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What does the [trans] in Trans[formers][sex] mean?
Podly
you unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered User regular
you unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered User regular
More critical theory for the benefit of your intellectual masturbation!
What does the [trans] in transgender mean? Presumably it comes from the latin meaning "across" or "through" or "beyond." Is it a transitional period? Is it "beyond" (the most dominant sense in Western discourse of "trans"), in a sense that the person is "beyond" the societal gender assignment? How does this match up with sex? Is gender a social construct which is being transcended, while sex is a deterministic trait which is prior to societal existence? Can sex too be a social construct?
I think the issue is interesting because if you take a seemingly logical stance, it will often distance you from another stance that you wish to hold. For instance: if you hold that heterosexuality is forced on to us through society and that "femininity" is created through this forced binary difference, then you are distancing yourself from the widely held position that homosexuality is a biological determination.
This thread may get down into the nitty-gritty semantics of human sexuality, but let's start with the first question -
what does the "trans" in transgender or transsexual mean?
What does the [trans] in transgender mean? Presumably it comes from the latin meaning "across" or "through" or "beyond." Is it a transitional period? Is it "beyond" (the most dominant sense in Western discourse of "trans"), in a sense that the person is "beyond" the societal gender assignment? How does this match up with sex? Is gender a social construct which is being transcended, while sex is a deterministic trait which is prior to societal existence? Can sex too be a social construct?
I think the issue is interesting because if you take a seemingly logical stance, it will often distance you from another stance that you wish to hold. For instance: if you hold that heterosexuality is forced on to us through society and that "femininity" is created through this forced binary difference, then you are distancing yourself from the widely held position that homosexuality is a biological determination.
This thread may get down into the nitty-gritty semantics of human sexuality, but let's start with the first question -
what does the "trans" in transgender or transsexual mean?
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edit: lolreading
Well, that's kind of a tricky one. Trans-form would mean that there is a substance in gender, which most transgender people would probably vehemently disagree with.
'Transgender' is a much thornier word and like Podly says, taking any stance has such severe repercussions that the easily-accessible or seemingly "logical" stances are in reality very unsatisfying. So, I'm uh, actually not going to weigh in on that one until other people post.
Oro, but what about hermaphrodites, etc? Are they excluded from the "male" "female" binary opposition of sex?
But that is probably a question for later. Let's stick to the first question for now.
To draw an interesting analogue, the vast majority of college-age pro-choice LGBT people I have met also opposed the option of aborting babies simply because they were [in the hypothetical] destined to be LGBT -- logically, that's bollocks, but they're too rolled up in the culture to notice or care.
It's an incredibly difficult space to navigate, really, and I'm not in my best intellectual sorts right now so I can't give you the whole breakdown in logical rhetoric but rest assured that it's a doozy. :e
This seems to be a much more fruitful discussion than the etymology. I mean, if we begin with the assumption that language is imperfect, this seems like a non-issue to me, but the problem that you bring up seems to be much more intellectually stimulating.
He's asking people to make the investigation of etymology that inevitably leads to the dilemmas and issues that I speak about.
This is an assumption made in my op, and a rather standard assumption to make. If we can agree that someone can be transgender, in that transgender is an identity unto which someone can ascribe themselves or have described unto them, then transgender is a phenomenon which exists, and its existence creates antimonies among logical positions, like the gender / homosexuality problem which I meantioned in the OP.
I'm a philosophical lightweight, but this makes it sound like people were incapable of understanding or thought before language or communication, and that language and cognizance go hand-in-hand. I don't know if I agree with that or not. But then again, I remember the whole Helen Keller thing, and I know that language gives us the structure of thought, but I also think that language and communication seems to necessarily come after human awareness. I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I want you to keep going. Wank until you're sore.
The idea that the concept of sexuality gives us the gender dichotomy doesn't seem logical to me at all. It seems more logical to say that heterosexuality is a part of the idea of masculinity, so what kinds of problems would that cause? I don't know because, again, I'm a philosophical lightweight, and all I really know on this subject is that I've read and largely agree with Noam Chomsky.
If I correctly understand what you are saying, then to be heterosexual means to be a man and probably a male. It strips women / females of sexual agency. I.E., females are not heterosexuals, but spaces of sexual pleasure for the heterosexual male.
How does our society look at bisexual women? How does our society look at bisexual men? Alternatively, women shouldn't enjoy sex.
Thought is more than just subvocalized speech, so I don't see how you can say that language is the structure of our thoughts and that which we can come to know. At the very least, it doesn't seem like an unproblematic assumption.
Good point. Freud thought that bisexuality was the default position, as did Levi-Strauss. This assumes that we are forced into heterosexuality. But let's look at deviants (in a non-punitive mode) and transgressers: is a gay man a bisexual person who only chooses a man? Why would he only choose men? Is he limiting himself in his sexual expression? Is he himself forcing arbitrary limits to his sexuality? Is then homosexuality not genetic? Is a transgender person who, though "naturally" a female, in becoming a man who is still attracted to and only to women bisexual, homosexual or heterosexual.
But is thought ever not linguistic?
Though again this is pretty OT and perhaps subject to a thread at a later day.
There's a false dichotomy between choice and genetics. Some things are neither genetic nor chosen: for instance, a love of figs most likely has no genetic basis, but that doesn't mean that a fig lover woke up one morning and decided "from now on, I'm going to love figs!"
Oh, nice catch. So would you say that some homosexuals are genetically based, while some base on choice?
