Guest post by tiggerthewing.
Ophelia pointed out the strange gender-essentialist world of some millennials, as revealed by a Guardian article.
One of the commenters linked to a description by someone of their ‘gender fluidity’.
There was one comment in particular that showed that the idea of gender essentialism has bamboozled young people:
also, my gender fluidity seems a bit different than yours (I just want to point this out), for me, I don’t really have with my body, It’s with the way I feel, sometimes I feel boy-ish sometimes girly-ish, and isn’t really my body that’s that’s the problem.
Despite what these people might be reading and hearing, that isn’t a description of someone who is trans but a description of normal, everyday experience of being human – which is why prescriptive and proscriptive gender roles are so harmful.
That the idea, for instance, that all women – and only women – like sparkly, brightly-coloured clothes, make-up and long hair, is precisely what feminists are arguing against. Just because, like the religion of one’s parents, it is an idea trained into children long before they have any capacity to reason, doesn’t make it true.
But instead of listening to older feminists who are trying to explain that since everyone has moods when they experience desires and feelings that their society only deems suitable for the opposite sex, so we should change society to reflect that, they have what amounts to a religious fervour regarding the truth of gender roles, so must mould their bodies with each mood swing to reflect which of the two ‘genders’ their current mental state occupies.
In this topsy-turvy world view, sex becomes irrelevant, and ‘gender’ paramount. ‘Girls’ can have ‘girl-dicks’ (and, presumably, ‘boys’ can have ‘boy vaginas’). Note the infantilising language, too; another reminder that these views are entirely comfortable within patriarchal constructs, which hold that only the most masculine of manly men are true adults worthy of the state of full personhood and everyone else is pretty much a child with no rights. And feminism is transphobic for pointing out the inherent bigotry? Please!
Why are they fighting the very people trying to liberate them? Why are they so determined to fit themselves into the boxes that they’ll accept the notion that ‘boys’ can’t have feelings ascribed to ‘girls’ or vice versa? They think that they are actually (and bravely) moving between gender boxes, but really they are only moving to a different corner of the same one, and getting pissed off when people point out that they haven’t actually moved boxes at all; indeed, by reinforcing the boxes instead of dismantling them, they are making it harder to move between them.
Adults indulge small children when they toddle up and declare “I’m a tiger! Roar!” and I think that these people are disappointed that the indulgence doesn’t extend into adulthood. Declaring “Today I’m a girl, so I have a girl-dick!” doesn’t get the “Of course you are. Which pronouns do you prefer today?” response they think that they are entitled to.
Comments
23 responses to “Guest post: Reinforcing the boxes instead of dismantling them”
This is honestly kind of how I feel about trans/gender essentialist world of today, and this was a really great summary for me, thank you.
Personally I don’t understand how we have seemingly reached a point where people are saying “because I don’t feel like wearing a skirt and makeup, I must be a boy today”. How strange and confusing. In my own case, I wear dresses and high heels from Monday to Friday at work (I don’t have to – technically I just have to be dressed professionally but I happen to enjoy it), but every weekend and afternoon I enjoy nothing more than wearing jean or track pants and avoiding doing anything to my hair or skin. Does that mean under this new world order that I turn into a boy every weekend?
I don’t understand this trans/gender essentialist weirdness and I’m not that much older than millenials – less than 10 years older, but sometimes their way of thinking in this area seems so alien I might as well be 200 years out of time.
The self-objectification is perhaps the ugliest thing here. It seems connected to women living outside their own bodies to the point where even sexual orientation is subject to fashion or political poses rather than actual personal feeling.
That’s why I’ve never understood why some people say they are “gender fluid”; I dont see the need to state something that simply describes the human state of being, something we all experience (all of us perhaps save the most gender-indoctrinated among us – hyper-masculinized males that cringe at anything remotely emotional or what they consider to be “feminine” traits, or hyper-feminized women that resemble stepford wives). Thankfully they are not the majority.
The problem is that many people are indoctrinated enough so that we still end up with gender essentialism as our cultural perspective. It is this unfortunate gender essentialism that has given rise to our current transactivism, as well as to our language that includes terms like “gender queer” and “gender fluid” as if those are special states of being, rather than just the normal human experience.
“only women – like sparkly, brightly-coloured clothes, make-up and long hair,”
Renaissance? The higher up you go in the Catholic hierarchy? Maharajahs? Imperial Chinese elite?
What are these people? Stupid or something? (Okay, back to finish reading the rest of the post!)
When I say “I spent most of the day in male mode”, I mean my mental body map had actually switched over to a secondary homonculus that gave a phantom limb sense of having a male body, complete with larger muscles, slimmer hips, and male sex organs.
