Three sentences
Yes but what does “identity” mean?
This is a perfect display of how a worrying amount (not all) of cis-women essentially characterize trans women as nothing more than men playing dress up. It’s a complete denial of their identity. I personally see transwomen as strength in numbers in the fight against oppression❤️
First: no, not nothing more than men playing dress up. It’s not that simple. If it were there wouldn’t be all this to-do about it. If it were just men playing dress up no one would care. But I, for instance, do think trans women are not literally women, but rather have a fantasy about being a woman which they want to live out. A fantasy which people live out is a lot more complicated and consequential than just playing dress up.
Second: what does “identity” mean in the sentence “It’s a complete denial of their identity”? What does it mean to deny someone’s identity? What does it mean to treat “denial” of someone’s “identity” as a shocking outrage? Is identity brute facts about a person? Or is it like a soul? Or is it some magical third thing that no one can quite define?
Men don’t get to have an “identity” as women, because they’re men. Being a woman or a man is just a physical fact, and you can’t think or dream or project or fantasize your way out of it. You can break the social rules about being it, and you can decide to obey the rules that generally apply to the other sex, but you still can’t actually become what you’re not.
Third – it would be nice if trans women were strength in numbers in the fight against oppression, but things haven’t turned out that way. At all. Trans women have turned out to be furiously hostile to women and especially to feminists, so no, they’re not allies against oppression, they are themselves oppression.
Trans Woman #1: “I’m a man who feels much more comfortable presenting myself as a woman. I’m appalled by male misogyny, and consider myself a feminist. I would like to join you in the fight against oppression— how can I help?”
Trans Woman #2: “ I’m a woman, and entitled to all the rights of a woman. I’m appalled by male misogyny and transphobia from cis women, and consider myself a feminist. I’m joining the fight against our oppression— let me help!”
It’s not that we couldn’t see trans women as strength in numbers in the fight against oppression, I think. The second one seems a bit overdressed.
Where would you place reading Jamil’s tweet on the Misery Index?
It’s wrong of Jameela Jamil to “personally see” all transwomen as anything. They are not a unified bloc of people but a diverse collection of males who have arrived at their trans identity by a variety of avenues, and not all of them automatically deserve to be sympathetically acknowledged as “women.” They’re absolutely not all freedom-fighters against “oppression.”
Here’s a typical transwoman in her own words, excerpted from Anne Lawrence’s book Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism:
All bold is mine. Or how about this one:
Those are particularly sympathetic samples of transwomen’s accounts in a book full of deeply personal testimonies. I would love to ask Jameela Jamil how someone’s “sexually exciting” presence in a women’s communal shower contributes to any kind of “fight against oppression.”
Anne Lawrence is a trans-identified male herself, and she takes pains to paint these accounts in a sympathetic light:
OK, that’s all well and good, but we’re still dealing with male people whose primary motive for being in women’s segregated spaces is their own personal sexual arousal. They’re there to get off, and it doesn’t matter that they’re not ogling the other women; by their own admission, they see the women as merely props in their male sexual fantasies.
Jameela is the one in “denial” — she’s not looking soberly at what the phenomenon of transsexualism actually is. True, it’s more than “men playing dress-up,” but there’s a big chasm between that and what trans activists are demanding we accept them as: pure and complete, legitimate females, in all contexts and all circumstances.
The truth isn’t so simple and easy to reduce to a feel-good tweet. She herself is an outspoken feminist; she ought to listen closer to other feminists who are speaking out about trans issues.
Ophelia, I suspect this is what you meant, but I still feel it’s important to point out that it’s not ‘trans women’ who are actors of oppression, but rather the current wave of trans activists. I’ve known far too many trans women in real life whose primary wish was to just be left alone–no desire to compete as women athletes, no getting their balls waxed, no desire to claim the handful of carve-outs that feminists have earned through blood, sweat and tears. Some of them did (and do) seek their OWN carve-outs (because the patriarchy sucks for everyone who is not a straight male WASP), but recognize the difference between their own needs and the needs of women, and would much rather both groups gain the rights they deserve.
The TRAs are being fetted by the media, because it lets them look woke and inclusive without actually addressing all the issues that gender constructs in society create. I suspect that a lot of old-school transwomen (ie, those with legitimate diagnoses of gender dysphoria, rather than boys who want to wear a skirt and sneak into the girl’s locker room) are finding their own existence made more difficult by the McKinnons of the world.
