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Where gender parity meets transgender
Organichu
poopspeesRegistered User, Moderator mod
poopspeesRegistered User, Moderator mod
note: this is a thread where I am asking questions. I'm not aiming to state things authoritatively and then defend those statements. I'm asking good faith questions because I aim to be a tolerant person and I have questions about these issues that are important to many people.
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I'm going to throw out a few basic terms that I think I understand as they are popularly used by progressives. If any of these rudimentary definitions are wrong, let me know.
gender essentialism- or any essentialism, really- is the idea that you need to possess a given list of traits in order to identify as whatever group or class. In this case, it means that men have to be like this, and women have to be like that. It holds these traits as fixed and defines inclusion or exclusion from the group not by self-identification, but by how you match these entries on a rubric. It's my understanding that modern, progressive thought refutes this concept. I totally dig that. It's wrong to tell people that you have to be like this or you're not who or what you think you are. Boys can play with barbies. Girls can race monster trucks. Nice.
transgender is a term that is meant to say that one who is popularly identified as belonging to one gender actually identifies as belonging to another. This also makes perfect sense to me. If you are born feeling like X, but society tells you you're Y, that is horrible and I can only imagine how distressing it must be. I experienced this a lot as a kid in an overwhelmingly [X religion/cultural group] nation when I didn't feel that way. I wanted to be thought of and regarded as something else, by myself and by others. And something like gender is more penetrating and integral than even that. So I get why this is important.
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This is my confusion: modern refutations of gender essentialism say that in order to be X, you don't need to enjoy abc, or prefer abc, or behave like abc. My thought, though, is that this neuters the entire concept of gender. I understand why people should be permitted to say what kind of person they are, and that society shouldn't tell them 'no, you're this type of person'. But in this conceived scenario, where our self-identify is accepted by others as sovereign and primary, doesn't gender as a concept sort of cease to exist? Which is to say, in a world where 'the good guys' get their way and you're never ostracized, marginalized, or pigeonholed based on their expectation of how you ought to be, then don't those titles- those classifications- no longer exist? Doesn't the concept of being a man or being a woman dissipate when we say that 'anyone can be a man' and 'anyone can be a woman'? Note that I'm not saying this critically: I don't see a powerful argument for why those categories should exist.
Now, I get transsexuality, even infinitely on down the timeline. You may be born with your body like this, but you feel like your body should have been like that. In this biologically, only semi-malleable arena, there are concrete and tangible markers of sex. So no matter how progressive society grows, it seems that transgendered people will always have a spark for their discontent and sense of disorientation or misplacement.
But it doesn't seem like that holds with transgendered individuals. It seems like once we remove the other-ing implicit in assigning values to various genders (maybe a pipe dream, but what I think is the goal, right?) that no one will ever feel as though they were
'assigned' the wrong gender.
Does this mean that in an imaginary world, 500 years down the road, where you can be 'a man' however you want to be or any 'kind' of woman... that there would be no context for wanting to 'change' gender?
@feral
@poshniallo
@arch
@arivia
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I'm going to throw out a few basic terms that I think I understand as they are popularly used by progressives. If any of these rudimentary definitions are wrong, let me know.
gender essentialism- or any essentialism, really- is the idea that you need to possess a given list of traits in order to identify as whatever group or class. In this case, it means that men have to be like this, and women have to be like that. It holds these traits as fixed and defines inclusion or exclusion from the group not by self-identification, but by how you match these entries on a rubric. It's my understanding that modern, progressive thought refutes this concept. I totally dig that. It's wrong to tell people that you have to be like this or you're not who or what you think you are. Boys can play with barbies. Girls can race monster trucks. Nice.
transgender is a term that is meant to say that one who is popularly identified as belonging to one gender actually identifies as belonging to another. This also makes perfect sense to me. If you are born feeling like X, but society tells you you're Y, that is horrible and I can only imagine how distressing it must be. I experienced this a lot as a kid in an overwhelmingly [X religion/cultural group] nation when I didn't feel that way. I wanted to be thought of and regarded as something else, by myself and by others. And something like gender is more penetrating and integral than even that. So I get why this is important.
---
This is my confusion: modern refutations of gender essentialism say that in order to be X, you don't need to enjoy abc, or prefer abc, or behave like abc. My thought, though, is that this neuters the entire concept of gender. I understand why people should be permitted to say what kind of person they are, and that society shouldn't tell them 'no, you're this type of person'. But in this conceived scenario, where our self-identify is accepted by others as sovereign and primary, doesn't gender as a concept sort of cease to exist? Which is to say, in a world where 'the good guys' get their way and you're never ostracized, marginalized, or pigeonholed based on their expectation of how you ought to be, then don't those titles- those classifications- no longer exist? Doesn't the concept of being a man or being a woman dissipate when we say that 'anyone can be a man' and 'anyone can be a woman'? Note that I'm not saying this critically: I don't see a powerful argument for why those categories should exist.