When I am in male mode, I move differently and have to remind myself that I am not really in the body I think I am before I interact with people so that I don’t get surprised by how they react towards me.
That’s what genderfluid means to me. Actually having more than one sex body map and sometimes being in the one that doesn’t fit one’s actual anatomy. Which isn’t about gender, but I’m using the word because other people act like it’s a polite word for sex.
When I have an accurate body map but don’t act feminine, I’m just being a human being. That’s what these little poseurs are getting wrong.
All I can say, quixote, is that if they are stupid it is by way of wilful ignorance.
Learning history has never been less difficult; reading about it is one of the laziest occupations now that we no longer have to leave our own armchairs. The internet has provided us with access to phenomenal quantities of historical material, and the experts to make sense of it. To have so little sense of the past, and the reasons we are where we are in the present, leaves people vulnerable to exploitation by the unscrupulous. What happened? When did we cease to instil any respect for history in so many of our young people?
Samantha Vimes:
Today my female personality was baking cakes (four huge cakes, from the morning till dark!), wearing a cute kitchen apron and graciously accepting the compliments. My male personality observed this from far away, enjoying the experience … and thinking of these horrible young people with no respect for history, who will devour the cakes tomorrow.
Or maybe it was the other way around? [Thinking hard…] Unfortunately, my sex body map doesn’t produce any answer; the only readable hint is a big red arrow directing me to bed.
Apologies, the only reason I wrote this is the strange need to say good night to all of you.
Good night, Ariel.
uhhh…that never happens to me.
My moods change sometimes, but my body map stays the same. YMMV.
Samantha, I’m not sure what I would use to describe your experience, but I don’t believe it is what is normally meant as “gender fluid”, which is about gender identity rather than an actual experience of one’s body actually being a different sex than it is in reality. I’m not saying this is the issue for you but it is interesting – I knew a woman with dissociative identity disorder where she experienced herself at times as different than what we saw – at some times she experienced herself as a child. I myself have body dysphoria that led to 3 years of weighing 85 pounds and yet experiencing my body as overweight. Even today I can’t “map” my body at all acurately. I still see a very ugly, obese person when I look in the mirror. Brains can pull some unusual deceptions in our experiences of our bodies because of a some sort of body/brain disconnect – temporary or long term. For some people it is benign and not requiring “treatment”. In my case, for some time it was life-threatening.
So we have this assertion: “all women–and only women–like [certain things]”. Now, this assertion is suspect on its face because it uses the “all” word. Study guides advise students to watch out for words like “always” and “never”, because statements that contain them are unlikely to be true, and I think that applies here. And even casual observation of humans easily turns up counter-examples to this statement: women who don’t like those things, and men who do.
But there is a related assertion, that I don’t have a quote for, and that’s part of the problem: I can’t quite figure out if people (who?) are actually asserting this, but it seems like this assertion is always floating around in the background in these discussions, and it goes something like this
Now, I think this statement is as false as the first one, and for pretty much the same reasons: it is an absolute statement, and thus unlikely to be true; more importantly, I find it implausible based simply on my own observations of humans over many years. (You can observe a lot just by watching –Yogi Berra)
Again, I don’t know that anyone is actually saying this, but I think there is a widely held perception that people are saying this–that this is a core tenet of feminism–and I think that perception is responsible for some of the pushback against feminism (Most of the pushback against feminism is raw power dynamics.) Trudeau played with this issue in some of the early Doonesbury cartoons.
I have a powerful imagination. My secondary body map developed when I was an adult, working on writing stories from the p.o.v. of a first person narrator. I essentially voluntarily created this second body map but find I switch over to it by a sort of mental drift at times.
Steven, there are biologically determined behavioral differences.
Men hardly ever breastfeed, for instance, as it is much more difficult for them to lactate. Furthermore, they don’t use tampons to deal with secretions from their reproductive organs. Happy?
Girls play with trucks. Boys play with toy kitchen stuff and dolls. If. No.One. Teaches. Them. Not. To.
Men are fashion CRAZY! — in times and places where men are encouraged to show off their wealthy and beauty with personal adornment. Women eagerly have taken up fencing, tennis, etc as society permitted.
But is this really, as a trans person, your perception of the point of contention between some trans-activists and some radical feminists?! That radical feminists want to deconstruct gender stereotypes, and that is what pisses trans people off? It’s not my perception.
My perception is that the problem some trans people have, is with feminists who insist this is all there is to being transgender. Trans people don’t “really” exist, they’re just people who identify with stereotypical traits of the opposite sex.
