Guest post: Having burst upon this world trailing clouds of gender
Originally a comment by Sastra on Define “suitable”.
… there’s an exercise at the end. It’s a Gender Comparison Activity. Children are asked to write down things which make them feel like the gender they are – like the way they dress, their favourite colours, the way they act, the games and toys they like to play with. Then they’re asked to make a separate list of things which are associated with the opposite gender – like if they are a boy but they like to play with dolls (that is the actual example given).
Then the children are asked to think whether those lists make them feel any differently about their gender.
If they weren’t thinking about themselves and what they like in terms of conforming to gender stereotypes before, they will be now.
Earlier in the book there’s a section on how it’s fine for men and women to break gender stereotypes ( man wearing make up, woman with toolbox) and if all the other stuff about transgender identities was eliminated, I could see the above exercise helping drive home the point about non-conformity. That is, I could see it helping if it didn’t mention how these things make us “feel the gender we are.” And I could imagine it being useful if we weren’t talking about young children at a stage of development which makes them much more likely to be impressed by the lists of What Boys Are Like and What Girls Are Like than a follow-up mention that oh, hey, no, they’re not… always.
Add in the trans stuff and it absolutely reinforces gender stereotypes. Even adults can’t describe what makes a trans person who doesn’t conform to the socially constructed beliefs about gender nevertheless identify as trans. It’s like describing God — if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t understand it. What’s concrete and comprehensible, on the other hand, is stereotypes.
The steadfast belief that children and teens simply could not be influenced into thinking they’re trans if they’re not really trans reminds me of the similar conviction regarding children and sexual molestation during the Satanic Panic and similar panics on child abuse. No matter what leading questions were asked or what coercive techniques were used over what amount of time, a five year old would never say someone touched them inappropriately if it didn’t happen. Never — it’s like a special gift of clarity and purity that rises above the massive evidence we have on psychological influence under social pressure.
Thus, kids who aren’t trans absolutely know their gender with the unerring accuracy of those who know their true gender doesn’t match up to what others see. Perhaps that’s why the book skips over defining critical terms. The kids already know, having burst upon this world trailing clouds of gender. The lesson is only to jog their memory.
Very Romantic.
In my free time, I will need to make an effort to read some bios of people who claim to be trans, because I really need to know how they separate their inner experience of being the other sex from mere expression of gender resistance. And the reason I feel the need to do this, is that I can’t understand how something so obvious to me and to the readers and comenters of B&W and to gender criticals over all, slips by the skeptical thinkers who dismiss any recognition of gender stereotyping as being bigotry.
I don’t think I am missing anything, but in the skeptical spirit of things, I need to check it out. The people we need the most are either under a spell (and if you believe in transgender identity, why not believe in all magic?) or they are playing along in this misogynistic and anti-LGB game. And in this atmosphere of “no debate,” they are not telling us which it is.
With a book like this, it is readily apparent that the recruiting is starting young as it does with religion. Pre-teens being rushed into a regime of blockers is concerning enough, but here stereotypes are used as evidence of an inner being, a soul if you will.
The connection is easy to make. But then, I’m not a famous skeptic, so I must not be educated enough to see where I am being steered wrong by terfism.
There used to be a popular thought experiment demonstrating how an inner experience of being a particular sex was not only innate, but separate from adherence to gender stereotypes.
“If you (a man) woke up tomorrow and your body had been changed to female — would you be a man or woman?”
The proper response (which btw was often received) was “Why, I’d still be a man — oh, I get it now. It’s something I know about myself in my brain. This is easy to understand!”
I haven’t seen that thought experiment (or several similar others) in quite a while. I suspect it’s because skeptics responded with either “I’d still be me, but if I had the body of a woman I’d be a woman” or “early learning isn’t remembered.” But since I was asked to imagine this scenario by people in rationalist forums, I suspect they think a gender identity present at birth is innately plausible because they’d honestly give the Correct response based on a quick intuition.
Combine that with a determined assumption that being trans is like being gay. If we wouldn’t demand that a gay person must describe what it’s like to be sexually attracted to the same sex and justify its existence instead of taking him or her at their word, then we shouldn’t do it for trans. It’s Standpoint Epistemology, in other words. Nobody can understand what it’s like to be X but the person themselves. Challenging their lived experience is denying their existence. We need to be humble.
I’d like a definition of transness that doesn’t rely on gender stereotypes, and that is different from plain, old “personality.”
Funny how this is pushed for transness, but not other forms of mistaken self-belief. We don’t do this for people claiming to be Napoleon, or the planet Jupiter, or a tuna sandwich. Who decides which standpoints are to be taken seriously, and which result in institutionalization? The forced teaming with LGB is shielding a lot of what would otherwise be deemed mental illness. There’s nothing impossible about a person being attracted to the same sex, while being the other sex is no more possible for them than being a dead French emperor, a gas giant, or two slices of bread with mashed fish in the middle.
Honestly, not Bruce, I think a lot of people are actually gas giants. They aren’t Jupiter, because Jupiter is the only gas giant that is Jupiter, but knowing all the people I’ve known, I feel like I’ve known a lot of gas giants. Or…maybe they were just…blowhards.