@Artymorty – cripes, those quotations are creepy. Ordinary women don’t get excited at being in the changing room in the gym. I have sometimes enjoyed the “femaleness” of an atmosphere eg in hospital in a women’s ward, but that was for the shared experience and the kindness women generally show to each other. Other women try on clothes together, or make up, or on a girls’ night out or even dissing the men in their lives at a spa but these aren’t arousing, just relaxing and fun.
I’m struck by the descriptions in Artymorty’s quotes. They gush about a “sexual excitement” that has nothing to do with sex (as I understand it). Maybe this is what they mean when they say they have “girl brains.”
A young trans-identified male I know described feeling “euphoria” when anyone addressed him as a woman or accepted him as a woman. He believes this is what it ‘feels like’ to be a woman. When challenged by actual women who do not feel euphoria on being treated like a woman, he assumes it is because we have always been treated like a woman, and are accepting of our own gender identity to the extent that we don’t have that euphoric feeling. That could be possible. It could also be possible that we don’t feel euphoric about being ignored, talked over, groped, insulted, condescended to, or mansplained, which is what usually happens when someone “treats us like a woman”. Merely calling someone by a traditionally female name is not the same as “being treated like a woman”.
And where the hell did people ever get the idea that euphoria is the mentally healthy state of mind?
If the impulse towards transgenderism is caused by a sexually excited drive towards being in women’s spaces, and an access of euphoria upon being mistaken for a woman, then the rejection of that drive and that mistake is a denial of their sexual fulfillment and rejection of their euphoria. This explains the rabidity with which the TRAs pursue those who refuse to kowtow to their delusions. “Gender identity” is nothing more than a sexual fetish. And, like rapey men everywhere, if we refuse to participate they will hurt us.
@iknklast #7 —
‘Euphoria’ doesn’t usually signal fitting in comfortably within the place where you belong. That would be more of an ordinary kind of feeling, I think. It’s particularly odd then that your friend apparently thinks a kind of giddy exhilaration is our normal state. That’s a suspicious sort of projection. It makes me wonder not just if they understand what women actually feel, but if their theory of other minds is intact.
When I read some of the accounts of gender dysphoria — the agonizing pain and obsession described by those who lived through or are living with it — it reminds me of similar reports of the experience of drug addiction, and what it feels like when your body craves something it doesn’t have. “I need puberty blockers; I need hormones; I need a mastectomy; I need breast augmentation; I need pronouns; I need validation; I need to pass; I need access; I need it and need it now or I don’t really exist …”
They’re jonesing for a fix. Thus, the later euphoria. They’re high. Perhaps.
Papito #8 —
But that wouldn’t explain ftm, or the mtf transgender people who aren’t autogynephilic.
I read something recently that described “gender identity” as the feeling that you ought to be measured by the cultural yardstick used for the opposite sex. You don’t necessarily fall into the center of that yardstick (the stereotypes), but if you’re a biological female trans man who loves sewing and wearing pretty dresses, then you’re doing that the way a biological man would — not like a woman would. You’re being both transgender and gender-nonconforming. You assess where you are compared to others on a different scale that the one you’re ‘supposed’ to because that’s the way you appraise yourself. Which means other people are off in their valuations. You’re really a man.
That’s a useful metaphor, because it might help explain why many trans activists manage to deny they’re buying into gender stereotypes and the binary while simultaneously accusing the gender critical feminists that no, that’s what they’re doing. They think they’re being told that boys must use a boy cultural-measuring-stick, and girls have to measure themselves by the one for girls. Sticks! Boxes! Binary! Change them! Gcf want us to keep them in place.
But a female who sews pretty dresses shouldn’t be considered either a ‘proper lady’ or ‘a daring man who defies social expectations.’ Gender identity is still a stick, box, and binary. They’re just someone who likes to sew pretty dresses. Don’t change the ways of judging and sorting — get rid of them.
(Okay, I found the link, which expresses it better: https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/)
Sastra, I agree with you. I don’t think there’s one answer for all transgender people. I just think sexual fetishism is the answer for the most driven, vocal, and dangerous transgender people.
