Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on By folks across the gender spectrum.
This invitation to submit is really rather helpful, in an a completely unexpected and unintentional way. Putting the whole list of gender variations (or least a good chunk of them) in one spot lets you see just what a mad, disparate, incoherent, contradictory mess it all is. The only way that some of these subunits can exist in the same room together is by keeping their definitions vague and non-commital to the point of meaninglessness, as normally several of the groups would be mutually exclusive, or distinct without actually being different. (Some of them may accidently include actual lesbians, like the occasional, unintended peanut that can show up in candy bars made in factories that are not nut-fee.)
Trans We know that transgenderism is supposed to encompass, amongst other demographics, autistic girls trying to escape womanhood, and AGP males attempting to break into it. To be somewhat more generous, it is an attempt or desire to “live as” the biological sex one is not, in order to match an internal “gendered” concept of the self, which would otherwise be in conflict with the physical body. Yet if gender is distinct from sex, why try to modify the body in an attempt to match the gender it allegedly houses? Why not leave each alone? How can there be a conflict if they’re different, unrelated, and independent? How does dysphoria arise? Why assume the “gender” is right and the body is wrong? Why force a “match” between them?
Nonbinary A supposed gender identity which apparently rejects either sex as a “target” identity. How does this fit with “transness,” which posits a mismatch between the gendered “identity” and the physical body? What is the “mismatch” here? This seems more like a refusal to engage in the stereotypical gendered sex-roles expected of each sex. Why would this require body modification at all? There are no “sexless” people to act as a “target” sex. Here we seem to have a conflation between sex and sex roles.
Genderqueer Let’s join two terms, one ill-defined, the other shorn of almost all meaning entirely, and pretend it’s something edgy and special. It would seem that a vital ingredient is hair dye. Be as cishetero as you like, but do it with purple or green hair and BAM you’re genderqueer. No, I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean; I think that’s the point.
Genderfluid Puts the lie to the whole “gender is innate and fixed” claim. Looks to me more like a lack of commitment than an actual “identity.” Think Philip/Pippa Bunce (when he wants to win a women’s race yet still be paid at the men’s rate, or Eddie Izzard when he used to move between boy and girl “modes.” Please. Make up your fucking minds.
Two-Spirit (Mis)appropriation of a First Nations cultural concept so that transactivists can use “White Western Colonialism” as an epithet while they themselves are White, Western Colonialists. Queerness (see “dyed hair” above) means their “whiteness” is now accidental, incidental Whiteness, but not political Whiteness. “Two-Spiritedness” is taken out of context, subsumed under and absobed into current Western concepts and understandings of “transness” and then, anachronistically, projected backwards in time, and continent-wide in space. It is simply assumed to be, monolithically, a part of all First Nations cultures, like tipis, totem poles, and feathered war-bonnets. Can’t get much more White, Western, Colonial than that, can you.
Gender Non Conforming Let’s trans everyone who chafed at the restrictions placed on them by sexist, gendered sex-roles, even though transness itself relies heavily on those very sex-roles to determine the supposed disconnect between the sexed body and gendered soul. Without this, a boy who likes dresses and dolls is just a boy who likes dresses and dolls, not a girl trapped in a boy’s body.
Intersex More appropriation. My understanding is that the preferred term is DSD, or Disorder (or Difference) of Sexual Devlopment. Transactivists prefer this term because it suggests that sex is a spectrum, that male and female are not as cut and dried, that there is some sort of biological no-man’s land, as it were. Even if this were true (which, of course it isn’t) such biological “space’ would not offer any support at all that humans can move between the sexes, however many “shades” there were between them. Using DSD is inimical because it says right on the tin that it’s a Difference or Disorder of Sexual Development. Nothing to do with “gender” at all. It’s a failure of the body to reach one of the two endpoints at which its normal growth and maturation would aim. Also, there are a whole bunch of DSD conditions, but each is particular to only one sex. It’s not a grab bag mixture, or a halfway house between being male or female that offers any kind of hope that one could be both, neither or switch between them. Thus the continued use of “Intersex” by transactivists is appropriative, hegemonic, and instrumentalist. It is a deliberate, bad-faith move that uses a suite of medical conditions as a means of forcing their agenda, dragging DSD people with them, without their consent.
To put it simply–if you trouble, research, or think about gender, we want your work.
Somehow I suspect that they wouldn’t be interested in the writing of anybody posting here at B&W, despite the fact that we certainly “think about gender” and definitely “trouble” it. I don’t think they like our kind of thinking and troubling, however we identified, or whatever body parts we sport.
