[HISTORICAL NOTE: This is literally the only post anyone ever wanted to reference after my blog was deleted. Sadface.]
This is a pet hypothesis of mine, nothing more. There is absolutely no empirical data to back this up. But I think it explains my observations fairly well.
One of the big things we talk about, in trans feminism, is the concept of “gender identity”– the subjective internal sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary. Trans people are people whose gender identity doesn’t match their gender assigned at birth; cis people are people whose gender identity does.
But the thing is… I think that some people don’t have that subjective internal sense of themselves as being a particular gender. There’s no part of their brain that says “I’m a guy!”, they just look around and people are calling them “he” and they go with the flow. They’re cis by default, not out of a match between their gender identity and their assigned gender.
I think you could probably tell them apart by asking them the old “what would you do if you suddenly woke up as a cis woman/cis man?” If they instantly understand why you’d need to transition in that circumstance, they’re regular old cis; if they are like “I’d probably be fine with it actually,” they might be cis by default. (Of course, the problem is that they might be a cis person with a gender identity who just can’t imagine what gender dysphoria would feel like. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to stick random cis men with estrogen and find out how many of them get dysphoric.)
(I’m noticing some similarities, as I write this, to what I’ve read about what being agender feels like– although of course agender people are not cis. If my agender readers could confirm or deny the similarity, that’d be helpful.)
I think this would explain a lot actually. There are a lot of cis people who feel the need to come up with absolutely ludicrous explanations for why trans people (particularly trans women) are trans. The “trans women are self-hating gay men.” The “trans men want to gain male privilege.” The “trans women fetishize themselves as female.” The “nonbinary people are making it up for attention or for queer streed cred.” The “trans women are agents of patriarchy appropriating womanhood in order to invade women’s spaces.” These explanations aren’t just dumb, they’re obviously dumb. Very, very few people would put up with everything from gatekeeping to violence for the sake of their boner.
However, if you don’t have a gender identity, and you assume that your lack of a gender identity means other people don’t have a gender identity, then trans people’s behavior is ludicrous. Why the hell are all these people deciding they’re women or men or something else? And when people appear to be doing something for no readily apparent reason, other people tend to grasp at straws to explain it, including obviously dumb straws.
Obviously, this doesn’t excuse the blatant transphobia of those explanations. Generally, when people are doing something for no reason you can understand, it’s safe to assume that they have a good reason that you just don’t know about. Ask them why they’re doing the thing they’re doing before you conclude it’s about whatever ludicrous thing best fits your prejudices.
Nevertheless, if my idea is correct, then it offers some hope in combating that sort of transphobia. We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is and that they don’t have one but other people do before they get lured in by the fuckwitted explanations.
Any thoughts?
Isn’t this something you and Scott added to the LW/SSC survey? What do the results look like?
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Quoth the 2014 Survey Results:
(Hopefully the markup will work on this.)
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Wow, that’s much more than I would have thought (39%)!
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Oh, thanks. I didn’t know these had already been posted.
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Wow, that’s much more than I would have thought (39%)!
Wow, I had the exact same reaction — to the other number!
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I did realize while I was writing that comment that I was probably surprised in the less expected direction!
The thing is, I’m of the ‘strongly identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth’ type, and I have literally never run into anyone writing/talking/anything about the kinds of genderfeels I have, and when that happens my brain assumes ‘clearly very few people are like me’.
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I’ve long had a similar theory on “straight by default” – that a lot of people might be a 2.25-3.75 on the Kinsey scale, but it’s just easier to be straight, so the issue of idenitifying as gay or bi never comes up, but if they suddenly found themselves in a world where all the incentives lined up gay they’d be shocked for a while. then maybe find themselves a nice same sex relationship.
It’s untestable (under current ethical restrictions, mwa ha ha), so maybe I’m way off, but it has some intuitive appeal, at least to me.
The bottom line for me is that some people obviously try their very best to be straight and can’t do it. So even if I think, rightly or wrongly, that I could identify as gay if the incentives were different, it’s obvious that some people are set and are going to be miserable if they can’t express themselves.
It seems to me that trans has a similar effect – I don’t wish misery on anyone, but the examples of people who tried their best to conform and were miserable are the best lessons, IMHO.
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Your theory on straightness sounds plausible to me. I’m attracted to a large fraction of women and a small fraction of men, and my interest in the small group of men I’m attracted to is never as strong as in my bigger crushes on women. As a result, I’ve never been romantically or sexually involved with any men; it never seemed worth the effort, when I could be pursuing women that I probably had a better chance with and had more interest in anyway.
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This pretty accurately matches my experiences too.
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As a man, I believe I may be romantically attracted but not sexually attracted to men. That is, my friendships with other men occasionally feel intimate and strong enough that I’m confused. I’m not certain my feelings are strictly platonic. However, it takes a lot for me to feel this sort of affection for a man, while, when I’m in the mood for relationship-like things, it’s much easier for me to become attracted to women.
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I feel like this may be the case. I’ve recently been exploring the possibility that I might be bi, and I’m starting to get the sense that my straightness came from the fact that I’ve never been encouraged to view other men as attractive, and have even been actively discouraged from doing so. The fact that sexual orientation is a relatively recent concept leads me to believe that more people are straight-by-default than currently are aware.
I also wonder how this plays into Scott’s piece on typical minds fallacy among anti-gay preachers. The gist of it is that they assume that because they personally experience strong attractions to men, everyone else does to. My hypothesis is that there is actually a large number of people in the world for whom sexual orientation IS a choice. They’re just straight by default and don’t understand how a person could possibly be exclusively attracted to the same sex.
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Not one mention of Leviticus in that reddit thread? “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” is relevant here.
There are some different issues in the Greco-Roman world (with the status questions around penetrator/penetrated, social role and age of the participants). The lines are different from the ones we have today, with, at the time, the penetrated, male or female, being inferior to the penetrator. I can’t remember which classical Roman author was making scathing comments linking grooming to “effeminate” (read: penetrated role) behavior (Seneca about leg shaving maybe?). This type of difference in status extends to the modern times, look at the practice of mass male rape during wars for example.
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@thirqual.
Something I particularly dislike people doing is asserting what’s going on in other people’s heads. It’s a cliche that homophobes must be repressing gay tendencies, and this may indeed be true a lot of the time, but the biblical attitude towards homosexuality is the reason that at least some christians are against it. I know because I was one.
When I was religious, I was never particularly (internally) homophobic. I always knew I had the occasional light sexual attraction towards other guys but this was never as powerful, nor as shameful to me as my sexual attraction towards women. If you’d asked me what I thought about gay people, I would have given the whole, love the sinner hate the sin, God hates it and who am I to disagree with God, homosexuality may not be a choice but acting on it is, schtick.
When I stopped being religious, my gut feeling towards gay people didn’t change at all, but my opinions on the morality of it have changed completely.
One issue I do take with your post is your quoting of Leviticus. Most christians I knew were perfectly happy to ignore most of the old testament law, stating that it was of the old covenant rather than the new, and therefore doesn’t apply to us (Jesus’s statement to the contrary not withstanding).
More relevant to the christianity that I grew up with was Romans 1 “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” and other statements from Paul along the same lines.
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@Pete: where do I discuss what I think is going in anyone’s head today, and especially anything regarding homophobes?
I’m very well aware of the “pick-and-mix” aspect of modern religious practice (quite happy about it, actually, it makes life easier)
I was pointing out this part of Leviticus to show that problems of sexual orientations vs sexual practices were complicated and culturally dependent, even more than 2000 years ago.
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@thirqual:
You don’t. In fact, I thought you were doing exactly the opposite and was agreeing with you.
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I’ve had the same thought. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I know many, many bisexual women. Most of whom probably range from a 2 to a 4 on the Kinsey scale. Even the 4s disproportionately date men, because the pool is bigger and the logistics are easier–and this is in a community (dancers in Los Angeles) where there is as far as I can tell absolutely no stigma against homosexuality at all.
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Yeah, I am like straight up 50/50 bi and I have disproportionately dated men because of a combination of:
I run into more men who like women than women who like women
I consider friendship important in dating and I develop friendship more easily with people who have personality traits, interests and attitudes that seem to be statistically more common in men
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I think a variant of this is probably true, but I doubt the big hump is at 2.25-3.75. I think that most humans are mostly attracted to members of the opposite sex, but the fraction of those who are still noticeably attracted to members of the same sex (or are not attracted as such, but will take sex with someone they’re not attracted to over no sex at all) is almost certainly quite a bit higher than behavioral patterns would suggest, i.e. I think that a lot of people are in the 0.5 – 1.5 range, but round down to 0.
