Our sex should obviously not be a major part of our lives outside of, like, medical things. But our society forces gender on us as a set of roles, expectations etc. to follow based on our sex. So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
But trans people throughout history have wanted to present as the opposite gender. This is in addition to cis people who oppose their own gender’s roles and do the opposite things. But trans people, obviously, go much further than any cis person does.
Is this because trans people want to actually be the opposite sex and for a long time being the opposite gender was the only possible thing? But now thanks to medical advancements they can get closer to that goal than any other time?
Why is this? Is it something in the brain, like with gay people? So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans? Would that even help? Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people. So, uh, scrap that.
Any essential books for reading up on all this stuff? Thanks
Yeah this is the way I wish more people framed it. I'm Trans. I don't know or care why, I do things that help me feel better and more comfy at no expense to anyone else, and there is no reason this should be controversial. It low-key bothers me when people argue you shouldn't hate trans people because they were "born that way" or "didn't have a choice" or whatever, because while I do believe those things for me, if someone wakes up one day and decides to switch gender it isn't harming anyone so who cares. You shouldn't hate trans people because it doesn't fuckin' effect you in any way what other people do with their bodies.
These seem like good faith questions, I like it.First thing first, trans people don't need any justification for being trans, they can present how they want and need no one's permission. There's a lot to be said that physical sex is as much of a construction as gender. At least 1% of people are born intersex, not to mention the history of women athletes getting disqualified for high testosterone levels. Sex isn't even necessarily intrinsic to chromosomes, because your DNA changes over time and something like a bone marrow transplant can give you DNA of the opposite sex. There's also 46,XX/46,XY, a chimeric condition where an outwardly female seeming person will have ovaries, breasts, and a uterus, but has XY chromosomes. When you mention this kind of thing to reactionaries or terfs you'll often hear them say something like "that's a disorder" or "people aren't supposed to be born that way." Well ok, intersex people exist and we live in a reality with them. They're proof that physical sex isn't some absolute written into the laws of reality, but furthermore they're normal people who deserve acknowledgement.
Also it depends on the trans person. Not every trans person is in agreement on this stuff. Also, not every trans person wants to be the opposite gender, because many want to be neither, or both, or something else entirely.
i think the best thing to consider though is trans people are just people with their own experiences, they don't need any medical acknowledgement, and I've met some who felt uncomfortable pointing towards intersex people to help explaining gender, and I get that
Thanks!
Biology is complicated. I’m clearly not an expert so I appreciate all the information. So, trans is a broad category that includes all people who want to be another sex or gender than the one they’re assigned to. That’s really simple and I don’t know why I got confused about that.
So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans
no. that shit was an argument they used for gay rights but its led to transmedicalization which is not an acceptable outcome---people should not require medical survey to be 'allowed' to express the gender they want
but anyway the homo v hetero brain scan studies are really flawed, we know from a vast corpus of asking people sexual orientation is not a 1 / 0 binary but these jokers stare at brainscans they've lumped into these fake categories and vibes their way to conclusions
I read about how the brain scans today are probably very biased and that “male” and “female” brains might not even be a real thing. Wild.
the differences they observe are completely informed by the semantic categories they put on the groups of brains before they even start observing them. anything gleaned by looking at pregendered brains is going to reenforce biases that existed going in
i think i phrased that a bit too broadly. the categories that neuroscientists use are specifically contested & problematic; there isn't argumentation against say, igneous rock being a meaningful category---but there are serious debates around how gender and sexuality should be conceived & the research that approaches from a heteronormative angle is going to be flawed from those incorrect assumptions
I can only really speak for myself here, but I want both. Like I want to be physically female, to the point where I could be a biological mother. Unfortunately, that's not possible at the moment, but I'm going to try my best to get as close as possible. But even though I say "I want" it's not actually a choice. Before I started taking estrogen, I was very depressed to put it mildly. If I stop taking estrogen, I'm pretty sure I will feel the same way again. None of this has anything to do with my gender. If I live in a society with no gender, assuming such a thing is possible, I would still have the same medical needs. But I also want a certain gender expression. It doesn't matter that gender expression stuff is socially constructed. There's lots of other things people want that are socially constructed, self actualization is a basic human need.
There are some trans people who medically transition and never present differently. It's usually trans women who start hormones as adults (sometimes they call themselves manmoders). I've talked to people who have done this for like a decade. After they take estrogen for a while they look pretty feminine, but most people don't really know what a male on hormones looks like, and so with a short haircut you can probably present as a man forever. In theory, these women as a test of someone who wants to transition their sex but not their gender. However, my sense is that most of them aren't very happy about their situation. The reason they present as men is because it's not safe for them to do otherwise, because they're still figuring out how to go about socially transitioning, or because they're afraid of looking like one of the horrific caricatures of trans women that dominate our culture (which, yeah, I'm afraid of that too).