Delusions come in many flavors. Some are entirely benign to others, some are aggressive. There are some women pretending to men, or men pretending to be women, whose investment in the masquerade isn’t so intense and vital that they will go ballistic if someone calls them Ma’am or Sir out of order. It doesn’t pop their bubble, deflate their euphoric sexualized fantasy. That should tell us something about the way in which this delusion or drive interacts with the rest of their mind.
Like most, I’m fine being polite to people I find odd, but I reject the idea of being obligated to play a role in someone else’s sexual fetishism.
Also, how did such simple, well-worn reason as “getting rid of the yardsticks” get defined as “radical feminism?” It reminds me of being in grad school and having a professor try to explain postmodernism to us younguns like it was new to us. It never for once occurred to him that his surprising revelations were arguments we had grown up with. They were old ideas to us, which we could agree with or argue with.
I do not consider myself a daring man who defies social expectations. I do sew awesome costumes for my daughter, I’m an excellent and enthusiastic cook, and I take good care of my children. Measure me on the cooking, sewing, and parenting yardsticks, if you wish; “gender” can go hang itself. Perhaps this is because “getting rid of gender yardsticks” was part of my upbringing.
My question is why is this whole society seemingly swinging back in the other direction, leaving me stranded on Radical Feminist Island?
Papito, my husband is a man who likes theatre, art movies, can match his colors much better than I can, cooks, dusts, and does the decorating. He is also a librarian. He never thinks of himself as trans, as gender non-coforming, gender critical, or rad fem. He thinks of himself as being himself.
I am a woman who does science, loves math, finds statistics exciting, do all the actual building and assembling of things in our house, and reads non-fiction. I change the tires because he never learned how. I do consider myself gender non-conforming, gender critical, and rad fem, but not trans. I think of myself as being myself, but I add the other labels.
I think the difference is that he is free to just be himself because he has enough male characteristics that he presents in a way that people define as male, and does not need any of the labels. I accept and embrace the labels because I am a female that has to fight to be accepted the way I am.
I don’t know how universal my experience is, and don’t claim it to be universal, but I do know several others who are similar, with the male just being himself without labels while not conforming to gender ideas, and the woman being herself but accepting, even requiring in some cases, the labels.
I think the hatred directed towards ‘terfs’ is partly fueled by a determination to link transgenderism with homosexuality, and gender-critical feminism with the conservative religious-right. Because both groups are skeptical of gender ideology, that means that the loathing and disgust expressed by the people who believe breaking God’s rules for Man and Women is an abomination must be shared by the gcf. They seem to believe that either this is a secret motivation hidden from the public and covered by phony posturing, or that expressions of anger by terfs/gcf are indeed the same kind of hate as the Abomination crowd and reveal the deception. It’s ultimately homophobia on both sides, the reasoning goes.
When they hear “men cannot become women” they think it belongs in the same category as “you need to act like a man.” It’s telling people what to do. Society doesn’t think it’s swinging back, then. There’s a lot of confusion.
Also, “Gender Identity is biological.” Any time a study finds a difference in the brains of transgender people it’s supposed to represent a change which took place in the womb, not only establishing the scientific existence of an innate gender identity in everyone, but demonstrating that trans gender are “born that way” — another way to link transgenderism with homosexuality. Criticisms of the studies come from hatred and pseudoscience — and homophobia.
It’s funny how people like PZ accept this argument so completely, when he has been so critical of those brain studies that purported to show women thought emotionally and men thought logically. The same arguments he made against those studies could easily be made against the trans studies, but he cannot connect the dots.
And since our brain is not fully developed at birth, to ignore the impact of socialization on brain development is, well, ridiculous.
@iknklast —
There also seems to be a problem with failing to distinguish transgender brains from non-gender-conforming homosexual brains. They have discovered similarities between brain bits from women and effeminate gay men. Unless they control for this, they may not be finding what they think they’re finding.
The frustrating thing though is that what evidence for brain-based gender there is, is fairly small, new, and controversial. They haven’t found a way to look at brain scans and tell transgender apart from not-transgender. Even if these conclusions were in fact true, you would think activists would cut skeptics some slack here — especially since it reeks of pink brain/ blue brain. It’s not like evolution, or heliocentrism, or some other established, well known tenet of science so that you have to twist yourself in knots to come up with ways to reject it and thus it’s all too obvious something else is going on.
