“…who was born a male but now identifies as a female…”
I do wish the reporter would just say, “…who is male but identifies as a female…”
I don’t like “born a male” because it implies there’s still wiggle room for someone’s sex to have changed at some point after he was born, when it’s an ironclad, journalistically sound fact that there absolutely isn’t. I don’t like “birth sex” for the same reason.
But I suppose “born a male” and “birth sex” could be interpreted as an attempt to clarify the person’s true sex — it’s that old thing where some people think a “trans man” is a male who dresses in women’s clothes and some people think it’s the opposite. There’s so much language confusion attached to this topic.
Perhaps adding “birth” to sex clarifies the true sex of the person in question, to those who might be confused. In the same way I sometimes use “biological sex” instead of just “sex” to clarify that I mean sex in the body dimorphism sense, and not the intercourse sense. Even I get annoyed with myself sometimes for adding the redundant “biological” bit (it’s redundant, of course, because sex is biological by definition) but I quietly concede that sometimes the point gets through more clearly when the sentence is buttressed with a bit of redundancy.
And then there’s the last part of the quote from the reporter: “…but identifies as a female.” Does the man identify as a female, or as a woman? That one’s slipperier still, because a lot of trans-identifying men don’t quite think they’re female, but rather they think woman and female have different meanings, one cultural and fluid, and the other strictly biological.
But that’s just it: this issue is about a whole bunch of people who have a whole bunch of different ideas about sex and gender, all bunched together. The media’s job is to report about it accurately. They should have started long ago by establishing clear language rules: the words sex, gender, and gender identity are not interchangeable, first of all. Plus they should have established clear basis facts: sex is established in utero, it’s binary, it doesn’t change, and there are no exceptions.
Then the media could have done everyone a true service by reporting on this phenomenon for what it is: they could have separated out the strands of “trans” which are quasi-religious and pseudoscientific (the sex-spectrum stuff and the transwomen who incorrectly believe themselves to be literally female) from the strands of “trans” which are psychiatric/medical (attempts by clinicians to treat patients in distress, and the debate over the optimal treatment for them), from the strands of “trans” which are a social contagion and a cultural epidemic (the kids; the enbies), from the strands that are just outright charlatanism and abuse.
Without the foundation in place to adhere to proper language and proper facts, there was no way they could have processed and reported on this subject appropriately. And hoo boy, they didn’t, did they.
Good rant, as usual, Arty. Another point of confusion (often deliberate) is the ‘transvestite’ or ‘drag queen’ or ‘cross-dresser’. These words are used interchangeably, which might be relatively accurate, except there doesn’t seem to be any clarity around whether they are or are not trans. It seems like they are trans when the trans want to use them to prove ‘there have always been trans’, but other times they are not trans, but just ‘acting female’. (Which for the most part they aren’t; they are acting like some grotesque caricature of female.)
Yes! Schrödinger’s Transvestite. I prefer to call it Schrödinger’s Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania.
That’s of course in reference to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Every October millions of people watch and sing along and Do The Time Warp and all that, and for that brief moment while their beloved cult classic is on, they can safely acknowledge that transvestism, transsexualism, and fetish are one and the same, because it’s impossible to separate them while beholding Tim Curry’s gloriously mad Dr. Frankenfurter. But as soon as the show’s over, after poor Frankenfurter laments, “don’t dream it… be it!” everyone goes back to denying that kinky transvestism is even a thing that could possibly exist. Suddenly, trans is sacred and sex-less once more.
It’s infuriating. Like the whole world has been hypnotized by a stage magician, and on command, they’re all clucking like crazy chickens.
I read a fair few books on sexology as a university student (most of which were written in the 1980s, 1990s and earlier 2000s ) and all of them acknowledged that fetishistic transvestism was a well-recorded phenomenon. A significant proportion of cross-dressing men did it because they found it sexually arousing to do so, all these sexology volumes said. *
For instance, the late Nancy Friday, who was not unsympathetic to trans-identified men, documented a significant number of erotic daydreams by such men in her 1980 pop-sexology book “Men in Love.”
Then sometime – probably after the backlash against the J. Michael Bailey book “The Man Who Would Be Queen” in 2003-2007 – it became TABOO to state this. To do so was to put forward the “bigoted” and “discredited” concept of “autogynephilia”.
An example of this:
“Michelle Goldberg has been legitimizing reactionary-feminist themes, like the debunked, pathologizing “autogynephilia” theory of trans womanhood, for a decade” wrote the pseudo-intellectual Sophie Lewis in her turgid, TERF-demonising tome “Enemy Feminisms”.
So you’re right. Nowadays, “Trans is sacred and sex-less” in the minds of not only most of its activists, but much of the Western media and academia.
* I have only read one account in my life of a woman who cross-dressed because she found it sexually arousing. I once read a Cosmo-style women’s magazine which asked its readers about their sex lives. A female correspondent interviewed there said she occasionally wore her boyfriend’s boxer shorts because she got an erotic sensation from doing so.
Overall solid, though there was that weak start: “…over the use of a single sex changing room by a trans member of NHS staff…” which of course should have been male member of staff.