So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
I'm really out of my depth here, but I don't actually think gender abolition literally means that there should be a society where a person's sex carries exactly social or cultural implications of any kind. I think it's more about how sex-based hierarchies are bad. But none of that actually matters for trans people who exist today, because it's a goal or an ideal. If you go outside, there are gender roles alive and well right now, and sometimes we have to go outside. Expecting trans people to somehow live without gender or whatever because that's what you think society should be like is like expecting a communist not to own a smartphone.
Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people
This is exactly how I feel about it. Lots of people disagree, but I definitely didn't act like most little boys as a child, and during puberty dysphoria just kind of destroyed my life. If you believe that a person is their brain, as in materialist monism, then some feature of a person which causes major effects on their life would logically have to exist as a physical structure or process within the brain. Assuming the brain scan was good enough, there's no actual reason why you wouldn't be able to identify this structure or process. However, I hope the scans never actually get good enough. Pre-natal testing has largely eliminated babies with Down Syndrome from many European countries. I used to work with some students with Down. They had major difficulties with some things, but they were also perfectly capable of understanding lots of stuff and are generally very happy. Sometimes, I would think about what it would be like to explain to them that they may be among the last generations of themselves who will ever be born. It's kind of horrifying. I don't trust cis people not to pull the same thing on us.
Books? I guess Whipping Girl by Julia Serano.
Scenario 1 doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If I lived in the future trying to be whatever a 2023 woman is would be like trying to be an 1880s woman now. But I think gender is inevitable, and I'd always want to be on the more feminine side of things.
But also 2 is true, everyone's gender is constrained by society and you can't really get around that
So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans?
what about all the lesbian trans fems i know then?
I think the concept of gender and sex as separate things has come about as a purely political argument that trans people are forced into in order to defend themselves. I think the two are so intertwined that they may as well be treated as the same thing.
But they can't be in this political climate.
Differentiating only between sex and gender is also an intellectual dead end that cannot adequately explain transness. You need at least a three-dimensional model for that, like Leslie Feinberg's split between gender identity, gender performance and biological sex characteristics. You can subdivide this further, biological sex is a mosaic of all kinds of factors (hormones, genitals, various secondary sex characteristics most of which only anatomists and the most deeply dysphoric trans people are even aware of etc.), but these broader categories are much more useful for most discussions unless we're getting into details. Under a 2D model that only knows sex and gender, we quickly see how limited it is once we move beyond the most basic explanations of how society shapes gender performance - for example, it becomes impossible to explain the difference between a butch cis lesbian and an AFAB transmasc enbie with the same gender performance as the butch who doesn't medically transition. If you only know sex and gender, it's literally impossible to tell why one is cis and the other is trans. But differentiating the two is a trivial task under Feinberg's model, because the butch's gender identity is woman and the enbie's gender identity is masc-leaning nonbinary person.
Most early terfs that actually started out as second wave feminists do not get that and because they're all incredibly hung up on their grief with Judith Butler and her sex-gender dichotomy and eventually their own GNC performance of femininity, they have constant brain farts as soon as trans people enter the picture.
I agree though that biological sex (as in: hormonal sex) and gender role are very closely intertwined, and that there is also some connection to gender identity. I need estrogen to feel at home in my skin, and that's not only because it physically turns my skin into the smooth and soft one i want for myself, it's as if estrogen is the only operating system that fits my brain. On testosterone i always felt on overdrive even when i was super low energy and could barely do anything. Without estrogen, i also struggle to live as the empathetic, warm, cuddly, outgoing and agreeable person i always wanted to be, but on estrogen, it comes naturally. I already discarded the walled-off, emotionally stunted masculine gender role i had been bludgeoned into before i started HRT, that just imploded as soon as i realized i'm a woman and hate it to be seen as a man. But i didn't get nearly as far as with my endocrinological backup, and i'm going a lot deeper into what kind of woman i want to be now that i'm settling into that and get treated as a woman by my friends.
Enlightenment science :brainworms: try to deconstruct and categorize the world, which is related to how our brains use signification to simplify the reality we perceive via our senses. This is why binaries can feel correct to people, and why stereotyping is a real aspect of human brain cognition. This isn't always a terrible thing, it's part of survival mechanisms and such.
Reality and material conditions don't care though, and trans people along with lots of other marginalized humans that don't fit into the category buckets easily are often repressed due to this reactionary mindset. As we learn more about the realities of the complexity of the world via science, we start to see how poorly the accepted understandings are. Just look into lateral gene transfer to see that the orderly 'tree of life' concept is not an accurate representation of genetic lineage and evolution for example.