Nope. Right off the bat — “you’re just like someone saying the earth is flat!” Because they linked to some neurological abstract and an article at Huffpo.
Methinks something else is going on …
Sastra #10:
If you ought to be measured by the opposite sex’s yardstick but it doesn’t matter where you are on that yardstick — you can be anywhere on the masculine-feminine spectrum — what’s the point of the yardstick at all? What does it matter which yardstick you use? That doesn’t make any sense, does it. But it highlights the problem with gender identity as opposed to gender: one is observed and the other is simply declared. You get placed on a gender spectrum roughly by how masculine or feminine you are observed to be in appearance, dress, behaviour, etc., in relation to others around you. But with gender identity you just declare how masculine or feminine you’d like others to perceive you, appearance and behaviour-wise, no matter how out of line it is with how others would naturally perceive your behaviour or appearance, by saying that’s how you feel inside. You can see how this plays perfectly into the hands of masculine males who have autogynephilia. Actually it seems the whole concept was developed with them in mind.
@ iknklast #12,
Your husband sounds like the kind of fellow I would get along with (and you sound like the kind of woman who brought me up; my mother was a mathematician).
I don’t know how much I need labels like “gender non-conforming,” “gender critical,” or “radical feminist.” To me it’s really just being normal, and honest. And I’m introverted, so I don’t explain myself often. But I need these words to explain to my children why it’s okay that they’re not in the middle of “gender yardsticks,” or spilling out of “gender boxes,” without taking recourse to that damn transgender ideology. We had some issues with that damn cult lately, which is what brought me here. My fierce, indomitable girl and my sweet, flowered boy need me to help them to understand that they’re no less a girl and a boy, respectively, and to be brave enough to not give a damn about other people’s preconceptions and limitations.
As for me, I think the biggest gender taboo I break – the one that truly gives others the most difficulty – is being a stay-at-home dad. Nine years in, people still ask me when I’m going back to work. Telling people I’m already doing what I really want to do – taking care of my kids and my wife – seems to trigger a processing error repeatedly. Both my kids were home sick today. My wife couldn’t have her career if I weren’t here for them. And we have all had a good day getting better. Chicken soup for dinner! Yes, it’s what I want to do, not something I’m just stuck doing.
I can’t hang out with dads (bragging about business, playing poker, or yakking about sports, so boring), and… I can’t hang out with moms either, doing their mom stuff. I feel like a skunk at a garden party when I go to a moms thing. It’s mixed-sex or nothing for me.
I don’t need labels for myself. I’m not the least bit feminine in appearance, and am perfectly comfortable with my appearance, preferences, and feelings. But until people stop looking at a man who takes care of kids by choice, not by accident, as if he has three heads, I’m still going to feel I have to defend my choices sometimes, and that means some words and theory.
And I experienced the opposite. As a woman, it was “why don’t you quit work and stay home with the kid?” “Why are you working when your kid has to be in day care?” And the biggie, following my divorce: “What kind of mother would allow her ex to have custody of the child?” The answer was, the kind of mother who is seriously ill and needs time to recover before I can take care of my son full time. That answer was not acceptable. I was a bad person – not a bad mother, but a bad person. I was inhuman, unwomanly, and a selfish arrogant monster for allowing my son to be taken care of by his father (who was a good parent while we were married, but degenerated once he had a new lover) while I got well enough to take care of him myself.
Once I had my son back in my custody, it was “why are you working, when your son needs you?” (My son was in school all day). “Why don’t you quit working and stay home with your son?” (Because I needed to pay rent and buy food, and because I am an intelligent, educated human being who needed something more than sitting around waiting for my son to come home from school, something more than picking up his socks and putting them in the laundry, etc. I needed intellectual stimulation).
There are people who are suited better for staying home with kids or running daycares than other people are. Some of those people are men. There are people who should never ever stay home with kids all day or run a day care. Some of those people are women (at least three or four of them are me, I am so non-kid friendly).
Now if we could just get people to understand that, and quit assuming these things automatically break out by sex (or gender, or pizza, or whatever), we could get past all this nonsense and start trying to solve problems that are much more important than what pronoun someone uses when they refer to us.