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Since this has gotten a lot of “me, too” responses, I just want to forestall people wrongly concluding that straight people don’t exist. I’ve never been attracted to any other men. At all. Actual, Kinsey-0, heterosexuality does exist. (Which might go without saying, except in the context of blogs like this one.)
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FWIW, I have never been attracted to other men, either.
That said, at the risk of being pedantic, I am not confident enough to say that P(Bugmaster is attracted to X | X is male) is exactly zero. I’d go with “epsilon”, instead, seeing as I’m not omniscient…
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I seem to be in the cis by default category; I have never completely understood what trans people are talking about with their gender identities. A number of trans people I encountered in the past seemed to have pretty strong gender essentialist beliefs, so I used to think that probably had something to do with it (not much of a gender essentialist myself), but then I started reading your stuff, and you don’t seem to be gender essentialist, so I’ve mostly just retreated to thinking this is just something I don’t get at all. Of course, people offer lots of analogies to explain it, but predictably they tend to either be things I also don’t get, or to seem to be importantly different in ways that make them less than helpful as analogies. Not that this is a problem; obviously one does not expect to fully understand everything about every other human being in the world.
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I feel very similarly. When somebody tries to explain the concept of gender fluidity my eyes glaze over – are they just essentialising gender to the point where they describe themselves as female whenever they feel more nurturing or male whenever they feel more assertive? It doesn’t make any sense to me – I’m a man because I have a penis and I’m attracted to things that look feminine and taking on that label seems like the simplest way of going about things. Sure I don’t like dresses or girly things but then neither do my sisters.
That there exist lesbian transwomen with no physical dysphoria blows my mind. It can’t just be a fashion statement, it’s all far too expensive and brutalising to be that, but whatever it is that compels them to behave as they do has no equivalent in my mind.
It’s very difficult to keep an open mind about gender fluidity in particular since it rarely comes with large costs associated, but perhaps this how colourblind people feel when watching others choose paints.
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> It’s very difficult to keep an open mind about gender fluidity in particular…
Personally, I find it nearly impossible to imagine what it would feel like to be gender-fluid, or transgender. If that’s what you mean by “open mind”, then yeah, I can totally see that.
On the other hand, the existence of trans people and genderfluid people is a brute fact. I don’t need to keep an open mind about it, in the same way that I don’t need to keep an open mind about the existence of, say, yogurt. There’s plenty of physical evidence out there to conclude that both yogurt and genderfluid people do exists, what more is required ?
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You don’t know that genderfluid people exist, you only know that people exist who claim to be genderfluid.
As usual, the Otherkin Defense makes it easier to appreciate the difference. Would you assert as confidently that
“There’s plenty of physical evidence out there to conclude that yogurt and genderfluid people and squirrel-kin and dragon-kin people do exist, what more is required?”
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As far as I can tell, being genderfluid, and feeling as though one is genderfluid, are the same thing (gender fluidity is about mental states, not physical shapeshifting). On the other hand, being a squirrel, and feeling as though one is a squirrel, are different things.
I think there’s at least some evidence for the proposition that people who feel as though they’re squirrels (in some way) do exist, but, because of the above, this is not enough for us to accept otherkinism (is that a word ?) as literally true.
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Otherkin don’t literally believe they’re squirrels. Otherkin might claim a deep spiritual connection to a squirrels or w/e, but pretty much all otherkin I’ve come across accept that they are, in fact, human.
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@unimportantutterance:
I thought they believed themselves to be animal souls born with human bodies, or something to that extent (though I could be wrong, obviously); I did not mean to imply that they believed themselves to be squirrels in terms of biology.
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Gay trans man here, with EXTREME genital dysphoria since childhood. I am masculine and dominant, a penetrator rather than a penetratee. I am, and have always been into, feminine, pretty, submissive cis bottoms.
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For the record, I’ve wanted to reference your snail sex science post.
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I’ve found the whole cis-by-default concept incredibly useful in explaining my lack of attachment to my assigned gender (and the dysphoria). These days, I consider myself somewhere between cis-by-default and agender (due to said dysphoria).
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Alternate explanation- the myriad contradictory ways that the trans community wants words like “man” and “woman” and “male” and “female” to be understood are incompatible with many cis people’s existing gender identities in exactly the same way that the popular understandings are incompatible with trans people’s. And in a conversation like that, when one side is small and unprivileged and the other is large and privileged, you get something like trans advocacy with all its double think, shifting targets, and trans-splaining, and something like the cis community’s reaction, which tends towards just being mean and cis-splaining.
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Where do you see the views as being incompatible, out of curiosity?
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I used to think I was cis, then cis-by-default, and then I realized I was actually genderfluid.
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Count me as one of those people who has no idea what it’s like to have a gender identity. If you could actually explain what that’s like, I would find it incredibly helpful.
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I don’t think all the people possessing a strong sense of gender identity necessarily mean the same thing.
I’m a cis male unambiguously not-by-fault, but my reasons for feeling that way seem completely orthogonal to the discussion offered by some of the other not-default people in various threads on this blog.
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*not-by-default, although it is indeed not my fault, either.
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I had this very same thought at one point! (in the sense that I had it some time ago, not in the sense I don’t think so anymore. I do).
I worked it out because I’m the other way around – I’m what I for lack of terms refer to as ‘strongly cisgender’, so instead of having a typical mind fallacy and thinking ridiculous things about trans people, I had a typical mind fallacy the other way around. I was trying to explain transness to a friend of mine, and he wasn’t getting it at all, so I went for the ‘imagine’ thing and he was like ‘OK, that sounds fine’. Which since that’s so much not the reaction I have took me by complete surprise.
I later thought about it and it makes perfect sense – trans people feel strongly about their gender but were assigned a different gender so we notice that because they have to do things about it. While without something else to prompt thinking about it, strongly cisgender people might not even notice that’s a thing, since they don’t have that reason-to-action, and thus the difference between strongly and by-default cis people ends up invisible.
(As a really terrible analogy, a person who was born and brought up in a city and hates living in cities is probably going to notice this. But a person who was born and brought up in a city and doesn’t care where they live and a person who was born and brought up in a city and really needs to live in cities and would hate it elsewhere might be really hard to distinguish unless something happens or there’s deliberate investigation.)
As a sidenote, I feel like at least some of the bad kind of gender abolitionists are also cis by default and stuck in a typical mind fallacy about it.
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Thanks for your terrible analogy, it’s just convinced me that I’m having typical mind fallacy over urban living – I can’t imagine wanting to live in a rural area, and had convinced myself that people did it just to live in bigger houses.
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Speaking as someone whose ideal living environment is a wooded rural area near a small city*, nope, it’s not just bigger houses, although that is a nice bonus. Large cities strike me as deeply unpleasant places to live, even if my living space were to be huge.
*Which describes where I grew up quite nicely, actually. Unfortunately, job considerations mean I’m probably never going back. Ah, well.
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I wonder if there was any intended irony in the wording of this, because it sounds like a very difficult endeavor. Cis-by-default people (such as, most likely, myself) might just have to accept the concept of gender identity as a black box.
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I think I probably am cis-by-default to a degree. I can kind of visualize what body dysphoria might feel like by imagining waking up in someone’s else’s, but the idea of having a gender identity seems weird to me. I like participating in male culture and doing stereotypically masculine things. But the idea of being called “she” and “her” is something I’m entirely indifferent to, outside of the use of “girl” as an insult. It took me several instances of reading accounts by people who’s honesty I trusted for me to accept that gender “identity” was a real thing and not just an attempt to be a difficult or a special snowflake.
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Given my talent with words (it’s pretty much non-existent), this might just sound like I accuse you of being horrible, but I’m not. I just struggle with people who accuse me (I’m trans btw) of wanting to be a special snowflake and it might help to know what those people might think (by knowing what you thought).
That said, you make it sound like accounts of trans-people experiencing violence (also ridicule, gatekeeping etc.) didn’t really influence your special-snowflake theory.