We’ve all heard the mantra, surely?: Sex is biological (SCIENCE!). Gender is a heirarchical oppressive system imposed on people because of their sex. Therefore it is nonsense to claim you feel yourself to be the opposite sex since the only feelings one has about one’s sex are those that are imposed externally. Ergo, trans women are at best delusional, maybe lying, and at worst, men appropriating womanhood to infiltrate women’s spaces and destroy feminism from within.
Unfortunately, this dogma is at odds with decades of psychological research, study and testing. And contradicted by the actual experiences of many trans women. I would like, if I may (without again being charged with “virtue signalling” and “dishonesty” by Josh of the comment police), to quote one trans woman on the subject, who in my experience is fairly typical:
Sorry to take up so much space, but my point is that while some trans (or pseudo-trans) people may buy into gender stereotypes (as do most cis people), this is not why there exists conflict between trans activists and some radical feminists. It is because of the denialism and disparagement of trans people by some radical feminists.
I forgot to link to the source of my big quote. It’s here.
@Steven #11
I suspect that if somehow–somehow! (But how?)–you could control for social/cultural influences, it’s likely you’d find some sex-based behavioral tendencies. Statistically men might be more likely to do physically agressive things, like punch somebody in the nose, and women would, statistically, be more likely to do social-glue-y things like bring cookies to the meeting. You wouldn’t be able to extrapolate from that to predict an individual’s behavior, though: plenty of men would never punch anyone in the nose and plenty of women would. And there are plenty of men cookie-bringers. (I’m hungry. Why don’t I have a cookie? I want a cookie.)
Hormones influence behavior, a lot. But hormone levels fluctuate throughout life, in response to circumstances (put orphaned pups in with a male rat and he’ll start caring for them; he may even lactate.) Anyway we humans have more control over our hormone-influenced behavior than other mammals do, they tell me.
I for one don’t think everything’s socialization. But I don’t know how you can tease socialization apart from biology, or if it even makes sense to try. Socialization affects everything. But I don’t believe that sex-based behavioral-tendency differences are really all that strong, or relevant. They vary from individual to individual and can change over the course of an individual’s own life. Nor are they immutable. If they were, human societies wouldn’t have to work so hard to reinforce gender roles.
@Silentbob,
This post was about the millenials in the Guardian piece.
Except some trans people have problems with feminists and others who don’t believe that. Some transactivists and their allies will attempt to trash the reputation of anyone who challenges or even questions a particular dogmatic narrative. See: Michael Bailey, Kenneth Zucker, Alice Dreger, Ophelia Benson, et al.
People who have spent decades doing psychological research, study, and testing, have been among those trashed. Other scientists simply won’t go near the minefield.
Not a good state of affairs. Hardly the way for science to flourish.
That’s certainly part of the story. There are some anti-trans radfems who behave despicably.
There are also some transactivists who behave despicably.
You’ve got to be kidding.
That’s one part of it, sure, but the whole thing? That explains the frenzied dishonest attacks on me for instance? That explains the “allies” who patrol Twitter warning anyone who RTs feminist women such as Helen Lewis and Sarah Ditum? (Those are the two “Improbable Joe” interrogated me about.)
If that were the whole thing we wouldn’t be where we are. It’s absolutely not confined to denialism and disparagement of trans people. If only it were.
I do think you’re mainly about virtue-signaling and bad faith argumentation, SilentBob. I do question your motivations.
This kind of misrepresentation is really getting old. It’s this sort of commentary that is a huge part of the current attacks against Alice Dreger, for example, but she never made this kind of claim, despite the tweeting and blogging hordes who say that she did. It’s nothing more than a strawman used to attack people who question the gender essentialist narrative.
(off topic)
@ 19 Josh Spokes
You’ve made that clear. Forgive me if I laugh in your general direction. I’ve been banned from a couple of FtB blogs for defending Ophelia against spurious charges of transphobia. There are too many links to too many posts on too many blogs over too many months too give you a complete picture. But here is an example of my participation in The Great Clusterfuck of 2015, and here is an example of the esteem in which I am held by those to whom I am supposedly “virtue signalling”.
(/off topic)
SilentBob, does it occur to you you are splaining to feminists how feminism has All Wrong views about transgender people, and maybe it’s the “tell us what our view apparently are” that gets an eyebrow raised in your direction?
The fact that you’ve annoyed other people does not make annoying behavior less annoying.
Did you notice how *nobody* told me, when I talked about my changing body map, that I didn’t actually feel that way and was just feeling rebellious against stereotypes? Maybe pay attention to what people are actually saying and not what their enemies say they say?
@ 22 Samantha Vimes
It was “virtue signalling” and “dishonest” that made me laugh. To “annoying” I plead no contest.
(I’ll try to better live up to my ‘nym in future.)