In regards to your question, just accept that people have different understandings of themselves. Categorization and labeling can help people connect to each other via these significations, which is positive, but it also can feed back into sectarianism and other negative reactionary impulses. See the friction between forms of transness and gay/lesbian sexuality as an example. Once the category becomes a faction, these reactionary impulses can become repressive to the transcendent folks.
The problem is attachments to categories that no longer serve the practice and purpose of science. It's a social process, and so it has similar pitfalls of social dynamics. The reactionary nature of defending established understandings is what I think needs to be guarded against. A binary is a shorthand way to describe a spectrum for instance, but if only the binary understanding is what is taught as established knowledge, it is all to easy to deride the reality of the spectrum as an affront to established science. This pattern has played out numerous times over the short history. This is why study of science as a social practice is really invaluable.
For me if I could have a cis-male body I would switch in a heart beat, but I don't think Id be comfortable with not being transgender?
I certainly don't want a "cure", the idea of taking something that keeps me as a woman sickens me. It would feel like brainwashing imo.
I spent most of my life as a woman, and while it wasn't for me in the end I am grateful for the perspective. It gave me a sense of empathy that I don't think I would have ever gotten had I been born a man. It has been a fascinating experience, even with all the inconvenience of being trans during these times.
I'm not trans, so what I have to say should be secondary to what any of our trans comrades care to comment. But from my reading of Les Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, it seems clear to me that it depends on the person. Not only are there the western genders that you're intimately familiar with, and the concept of being nonbinary or transgender/sex, there are genders that were understood in other cultures that differ in category from any of these. So the answer is, both and more, depending. I think there's a focus on flattening the gender/sex/sexuality spectrum along the most physically realized aspects partly because capitalism commodifies any and everything into its most physical aspects. Surely there are some trans women and men that would feel satisfied being transgender and not wanting any sort of affirmative surgery if not for the various social pressures of capitalism; but those social pressures are a real force. Who's to say how everyone would shake out under different cultural systems. As for Trans Liberation, there are wonderful cases presented of all of the above, people that identify with indigenous gender identities, people that identify as crossdressers or transsexual, and of course Les Feinberg hirself who identified
with the "male" genderas nonbinaryhad seemingly little interest in any sort of surgery. I would highly recommend it as a relatively short read that exists largely to present radical trans acceptance from a variety of perspectives and contexts, as Les speaks to different groups and includes letters from a wide variety of people.:cat-trans:
that's a fine (more than a) nitpick, i thought i had it the right way round
I mostly say I'm female despite being biologically male because our culture expects women and females to be synonymous and our culture will also often murder us if we reveal that we are only one of those things. In a perfect world I might not try to change my perceived sex along with my gender, but we don't live in that world so honestly I don't think about it much.
Our sex should obviously not be a major part of our lives outside of, like, medical things.
Relationships? Sex matters a ton in most relationships.
There's people i crush on hard because of how they do gender, but when we're talking physical attraction, it's also very often biological sex characteristics. It's honestly reductionist to just boil it down to a few isolated characteristics, but OTOH straight men in particular are obviously really good at objectifying humans to the point were we exist only as "that ass over there".
Do you think a straight guy would want to have sex with someone who has a penis? Some maybe, but most no.
Initial attraction is based on gender expression, but maintaining a healthy relationship needs sexual compatibility (in most cases anyway, ace people are different obv).
Do you think a straight guy would want to have sex with someone who has a penis?
It's at least much more common than most people think, you could ask anybody who gets crept on by straight dudes about that. Most of them just won't admit it. And if you knew anything about trans anatomy, you'd also understand that a penis on testosterone is fundamentally different from a penis on estrogen. You could at least try to educate yourself before you judge other people's genitals and their sexuality like some fucking terf.
So what you think sex just doesn't play a role at all in sex? Some straight guys are ok with a penis, some straight guys aren't ok with a penis on testosterone but are ok with a penis on estrogen, but some (my assumption is still most, i.e. at least 50%, but the point still stands regardless) straight guys aren't ok with either. That's not something that can be controlled the same way sexuality in general can't be controlled.
And not every trans woman is on estrogen. Like trans people throughout history that this post explicitly mentions.
all i'm saying is that your post came off as needing some additional information because withoiut context it could perpetuate harmful stereotypes about unoperated trans women that regularly get us harassed, attacked or killed.
gender is probably something your brain can do, and would still do if you were raised by wolves, but all the stuff we attach to gender is made up. we shouldn't be medicalist about it but affirming surgeries are probably way older than you think even in the western cultural context, and there's some weird stuff in this historical record about ancient practices that amounted to hrt.
idk if other agender people have a gender and can't recognize it due to a lack of cultural context, or if our brains aren't doing the electrochemical process that nominally produces gender. probably some of each, but i'm not sure it matters.
frankly i'm not sure how much the details of the inaccessible interiority of other people matters for anything, not just gender. we can only interact with it by proxy.