Am I totally misreading you there? Did you maybe never get that much in contact with those stories? Were they not convincing enough to discard the special snowflake theory?
(I realize I might be pushy/demanding, don’t feel an obligation to answer)
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I’m not the poster you’re asking but I came from a similar mindset so here’s my answer: I really haven’t been that much in contact with those stories but even if I had, I don’t see that they would count against “special snowflake” status. To the contrary, knowing that *people like you* are being persecuted for their beliefs seems to me like a really attractive thing to be able to claim if one is vying for “special snowflake” status. As in, “I’m so special it threatens people – they can’t even *handle* how special I am!”
A shared sense of persecution – knowing the world is against us – pretty clearly unites groups and helps create a shared sense of purpose. It does this for Jews and Christians and Scientologists and nerds and, heck, probably even Bronies. So why not for trans-people?
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I can kind of visualize what body dysphoria might feel like by imagining waking up in someone’s else’s
Riffing on this: My basic reaction to “what if you woke up tomorrow in a female body” is “that sounds like it might be traumatic (or not, it’s hard to say), but no more so than waking up in a different male body.”
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Huh. My reaction to this thought experiment is that, at least as far as I can reasonably predict, waking up in a male body that was recognizably mine (e.g. about the same height/facial features/build, other than sexed traits) sounds *much* less traumatic than waking up in a completely different female body.
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Right. I’d agree with that. My immediate reaction was based on “a female body” in a generic sense. Yeah “myself, but female now” sounds a lot less disturbing than “totally different, but still male.”
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What would it be like not to be able to reach things from high shelves? 🙂
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Yeah “myself, but female now” sounds a lot less disturbing than “totally different, but still male.”
“Myself, but female now” is a contradiction in terms for me. “Me, in a different male body,” on the other hand, isn’t hard at all to conceive. In fact, this actually happened. I went from short, fat kid, to near-anorexic beanpole teenager, to athletic, slightly-above-average height adult.
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So the contingent fact that human bodies are actually observed to gradually change in particular ways but not in others defines what sort of sudden (and not observed) changes should be regarded as automatically identity-negating?
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No, I didn’t mean for the third sentence to exhaust the possibilities of the first two.
I plan on writing a longer comment about what my non-default cisness means to me, but I haven’t had a chance yet (clearly, it’s very different from some of the other non-default identifiers here). Should come later today.
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My full reply is here, placed elsewhere because it’s so long.
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I have conflicted thoughts on this topic. I want to say “I feel conflicted about my gender identity” but it’s the sort of conflict that causes no stress.
So, like, I’m a guy. Anyone who sees me would identify me as male (although fairly flamboyant and not very stereotypically guy-like, and I get a lot of people thinking I’m gay). I have a penis, I was assigned male at birth, I have always been identified as male and I have always identified myself as male, and I’m totally unconfused about this.
And the first time I heard about transgender people, I was a little confused, as Ozy describes. Because, like, why is this that big a deal? Clearly it is, and sheer politeness if nothing else would keep me from telling people not to identify as whatever. But I don’t have an emotional understanding of why people would care.
I do, however, have a decade-old recurring fantasy of participating in lesbian sex. Not, like, me-as-me having sex with a couple lesbians, but of being a woman and having sex with another woman. Or even being a woman and masturbating. And sometimes the idea of being a woman in other contexts appeals to me.
Just, like, not enough for me to bother doing anything about it. If I had magical powers that would painlessly transform me into a woman and back, I’d probably switch around a fair bit. But if I had magical powers that could painlessly transform me into a woman and then leave me like that. I’m pretty sure I’d never use them.
So maybe I have a very weak gender identity as genderfluid? That would certainly explain the amount of “you’re not really a guy, are you?” I get. Or something? It’s just not something I think about too much because it’s not a big deal to me.
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I think I’m in the “regular old cis” category. Although I have (to the point that it’s a running gag b/w me and a former roommate) a sort of opposite-of penis envy, where if I woke up in a cis man’s body, everything about it, from the excess hair to the lack of breasts to ESPECIALLY the thought of having a penis would FREAK ME OUT. Penis relief, you could call it? And it’s not that I don’t like cis men’s bodies (dear HEAVENS no), I just Could. Not. Have. One. And I’ve always sort of figured that’s what body dysphoria must feel like? Social dysphoria I don’t know as much about, but I know I’d flip if someone called me “he” (it was a fear of mine when I cut my hair), so yeah, I’m pretty sure my being cis is not by default. Although I DO wonder if lot of radfems are this way– I’ve heard radfems say “there’s no such thing as a cis woman because NO ONE feels like they belong in/ are good at Woman.” And I’m sitting there thinking “……I do.”
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> I’ve heard radfems say “there’s no such thing as a cis woman because NO ONE feels like they belong in/ are good at Woman.”
Except for themselves, presumably ? Otherwise, wouldn’t their entire movement be self-defeating ?
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AFAIK, radfems mark a huge difference between being female (having a vagina) and being a woman (wearing make-up, being more nurturing etc.). They feel female because they have female bodies. They don’t feel like women, because being a women means oppressive beauty practices, lower social status, less money, uncomfortable, impractical expensive clothes, always smiling, deferential, etc. etc. etc.
I think (genuinely not sure on this one) a radfem paradise would be one where males, females and intersex people still existed but men and women didn’t because all of the things that make us men and women would become matters of personal choice and would no longer correlate with sex.
This is why they have an issue with trans-people, because they see it as people reinforcing harmful and meaningless categories which oppress other people. If we accept that ‘woman’ is a real thing because transwomen have a ‘real’ need to be a woman, then the radfem aim of destroying ‘woman’ is unacheivable. I think this is a really threatening thought for someone who sees their only hope of freedom in the abolition of gender.
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What Pluviann said. They also, AFAIK, reeeeaaalllly don’t like the concept of body dysphoria. Also, Ozy has said here, and I agree, that one of the more frustrating things you see in a lot of radfems is “socialization for me, but not for thee,” i.e. It’s fine if I oppress myself with makeup/whatever, because the patriarchy socialized me into it. I believe your crippling dysphoria is also the product of mere socialization, therefore you can’t transition because… of reasons.” This drives me particularly nuts because I think that feminism should be about getting rid of the gendered coding on things like makeup, so that anyone who wants (including men and nonbinary people) can enjoy them, whereas radfems seems to just want to get rid of feminine things, period.
Man, I really am hopelessly un-radical in my feminism. And my politics, for that matter.
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The most anti-trans radfem theory I’ve seen goes like this:
[warning — extra hostile TERFy stuff ahead — also, this is a fringe view, AFAIK]
1. in our society, the class of people with penises and stronger bodies has higher status than the class of people with vaginas and weaker bodies
2. the historical cause is, basically, “might makes right”, which is unjust
3. this is the deepest and oldest injustice, enforced since the dawn of humanity
4. addressing it requires revolution, radical reform or at least self-isolation
5. “trans men” are gender traitors (cf. “class traitor”) who selfishly escape the oppression by pretending to be men, and abandon their comrades in misery
6. “trans women” are especially devious and predatory members of the high-status class, who use the gender equivalent of blackface for teh lulz and try to gain access to bathrooms to sexually abuse members of the weaker class and prevent them from escaping the oppressive nightmare even for a few minutes
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>”They also, AFAIK, reeeeaaalllly don’t like the concept of body dysphoria.”
I think that this is partially because a certain number of rad fems seem to project that everyone (or at least every woman) experiences body dysphoria, as well social dysphoria about gender. I have vivid memories of reading one particular essay (I can’t unfortunately, remember the title) about the complete horror of being trapped in a female body, and…yeah. It just seemed very, very close to what people are describing when they describe body dysphoria, and also to my own experiences of (not particularly gender-related) dysphoria.
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Hmm, I guess from the perspective of genderqueer activists, it’s the cis-by-default people (including many radfems) who are the real “gender traitors” — choosing the easy path of conformity instead of joining fellow agender folks in the fight for true social acceptance.
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Normally I hesitate to compare different axes of oppression like this, but I really think the best and most charitable way to understand this sort of radical feminism is to think of the way they see gender as similar to the way some schools of thought see race.
Thus: race in the modern sense is a social construct (if you don’t believe that, please briefly pretend that you do), and one that was basically invented for the specific purpose of oppression (specifically, justifying the trans-Atlantic slave trade). The concept of race is thus fundamentally tangled up with racism – you can’t have one without the other. In a better world, a world without racism, no one would see their race as a core part of their identity – in fact, they necessarily would not have a concept of race the way we think of it at all.
