Life in a male body
It would be nice if everyone could grasp this point.
It’s the truth. I can’t experience life in a lizard body or an eagle body or an elephant body (and neither can any other human). We can try to imagine what it’s like, but that’s the limit of what we can do.
People who are not born X can’t experience what it’s like to have been born X. Of course they can’t, by definition: not being born X=not having the experience of having been born X.
The idea is that there’s such a thing as “feeling like” a woman and thus sharing the lived experience of being female, but the idea is wrong. You can experience your own idea of what it’s like, but you can’t share an experience you’ve never had and by definition can never have. You can try to imagine it, empathize with it, and the like, but you can’t literally have it.
But there’s always someone who doesn’t get it.
Because being presumed to be female is not the same thing as being female. At all.
It’s possible to have experiences that are like experiences that women have, but that is not the same as experiencing what it’s like to exist as a female, because of the whole not being one thing I just mentioned. You can imagine, guess, fantasize, pretend, but that’s all you can do.
Anyway, sooner or later the contempt and entitlement elbows everything else aside.
The pink flowers don’t cancel out the male entitlement.
If they cannot buy into Western women being oppressed, they do not know what it feels like to be a woman.
The word “Western” here is utterly irrelevant; it’s just been thrown in there as an attempt to make women who are women — women born female — feel like they’re actually a subset of women, and a privileged racist bigoted unclean impure subset at that. It’s just a male’s attempt to drag a woman down and hopscotch over her and become the most oppressed.
This is why I reject “intersectionality.” I agree that the idea started off with good intentions — on paper, what’s wrong with recognizing that there are different “axes” of oppression and that they interact with each other in important ways? — but in practice what you get is trans-identifying males shitting on women over their “whiteness” or their “Westernness” or “cis-ness” or whatever. Fuck that.
I’m very much reminded of philosophy like “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” when it comes to stuff like this… the consensus long seems to have been that it isn’t possible to know what being something is like without actually being it.
Times sure have changed.
Oh I dunno.
Living as they do each in his own special tub of bullshit must give each of these trans-whatevers a superior perspective on the lived experience of Diogenes of ancient fame. And that’s just for starters.
There is actually something brilliantly honest about:
“ANY understanding of the “lived experience” of being female when some trans women are presumed to be female by almost everyone around. That’s categorically extremely female typical experience.”
The entire female ‘experience’ is defined by how it is perceived from somewhere else (basically male). There is nothing to being female beyond the collective presumption of ‘everyone around’.
We can do what we want.
QED.
@BKISA
I will admit that I can’t experience being a bat, but is that the same as not knowing what it is like to be one?
I have been presumed to be Irish. I have also been presumed to be Colombian. I am neither. And someone else’s presumption that I was (Irish; Colombian) did not add one iota to my understanding of what it’s actually like to be what I am not.
If I go along with the presumption, and pretend I am what I am not, it’s not only silly, but it is also cultural appropriation.
Isn’t a trans-identifying male pretending to be really female “sexual appropriation?”
Papito:
I would say more like sexual aspiration.
Colin @ 7 – so what does it mean to know what it’s like to be a bat separate from the experience of being a bat?How is it possible to know what it’s like without experiencing it?
We can of course have our own ideas of what it’s like to be a bat, and we can assume that they are in fact what it’s like to be a bat, but we can also be wrong…and there are no bats who can tell us we’re wrong.
Making guesses from the outside is one thing and experiencing is another. This is Known Heretic’s point, I think, and I know it’s mine.
Hrm. That seems a debatable distinction, mostly because there’s that “like” in there. As in, I think I’d agree 100% if it were “experiencing what it is to exist as a female”. Or, alternatively, “experiencing existence as a female.” Experiencing what it’s “like” to be an X (in Y doing Z) is per se a matter of imagination and empathy. It’s employing theory of mind to figuratively put oneself in another’s situation. It can also be recognizing a similarity of experience already extant such that some aspect of one’s own existence functions as a simulacrum of someone else’s.
I’ve never broken my nose, but I’ve experienced pain, injuries, and even broken other bones. While I haven’t had that particular experience, and thus have never experienced what it is to suffer a broken nose, it would be wrong to say that I don’t have any understanding whatsoever of what it’s like.
Like, I get the point. My brain is just a stickler for precision.
Hm yes I see what you mean. I guess I borrowed Nagel’s wording for the wrong purpose.
Then again…is “what it’s like to have a broken nose” as inaccessible to us as “what it’s like to be a bat”? I think no. Second rhetorical question: is what it’s like to be the other sex as inaccessible as what it’s like to be a bat or to have a broken nose? Or somewhere in between? I don’t know.
I would guess it’s somewhere in between. Males do share many experiences with females, because we are both human. It’s just the difference between being a male human and a female human. Just like white people share many experiences with black people, experiences that accrue to our being human. But the male/female, black/white experience means we interpret those experiences through different filters.
The thing is, a female child has certain experiences as a result of being female that date back to birth (and for some, before, now that everyone has to know the sex of their child before birth). These are embedded in femaleness in a way that we do not know, and that cannot be replicated by anyone who has been brought up male, even if they are now being treated as female, and going through the same experiences as a natal female. And are they? Do transwomen experience the same things? Are they able to pass well enough that they get the constant pats on the fanny, oh-so-casual brushing of the arm against the breasts, the leers, the ogles, the catcalls, the grabbing, the fondling, the dirty jokes? In short, is their experience really like that of a female, or is it sort of a simulated half-female experience? I don’t know, because never having lived as a transwoman, I cannot be sure what it feels like to be a transwoman (a point many TRAs like to make when it suits them).
Interesting questions to ponder. I can’t say much about degree of accessibility, except that it’s prima facie a proportional function of similarity.