You don't get it. MrMister is pointing out that homosexuality may (and almost certainly is) the result of some factor other than genetics that is nevertheless unchosen. Say, for instance, the hormonal environment in utero. The false dichotomy is the notion that either something is chosen or it is genetic, when in reality there are a wide variety of things one does not choose about oneself that do not derive from genetics.
Homosexuality may be developmental, it may be cultural, it may be genetic, and it may even involve some aspect of choice. It could even involve all those factors at once. I don't really know enough about the subject to tell, and from what I understand the question is still beyond our ability to conclusively answer. However, I don't think that the answer, whatever it may be, bears on public policy: even if it is a choice, the option of choosing same sex partners is harmless to those around us and part of our basic liberty.
I thought that it generally worked the other way? That is to say that when a transgendered person is reassigned they usually retain their orientation, homo or hetero, except that now they are attracted to the different sex.
I remember reading something in my marriage and family class about how rates of homosexuality skyrocketed in East Berlin after WWII. The theory was that the stress from the rape+pillage job the Russians pulled resulted in prenatal hormonal environments that helped foster homosexuality over heterosexuality.
The study was done something like 40 years after the fact, so who knows, but it's an interesting theory.
It originally was used in the sense of "across." If you wanted to live across genders - that is, in a gender other than your biological sex - you were labeled "transgender" or "transsexual."
Personally, I think the term works, partially because of the adoption of the opposite term, cisgendered. If you study organic chemistry, you encounter carbon chains that look like the letter Z - those are trans-chains (the ends point in opposite directions). Some carbon chains look like the letter C - those are cis-chains (the ends point in the same direction). It's an analogy that works in my mind - for cisgendered people, there's little conflict between the way other people see you and the way you see yourself. The 'ends' point in the same direction.
We'd call those people "intersexed" rather than "transgendered." They're not excluded from the "binary opposition of sex," as long as we collectively acknowledge that the binary opposition represents two ends of a spectrum rather than two discrete categories.
Transgendered people may be, but are not necessarily, intersexed, and vice versa.
Distinct concepts, but not entirely distinct in reality. See below.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
There have been cases of transgendered people whose sexual orientation remained constant across genders. While living as a man, they were attracted to men. While living as a woman, they were attracted to women. There's every possibility that of sexual orientation is not merely whether you're attracted to [men|women], but also whether you're attracted to [self|other].
But this does not happen in every case, and I don't know whether it happens in a majority of cases, but from personal experience I suspect not.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I would argue that there is a biological (genetic and/or influenced by natal hormonal exposure) tendency towards a given sexual preference, but cultural forces impel us to make a binary choice. There is a plethora of historical examples of individuals who took partners of both genders relatively indiscriminately and cultures where such behavior was the norm. However, it hasn't been that long in the modern west since bisexuality - especially male bisexuality - was frowned upon by both heterosexuals and homosexuals.
The myth that gay people have generated in order to be accepted into the mainstream culture is that their love for the same gender is analogous to and a mirror image of mainstream heterosexual love for the opposite gender. On reason might be that this is a far more convenient myth for a sexually repressed culture than "love whoever you want to love, fuck whoever you want to fuck, and make babies if you want, and if you get to do all three with the same person, go you!" A second reason might be that the people who most direly needed to break out of the heterosexual straightjacket were the strong homosexuals - people who were largely bisexual were doing just fine living a straight life and maybe occasionally having secret or not-so-secret gay trysts on the side.
So those of us whose sexuality defies categorization (and by 'us' I mean that I identify with this motley group personally) find ourselves without any convenient labels to hide behind.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Wouldn't that have more to do with the removal of a regime that shipped gay people off to concentration camps?
Yes, stop drinking the pomo kool-aid. You cannot seriously entertain this question unless you seriously shut off your think-parts.
Some people don't think in language. (I don't, most of the time.)
And if you don't believe me, read Animals in Translation.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Man I thought the behaviorist approach to language went out of vogue like 30 seconds after it got proposed.
I dunno if I'd call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis behaviorist per se, as it is concerned with internal states (thoughts and cognitions) that pure behaviorism is not generally concerned with. But yeah, in its purest form it's gone out of vogue though some people still hold it to be partially true.
And I'm sure it is partially true, that language influences schemas, but if schemas and cognitions did not exist in an realm outside of language then it would be impossible for language to meaningfully evolve.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So then is sex as well a social construct?
Nothing in my statement is relevant to whether or not sex is a social construct.
That said, the stock answer is that gender is a social construct while sex is a biological characteristic.
However, how we think of biological-sex is so steeped in cultural framework that I would not argue against the statement that sex is largely a social construct (with biological underpinnings). For instance, we don't typically think of XY individuals who are anatomically female due to androgen insensitivity syndrome as a distinct sex from XX anatomical females, even though by the strictest definition of 'sex' they really would be. However, I would argue against a statement that sex is entirely a social construct, because that's patently and obviously false.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
While I agree that the no-thought-without-language nonsense is not behaviourist, I wouldn't equate it with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis either. S-W contends that language influences our understand of the world to such an extent that the understandings of the world are incommensurable.
OTOH the no thought without language thing is a separate issue. Donald Davidson, for example, contended that animals cannot think as they do not have lanuage - exactly what he thought animals did do is beyond me. Pomo's and acolytes of Derrida and so forth hold that language is the ultimate basis of reality or some nonsense, and I'm not convinced that they're capable of thought let alone academic rigour.
Okay, fair enough.
It's all bollocks anyway.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.