Comment by nicoburns
5 years ago
I won't defend those words/actions: I don't agree with them, and they're definitely hurtful. But I don't believe that being hurtful necessarily means that you haven't made a serious attempt to understand the other persons point of view. I guess whether that is sufficient to count as empathy will depend on your definition of empathy.
My wider point though is that both sides seem to be failing to sufficiently take into the other side's perspective. The point about same-sex attraction in the second tweet you link is a good one IMO. I can't describe my sexuality without referring people's physiological attributes. Doesn't that make them socially relevant? A view on gender that completely eliminates the physical components of sex/gender is denying people's realities just as much as one that doesn't account for people's "feeling of gender".
Trans people are absolutely right that people like JK Rowling are treating them poorly. But they can't claim the moral high ground until they stop completely dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who tries to tell them that the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to them, and labelling such people as transphobic. That's not very empathetic either.
I think this is a completely illogical thing you're arguing.
Trans person: I feel (this way).
a non-equivalent statement from an anti-transness-person: You are wrong to feel that way; your feeling is false and what you are doing is wrong.
An equivalent statement for the non-trans-person here would be: I feel (this other way).
This business about trans people "dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who tries to tell them that the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to them" is just bullshit. I've talked with and interacted with trans folks and really no one's gonna tell me that their experience growing up as a boy and transitioning into girlhood or womanhood is the same as my experience growing up as a girl. And none of them has ever said that my experience of my physical self is not important, or is transphobic. Like, what? Can you find me instances of this sort of behavior?
Ragging on "people who menstruate" instead of "woman" (pun intended) as Rowling does is not her saying "the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to me". Menstruation is not the definition of womanhood (you do know postmenopausal women exist, right?). If you want to talk about menstruation, talk about menstruation. Don't pretend it's equivalent to wearing nailpolish or getting catcalled or giving birth or trying to find pants with pockets that fit a cell phone. JK Rowling is trying to tell other people about how they should experience sex/gender, not just representing her experience. Beyond being not empathetic, it's intellectually lazy.
I see it more like this:
Trans man: I "feel like a man", and this makes me like you because "trans men are men".
Me (AMAB, uses label "man"): I don't "feel like a man". That's not what being a man means to me.
Trans man: Well that's what being a man means. It's transphobic to think anything else.
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I feel like trans people are assuming that cis people have the same gender feelings that they do. And while some cis people do seem to have those feeling, many (like myself) don't. I'm not saying that trans feelings are wrong or that they don't feel like they say they do. I'm saying that the feelings they describe don't correspond to gender as I experience it. And thus that a model of gender that defines gender exclusively in those terms doesn't represent my experience.
Whenever I express the above viewpoint I get shut down and told that I'm transphobic. In other words: I am told that my experience of gender is invalid.
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> If you want to talk about menstruation, talk about menstruation.
I kinda agree with this. But I feel like this ought to apply to aspects of gender as well as aspects of sex. If we should about "people who menstrate" rather than "women", shouldn't we also talk about "people who feel like women" and "people who present as women" rather than "women". Taking the "feeling" of being a man/woman as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has such feelings just as taking physiology as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has the same gendered physiology.
> Me (AMAB, uses label "man"): I don't "feel like a man". That's not what being a man means to me.
I mean... it is what being a man means to you, because that's what you "feel" being a man is.
You are a single cell in a culture. You can't decide for anyone other than yourself what it means to be, say, a Man, a (certain religion), a (I dunno, gamer?). These are identities and they're based on your feelings. Sometimes you'll bump into someone else that uses the same word to describe that identity. Say two "gamers" bump into eachother. Both would say "I am a gamer." One has never played Mario and the other has never played Halo. "You're not a gamer!" they say to eachother.
Of course, when we're talking about gender and sex, there's a lot more at stake, and a lot more historical and cultural tendrils to pick apart. Regardless, whatever it means to you to "be a man," is entirely on you. You don't get to decide for me what it means to "be a man," and therefore you don't get to decide for a trans man what it means either.
On that same note, my definition of what it is to "be a man" has no bearing whatsoever on your manliness or identity! You can feel safe in your identity regardless of what the rest of us are doing. What, are you not confident in your own identity? That's a separate issue, and it's not trans men's fault that you feel that way.
>Trans man: Well that's what being a man means. It's transphobic to think anything else.
I don't know what trans men you've met, but this is laughably far from my near-universal experience of hearing them say things like "oh god what if the way I assert masculinity makes someone feel bad or invalidates someone else's feelings or experiences." I have no doubt people have said things akin to that (being trans is by no means an inoculation against horrifically bad takes) but basically every trans person I know explicitly has a model of gender that doesn't invalidate your experience of "I don't experience gender like that, but 'man' works well for me, not least because of my physical body."
People may point out that it could be good to pull on that thread and consider the possibility of being agender or otherwise non-binary, but no one I know would call you transphobic for critically engaging with your gender and coming to the conclusion "nope, still don't get anything new from considering this, 'man' it is". Quite the opposite in fact, as even attempting to do so should be a decent signal for empathy with trans people.
At the end of the day, the label is for you however that manifests; whether it's having a mental model of gender where you finally have a place instead of always being pushed to the side, or having a magic phrase that indicates to someone the broad strokes of how you'd prefer to be addressed, the label is only important insofar as it helps you.
>If we should [talk] about "people who menstruate" rather than "women"
Just to clarify, "people who menstruate" isn't woke code for cis women to make trans women more comfortable. It's explicitly inclusive of trans men since many do menstruate and strongly prefer not to be labeled women as a result of that.
This is what makes Rowling's take on "people who menstruate" as well as the strong chorus of "trans women are women" and much weaker echo of "trans men are men" in response to it that much more tone-deaf. Trans men were the people whose experiences Rowling aimed to invalidate, but as usual trans women became the public face of the issue.
>Taking the "feeling" of being a man/woman as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has such feelings just as taking physiology as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has the same gendered physiology.
For argument's sake, what if your subjective experience of being a man were just so ingrained in you that you never consciously engaged with it? That could manifest the same way ("i don't 'feel like a man', that isn't how being a man works for me"), but now would you have a place in the "feelings" model you've established as exclusionary.
It seems to me that the fundamental issue you describe comes down to the coexistence of "I'm a man because that's just what I am" and "I'm a man because I feel like a man", and the only conflict inherent to that comes when the former group feels pushed out by the latter. I personally fail to see any way that someone embracing masculinity, especially if it's something that's long been denied to them, invalidates the experience of a man who's comfortable enough being labeled a man even without subjective experience of his gender.
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