Pants versus ears
Trans-identifying man Jennifer Finney Boylan says sex is not in the body, it’s in the brain.
When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?
Nothing. It means nothing.
Or it means something, but the something it means is about fantasy and imagination; it’s not about material reality. We can think we “feel like” anything, and that can be a fine pathway to empathy and broader sympathies. It can be, but it can also be a lousy rotten stinking pathway to telling people you know more about being those people than they do.
Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology.
They don’t say that about everything. Nobody cares what fantasies people have about themselves unless those fantasies impinge on other people’s rights.
In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on the women’s sports teams in public schools.
Yes, because it’s not fair for males to play on women’s sports teams, regardless of what their fantasies about themselves are. This does not mean the males have to drop their fantasies; it just means they can’t live their fantasies at the expense of the rights of girls and women.
It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.
Then be a womany man or a manny woman.
H/t John Reed
“It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.”
For many situations, yes, I would agree. But not for all situations. I hope Jennifer is still getting her annual prostate examination.
Julia Serano of “Whipping Girl” fame was the first person I encountered employing that rhetorical trick.
Something along the lines of “We [sic] women fought long and hard [um, … I didn’t mean to do that] to not be defined by what’s between our legs!”
But what that is actually supposed to mean is that in a sexist society, women (AKA “adult human females”) were saddled with all of the gendered stereotypes that supposedly rendered them inferior to men. These gendered stereotypes were collectively known as “femininity” for women and “masculinity” for guys.
“Feminine” meant overly emotional (“hysterical”), unstable, delicate, bad at math, sports, logic, rational thinking, fearful, soft, etc., . Women (especially feminists) fought to deny that rigid gendered image of womanhood. Which is what is so infuriating about Serano claiming that “femininity” is the essential element of being female. He doesn’t define himself by whatever is between his legs, but by his own made-up notion of gender.
I read the article hoping that there would be a real attempt to answer that question. Because I’m genuinely curious and befuddled — many trans people and their allies are adamant that it’s a phrase that means something, that they really do “feel like” a woman (or a man), and yet I am sincerely baffled. I don’t know if I “feel like” a man or not, because I don’t know what that’s supposed to feel like. Like everyone, I am a mix of some traits and inclinations that our culture regards as male, and some that it doesn’t.
It could, of course, be one of those things that I can’t know because I’ve never experienced the alternative. Cis privilege, you might say, though I can hear many of you retching at the phrase. But I’ve never experienced gender dysphoria, either, yet I can wrap my head around the concept. I can imagine having a sense of wrongness with one’s body. (Whether the right way to address that feeling is by changing the body is another issue.)
But we’re told — including in this WaPo piece — that this is not necessarily part of being trans. But then what does it mean?
Of course there’s the usual throat-clearing about XXY chromosomes, women with hysterectomies, etc., but all of that is really just a way of throwing up smoke, i.e. “if I can come up with an exception to any working definition you propose, then no definition works, and we might as well go with ‘anyone who says they’re a woman is one!'”
There’s also some hand-waving about brain scans and such, but the author backs away from any serious attempt to use that as a criteria. Because, of course, if a brain scan could diagnose trans-ness, then that would mean we could scan the brains of troubled teens and presumably, in at least some cases, rule out transgenderism, and that would never do. If some scientific study can be argued to demonstrate an objective physical basis for transgenderism, activists are happy to trumpet it and condemn critics as being anti-science, but the author is quick to say that we can’t possibly restrict it in that way. Heads I win, tails we flip again.
Yes but neither has anyone else. Never forget that. They say they have but they too can’t know. No one can.
Ophelia,
I know EXACTLY what you mean!
Me;
LOL
iknklast,
:)
This. I’m always coming back to the inability of anyone to know “what it’s like” to be anyone but who they have always been, and the inability to call upon a non-existant and impossible comparison to declare they’re really somebody of the other sex. Short of brain injury or disease that causes profound changes in one’s personality and sense of self (where, if there is awareness for the person suffering from this brain pathology, and not just their friends and loved ones), where it’s going to be a “before and after” comparison of subjective experience, most people are not going to have any “lived experience” of being somebody else. I’m not denying the painful reality of those who feel true discomfort with/in their bodies, but I am denying the proffered explanation of having a “gendered soul” or having been “born in the wrong body.” It’s the equivalent of refusing to accept “demonic possession” as an explanation for mental health issues. The malady is real: the “possession” story is bullshit.
Yep. We owe it all to Thomas Nagel and “what is it like to be a bat?”