“…who was born a male but now identifies as a female…”
I do wish the reporter would just say, “…who is male but identifies as a female…”
I don’t like “born a male” because it implies there’s still wiggle room for someone’s sex to have changed at some point after he was born, when it’s an ironclad, journalistically sound fact that there absolutely isn’t. I don’t like “birth sex” for the same reason.
But I suppose “born a male” and “birth sex” could be interpreted as an attempt to clarify the person’s true sex — it’s that old thing where some people think a “trans man” is a male who dresses in women’s clothes and some people think it’s the opposite. There’s so much language confusion attached to this topic.
Perhaps adding “birth” to sex clarifies the true sex of the person in question, to those who might be confused. In the same way I sometimes use “biological sex” instead of just “sex” to clarify that I mean sex in the body dimorphism sense, and not the intercourse sense. Even I get annoyed with myself sometimes for adding the redundant “biological” bit (it’s redundant, of course, because sex is biological by definition) but I quietly concede that sometimes the point gets through more clearly when the sentence is buttressed with a bit of redundancy.
And then there’s the last part of the quote from the reporter: “…but identifies as a female.” Does the man identify as a female, or as a woman? That one’s slipperier still, because a lot of trans-identifying men don’t quite think they’re female, but rather they think woman and female have different meanings, one cultural and fluid, and the other strictly biological.
But that’s just it: this issue is about a whole bunch of people who have a whole bunch of different ideas about sex and gender, all bunched together. The media’s job is to report about it accurately. They should have started long ago by establishing clear language rules: the words sex, gender, and gender identity are not interchangeable, first of all. Plus they should have established clear basis facts: sex is established in utero, it’s binary, it doesn’t change, and there are no exceptions.
Then the media could have done everyone a true service by reporting on this phenomenon for what it is: they could have separated out the strands of “trans” which are quasi-religious and pseudoscientific (the sex-spectrum stuff and the transwomen who incorrectly believe themselves to be literally female) from the strands of “trans” which are psychiatric/medical (attempts by clinicians to treat patients in distress, and the debate over the optimal treatment for them), from the strands of “trans” which are a social contagion and a cultural epidemic (the kids; the enbies), from the strands that are just outright charlatanism and abuse.
Without the foundation in place to adhere to proper language and proper facts, there was no way they could have processed and reported on this subject appropriately. And hoo boy, they didn’t, did they.
Good rant, as usual, Arty. Another point of confusion (often deliberate) is the ‘transvestite’ or ‘drag queen’ or ‘cross-dresser’. These words are used interchangeably, which might be relatively accurate, except there doesn’t seem to be any clarity around whether they are or are not trans. It seems like they are trans when the trans want to use them to prove ‘there have always been trans’, but other times they are not trans, but just ‘acting female’. (Which for the most part they aren’t; they are acting like some grotesque caricature of female.)
The term I’d prefer is “a man who pretends to be a woman”, but I fear we’re still a long way from that.
Yes! Schrödinger’s Transvestite. I prefer to call it Schrödinger’s Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania.
That’s of course in reference to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Every October millions of people watch and sing along and Do The Time Warp and all that, and for that brief moment while their beloved cult classic is on, they can safely acknowledge that transvestism, transsexualism, and fetish are one and the same, because it’s impossible to separate them while beholding Tim Curry’s gloriously mad Dr. Frankenfurter. But as soon as the show’s over, after poor Frankenfurter laments, “don’t dream it… be it!” everyone goes back to denying that kinky transvestism is even a thing that could possibly exist. Suddenly, trans is sacred and sex-less once more.
It’s infuriating. Like the whole world has been hypnotized by a stage magician, and on command, they’re all clucking like crazy chickens.
Artymorty,
I read a fair few books on sexology as a university student (most of which were written in the 1980s, 1990s and earlier 2000s ) and all of them acknowledged that fetishistic transvestism was a well-recorded phenomenon. A significant proportion of cross-dressing men did it because they found it sexually arousing to do so, all these sexology volumes said. *
For instance, the late Nancy Friday, who was not unsympathetic to trans-identified men, documented a significant number of erotic daydreams by such men in her 1980 pop-sexology book “Men in Love.”
Then sometime – probably after the backlash against the J. Michael Bailey book “The Man Who Would Be Queen” in 2003-2007 – it became TABOO to state this. To do so was to put forward the “bigoted” and “discredited” concept of “autogynephilia”.
An example of this:
“Michelle Goldberg has been legitimizing reactionary-feminist themes, like the debunked, pathologizing “autogynephilia” theory of trans womanhood, for a decade” wrote the pseudo-intellectual Sophie Lewis in her turgid, TERF-demonising tome “Enemy Feminisms”.
So you’re right. Nowadays, “Trans is sacred and sex-less” in the minds of not only most of its activists, but much of the Western media and academia.
* I have only read one account in my life of a woman who cross-dressed because she found it sexually arousing. I once read a Cosmo-style women’s magazine which asked its readers about their sex lives. A female correspondent interviewed there said she occasionally wore her boyfriend’s boxer shorts because she got an erotic sensation from doing so.
Overall solid, though there was that weak start: “…over the use of a single sex changing room by a trans member of NHS staff…” which of course should have been male member of staff.