However, in this world, most African-Americans actually do see their race as a core part of their identity (if a part they often feel deeply conflicted about) – and they don’t have the option of not doing so, because their race defines so much about their life and the way other people treat them. And this sense of race as part of one’s identity can be a good and necessary thing, because learning to embrace and take pride in one’s identity as a black person can be an important step toward unlearning internalized racism. It also provides a sense of solidarity with other black people, which is important to any movement to end racism.
Now an anti-racist activist who believed the above, upon hearing about a black person (in this case, let’s assume we’re talking about someone who’s clearly, unambiguously black as the term is usually defined in American society) who identified as white and wanted pursue medical treatment to bleach their skin and straighten their hair in order to be perceived as white by others, might say: it’s understandable that you’d want to be white, because there are many social advantages to being white, and because society teaches contempt for blackness. But it’s not healthy, either for you as an individual or for society as a whole, for you to embrace that. It’s coming from a place of internalized racism and self-hatred. Besides, you shouldn’t have to identify as white in order to be treated like a human being. By saying you are, you’re denying solidarity with your brothers and sisters who fight to be respected without denying that they’re black.
The same anti-racist activist, upon hearing about a white person who identified as black and wanted to darken their skin…well, we probably all know what anti-racist activists say about blackface, right? And if they heard that such a person wanted to be accepted in black-only spaces, they’d be alarmed and see it as an invasion, a destruction of what used to be a rare safe space for people who badly needed it. And if they heard that white people who wanted to “live as black” wanted their experiences to be centered in the anti-racist movement, they’d be rightly infuriated.
Swap out race for gender, and you have something very much like the trans-exclusive radfem view on trans issues. Now, I think there’s some relevant differences between race and gender in this way, and maybe radfems would even agree that there are a few, but I think the above matches up closely to the way they view trans issues.
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@Pluviann and viviennemarks
The following is an excerpt from someone else’s blog [Source: http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2009/08/andrea-dworkin-on-transgender.html%5D. I did not write anything after the colon. It’s just that WordPress tends to undo nested blockquotes, so I’m saving the blockquotes for when she quotes Dworkin:
In conversations with trans feminists, I have continually assured them that many Second-Wave radical feminists were NOT transphobic, and actually empathetic to trans people. However, I’ve had trouble finding any proof, other than my own memory and a few trans friends of Kate Millett’s. Depressingly, the more I searched, I found much more proof that radical feminists were mean and vicious (i.e. Robin Morgan’s lynch-mob rhetoric concerning trans women in her book titled Going Too Far). The Janice Raymond/Robin Morgan/Mary Daly faction seems to have “won” the transgender round of radical feminist theory, by default.
And so, it brings me great pleasure, after a very long search, to finally have the following quote IN MY HAND, not just from memory. Thank God for Amazon.com and the used books option, since this is long out of print.
The book is WOMAN HATING, copyright 1974, EP Dutton, New York City, ISBN 0-525-47423-4. The book jacket contains approving blurbs from: Phyllis Chesler, Ellen Frankfort, Florynce Kennedy, Audre Lorde, Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem.
I find it interesting that Morgan did not provide a blurb, since she and Dworkin were good friends. (Was this passage the reason?)
Note: In the 70s, at the time of this writing, the accepted terms were “transsexual” (instead of transgender) and “hermaphrodite” (instead of intersex)–and these are the terms Dworkin uses.
~*~
First, Dworkin believed that the human race is multi-sexual, and to maintain patriarchy, these multiple genders must be “contained” within the two-gender binary. Transgendered people, then, are the people who have fallen through the cracks, so to speak, who do not fit into this rigid system.
These excerpts are all from the suitably Dworkinesque-titled chapter Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking and Community:
She discusses the facts that there are intersexed people, hairy women, feminine men, indistinct genitalia, etc.
Later in this section, she makes a statement in italics, for emphasis:
And then, we get to the section titled Transsexuality, which she starts off by quoting “a transsexual friend”:
Keeping in mind there were far fewer uncloseted transgendered people in the 70s, I find the following paragraphs to be pretty radical and trans-positive stuff:
Dworkin obviously meant that transgenderism will “disappear” after her androgynous feminist revolution, not that we should make actual trans people disappear RIGHT NOW. I think she is very clear on that.
When trans feminists initially read these words in the 70s, it is understandable that they felt welcome in the feminist movement. When they attempted to take their place among us Second-Wavers, they were rejected, trashed, outed, and accused of being “rapists” simply for being trans persons. Feminists who loved what Andrea wrote about pornography (including her legal activism), seemed to overlook what she said about trans people, and/or assume she had the views of Morgan, Daly, Sheila Jeffreys, et. al.
No.
Let the record show, once and for all, that she did not.
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! I have had that same reaction to radfems!
(Also you’re the first non-me cis woman I have ever seen writing about experiences of being strongly cis, so !)
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This has always been my favorite article of yours, because it gave a name to my curious apathy towards gender as a whole.
The “not grokking trans” thing doesn’t ring true for me, because of another, non-gender dysphoria, but I can see how it would work. On the other hand, I imagine that people like are at least aware of people feeling strongly about gender, due to the extreme reactions displayed when that gender is questioned or impugned.
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I just chalked that up to sexism, personally. It’s only recently that it occurred to me that you can not hate a gender and still be offended by being mistaken for that gender.
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This model was pretty useful for me a month or so ago, when I was untangling my gender. Or, more accurately, it was the model which prompted me to untangle my gender after I found it from the LW survey. Because I do pretty much run into the cis-by-default pattern of not having any fundamental gender and just holding onto the one that my parents handed to me.
The complication, though, is that I seem to still be more concerned with my gender than is traditional for cis-by-default people, and it took me a bit to figure out what was going on there. When I looked a bit deeper, I realized that, sort of like how I’d get tired of a hat I’d worn every day for my whole life, I was getting tired of maleness. I’m currently trying to grow one or two more genders for myself, so I can swap around whenever I get too tired of a particular one. I have no clue how to actually do that, though, so it’s probably going to take a whole bunch of trial and error before I succeed.
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I could be described as cis-by-default (although I think I also qualify as genderqueer by some definitions), and this makes me feel deeply alienated when it comes to the sort of trans theory and activism I generally see these days.
Because the only time I ever feel misgendered, or experience something like dysphoria, is when someone insists that I must really have this thing called a “gender identity” and if I say I don’t I’m either in denial or unable to notice it.
I don’t mind someone calling me a woman if they think of “woman” as their term for “adult human with the sort of phenotype normally associated with XX chromosomes.” I mind deeply if they’re using “woman” to mean “person who feels an internal sense of identification with the female gender role.” That’s not me. I’ve never, ever felt anything remotely like that. The idea that anyone thinks that’s who I am feels revolting to me on some deep level.
Now, you might be thinking: if people are redefining “woman” as “person who identifies as female,” and you feel deeply repulsed by the idea of identifying with a gender in that sense, why don’t you identify as agender? That’s a valid question – like I said above, I think I fit the definition as some people use it. There’s two problems I have with that.
First: on a visceral level, saying “I’m agender” feels too much like saying “I have a gender identity and it’s agender.” No, I just don’t have one. It’s like how, if someone asks you “What color is justice?” the correct answer is not “it’s transparent” or even really “it’s colorless” – it’s that justice has no color and is not the kind of thing that could possibly have a color.
The other thing is, being a woman – in the old-fashioned sense of “person with a vagina” – has affected my life in all sorts of profound ways, and saying I’m not a woman feels like denying that. I can’t just stop being a person with a vagina, and moreover I don’t think I should have to deny that I’m part of the class of vagina-having-people in order to get people to stop letting it affect the way they treat me. Being a part of the social class of vagina-having-people is a huge part of my life and I need a word to refer to it. (“AFAB” doesn’t cut it – that makes it sound like an arbitrary decision someone made at my birth, but it’s not arbitrary; it’s an actual fact, just a fact about my body rather than about my mind or sense of personal identity.)
I don’t know how to resolve this. I want to be an ally to trans folks, but a lot of the way trans activists use language these days feels so alienating, because it doesn’t seem to have any place for someone like me.