Going back to broken noses, let’s suppose a pair of identical twins who’ve grown up together and always done mostly the same activities. Can’t get more similar than that in the real world. If one of them breaks a nose, what that’s like should be maximally accessible to the other twin.
If we say that the twins are merely fraternal, does that make a difference? What if they aren’t twins? What if they aren’t related? What if they live on different continents? In different times? What if they have different eye color? Hair color? Hair style? Favorite episode of Red Dwarf?
None of that seems at all relevant to whether someone can form a useful mental representation of having a broken nose. We are left, then, with the awkward idea that relevant difference is what makes a difference, which is all but tautological. That doesn’t seem helpful, but it does mean that we can automatically reject anything like, “S and P are different, so S categorically cannot understand P’s experience.”
Also, continuing iknklast’s thoughts @ 14, do boys and men who are trans grow up hearing “girls are ___” and “women like to ___” and automatically hear that as being about them?
I doubt it, myself.
Or maybe they hear the complimentary things as being about them but the belittling and dismissive and contemptuous and hostile things as being about those other people. All those “girls can’t”s and “women are no good at”s are about cis girls and women, not the true girls and women who are born male.
And other little things. Such as my algebra teacher never called on me (or any other girls), and had a real joking, one of the guys relationships with the boys. I didn’t believe I could do math until I was in my 30s, even though I was successfully doing it all my life.
And the little things like washing the dishes and cooking while the boys watched television and built model airplanes. The clothes that kept me from being as active as I would like. The admonitions that it wasn’t good to win any games against the boys (I suppose maybe Candyland would have been all right, but we never played that so I don’t know). The talking around and over you while you are trying to be part of a conversation…even when you have more knowledge of something than the boys.
Nullius, I think your example is trying to compare apples to oranges. Having a broken nose is something I can imagine because I have had numerous nasal surgeries, and know what that’s like. Having breaks and sprains and strains is part of the human condition, and is not different based on being male or female, based on country of origin, color, or other condition. The things that go into living as a woman vs living as a man are different; there is not a universal experience to draw on. And, I will say, that while I could imagine what it would feel like to have a broken bone, once I actually had one, it turned out I was only partly right. Same with labor; I thought I could imagine, because I had stomach pains and cramps at other times. I was wrong. I never imagined anything like that until I went through it.
I do not believe we can imagine what it is like to be subject to constant racism everyday. Especially the covert kind, the kind that other people can’t see, and that we often can’t see, but that serves to create a barrier between the races…an invisible barrier. I do not believe I can imagine what it would be like to be a man. Oh, I can imagine it right enough, but I don’t believe that is really what it is like to be a man. Probably in part, okay, yes, but not in the full extent of being male and entitled and expected to be macho and having unprotected genitalia hanging off the front…nope. I can only imagine it, I can’t really understand it.
So, yeah, I think we can actually make that generalization. Because sex and gender are not like broken bones and noses, which we all have, and which are basically the same for everyone. They are a whole different concept, a whole different idea, and to believe that someone raised male, with male privilege, can comprehend what it feels like to be female…I just can’t do that. Any more than I can imagine what it feels like to be Donald Trump, or even Ivanka Trump…or for that matter, what it feels like to be Elizabeth Warren, who has a background somewhat similar to my own, and ideas much closer to mine than any Trump currently known to man.
Another thing to consider is that these men who think they know what it’s like to be female don’t really have anything to base this idea on. We women may have a better idea of what it’s like to be a man, because virtually all of the media we consume is from the male point of view, which is taken for granted as ‘the’ point of view. The cultural productswe see, hear, read and experience are products of male culture, and we grow up trained to see the world as men see it (and consequently experience cognitive dissonance which we often don’t recognise and acknowledge until our consciousness is raised–I was just reading a history that quoted CS Lewis saying ‘[h]e [Owen Banford] is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman’–nothing at all weird, uncomfortable or alienating about that…).
Men, on the other hand, will struggle to see the world from a woman’s point of view unless they make a conscious and dedicated effort to seek out media created by women–granted that’s a bit easier now, but the further back you go the more difficult it is to find women in the ‘canon’. I’m sure there are men who genuinely want this experience, and have genuinely tried to have it, but I am willing to bet money that the men we’re considering here, who claim to know what it’s like to be a woman, have never actually made that effort–because they see women from men’s point of view, as that’s the only point of view that exists for them. Viz Ophelia’s post the other day about that dude who was explaining how to take a shower like a woman.
OB:
And even if bats could talk, how could we know that what they meant by X was the same as the listener’s experience of X? Never mind inter-species conversations. The same applies to humans – even identical twins.
It is one of the oldest problems in philosophy.
And how reliable would an English-Bat Language dictionary be? It’s a bit of a riddle.
I hope you’re familiar with the great Professor van Manderpoot’s solution to this problem:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22895/22895-h/22895-h.htm
Personally, I don’t even know what it feels like to be a generic man, I only know what it feels like to be one particular man. Other men may and likely do experience being men differently than me and than each other. We can all only imagine how it feels to be the other, whether it’s the other person, the other sex, or the other species.
One of the handful of truly revelatory experiences I’ve had in my consciousness-raising journal is understanding that men are able to be in the world as individual people in a way women are not.
wrt broken noses: I can add from experience that what it’s like depends very much on how it happens and how the injury and the person are treated afterwards. Having my nose broken by an aggressor in an isolated place was very different to having it broken by accident while sparring, surrounded by friends and a first-aider.
But perhaps I’m pushing the analogy too far at this point.
wrt men knowing what it’s like to be a woman: we don’t even know if men can know what it’s like or even how to find out whether we can find out, so I’m inclined to take those claims with all the salt I can lay my hands on.