Now, I get transsexuality, even infinitely on down the timeline. You may be born with your body like this, but you feel like your body should have been like that. In this biologically, only semi-malleable arena, there are concrete and tangible markers of sex. So no matter how progressive society grows, it seems that transgendered people will always have a spark for their discontent and sense of disorientation or misplacement.
But it doesn't seem like that holds with transgendered individuals. It seems like once we remove the other-ing implicit in assigning values to various genders (maybe a pipe dream, but what I think is the goal, right?) that no one will ever feel as though they were
'assigned' the wrong gender.
Does this mean that in an imaginary world, 500 years down the road, where you can be 'a man' however you want to be or any 'kind' of woman... that there would be no context for wanting to 'change' gender?
@feral
@poshniallo
@arch
@arivia
Organichu on
0
Posts
Pretty close.
Gender essentialism means that there is an essential nature - an essence - to gender that is independent of culture and outside of human control.
A statement like "boys can play with Barbies, too" isn't essentialist; but if that statement is phrased like "boys can play with girl things, like Barbies, too" there's an implication of gender essentialism there. The implication is that Barbies carry some essential girl-ness. In context, somebody might merely mean that as "in our culture, Barbies are traditionally girl toys" which isn't essentialist.
This is closely entwined with a separate, but related, idea - biological determinism. This is the idea that our sexual biologies determine our gender roles or gender identities. One of the criticisms of anti-trans second-wave feminists like Germaine Greer is that they rejected biological determinism but didn't adequately reject gender essentialism. The classic book that launched second-wave feminism was Simone Du Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' in which she famously said that "one is not born, but becomes, a woman." In that same book, she explored the experience of being a woman in a man's world; an exploration that was continued in a number of other books but notably Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique.'
Some anti-trans feminists, like Germaine Greer, took that female experience and assigned a sort of essentialism to it. Greer (and others) said, basically, if you didn't grow up with the experience of being a woman, socially and biologically, then you weren't really a woman. The implication was that you were missing some essential quality of womanhood. (I pick on Greer a lot for this even though I like her writings on other subjects. She's fun when she's not pissing on trans people.)
This attitude is sort of dying off with third wave feminism but it still lingers.
I'll get to the rest of your post in a moment.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It is also easy to see how a transgendered person will naturally cleave to the cultural trappings of the physical sex they wish to be and feel they should be - clothing, gender roles, demeanour, etc. - which is a complicated and highly politicized issue itself.
A book on the topic (written by a biologist who is herself quite far-out on the progressive left; I can post the title when I get home) mentioned a correlation between a chemical released into the ecosystem (water, food, etc) and significantly higher rates of self-identified transgender folks. She suggests that the mismatch between the physical body and the sense of gender identity is, in fact, a mismatch between two biological things, though "sense of gender identity" is definitely complicated and presents all sorts of questions like "what is the content of biological gender identity, ie what aspects of an individual's identity are derived from their mental, biological gender, if such a thing exists?"
well
Yes.
Inasmuch as I flit close to gender abolishment as a societal goal.
The longer answer would be that, well yes, but I think such a hypothetical is inherently impossible. Under that light I would then say that I would like to move towards the more reasonable goal of destroying barriers and negative stereotypes associated with gender and gender expression (see my post in the "whose definition of feminism is it"? thread).
What I mean is that if it were completely possible to dissolve any and all barriers to gender expression and accept self identity as the primacy, then sure by default I think the idea of "gender" will begin to fade away.
I don't think this is possible at all, not do I even think it is a reasonable end-game scenario. Similar to how the current feminist movement is fighting with a lot of stigmatization of older gender roles (there is an undercurrent of disdain for stay-at-home moms, for instance, while venerating the stay-at-home dad) I don't think gender roles and gender categories will ever go away; we won't let them.
But I think that making it easier or more accepted to buck your "essential" gender, or present alternate gender expressions whenever one chooses is a reasonable scenario. In this ideal world, I don't think the categories "male" or "female" will go away, and I don't really even want them to. There are still positives in a lot of the old gender categories, and we don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because some people like different bathtubs.
Why did I type that
Yes, pretty much, with lots of caveats and asterisks.
Part of the difficulty here is that trans is a very very complex thing - probably multicausal, possibly an umbrella term for different experiences.