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[[I don’t mind someone calling me a woman if they think of “woman” as their term for “adult human with the sort of phenotype normally associated with XX chromosomes.” I mind deeply if they’re using “woman” to mean “person who feels an internal sense of identification with the female gender role.” That’s not me. I’ve never, ever felt anything remotely like that. The idea that anyone thinks that’s who I am feels revolting to me on some deep level.]]
That is so exactly my experience! I now ID as trans and agender but I still have a huge amount of bitterness over my years of being told that my belief that I could have been just as comfortable born in a male body and socially classed as a male showed that I was deluded about my own gender, so blinded by privilege that I was unaware how much being recognized as a woman really mattered to me and how horrible it would be to be “misgendered.” And that defining being gendered female as something society did to me rather than Who I Am on the Inside made me transphobic scum.
I think part of what makes this all so confusing is that “identity” can mean a couple of different things. On the one hand, identity is simply a belief that a particular label describes you. So I can hear how most cis people define “woman,” and say that by that definition I am obviously a woman. I can hear how radical feminists define “woman”, and by that definition I am 100% a woman and will continue to be at least until I transition. And I can hear how some trans activists define “woman” and say that clearly by that definition I am not remotely one. By this definition, I obviously have a gender identity, in the sense that I can describe my relationship to the different definitions of gender in words, even if those words are “I don’t have a sense of belonging to any particular gender, so I guess that makes me agender”. By this definition it is possible to identify with a label that doesn’t really describe you (ex: thinking you’re straight because you don’t recognize same-sex attraction for what it is, or thinking that you’re a woman because you have a standard untransitioned FAAB body and haven’t updated your definition of “woman” to a non-transphobic one) but not to be mistaken about the fact that you have an identity.
On the other hand what is often meant by “gender identity” or just “gender” online is something different, some sort of innate, deeply-felt sense of belonging to a particular gender that does not rely on matching yourself to a definition. This is the kind of gender identity that I most definitely don’t have, and that certain trans people online like to accuse others of being mistaken about (“special snowflake” etc etc).
As for agender implying a gender identity, some people who use it do consider themselves to have a gender in that second, strong sense, but it’s also the most widely used and recognized term for describing those of us who have no idea what that kind of gender identity would even feel like to have, so I’ll take it. Plus it’s very common to append a term like “demigirl” to describe a weak sense of identification with women as a group due to shared experiences, looking like one, etc, without a sense of deep-down belonging to that group.
I am similarly frustrated by the lack of any language left to us to use to describe the experience of participating in society as a person who is visibly AFAB and therefore gendered by others as female; you get a lot of sentences like “Women experience X type of microaggression that men don’t” when really that’s not an experience of women, it’s an experience of people who are read as women even if they’re really agender demiwomen or even pre-transition trans men. I mean, I’m pretty sure men who whistle at me in the street don’t give a fuck about how I identify. Some trans people describe themselves as “politically women” to talk about how we are treated like women by society, but I’m pretty sure that’s usually considered transmisogynistic (because it could be interpreted to imply that TERFS are right about trans women having male privilege).
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Most people are still unfamiliar with the term gender identity. When it becomes a well known term, what happens if it turns out most people feel the same way you do and cis people are a very small minority?
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>I don’t mind someone calling me a woman if they think of “woman” as their term for “adult human with the sort of phenotype normally associated with XX chromosomes.” I mind deeply if they’re using “woman” to mean “person who feels an internal sense of identification with the female gender role.” That’s not me. I’ve never, ever felt anything remotely like that. The idea that anyone thinks that’s who I am feels revolting to me on some deep level.
This is exactly how I feel, except with man and XY instead of woman and XX
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I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. I feel like that basically describes me. When I first learned about transgender people I was very confused and also very curious. I did a bunch of research online and hung around trans forums and I understood that this was real for them but I never really understood what it felt like. To myself I identify as agender, and would think it would be cool to look androgynous, but it there isn’t really any issue with just being known as cisgender.
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I *still* don’t buy the “gender identity” thing – I just don’t care. It’s not like trying on different genders is the weirdest thing humans do. I’d do it for fun if it were as simple as flipping a switch, because why not?
I think the dysphoria is prior to the “identity”. I can understand it that way, at least.
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What does “I don’t buy” mean? Several people say they have it, there are whole movements of people who go through extremes because of it… I mean, there’s reams of physical evidence of the existence of this “gender identity” thing in other people, what *else* would you need to buy it?
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Yay, this post is back! 😀 FWIW, I had a collection of your old posts I was intending to write a blog post referring to at some point, but I never ended up writing any of that.
As one of your cis-by-defaults, I’d like to expand on what things look like from a naive point of view. I’m don’t exactly hold to what I’m describing here anymore, but I have no idea what I do hold to, because the actual situation is very confusing, but regardless I thought presenting the “naive” point of view I used to hold would be a useful point of reference. Of course other people’s naive cis-by-default point of view might differ, this is just my own.
So from this point of view, “[detectably] strongly cis” just looks like “unreconstructed sexist”. (Any good liberal and/or nerd wouldn’t needlessly restrict themselves that way! We’re supposed to be the ones who see past that sort of thing!) If it’s not detectable, well, then, you apply the typical mind heuristic and asume they’re like you. And (again, naively) trans just looks like “asserting things that make no sense”, at least if they’re also a feminist. (“You want gender to be simultaneously significant and insignificant? Huh?” I actually do still remain unconvinced that combining these can work in the long term, though Ozy’s insistence that they can is at least something of a reassurance.) Trans-but-not-feminist just looks really sexist.
(I guess a lot of the above is predicated on being a liberal/feminist. I have no idea what it looks like from a conservative viewpoint.)
…and OK, when I say “feminism” here I really mean something like what Ozy calls “gender abolitionism”. The idea that there might be feminism not in favor of that I didn’t learn for quite a while, and I found the whole idea pretty boggling. (And such feminism is definitely not of a sort I would support, because I still find it directly counter to the reasons I ever considered myself a feminist.) But, again from this naive point of view, the term “gender abolitionism” seems pretty strange. Because gender is identified with sex, so that makes no sense outside of as a transhumanist context; rather the idea isn’t to get rid of it but to render it irrelevant. Like, basically, as a fictional reference point, the ideal would be Vaarsuvius.
<Spoilers for OOTS>Bs pbhefr, jura V fnl “gur vqrny vf Innefhivhf”, V zrna cheryl ba gung bar znggre — V’z abg vagraqvat gb raqbefr trabpvqr. :)</Spoilers for OOTS>
(…I have been waiting for months to make that joke.)
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I’m an untransitioned transwoman with a strong gender identity (or at least strong social dysphoria) who is confused about gender abolitionism (and her own views on the matter).
Basically, I used to be fanatically gender abolitionist because I assumed (typical mind fallacy) that everyone (of “both” genders) experiences social dysphoria[1] (typical mind fallacy) and this is the reason why feminism exists in the first place.
So for a long time I tried to live hyper-androgynously to prevent hurting anyone by causing them social dysphoria. Of course, if I can actually express any gender identity I want without causing horrible pain to all I meet, why should I be androgynous and/or gender abolitionist in the first place?
Inconveniently I still often hate myself for my transition plans – on a gut level I now believe I’m literally the only person on the planet who can actually live with the gender system and that all others who have a strong gender identity are just pretending for social reasons and hurting inside…
So thanks to the typical mind fallacy, being trans-but-not-(really)-feminist/gender abolitionist can look really sexist from the inside as well…
[1] I didn’t typical-mind my body dysphoria onto others because I used to deal with my feelings of body dysphoria by pretending that many physical sex differences don’t exist at all, pretending that differences that both have a physical and a social part (e. g. body strength) are exclusively social, consistently misremembering some physical differences (don’t ask me how) and repressing the feeling that my body exists at all (don’t try this at home).
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I don’t think gender abolitionism as advocated by the kind of people who hang out here usually means “these behaviors which society assigns sex roles to are bad and no one should do them” (I don’t know what the TERF types people talk about believe). It’s more that, at least in my case, there should not be any social expectations for those behaviors to be associated with a certain sex or with each other.
