-women do not act feminine, care little about their appearance, and do not know how to respond to male affection appropriately.
Yeah, clearly a full-on misogynist here, one who thinks women have some sort of duty to “act feminine” and “care about their appearance” and “respond to male affection appropriately” (i.e. accept all overtures?).
Then comes the peripateia: the trans woman takes over the duties.
The first thing that you have to understand is that, despite what the mass media and the society says, transgender woman are women, and in many ways they are probably the only women around.
Right. Women aren’t women, only trans women are women. I’ve seen that claim before, but have always told myself it was only outliers who said things like that.
A transgender woman responds to male affection with feminine gratitude, which is rare among your average cis-woman. Cis-women, with their mentality of entitlement, conclude that male affection and attention are their birthright, and hence treat the men around them like toys to be played with and discarded at will.
The bitches.
See what I mean about the pattern? Cis-women on the one hand, and men on the other. Men need trans women, and women need to fuck right off. Might trans women like trans men? That’s not discussed.
Transgender women are also very attractive, and a simple overview of a Transgender Dating Site will prove that the cultural myths about transgender woman are just petty lies that have no truth in reality. Trans-women take much better care of their appearance than the slovenly modern cis-woman.
The bitches. The ugly, slovenly, filthy bitches.
The average man is so disillusioned with the dating market that he can be forgiven for his lack of enthusiasm. In fact, many men have just given up and are no longer interested in finding their soul mate. Men cannot be blamed for what is essentially the caustic nature of cis-women. However, men would be losing out if they allowed their lack of enthusiasm to stop them from trying Trans dating. Men have to understand that cis dating has reached its end and Transgender dating in the way of the future. It is about time that dating was about love and fun, rather than joyless work as cis dating has become.
Men are fabulous, and women are horrible. Trans women are also fabulous, and trans men – say what? Never heard of them.
So. I’m hoping this post is off-the-charts atypical.
Who better to enact male fantasies than a male? This was a subtext of the movie The Crying Game.
This twit is clearly projecting his own hatred and fetishes on other men. Blerg.
So just where are those guys getting their definition of “feminine” if it does not describe how the “vast majority of women” behave? From porn?
I think it must be a kind of Platonic ideal “feminine” that actual women can never approach.
That puts a wet finger on the author’s very foggy bathroom mirror alright. (My emphasis.)
It’s true. The “vast majority” of cis-women don’t act feminine. The figure is 83%!
This kind of writing is so transparent. It tries so hard to sound all fact-y, but fails utterly.
“The average man,” “transwomen take better care of their appearance,” “it can even be argued.”
I’m sure you all could if you took acting lessons and tried really hard. I want to see some changes around these parts ladies.
[runs for the hills]
Say what? If transgender women are acting differently than ‘cis’-women, then how do we know that they are the real women? Maybe someone has misidentified what it means to be a woman, and how women should act?
This guy does depart from the average MRA in one way thought – he does realize that many of us do have partners and relationships, but blames that on “love hormones”. Okay, if we’re so awful and unlovable, why in the world would a love hormone kick in? Wouldn’t that react to something more pleasant, say Chanel #5, fire red lipstick with matching nail polish, and a swishy-skirted dress that stopped above the knee so the shapely legs could be seen, terminating in a spike heel to make their feet look all feminine and desirable?
I’m so sick of being told I’m not properly a woman. It’s my decision what it means to be a woman, at least a me-woman. I don’t get to define what it means to be an Ophelia-woman or a Paris Hilton-woman, or any other woman, but I do get to decide what it means to be a woman in my own way. And that means tromping in wetlands, drinking sweet wines, disliking sports, and wearing pants instead of swishy-skirted dresses.
I’ve been womaning all wrong.
Excuse me. Time for me to practice batting my eyelashes.
I’m going to have to work harder on my caustic game. I’m afraid I could be letting our side down.
What happened there? I thought they were talking about “cis people”? How come every single instantiation of “women” is “cis-women” and none of the instantiations of “men” are “cis-men”? Double standard much?
Also, “Cis-women, with their mentality of entitlement ….” WTF? It’s men who feel totally entitled to someone’s attention. The “entitlement” shoe is entirely on the wrong foot.
Oh, but maddog, you don’t understand! Men are entitled, and those judgy bitches keep insisting on having a smidgeon of attention, which detracts attention away from the one really entitled to it, so “they” (women-children) are insisting on hogging all the attention by speaking now and then and actually being seen from time to time.
