Throwaway to avoid getting doxxed

I know there are probably arguments against centering biology in the discussion about trans people (and if you want to make these arguments to me please do, I'm all ears), but I have found that many transphobes are brought to reflection when told that transgender feelings have a congenital basis, like homosexuality. I have been testing this. Again, I realize this might be a flawed or wrongheaded approach and I am open to criticism.

Anyway, my issue is that, while I have read some research, I do not have a strong enough grasp of the field as a whole to be forceful with this rhetoric. If I start posting studies, I might end up cherrypicking a position that is open to strong criticism.

I realize the research itself is unsettled and many questions remain, but I just want enough to inspire doubt. I want people to doubt that their current understanding of trans people is correct.

This study published in nature found correlations in the parietal lobe that might be associated with perception of one's own body, but I do not feel comfortable posting studies anywhere until I feel more confident that I know what I am talking about.

*got rid of the word "transsexual"

      • throwaway_159246837 [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        What are your thoughts on this thread?

        I tend to agree with you, but on the other hand I'm the person who might be construed as "just asking questions" about who is allowed to identify as trans, because I centered biology by posting this thread

          • throwaway_159246837 [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            biology is definitely an easy answer, which I think is what led me to it.

            some vague mention of transphobic rhetoric

            Much of the transphobic rhetoric online posits that trans people are either delusional or have various strange motives. Many transphobes are christians who think trans people are an affront to god.

            A biological basis swats much of that aside, but it also potentially restricts socially acceptable expression of sexuality, like you mentioned, especially if the biological basis is one we claim to fully understand. We end up with an approved list of ways people can be, and it'll be a list reactionaries can attempt to modify.

            What do you think about the following middle ground approach: I point to some biological patterns that have been found and say "obviously at least some trans people were born this way and have no control over it" but then add "it'll be a long time before we fully understand all the biological factors that contribute, so maybe we should just let people live their lives how they want to as long as they are not hurting anyone. There aren't that many, and overwhelmingly they are not hurting anyone. Trans people have been around throughout human history, this is just part of the human condition."

              • throwaway_159246837 [none/use name]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Yeah, that is the idea. Instead of transmitting an entire worldview, I just want to prove that their current one cannot be correct. Based on feedback from this post, I'll also prioritize not setting anyone up for a truscummy, trans-medicalist view in the future.

        • wire [it/its]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I want to add my perspective as someone who you seem to think would have been helped by there being more hoops to jump through. I completely recontextualized my gender identity in the years that I've been trans. For context, I've know that I'm trans for four years now and I've been on hrt for a year an a half. About a year ago, half a year into being on feminizing hrt, I realized that I had dysphoria from my breast development. This began a series of self-reflections on gender that led to me going from identifying as a transfem to a demiboy, and one that's pretty heavily aligned with masculinity at that. You might be tempted to look at an experience like mine, where hrt caused me more dysphoria and changed my body in a way that I didn't like, where my gender identity swung wildly from one end of the binary to another, where my goals with hrt went from looking like a binary woman to light feminization, as evidence that there should have been more systemic hurdles for me to face. I'd like to tell you that wouldn't have helped.

          At the start of being prescribed hrt I was asked to confirm that I had gender dysphoria through a series of questions. I was lucky, genuinely, to have a doctor who understood that my dysphoria was valid even if it presented atypically. Because I do have dysphoria, even now I can barely look at my face without feeling uncomfortable among a litany of more dysphoria from other secondary sex characteristics. If my doctor had a more strict diagnostic criteria like that often used in European nations my dysphoria wouldn't have been enough. These additional restrictions would have prevented me from getting hrt at all. I sincerely doubt I would have ever been able to parse my feelings on my identity before hrt, a process which does take time to truly affect a patient. I needed to stop feeling disgusted by my masculinity in order to identify with it, a process which couldn't have happened without being on estrogen. I like being a guy, its just that being a guy feels better for me on E.

          My recontextualization of my identity happened through talking to trans people, binary and non-binary. These conversations with people who deeply understood my experience directly lead into me realizing that I wasn't a binary trans woman or even transfem because of their willingness to accept my transness and also give room for me to be critical of my own gender. This wasn't me talking to transfems and realizing I didn't meet a checklist but rather them helping me process the complex emotions that often come with something like gender by first assuming that I was right to call myself trans. An experience which did fuck with me early in my transition is actually very aligned with what you're proposing. I was talking to a trans woman who told me that I was just a very gay man and that I couldn't be trans because I didn't have a very narrow, specific type of dysphoria. This was confusing and unhelpful, because I hated being a man and very earnestly wanted to be something else. Instead of giving me room to figure out how to contextualize my relationship to masculinity and connect the aspects of it that I dislike to the patriarchy or to my dysphoria, I was dismissed outright. It was that dismissal that directly led into me pursuing hrt without having a deeper understand of my identity. By making rigid, inflexible definitions of who can and can't be trans, by imposing a larger than current number of restrictions on me, I was denied support in figuring out my identity which directly led to a situation you seem to be concerned about preventing.

          At the end of the day, even as I type this in a binder because I haven't had top surgery yet, I don't regret a minute of my transition. I don't regret that I'm going to have scars on my chest for the rest of my life because I was wrong about my identity. More hoops would have made it harder for me to start this process, more challenging for me to get resources that would have helped me. Having more rigid definitions of transness encourages a narrow interpretation of the gender binary leaving many trans people out. It also creates a situation where euphoria isn't considered valid. You can't prove empirically that my gender identity is something that I love, you have to rely on the absence of dysphoria that used to exist. If you have too little or not the right type of dysphoria then you can't be trans even if you'd be overjoyed to transition like I am. People are complex beings and adding more clinical steps, more boxes people have to check to be valid, is antithetical to this complexity.