I’m in the same position some other people here have mentioned where they heard about gender abolitionism and approved of it, and were later surprised to find out that apparently it is considered to be opposed to transgender people. Which seems strange- the problem gender abolitionism would have with trans activism is the encouragement of gender roles sometimes found in its rhetoric, but as far as I can tell there is nothing that would be opposed to either acting out the behavior society currently assigns to the opposite sex or anatomical alteration (hormones/surgery/whatever).
When I think of an archetypal gender abolitionist society in scifi I think of The Culture, which hardly seems like it would be hostile to people who currently identify as transgender. People there would not identify as transgender, because they have no concept of gender (some might identify as “monosexual” (yes I know this means “not bi” IRL) or something if they particularly like being a certain sex), but there is nothing preventing people from acting in ways currently associated with their sex, and sex changes are actually the norm but still optional.
(Also,this is in no way incompatible with there being average biological behavioral differences between sexes)
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Illuminati Initiate: Regarding your first and third paragraph, yes, exactly. But as for your second paragraph, well, I’m one of those who is still very wary of the whole transgender-activism thing; for why, well, see my earlier comments here (which I never finished, oops) and here. The super-short version is, I claim that this sort of thing cannot avoid promoting gender roles even when it attempts not to.
I would like to also note that Ozy’s one post on the matter so far doesn’t really live up to the title. It doesn’t actually make an argument that trans-positive gender abolitionism is possible; it just makes an argument that particular obstacles that have been proposed are not in fact obstacles. But it doesn’t actually outline a plan.
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Cis by default (or mostly cis, if there’s such a thing) here, too. I do have a fairly consistent sex dysphoria and some degree of gender dysphoria (actually I don’t want to be subjected to any kind of gendered treatment, either in a male or a female role). I think if I were afab cis, I would have less sex dysphoria but more gender dysphoria.
It’s a good thing that I live in a fairly egalitarian society.
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Hmm… I wonder what difference (if any) there is between your and Ozy’s gender feelings. Your chosen labels are different, but your descriptions sound similar to me.
Personal story:
The first openly genderqueer person I’ve known was also Finnish and dysphoric about gendered treatment. They kept their given name, anatomy and appearance a secret, and insisted on gender neutral pronouns. I learned that I’m not at all as gender-impartial as I thought.
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Yeah, I have always loved the cis-by-default coinage as I found it really accurate for me (and I have totally encountered cis people with strong gender identities; my fiance is one).
So like, if I woke up with a typically male body and he woke up with a typically female one, he would experience gender dysphoria, while my main worries would be his lack of attraction to dudes and the fact that none of my clothes would fit right.
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“Unfortunately, I am not allowed to stick random cis men with estrogen and find out how many of them get dysphoric.)”
Fortunately you don’t have to, Ozy; nature does that for you. Testosterone levels begin dropping around age 40 and the effects can be pretty dysphoric for some. The drop in testosterone with no concommittant drop in estrogen has the overall effect of raising the level of estrogen. Depression and fatigue are the most common symptoms.
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I’m not sure that’s the same thing as dysphoria, though? I’m FAAB and nonbinary, and I get nastily depressed and self-hating sometimes during the stage of my cycle when female hormones are lowest. While on combined oral contraceptives I sometimes got emotionally unstable during the withdrawal week. But that doesn’t negate the fact that being on hormones that make my body more feminine made me REALLY UNHAPPY in a way that few women would have been.
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“I’m not sure that’s the same thing as dysphoria, though?”
Me neither; I’m just working on this idea.
That’s interesting about you hormonal cycle. It sounds like the inverse of what I was describing, and that leads me to think there is more than just hormone levels that matter, it also matters which neurological plant those hormones are acting in and on.
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I have no idea is this is a valid comparison (please correct me if I’m wrong):
The one time I felt like there was a fundamental incompatibility between my brain and physical body was when I somehow fell asleep on top of my arm, long enough to completely cut off any sensation of feeling in it. Not “asleep/tingly”. Dead. I couldn’t feel anything, and I couldn’t move it. And then it slid off of my bed to the floor.
I don’t know the right word for this (I’d never felt anything like this before), but it felt really wrong. Part of my brain was telling me that my arm was next to me on the bed, but visually, I could see that my arm was dangling off the side, touching the floor. My thought process was something along the lines of “Holy shit! That’s not right. Put it back! Put it BACK!” and I tried, for moment, to shake my arm to “reorient” where I thought it’s physical position was, but I still couldn’t move it.
I forced myself to calm down before I started panicking, but it was still uncomfortable enough to where I used my still working arm to pick up my dead arm, and move it to the physical position that felt “right” as I waited for sensation/normal blood flow to come back.
Anyway, I imagine gender dysphoria as an extreme version of this.
I bring it up because before this happened to me, I used to think that I was completely “cis by default”. Now, I think that if I were to somehow wake up in a woman’s body, I could get used to it, eventually, after a considerable period of mental adjustment.
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I’m not sure where I fit into this.
On the one hand, I have no clue what “identifying” with a gender means. I simply have to take other people’s word for it that they do identify with a gender of some sort. I don’t know what it being male (or female) means beyond (a) anatomy and (b) social roles and expectations.
Based on (a), I’m male. Based on (b), I’m only as “male” as I have to be to get by; for me, masculinity and all the being-a-man stuff is just weird and somewhat repugnant, like the drink-until-you-throw-up-and-then-drink-some-more culture at college.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of transitioning, because most of what I do when I’m trying to be just me (as opposed to what I’m expected to be) seems to be what my society tags as “female,” but I can’t imagine that even if I did the whole nine yards I’d see myself as a woman. I’d just be this person who moved across the aisle.
I’ve been semi-involved with the trans community (on-line and some in-person stuff), and I get the impression I’m not unique.
Does this mean I’m “trans-by-default”?
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I . . . think I fall into this category. I think I have a bit more of a gender identity than this post implies (“people are calling them ‘he’ and they go with the flow”), but I think that that’s to a large extent a function of “fitting the definition” in an anatomical fashion*, i.e. having someone regard me as a woman would be kinda weird (I think) in much the same way as having someone (who isn’t a basketball player) regard me as short. But if I were to wake up one day in a female body, then I imagine that I would, at least eventually (I have, after all, had almost three decades of maleness at this point), develop the opposite identity. Of course, predicting that sort of thing is hard.
Unfortunately, I am not allowed to stick random cis men with estrogen and find out how many of them get dysphoric.
Which is just another reason we should establish liberty in drug consumption and academic research!
(I’d actually be very interested in being stuck with estrogen and seeing what happened, actually, although I’d prefer to start with a low-enough dose to retain a testosterone-dominant system, just . . . less, and work my way up from there, or not, depending on initial results. Of course, I’d also be interested in being stuck with (again, low dose) additional testosterone to see what happens, although I suspect the results would be less interesting, whether for good or ill.)
And when people appear to be doing something for no readily apparent reason, other people tend to grasp at straws to explain it, including obviously dumb straws.
Note also that some of these dumb straws are probably over-extrapolations of at least some of their believers own experiences. I’d suspect that many, probably most, radfems who think transmen are just out for male privilege have wished they were male so they didn’t have to deal with (real or imagined) pervasive misogyny at one point or another. If that’s the case, it’s hardly surprising that their default assumption on seeing “women trying to be men” is that they’ve taken that same thought and acted on it.
Similarly, I think of myself as an autogynephile, in the sense that I am attracted to female bodies, enjoy being attracted to myself, and therefore am turned on by the thought of having a female body. So in one sense, transexuality as an exceptionally committed version of the same phenomenon makes a lot of sense. I mean, if I had access to a transformation gun like the ones in El Goonish Shive, I’d totally use it, and I don’t know what body I’d end up keeping. It’s not that surprising that someone would be more willing to do the same less effectively, more expensively, and more irreversibly; there are a lot of things that I would do if they were effective, cheap, and reversible, but which others do even though they’re not.
Of course, that doesn’t explain transgender at all, since I have no real interest in social transition. But that’s where the over-extrapolation bit comes in, if my guess is right.
Or maybe it’s all just wild guessing. Who knows.
Very, very few people would put up with everything from gatekeeping to violence for the sake of their boner.
Given what people throughout the centuries have risked death (sometimes by torture) to do, I am not convinced that the fraction of the population who would do all of that for the sake of their boner, if their boner demanded it, is less than the fraction of the population that is trans.
*Not saying that that definition is “right,” just natural and standard.
