When they present that way
What does that mean though?
What does “present that way” mean though?
It can’t mean dress up as the other sex in private, because obviously anybody can do that any time. So what it means is dress up as the other sex in public, i.e. involve other people, including total strangers, in one’s “desire.”
People don’t get to do that. I don’t care how “tormented” they are. Sorry, but I don’t. Everybody is “tormented” by something. When someone’s putative torment can be soothed only by enlisting strangers in that someone’s fantasy life, that becomes a problem for everyone.
I don’t see the problem. We have men wearing “women’s clothes” and women wearing “men’s clothes” when we agree that anyone ought to be allowed to wear whatever they want. Same for behaving in a “feminine” or “masculine” fashion. Once the argument that trans-identified people really ARE the opposite sex * is off the table, what we have is the equivalent of a bike rider from Iowa throwing little Italian phrases around and moving his hands when he speaks. As long as nobody is compelled to believe he really is from Italy, he’s not allowed to change his birth certificate, and he doesn’t explicitly lie, we’re not participating in his fantasy. Someone chooses to flatter them with “my, it’s just like you’re Italian” to watch them preen, go for it.
Teenagers who dressed as goth in public weren’t subjecting us to anything but maybe bad taste.
*(or both sexes or neither sex)
Hahahaha Indiana, not Iowa. I love that movie.
I agree with Sastra. The problem is a little farther down the line. Anybody can dress up as the other sex in public. Bros want to wear skirts, fine. Ladies want to dress like
lumberjacksSmith students in boots and flannel, fine. They just can’t force other people to agree that they are the other sex.Yes, Indiana. My bad.
Anyway yes, sort of, and I know what you mean, and I started to say that at the end and then deleted it, because…
…
……..well because I’m not sure about it, not after all we’ve been seeing. I’m not sure it would be just a matter of wearing what they want. I’m not sure it wouldn’t start as that and then expand and expand and expand in just the way we’ve seen. Give an inch and they’ll take a mile sort of thing. I don’t know, maybe by now I’ve been warped by all the narcissistic creeps who’ve been playing this game for years.
Just don’t make me eat all those eenie foods.
Facts are irrelevant. Reality is irrelevant. So let’s just ignore that little inconvenience.
Let’s make sure they are “happier.” Collectively, all of us. Let’s legislate for happiness. We owe it to them.
Sure.
I see Blanchard as asking the relevant questions which ought to be asked, setting out the real situation and therefore setting up the real dilemmas. The fact that the facts have been hijacked by people who have another agenda doesn’t affect his point. Any situation can be driven out of control and force us to ask practical questions which may have little or nothing to do with what the original issue is.
Blanchard is setting up a legitimate public dialogue. If that’s not provided as a live option there’s no fair and reasonable place for the general public to land. That leaves the extremists and ideologues in control.
I think we have to accept that people have different ideas. Some people find people dressed up as the opposite sex very irksome. Some people don’t mind. Some people will even tell the cross-dressers that they are the opposite sex. I find such diversity of perspective much less troubling than the idea that some people get to decide what’s allowable for everybody to think and say. Or wear, as the case may be. In order to have a legitimate public dialogue, we have to first agree that people may disagree, and we are far from that now.
I don’t particularly like Blanchard’s proclamation. I think it continues to be important that a man cannot become a woman, or vice versa. And I think it’s especially important to deconstruct the idea of “trans people,” because not every person who feels at one moment or the other that they are “tormented by the desire to be the opposite sex” will actually benefit in the long run from pretending to be so, let alone having irreversible medical procedures to help with that pretense. So yes, it is important to ask whether a group of people can be happier, but there are just too many implicit assumptions in Blanchard’s statement for me to like it much. First off, we should consider if other people will be made less happy. I think that, in the case of women’s spaces, there is not a net increase in happiness from humoring dudes “tormented by the desire” to pretend to be ladies.
I think it’s important to ask why they’re happier though. If it’s to satisfy a fetish, then it needn’t be accommodated in public. We’re in the woods currently because the mantra TWAW makes no distinctions with respect to said why.
That. It’s asymmetrical. Women wearing jeans don’t cost men anything. Men wearing catch-me fuck-me shoes are another story.
OMG! It’s one thing to misgender someone but to place ‘Breaking Away’ in IOWA!!!! Where is the de-platforming button located?