Then we want special privileges – read, equal rights – just for being women!
iknklast @ 8 –
Yes well that’s the big dividing line, isn’t it. Some (many) of us wacky feminists think there’s no such thing as “the way women act,” there’s only the brute fact of having female anatomy, which says nothing about one’s eyebrows or personality or willingness to bind our feet. The most up to date (aka Twitter-educated) trans activists think there’s such a thing as the lady brain, which can be in a male body while a male brain can be in a lady body. The author of this piece takes the second idea so far that it turns out only trans women are really women. Go figure.
One other thing occurs to me: The author apparently explicitly calls dating a “market”, and implicitly uses imagery of gaming/competition/performance. Perhaps this might offer some explanation for his troubles with “the opposite sex”.
Speaking for one trans-activist – I don’t think there’s a “way women are inclined to act”. But obviously there is a “way women are taught/conditioned/pressured/coerced to act”.
I don’t think there is a “lady brain” or “man brain”. But I think there’s an area of the brain that causes children to model behavior of adult females preferentially to adult males (or vice-versa).
A study last year showed that even at young ages (5-12), transgender boys and anatomically-male boys scored identically on implicit associate tests (IATs) that tested for association of concepts of “self” vs concepts of “male/boy”. Likewise, transgender girls scored the same as anatomically-female girls.
http://www.pubpdf.com/pub/25749700/Gender-cognition-in-transgender-children
This, coupled with previously-mentioned twin studies, and a host of other mounting research, indicate that there simply is more to maleness and femaleness than just “the bits and pieces” + “culture”. That said, if there truly is a gendered feature of human physiological development, I can appreciate that it’d be a nugget of truth dug from a collective pool filled with centuries of sexist shit – and I’d understand that a lot of time and energy would be needed to wash off that kind of stench.
Re “mimic the behavior of adult females”: Is that “mimic certain behaviors (and those behaviors are typically exhibited by adult females)” or “mimic behavior exhibited by people with certain perceptible characteristics (and those people are typically female)” or what?
Golly! All the gender essentialism of the Trans Purity Police, firmly linked to seething MRA/PUA resentment.
The site’s blurb says:
‘If you’re a transgender MTF, transgender FTM, transsexual or genderfluid you’ll find your soul mate here.’
But the heading list in the left margin are almost entirely focused on cis men who want to date trans women. Of twenty links, only two overtly mention MTFs.
I suspect there is one dood behind the whole thing. A sort of Bill Donohue of dating….
But I think there’s an area of the brain that causes children to model behavior of adult females preferentially to adult males (or vice-versa).
There is a brain/behaviour loop – repeated behaviours make measurable changes to the brain, so how can one tell which came first?
How is “behaviour of adult females” defined? Average? Mean? Median? Stereotype? Archetype?
For just about any measure, individual differences between genders (including cis and trans) are far greater than the differences between the averages. I know some transwomen who are very much into fashion and makeup, and others who are into physics and astronomy and computers. I know some transwomen who love to wear frilly dresses, and others who prefer Tshirts and jeans.
I was curious about whether “gender cognition” is a thing, so I googled it, and found that it’s apparently not. That paper is alone in using the phrase that way. (There are citations with the two words next to each other, but not as a phrase.)
@Sackbut,
Definitively the latter. Similar to patterns observed in other primates: young male chimps mimic adult males preferentially to adult females, and young female chimps mimic adult females preferentially to adult males.
@Theo Bromine,
My theory is that the human brain, probably like all sexually reproductive species, is wired with an innate capacity to differentiate between adult females and males. It is also wired to make observations and derive patterns from those observations. When children make repeated observations of some behaviors as “mostly/only adult-males” and other behaviors as “mostly/only adult-females”, this pattern turns into an association between those behaviors and male/female adults.
[I avoid using the term “feminine” or “masculine” to describe these mostly-female and mostly-male behaviors, because the terms carry a lot of sexist baggage. If I were to say “pink is a feminine color”, most people are going to take that as an assertion girls/womens’ have a natural/innate preference for the color pink. In fact, I’d only mean that (in the context of a particular culture) we see a higher frequency with which adult women wear pink clothing/accessories than men.]
My “off the rails” theory is that, much as humans have a sex drive that is more readily activated by sensing “that person is an adult male” vs “that person is an adult female”, so too might humans have a learning/modeling/mimicry drive more readily activated by someone perceived to be an adult male rather than adult female.
While I won’t claim the theory has been robustly (or even very directly) scrutinized, I’m very much of the opinion that it far-better explains the patterns of transgender behavior within our population than the “culture-only” stance. I’m still itching to hear why identical twins of transgender people were found much more likely to be transgender themselves (and the effect is not observed among fraternal twins). Or why being transgender is about as common in boys and girls, despite cultural sexism being almost 100% in one direction. Or why “transgender” is an actual thing that crops up with great regularity in young children, but counterparts (with similar levels of earliness-of-onset, intensity, and life-long persistence) of trans-racism, trans-classism, or trans-culturalism are effectively unheard of.