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I am very confused how people could not care about which gender they are. Even in the most progressive communities people treat men and women very differently. For example many men are not exactly comfortable cuddling with other guys (see Scott for an example of a progressive man with this attitude). Many social groups and events are at least implicitly determined by gender (guys/girls night out etc). Women cannot join (most) fraternities and the culture of frats vs sororities is very different. There are myriad examples.
I really don’t understand how people would avoid severe social dysphoria if they had their sex changed.
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Two possibilities come to mind. Note that these are both for how people could not have enduring dysphoria from now being the opposite sex, not necessarily for how they would avoid a change-induced shock that might produce transient dysphoria.
1. They might not have a strong intrinsic preference for the treatment of their prior gender, but simply have adapted to it because it was what was offered. Given time, they would adapt to the treatment of their new gender as well.
2. They might object to the treatment, but view that not as an problem their new identity, but as a problem with how other people were behaving toward them, just as many cisfolk who chafe at various aspects of socially imposed gender roles continue to be cis.
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3. The treatment of both genders seems fucking annoying to me (although there are also some positive aspects), adding up to approximately the same degree of disutility to me personally.
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I currently am annoyed about things people assume about me or want to not allow me to do because I’m a woman. If I was a man, I would be annoyed by things that people assume about me because I am a man.
Obviously, I would enjoy some benefits of male privilege, which might be nice. But yeah, there would certainly be a degree of social dysphoria, but I think it would largely be because the identity that I have and have carved out in the world is undeniably affected by and responds to the fact that people see me as a woman, so there would be adjustment involved if people suddenly saw me as a man. Some of it I would like, actually, like a decreased chance of people randomly hitting on me in an unpleasant manner (I don’t mean ambiguous shit here, I mean getting handsy and refusing to listen to a clear no, which has made me have to leave places I would otherwise have continued to have a good time just to get away from the dude). Some of it I would not like, such as an increased likelihood that I would be encouraged not to display my emotions / cry for fear of being ‘a pussy’, or the fact that people would probably object if I wore skirts to work.
*But*, unlike a trans person, or my fiance if his body got gender-swapped (which would make him a trans person) I would adjust to it, and I wouldn’t feel dysphoric at being called ‘he’, and my body would feel wrong until I got used to it, not always until I changed it.
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If I were a man, I’d be a gay man (assuming what is being changed is sex not sexual orientation). Most women only social groups include gay men (in my experience).
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I’m already really bothered by most specifically gendered activities/stuff – I’d never join a sorority (or a fraternity), I don’t think I’ve ever been on a girls’ night out (I’ve been on some outings that happened to only include women because no guys showed up, but not when the idea of the outing was “only women invited”, that just sounds weird!), and I generally dislike interacting with people who insist on gendered social divisions. So I really don’t think my life would change that much, and to the extent that it would change, both the female-identified and male-identified versions have a lot of random social annoyances. I guess you could say the whole concept of gendered treatment gives me mild social dysphoria, so switching genders shouldn’t make it much worse.
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Ok, I have time to give a shot at an explanation of my atypical strong cis gender identification now. For reasons of length, placing it at the bottom.
Social dysphoria would, in most contexts not be an issue for me. I seem to be better than most people at “keep the circle of people whose opinion of you you give a fuck about” small, so opprobrium (short of outright discrimination or violence) for failing to conform to perceived role norms wouldn’t bother me. I’d be mildly annoyed, but nothing more, if people started using the wrong pronouns with me, either in my current, correct body, or if I was magically transmuted into a female body.
On the other hand, even in a world where we’d largely eliminated differential behavioral expectations in most spheres, I’d still be severely physically dysphoric if trapped in a female body. This is because gender is inextricably tied up with sex (in both senses of the word) for me.
On previous occasions, I’ve described myself as a dom, but that’s really a convenient shorthand – I’m uninterested in bondage, and only moderately concerned with power role-play in the bedroom. What I am is basically the straw bogeyman than anti-PIV radfems wrongly think all men are. My drives toward sex and aggression are conflated; good sex for me is really rough sex, in the penetrator role. Further, while I understand this is a personal idiosyncrasy, for me instinctively dom = male and sub = female (in the bedroom only!); my reaction on a system 1 level to sexually submissive men is a mix of pity and contempt; my system 1 reaction to sexually dominant women is hostility. (I find watching female-domme, male-sub pornography about as disgusting as watching gay pornography as a Kinsey 0.)
So taking away my penis and giving me a vagina would be equivalent, not only to depriving me of the ability to enjoy sex, but taking dom-me and trapping me in what I perceive as a submissive body. It’s hard to articulate how horrifying this prospect is.
***I hope that with the audience of this blog, this disclaimer isn’t necessary, but I’ll include it here anyway. None of the above should be taken to mean that I think females/women/vagina-possessors, whether submissive or not, have less moral worth as people than males/men/penis-possessors, nor do I agree with the reactionaries about anything gender role/society related. My bedroom preferences are what they are, and they’re separate from my politics.***
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Interesting. Also thoroughly bizarre to me, but that seems to be universally what anyone’s gender (or lack thereof) is to anyone who has a different gender system.
Point of curiosity: Have you ever tried watching lesbian D/s strapon porn? If so, what was your reaction?
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Yes, and my instinctive hostile reaction to the domme is far stronger than any appreciation for the sub.
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Interesting. What about non-D/s lesbian porn? Just boring?
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Yep, I have never experienced or understood the “two girls making out is hot” thing that is apparently so common in other men.
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Huh.
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Ooh, further tangent*: There’s a fairly sizable pornographic sub-sub-genre** out there that features a pre-/non-op transwoman (i.e. someone with breasts and a penis) having sex with a ciswoman. Some of it (although not all) has pretty standard penis-owner–dominant dynamics. Have you seen any of that, and if so, what did was your reaction?
*if you don’t mind my constant questions; I find how-other-people-think fascinating, but also difficult to comprehend. Also assuming that I am not violating some sort of local standard of decorum with this particular line of questioning.
**Pornographic genres are a beautiful (and sometimes awful) fractal.
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I feel that perhaps there is a limit to how many comments discussing what sorts of porn I can tolerate would be reasonable, so this is probably the last one.
My system 1 reaction to non-op transwomen is disgust. As I’ve said in a prior thread, I’m completely willing to use whatever pronouns people want, and let them use whichever bathroom they want, but I am totally incapable of alieving that anyone who has or had a penis at any time is a woman. With regard to the originally hypothetical, this wouldn’t actually help me, though. I’d still be unhappy if I was magically transmuted into an otherwise-female body that had male genitals. I might be able to have sex that was worth having, but I’d still perceive myself both as a freak and as having an otherwise submissive body.
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Fair enough. It’s been an interesting discussion.
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Dude. I recognise that gender system. It’s uncannily similar to classical Roman views on gender.
… are you by any chance secretly an ancient Roman?
Predictions, predictions … hmm, have you looked into male-on-male? You mentioned something being like “watching gay pornography as a Kinsey 0”; so you’re not a Kinsey 0 yourself, then?
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No, you misunderstood me. I am a Kinsey 0, and I find gay porn equally repulsive.
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Random potentially interesting thing on vaguely similar lines to @Matthew’s comment:
I *don’t*, generally, consider Dom=Male and Sub=Female, and as a switch I am capable of getting excited about a Dom or Sub of any gender (if they are a person I happen to find attractive and preferably into the same things as me).
But – and I’m a pretty ‘blokey’ woman at the best of times – when *I* Dom, I become more masculine. My movements, as I recognise from my physical theatre training, become more masculine. I no longer properly ‘map’ my boobs to ‘sexy boobs’ in my head, but more to ‘my chest’. If I am doing something where I want a sub to call me a title, it feels *wrong* for them to call me any feminine title – Mistress, Ma’am, etc, it’s all wrong. What I want is to be called Sir, but I will accept something gender-neutral like ‘Boss’. It would feel wrong to wear skirts or heels to Dom (although for some reason makeup is fine), and when, as I find myself doing, I think of my ‘Dom persona’ in the third person, it’s a he.
I don’t *think* that this is to do with some inherent thing where I think Doms should be male, because I empirically don’t have any issues whatsoever with female Doms. I *think* my genderqueer side has just decided that ‘Dom me’ is where it is going to express itself.