I get that it can be jarring and disconcerting when men wear dresses and/or skirts and/or high-heeled shoes, but I don’t think it works well on a practical level to try to regulate which males may wear which kinds of popular garments based on how they feel when they wear them. I think a step back to a broad anthropological perspective on the connection between clothing and human sexuality can provide insight.
Humans have been wearing clothes for at least 100,000 years; for most of that time it seems clothing has been very “gendered”; and “gender expression” is by nature an evolution of human sex signalling. Clothing is highly symbolic and the wearing of it transmits a ton of information — class, health, wealth, status, ethnic & religious affiliation, and so on — much of it registering only subconsciously, until it shows up out in unexpected contexts.
Dresses and skirts and “feminine” coded clothing often carry symbolic meaning around things like feminine standards of beauty within society, and by extension, feminine sexuality. Much of the fashion industry revolves around it. And of course a lot of feminist analysis has involved critique of it.
Pants and suits and “masculine” coded clothing often carry symbolic meaning around things like projecting power (eg “power suit”) and masculine sexuality (which to men seems to be all about power).
Both men’s and women’s clothing are generally becoming more casual, designed around practicality, and by extension less gendered — less coded with the signifiers of power and sexuality — but such things as power suits and little black dresses are still alive and well, and they’re still laden with gendered and sexually-coded signalling.
And it really does matter to many people. We’re strongly, instinctually evolved to have a preference for how we express our presentation, and it’s hard-wired to connect to our sexuality, at a very deep, basic level of human brain function. Our higher-level minds, our cerebral cortexes and our coscious processing centres, ultimately make the call when we’re standing at the closet deciding which garments to apply over our bodies, but those decisions are the product of extremely strong pull from our lower instincts. And to grind against such pull can come to feel deeply exhausting and detrimental to well-being after a while.
This is equally true for males and females, whose sexual orientations are straight or (far less typically) gay; with orientations directed outward, or (far less typically, but at about the same rate of homosexuality) inward. There are those who have a really hard time wearing dresses and heels, but, as counterintuitive as it may seem when looking at clothes from a practical perspective or from a feminist perspective, from the instinctual/gender/sex-signalling perspective it’s also the case that there are those who have a really hard time wearing pants and Birkenstocks.
Very feminine gay men with gender dysphoria really struggle to wear “masculine” clothing and feel much more comfortable in dresses — which is to say, in clothing that signals their sexuality to masculine men. Some women feel the same way — the Barbie phenomenon. They don’t necessarily register it consciously that that’s what they’re doing. It’s often more indirect, like a feeling of wanting to “look pretty” or a feeling of wanting to have the same appealing look as a certain female celebrity they admire. But that’s still ultimately about the sex-signalled coding of feminine dress. “Looks pretty” is just a less direct way of saying “looks sexually appealing.” And some men with inward orientations feel the same: their brains are wired with that strong instinct towards feminine gender-expression, and it’s often indirectly connected to their sexuality. (It’s sometimes directly explicit, too, in all of the above cases: straight and gay men and women can dress deliberately sexually provocatively. And I think any clothing policy to address inappropriately sexual clothing would benefit from language that is “gender-neutral”.)
Because women are so objectified, women in the West want the freedom not to have to wear “feminine” sexually-coded clothing, dresses and the like. So I understand that to see that some men want INTO them can seem repellent. (And some women outside the West who aren’t allowed to wear clothing that’s too coded with sexuality want the freedom to be allowed to wear such clothing.)
I think that ultimately, uncoupling clothing from biological sex — females and males are equally allowed to wear the same kinds of feminine-coded or masculine-coded clothing in any given situation — is a net positive for all, because it lets society examine the coding that goes into clothing, the sexist biases in them, and the ways it can lead to oppression. But I recognize, too, that it grinds against a lot of women’s sense of liberation from sexual objectification that some men don’t see such clothing as oppressive but as something that causes deep internal discomfort to suppress their desire to adorn themselves with.
All of that is to say that I agree that there’s still plenty of conversation to be had around taste and appropriateness in specific situations, but I think before we start thinking about blanket policies involving males wearing dresses, we can gain some valuable perspective from looking at clothing in a big-picture, broad, anthropological/psychological/biological/sociological kind of context.
