Comment by chc
5 years ago
This seems like a false equivalence. Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them, nor to invalidate cis people's gender or force them to be treated as another gender.
> Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them
I feel like they are.
Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:
(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.
This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.
OR
(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.
But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.
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If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
> If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)
Right, so this deals with one side of the equation: it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it. My physiology is an important part of me (and my identity), and if I describe myself as non-binary or agender then that part of me isn't being communicated or represented. I want to be able to describe my (lack of) gender feelings and my physiology separately, and make the same distinction when talking about other people.
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> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.
(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)
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Except when they are: As in the case of Caster Semenya. Never has it been more clear that trans rights are human rights.
Trans athletes who are male and transitioned to female should not be allowed to participate in women sports because it is discriminatory to women.
Caster Semenya is a cis woman, not trans. People are so preoccupied with stripping the rights of trans people that they ended up stripping away the rights of cis people while they were at it.
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