At the most severe, you have people whose 'body map' doesn't match the reality. We all have a complex system of proprioception - instinctive knowledge of our own anatomy and how we're positioned and how we're moving. It's how you can tell if you can fit through a doorway without measuring it, how you know you're sitting in a chair without looking at your legs, etc. It's also implicated in conditions like phantom limb syndrome or alien limb syndrome where you're missing a body part you feel like you should have, or vice versa. The most difficult and distressing cases of gender identity disorder involve a disturbance in proprioception - your sexual anatomy feels wrong and alien.
And then there are people who don't really have that same disturbing proprioceptive experience, but they assign themselves a gender identity that does not match their biology. These experiences are a little more difficult to describe in precise terms.
As for whether the majority of trans-identified people fall closer to the former end of the spectrum or closer to the latter, I don't know. I don't know if there are numbers on that. What I do know is that even among those trans people who have access to sexual reassignment surgery, only a minority go through with it. The majority find nonsurgical means of coming to terms with their own bodies. Whether that's because of payment difficulties or an assessment of the medical risks of surgery or whether they simply don't have as severe body map issues, I don't know.
What I am saying is that it's tempting to say "trans people are like this" when there are plenty of people whose experiences don't match the common popular or even medical or psychiatric narratives about trans people.
One more post coming.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Can you explain some of them?
Well, I would be hard-pressed to find negatives in the "stay at home mom". This hits the following "categories"- Women are more caring, women are better at raising kids, (biologically) women invest more into children, women should do the cooking and cleaning...
It goes on and on
the thing here is that while these things can be positive, they remain shackles when they are not only expected of anyone who wants to identify as a 'woman' but also when they are the only way for a person of a certain sex to act.
The thing is, these things are not "negatives" in a vacuum. Most gender stereotypes aren't negatives in a vacuum!
But there is a lot of cultural context and baggage with everything.
So "stay at home mom" can be a positive...when it was actually a choice by the individual, not forced onto them by society.
To me, the response to this
Is "no", because once people aren't forced into an expression they don't want to present, or prevented from expressing what they want, they will be more free to pick "traditional" roles, without stigma either way.
does that make sense, 'chu?
Every human culture that has been identified has some gender roles and some sense of gender identity. However, what those roles actually are is not universal.
One of the common complaints of trans people going through psychiatric treatment is that there is often an expectation on them to adopt trans roles that they're not comfortable with. An MtF might be pressured to start wearing more girly clothes, for instance - to the point that surgery might be denied or delayed because they haven't adopted enough female gender roles to satisfy the medical professionals signing off on surgery.
These things suggest that gender roles and gender identity are two separate things.
My conjecture - and this is by no means me speaking as an expert, just as a guy who reads about this stuff and talks to people - is that we have a very deep-seated, probably biological, probably inherited system for distinguishing people into sexual categories (much in the same way we have a biological inherited system for recognizing faces and a biological inherited system for bonding with family members). However, the specific cues we use to identify people as one sex or another are culturally malleable.
Kids start to get curious about gender very early in their development and they start asking questions about whether boys can have long hair or girls can play sports almost as soon as they can start forming sentences. And they recognize patterns - if they've been taught that X and Y are 'girl things' while A and B are 'boy things' and they see X,Y, and Z together all the time but never A,B, and Z, then they're going to conclude that Z is also a girl thing.
So when we're talking about trans people, we might be talking about disturbances of proprioception, mismatched gender identity (either mismatched with their anatomy or mismatched with social expectations), or difficulty performing expected gender roles.
I think it's fair to say that this is all a relatively brave frontier - it's not well-understood how those three things interact or how they might lead to unhappiness in any given person.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think you can cut it more simply Feral.
I seem to recall people with either brain damage or inherited mutations (talked a lot about in Carol Kaesuk Yoon's book Naming Nature, which is an interesting read whose thesis I completely disagree with) who literally cannot separate things into different categories.
I am fuzzy on the specifics, but it basically implies the "fix'd" quote I posted, and I tentatively accept at least that hypothesis. In fact, that hypothesis is basically the center of my posts here regarding 'Chu's questions about whether gender will "disappear" once we have basically become like, super accepting.
That's fair enough. But I guess where it leads me is to the infinitely many permutations of 'how I express my masculinity' or 'how I express my femininity'. Which is like, hmmm. I dunno. If my idea of masculinity is getting drunk with buds and fighting people who disrespect me and climbing mountains, and yours is listening to singer songwriters and smoking cigarillos while writing in Paris- are they both 'male' properties? Is it 'Arch's version of manliness' and 'John's version of manliness'? When things are that diffuse, I don't understand how it works to still consider just two titles for two things.
