Guest post: Always already
Originally a comment by Papito on Relating to coercive behavior.
Since “changing gender” doesn’t really mean anything, how can one prevent it? If you are “assigned sex at birth,” but you are born with an inherent, inalienable gender, then it never changes, so you can’t prevent it changing. For example, once upon a time, in a deleted universe, there was an actress named Ellen Page, but in our more valid universe you can see that a fellow named Elliot Page has credits for Juno, where he played a pregnant girl, and Hard Candy, where he played a 14-year old female vigilante. Because he was always Elliot, he never changed gender. He played those roles as a remarkably talented young lad.
In the case of a young girl who was assigned male at birth, a similar rule holds: she is already a girl, and she doesn’t need to do anything in particular to prove that. We are informed by many transwomen that having a penis does not mean they’re not a woman – it’s a “ladydick.” So preventing a child from having genital surgery isn’t preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Many transwomen are balding and bearded, but they’re still women, so preventing a child from taking puberty blockers or female hormones is not preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Some women, trans or otherwise, even wear clothes typical of men on a daily basis, so preventing a child from wearing women’s clothes isn’t preventing her from changing or expressing gender. Some women go by names that are more typical of men, like Freddy or Jack, so preventing a child from taking on a typically female name is not preventing her from changing or expressing gender.
As long as a woman can look like anything, have any body, and be called anything, no restriction in dress, address, or medical treatment can prevent, define, or change a child’s gender. Parents should feel free to uphold whatever rules they prefer, with no worries that they can be misinterpreted as attempts to suppress or change a child’s gender.
If gender is somehow innate (whether we’re born with it or develop it at a very young age) and not related to sex, we might expect a rash of older people coming out of the closet now that being trans iss0 widely accepted. And yet tht seems not to be happening. Why is that?
WaM, isn’t it obvious why that seems not to be happening? It’s just statistics. Yes, one would expect the doctors to have a roughly fifty-fifty chance of correctly assigning a new-born’s sex, but by a highly unlikely but statistically possible stroke of fortune, until sometime around the end of the last century the doctors had had an amazing run of luck and guessed correctly almost every single time.
Acolyte, doctors must be getting worse at correctly assigning gender to newborns. I blame colonialism.
AoS,
Ah, that explains it. Sadly I didn’t take Woke Statistics in grad school, so I missed those lessons.
You’d think that would be the case, wouldn’t you? If their views on Gender Identity were followed consistently, then there’d be no need to start adopting new pronouns or begin taking hormones to be the True Self. Whether someone is male or female was fixed in the brain at birth and discernible as soon as the infant can speak and let everyone know. A parent refusing to allow a child to transition then would be on par with their prohibiting pierced earrings or long hair. It may annoy a teen to have to wear comfortable, suitable clothes which don’t make them look like they’re cruising the midnight streets looking for customers — but it won’t kill them.
It’s the need for validation which is at odds. The woman who can be anything, have any body, and be called anything is desperately dependent on how others perceive her. The Almighty, All-Powerful Self is woefully inauthentic if unacknowledged — so not so Almighty or All-Powerful after all.
The powerful part of the Inner Self isn’t really in the identity, but in the right to be given whatever it wants. It wants to be expected to be a certain way because of being a boy Self, a girl Self, or a neither-boy-or-girl Self in order to reject those same expectations when and if It chooses. If the system isn’t set up for kids who must express a self-defining gender that has no defining boundaries and permit soft, feminine gay transmen in dresses and trans -identifying butch lesbians in biker gear, then it’s not free enough from all restrictions, including those of coherency.
The freedom to throw off gender exists only when a woman is an adult human female. Now it’s being man-handled into Gender.
It’s almost as if someone planted an idea in her head, and the idea grew like a tumor in her brain until it completely consumed her and she lost track of reality (should have made herself a better totem). Someone should make a movie about that. It’s the kind of weird idea that Christopher Nolan might like…
WaM #1
On the same note, if the recent explosion in trans identification is entirely due to more previously closeted trans people finding the courage to come out, and if suppressing one’s gender is so excruciatingly painful that the inevitable result is Bird Box levels of suicide, there should until recently have been an unexplained epidemic of suicide followed by an equally unexplained drop in suicide rates as trans people began to come out en masse.
Citation needed.
I was listening to a public radio segment about the effects of the demise of Roe vs. Wade on pregnant women in various US states, whether they want to continue the pregnancy or not. A woman whose name I forget was an expert on the issue and was being interviewed. She made lots of relevant observations.
Then she was asked about the effects on “transmen”. The interviewee was going out of her way to express how awful the situation for these “men” is, because people don’t realize “men” can get pregnant, and so many of the facilities are oriented toward women and have little nor no accommodations for “men”, how humiliating that all is, how it’s the worst situation of all.
Pretty much all of that had nothing whatsoever to do with abortion, or Roe vs Wade. It was all about validation.
ICK. Was this recent? I wanna find it.
Looks it was a show called Think, from today (January 11), “Even wanted pregnancies after Dobbs are fraught”.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/478859728/think
Thank you! Will listen tomorrow.
@WaM #1
In Germany, there is the famous case of Georgina Kellermann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgine_Kellermann
who came out aged sixty-something. Kellermann is now even presented as a role model to women on how to make a career as a woman (there was a feature in the rather prestigious weekly newspaper Die Zeit, featuring three women, one of them Kellermann), despite the fact that Kellermann presented as and was treated as a man during Kellermann’s whole career.
So: Advice on how to make career as a women: Be a man.
Re: #1 & #11
FWIW the only trans person I know is a ‘transwoman’ who is over 60 years old and came out just a few years ago. ‘He’ is now taking hormones and FAIK has had surgery to make the body more like a female one