Interesting, anyways? I still don’t really find myself IDing as genderqueer or genderfluid, or at least not in as much as those are types of trans, since even at my most blokey/Dommy I don’t experience anything that compares quantitatively to dysphoria.
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Unfortunately, all of them are tainted by decidedly undomly connotations — “mistress” = “illicit, lower status lover”, “ma’am” = “cordial, yet judgmental Southern US lady”.
But choosing “Sir” or “Master” would feel like giving in. I’d rather dig my heels in and reclaim “Mistress”.
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For me, my instinctive reaction (or system 1, in Matthew’s terms) reaction to male dom female sub is to see them as abuser and victim and be very repulsed. Same-sex dom/sub of either kind, or female dom male sub, can be OK or even a turn-on, as long as they don’t cross certain lines. And even so, I often view it as abuser victim, but without the repulsion. (I am talking about fantasy only, mind you). In fact my favorite fantasies are non consensual dom sub. Oh, and sex of any kind turns me off, it’s more the vulnerability and the sense of control that I like.
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>>>The “trans men want to gain male privilege.”
When I was a kid and first learned about transgender people, something like this was briefly one of my working hypotheses for why someone was transgender. I didn’t know about technical terms like “privilege,” but I thought maybe people who transitioned from one gender to another did it because they really, really wanted some of the advantages being a member of the opposite gender had (I also assumed that men and women both had different sorts of advantages in life, so my hypothesis explained both transmen and transwomen).
Now, when I learned more about the subject I quickly rejected this hypothesis. It didn’t match the facts at all. But the really interesting thing was, when I did believe this hypothesis, I wasn’t angry at transpeople. I thought that if they truly wanted the advantages of being another gender, transitioning was a completely reasonable behavior. I wasn’t angry at transpeople the way TERFs are. I respected their decision.
I wonder if this means the anger TERFs feels at transpeople has some other component than just the belief that they are after “privilege.” Like maybe TERFs have the same purity mindset that social conservatives do, and TERFism is just social conservatism dressed in a feminist suit.
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TERFs are fairly explicit about what they believe. They feel that women are a group under siege by men and patriarchal culture, and that radical feminism represents a long awaited effort at carving out a sort of Israel for women where men can’t get at them. Then along come people with penises who want inside the gates.
From their perspective, they are trying to have something for themselves, and just for themselves, in an environment that gives them nothing. Specifically, they feel they are building an identity as women, institutions and social groupings for women, and so on, all premised on the idea that men insist on taking over and dominating everything they touch, so the only way for this to work is to make sure men stay out.
If you start with those beliefs, it’s not tough to see why hostility towards trans people might follow, since a literal part of the trans woman agenda is something like, “We are just as entitled to the cultural capital that accrues to women as people born with vaginas.” Well, if you’re a radical feminist, that sounds an awful lot like your neighbor declaring that he’s entitled to your dinner. Except worse, because in the radical feminist’s mind, that dinner was painstakingly crafted over centuries of suffering at the hands of people very much like your neighbor, and is the only thing standing between you and yours and famine.
This sort of dynamic happens all over the place. Native American activists have a sometimes dubious relation with non ethnic Native Americans for similar reasons. You spend all this time crafting social capital for your tribe, and along comes some johnny come lately who declares, “I’m totally a Cherokee! I’m one eighth Cherokee, I think, but I identify that way and am dating a Cherokee girl and its super important to me. So isn’t it awesome? You and I, Cherokee buds together, doin’ Cherokee stuff!? Buds for life!” and you naturally hate him.
Even religions that literally go out of their way to obtain converts sometimes look at new converts this way. “Oh, there’s Joe. Most dedicated Catholic I’ve ever met. Just became Catholic last Tuesday, probably because he’s engaged to Sally, and now he’s more Catholic than all of us. Doesn’t know the liturgy, but sure can put charcoal on his forehead and post selfies on Facebook.” And that’s literally right after having explicitly recruited the guy, on purpose, by telling his girlfriends he couldn’t have a church wedding unless he converted, and then accepting the instant, possibly dubious, conversion.
Hell, people do that over liking video games, and that doesn’t even MATTER. “Oh, you played some Nintendo as a kid, then stopped, and now you’ve got a gamer t-shirt on and want your opinions accepted as inside baseball? Bah.”
For the record- not endorsing any of the above. Just describing it. I don’t think any of this has to do with psycho analyzing the opposition. Often, they’ll just tell you what they think.
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The previous instance of this post changed my life.
To exaggerate and simplify slightly, it was the first time it occurred to me that anybody even remotely associated with trans activism might be willing to accept that the way I experienced gender was real, instead of just accusing me of being a liar or a troublemaker if I ever had the nerve to describe it out loud.
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I recently heard a talk given by a female person who self-described as “genderfluid”; she explained that this meant sometimes she liked girly stuff like makeup and dresses but other times she liked manly stuff like wearing pants and climbing trees. And my immediate reaction was “why do we need the word ‘genderfluid’ for THAT?” There already exist PERFECTLY GOOD WORDS to describe a female person who still sometimes might do masculine things.
The main word that comes to mind to describe such a person is: “woman”. To reject that term implies that “women” must be people who CAN’T wear pants/ignore makeup/operate chainsaws, which is offensive.
Reading this post helps address my confusion – that person might have a “gender identity” that somehow precludes doing manly things without simultaneously “identifying as a male”. Being cis-male-by-default, I don’t know what this would feel like but it’s something to consider. Feels like progress, anyway.
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I’ve had a strange experience of gender identity. It gradually donned on me that I didn’t strongly identify as female, I just went with it because people told me I was, and that eventually made me wonder if I was even a woman at all. I sat with those feelings for months, and I eventually came to the conclusion that on some days I identified as female and on others I didn’t identify as anything in particular. And here’s where it gets weird: During this period, I started to develop gender dysphoria on the days where I didn’t identify as female, and no matter how hard I tried to just go back to being fine with people perceiving me as female like I had before, I couldn’t make it stop. In fact, resisting like that only made it worse. So, that’s how I came to define myself as genderfluid. It was the only way to make it stop hurting.
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Hmmm… I’m….I’m not even sure.
I know I’m not male – that’s about it.
‘She/her’ or ‘they/them’ are both perfectly fine pronouns for me in my view.
To my mind, cis is identifying as the gender you were born with. I don’t but I don’t really identify as the other gender either – in fact, I’m sure I’m not male.. I don’t really care though…I guess it’s more a case that I don’t care enough to argue with people about it if they choose to see m
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I grew up heavily agendered without realizing it, and just went along for the ‘cis-by-default’ ride because everyone else enforced it that way- I just tried to make things work as a ‘man’, not really understanding it, just trying to survive…
I am in transition because my body was wrong – how it looked, how it felt to be in it, how it felt to use it, how it felt to the touch, how it’s sex drive worked, how I was expected to sexually perform because of what sex it was – all very very wrong, from the beginning of puberty until transition. Sure, there were plenty of things that I wanted to do, that I wasn’t supposed to do, that I would get mocked or ridiculed for trying to do, that I built a deeper resentment for my condition being born male & towards women for being allowed to do them- but I felt this was a normal experience for most people, that they had to figure out what ‘parts’ of their personality were OK to show to the world, and what parts they couldn’t express without finding a safe space to do so. I found enough personality to work with as an adult to pass well enough as a masculine, cis-hetero male, although I was angry all the time, and no-one but me knew why…
During that time repression worked well enough to live the life I was ‘supposed’ to for my conservative Christian parents for whom I was an only child- I will add though that the only reason it worked ‘so well’ (in quotes because there was almost 15 years of addiction to multiple substances in there!) was because I had no idea medical transition could achieve so much until I just couldn’t take it any more and was either going to kill myself, live as a eunuch, or transition, to whatever extent I could – then I began to research it all for real – I wish somehow there would have been a way to inform my parents that this could be done in my teens, If I’d have known it was possible to ask for, or if my parents had been progressive enough to look into it, I’d have transitioned as a teenager without question!
I love your suggestion of the question above, about one day waking up in the other body – If someone had asked me that question I would have answered that it was the biggest dream come true.
To this day I have experienced some difficulty getting support from the trans* community at large because of either gender essentialism, the idea that transsexual transition is and/or should be a product of primarily social dysphoria, or gender conformist ‘policing’ by others who expect me to present in a hyper-feminine way in order to justify my ‘trans-ness’.
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