To “present” as male means having a penis and testes.
To “present” as female means have a uterus and ovaries.
So, epic fail for trans accommodation.
Arty, I don’t have a problem with how people dress in general, it’s whether said dress is appropriate given the context. Wearing a thong bikini at the beach is fine. Wearing it at the office isn’t. I know some queer activists want to normalize overt displays of sexuality in public, while some Islamic fundamentalists want to make women wear burkhas. I think there’s a middle ground to be had that’s worth having, which is dress with style as you like. I used to do the renaissance faire scene and one of the more memorable things I saw costume-wise was a group of men dressed as French fops, to the nines and then some. They were fun and I’m sure they had a good time too, and they were pretty outrageous without being blatantly explicit.
The question of what counts as an “overt display of sexuality” is strongly coloured by social norms and instinctual reflexes, though. We have somewhat of a bias towards seeing atypical gender expression as overtly sexual simply because we’re not used to it. Gay men learned this the hard way: we were told, “Look, I’m fine if you’re gay, you do what you want in private. Quit shoving it in our faces.”
By “shoving it in [people’s] faces” they meant us doing the exact same things straight people were doing: occiasionally holding hands in the street or wearing a wedding band or giving our partner a little peck on the lips when seeing him off at the train station.
There are some analogies around sex-swapped gender expression in clothing. The strong emotional reactions it can elicit are tangled up in an assortment of issues around sex and power and inequality. Some of these are intrinsic to the sexual power imbalances of current society and worthy of analysis and critique, but at least some of it is weighted by bias that comes with atypicality.
“…whether or how much the majority of society is willing to accommodate this.”
There is the problem – I am a woman and I don’t want to accommodate the delusions or fetishes of men in women’s spaces. I don’t want to be forced by threat of online banning or job loss to obey some man’s personal beliefs. These men brought their self-imposed issues into MY life, and I want them to stay out of my life.
At risk of overstaying my welcome in this thread, or at least boring the guests and hosts alike by blabbering too much, there’s something that came to mind that I think serves to enlighten the topic a bit.
It’s a groundbreaking article in The Atlantic from 2002 called Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses, which has since been memory-holed by The Atlantic and become something like a piece of Samizdat on the web.
Here’s a copy:
https://childrenoftransitioners.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/consmenconsdresses-2-2.pdf
It’s a very well-written piece by a woman named Amy Bloom, and it provides a lot of insight into men who have this deep instinctual compulsion to wear women’s clothes. And particularly relevant are the quotes from Ray Blanchard, who is having none of it when the men insist their desire to wear feminine clothing is unconnected to their sexuality.
The men protest that it’s simply “more comfortable” to wear feminine clothing. Blanchard, contra many feminist takes that characterize him as oblivious to this sort of thing, calls everyone’s bluff: Who are they fucking kidding?! Women’s clothing is plainly less comfortable to wear than men’s clothing! When they say it “makes them feel more comfortable” to wear all this stuff that is just so constrictive and so much stuffier than what men are allowed to wear, well then obviously there’s something deeper going on here.
But he correctly deduced that it was the lower-brain instinct to sex-signal in a “feminine” way that caused these men to want to wear feminine clothing, even when they were adamant that it wasn’t sexual at all. (In fact, they, like many transvestites, would eschew any feminine clothing that seemed to them too overtly sexual, in favour of things that straddled the line of being inappropriate for a man to wear — coded as feminine — without seeming inappropriately sexual in a conservative context. Hence, “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses.”
Of course you’re neither overstaying nor boring. Tut.
In the current climate, saying this is akin removing guardrails from a dangerous road. He doesn’t face the risk of following through on what he thinks is “irrelevant.” Different people will have different ideas about what is or isn’t “relevant.” Any measure that weakens women’s sex-based safeguards is a non-starter.