@Ophelia,
This research is exploring the transgender phenomenon in a novel manner; I wouldn’t be surprised if the authors were deliberately introducing new terminology to avoid any baggage of meaning associated with existing terminology. That said, I understand the skepticism toward novel research findings. If, hypothetically, this research were found to be rock-solid and reproducible, would it change your perspective on whether or not there might be biological aspects to one’s inclination to claim to be a boy or a girl?
Is there any data that could change your mind? Say FMRIs taken of 1-year-olds upon viewing pictures of men and women, and the FMRIs showed:
1) Different patterns of neural response in most boys/girls to images of men/women
– and –
2) A small percentage of boys/girls showed patterns consistent with the opposite gender
– and –
3) A longitudinal follow up showed that the boys & girls had a significantly higher tendency to transition their gender later in life.
Would you find something like *that* to be compelling? Or, still, and always, “just culture”?
Kevin – well sure. I don’t claim to have certain knowledge about this. I said “Some (many) of us wacky feminists think there’s no such thing as “the way women act,” there’s only the brute fact of having female anatomy, which says nothing about one’s eyebrows or personality or willingness to bind our feet.” Think, not know.
Anyway, if you’d pressed me on that point I probably would have modified it further. I don’t think I would resist claims that, for instance, women and men generally have slightly different ways of walking, because they would, wouldn’t they. So if you use a broad definition of “act” I would walk back some of that claim.
But that still leaves a hell of a lot of room for people to be looking at current styles of behavior typical of the two sexes and think of them as more inherent than they are. A lot of people are doing exactly that, and I think it muddies the whole discussion terribly.
Kevin #20,
Why 1-year-olds? Why not 1-week-olds, if you’re trying to eliminate a possible cultural effect?
@Kevin:
Just because a behaviour is seen in non-human animals does not mean that it is innate/instinctive/hard-wired as opposed to being learned. There are certainly other species with behaviour that has a significant component of learning (perhaps even “culture”). Consider the difficulties wild animal rescuers have with returning orphaned wildlife to their natural habitats.
I have no problem with the idea that some children (and adults) identify more strongly with behaviours and preferences that are more typical of the average presented by members of the other gender. But I do have a problem with the *averages* for each gender being held up as being representative of what it means to *be* that gender.
And I also have a followup question: What is gender *for*?
This reads very much like it was written by a bitter transwoman. I’m speculating, but I think this explains the hatred for those women that refuse to embrace the ‘feminine’ stereotypes, the resentment at trans-women not gaining acceptance, and possibly also the assumed male viewpoint.
@ ^
Oh, Holms. If you’ll forgive me saying so, your prejudices are running away with you.
Although there are no by-lines on that blog, all the posts are similar, written in the same voice, and several make reference to being a (presumably cis) male.
Source: transsingleblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/dating-site-for-transgender
Source: transsingleblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/man-for-a-transgender-woman
The content is consistently misogynistic, but more to the point it’s incredibly belittling to trans woman. Basically the gist is that trans women are bimbos who are grateful for any attention. It’s a mystery to me how you could think any actual trans woman wrote that.
By the way, to my eyes this is very obviously not a “real” blog — it’s a marketing exercise. Every post is short, includes stock photos, and contains exactly two links; one to transsingles.com and one to facebook.com/transssingles. It’s search engine bait.
Why “more to the point”? Why is belittling trans women “more to the point” than rampant venomous misogyny?
Why “a (presumably cis) male”? Why is “cis” merely “presumed” for men but angrily spelled out for women?
It could be that those choices hint at your prejudices, too.
I don’t know whether or not Holms will “forgive” you for saying that, but I can tell you I think it was obnoxious. Holms said the post “reads very much like it was written by a bitter transwoman” – well, it does. We’ve all seen things written by bitter trans women, I think – the “die in a fire” types – and it does sound like that. It’s not “prejudices running away with” us to think so. Angry misogyny sounds like angry misogyny; that’s not a big surprise.
You’ve read more, and found indications that it’s not a trans woman; fine, report on that, but it’s not necessary to make accusations in the process.
There are several MRA transwomen: Theryn Meyer, Blaire White, Valerie Keefe. This could easily have been written by one of them. When I read it I thought it sounded like White.
I’ve encountered enough MRA cis women that seeing MRA transwomen is hardly surprising.