Define “tormented” and “desire.” As long as these men don’t end up believing that “presentation” confers membership in the opposite sex. We’ve seen how far those demanding “validation” will go. It must be strictly limited to personal adornment and must not expanded to include “performance” in female single-sex spaces. Will they be “happier” if they are kept from affirming themselves in female facilities? How well will they resist the temptation to see just how well they pass? Once women have regained “permission” to keep men out of their spaces, policing sex-segregated spaces will be easier. But until such “policing” and “segregation” are seen as good and necessary, doing so will be fraught with peril for women who attempt to do this without universal social approval. We’ve already seen that there are far too many people (including some women) who are quite willing to open women’s spaces to men claiming to be women. There will be continued pressure to do this to relieve the “torment of desire” and make these men “happier.” Women who resist will continue to be portrayed as heartless bigots out to stick it to a “marginalized” “community.”
As Ophelia noted above, the costs of “accommodation” are not borne equally by the sexes. What happens when “presentation” is viewed as a passport? Or camouflage.
Then they’ve lost the argument that TWAW. That statement requires a belief that a trans-identified male is a WOMAN regardless of how he presents or whether he passes. A transwoman with a full beard wearing overalls and work boots is just being “butch” and no less a woman. “Presenting as female” need involve no feminine stereotypes at all: you simply jump out from behind a door and yell “TA DA — I’m trans y’all!”
If it requires a costume, it’s obviously a role being played.
Perhaps I’m reading Blanchard incorrectly, but once it’s “irrelevant” whether a man can become a woman or vice versa then every argument which depends on that assumption is out. So is the whole issue of “trans rights.” His questions are open-ended. It might not be the case that individuals tormented with the desire to be the opposite sex are happier when they dress up.. Responding to whether or how much to accommodate them with “no” and “none” is also on the table. If TWAW and TMAM are waved away, conversations can begin.
That’s exactly right @21. If first the immutability of sex can’t be established as a fact, then any talk of how to accommodate those engaging in ‘performative gender’ will not be productive. It’s not possible to find any common ground in so many varied subjective viewpoints if material reality is ignored as “irrelevant.” It reeks of postmodernism.
@Artymorty – that is a very good article.
Normal straight guys, in my experience, could not imagine wearing female clothing except for a laugh – at a costume party for instance. I was making a video with some friends and there was a scene where the guys put on women’s clothing. The satin, cleavagey red thing I lent my boyfriend made him feel very uneasy. He liked it on me, the feel and look of it, but for him to wear it gave him the creeps. Yet in other ages men wore elaborate, bright silk clothing and enjoyed the display – but of course it wasn’t women’s clothing. I suppose he felt unmanned by it – it was associated with women and the desire for women.
KBPlayer, I agree that most straight men have a problem with that. Most of the straight men I have known have donned women’s clothing only for (1) money; (2) costume party; or (3) to mock women. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive; mocking women is often the point of dressing as a woman at a costume party.
I see that during my break from reading this, other people have made pretty much the same point I was going to make:
When he takes off the table the very thing that is upsetting everyone, then what follows is mental masturbation about a strawman.
It’s the demand of certain men to be allowed to take absolutely everything away from women by declaring that they can be whichever sex they want to be, and no-one is allowed to stop them, which is infuriating and endangering women. To hell with what they’re wearing! Just stop dressing inappropriately (no genitals on display in public, thank you), and no-one will care. It’s not THAT long since the nineteen-seventies, when both sexes wore brightly coloured clothing of similar styles, and no-one tried to invade the spaces, sports, etc. of the opposite sex.
Needs to be said more often. Sometimes I think everyone has some sort of collective amnesia about the 1970s, maybe induced by disco music.
@24, yes. One of my holiday memories from around 20 odd years ago was a bunch of very manly friends wearing their wives bikinis, complete with balloon breasts, sarongs for modesty, and singing “Man! I feel like a woman.” They did manage to make it more about mocking themselves, but it could easily have been seen as women mocking. Kind of prophetic about the trans thing though as even with the visible balloons and lack of makeup they were more womanly than some of the trans we see.
@25, 26. Again, yes. Society is much more wound up about gender presentation than it was in the 70’s and 80’s. Very strange considering that in many ways we (at least in NZ) are a more open and accepting society than we were in the 70’s. It’s much more rare to see a teenage girl dressed in unisex clothing, no makeup, and short hair than it was. That’s just presentation. Research I saw a few years back suggested that young women now, despite the gym/pilates/fitness craze we keep hearing about, are significantly less muscular on average than they were. Maybe that’s because women have become more sedentary like we men have, or maybe they don’t take on tasks requiring physical toil as much (harder to do while looking like a starlet).