It doesn't work. Subjective definitions of gender expression don't really serve much purpose, do they? It's interesting that we categorize everything by assigning a gender to it, but I'd go on to say that can be harmful. For example, when preventing someone from doing something because they wouldn't be comfortable transgressing their gender expectations.
So many times I've seen a transgender individual question themselves, in the vein of "I feel like a woman but I don't like pink or wearing skirts. This doesn't make sense!"
It's also negatively affected myself, actually. Coming out as trans has been met with opposition because I didn't have a history of feminine expression in their eyes. The diffuseness of expression prevented them from allowing me to identity as I chose.
So yah, there's nothing really intrinsically male or female. Whatever causes you to define them as such should be recognized as a personal, subjective categorization and nothing past that.
Isn't the problem here the definition of "woman" rather then the point Greer is making?
Because I'd say you are certainly missing something by not growing up as a woman, because there will be certain life experiences and such based on your biology/society/etc that shape you that woman will have in common.
Like you can want society to label you a woman and treat you like one, but if you grew up labelled and treated like a man you are definitely missing things that other woman (who spent their whole life treat and labelled as woman) have. And it essentially becomes a question of what you consider being a woman to be.
I don't know much about Greer's work, so maybe there's more here that clarifies an anti-trans bias.
Some people identify themselves as pansexual, omnisexual, or some other superlative that attempts to convey that their sexual interests do not consider gender to be a factor of note. However, this is not the majority of people, and I have sincere doubts without some sort of fundamental post-humanist shift in culture that it would ever be. For the majority of people, gender and even physical sex are important factors in their sexual interests. Even among many bisexuals, you will find that while they are open to sexual activity with people who are male or female, they still sort of have a basic expectation that a person will identify as one or the other. I've very rarely met self-identified bisexuals who are attracted to and perfectly fine with people who express directly contrary or completely ambiguous gender and sexual traits. Such folk rarely identify as bisexual in the first place, preferring other terms.
As a result, from a position of romantic attraction and sexual partner selection, gender can serve as an effective short-hand for the sort of traits a person is looking for. A self-identified heterosexual man wants a woman, and he's going to identify a woman not just from a stance of physical sex (ie genital arrangement) but also from gendered traits that he has come to consider to be distinctly the province of women. What kind of woman he wants, what he's looking for in a woman, is highly variable but inevitably if pressed on the subject with questioning you will find at its most basic he's placing strictures on his perspective that narrow his selections to individuals who exhibit very commonplace gender traits for being a woman.
(golly that's a sentence)
So, here's the rub on that: If we accept the commonly held viewpoint of progressives and liberals that sexual orientation has an inborn and immutable component, that is not consciously chosen by the person but just a part of who they are, then likewise gender itself must also have a certain amount of categorical objectivity. If you assert the former you sort of inevitably assert the latter. If you assert that people who are homosexual are born homosexual or their homosexuality develops so early and so unconsciously in their life that it is laughable to try to alter it with conditioning, then you are likewise asserting the same viewpoint of gender.
Because otherwise, how could a person say "I'm a homosexual man, and therefore only attracted to other men" and have that be an intrinsic quality of who they are without also having their definition of "men" being intrinsic?
You could say "Well, it's not genetic or inborn but it's incredibly complex and developed very early on psychologically and once it has crystallized that is just how it is" but that still means the same is true of gender. You can't simultaneously assert a person's sexual attraction matrix is immutable or crystallized very early on without saying the same of gender as well, on some basic level.
If gender itself is rendered obsolete by stating it is mutable and entirely subjective to interpretation, then likewise any sexuality that is based on gender is likewise mutable. If gender has no essential qualities, and if physical sex can be reduced to a simple genital structure and nothing more, then likewise sexualities based on defining yourself as only liking certain genders becomes suspect.
I find rarely is a person confronted with this reality willing to go all the way on it. Either gender is a choice, or it isn't. If gender is a choice, then so is sexuality. If a person is able to feel "wrong" because they feel misaligned with the gender society has told them they are or the sexuality that is expected of them, then that implies that these things can have a very real, internal, immutable component beyond cultural notions or personal choices.
This is sort of gender identity and gender presentation clashing in a culture where some degree of gender essentialism is accepted and roles are heavily tied to that. As a culture, we expect more from trans people than those who aren't. I think part of it is the assumption that presentation and identity are pretty inherently linked, and that body and identity are linked is taken for granted. So for someone who's born with female gear, we assume they are a woman. And will probably have female presentation. And if it's ambiguous or pretty masculine, we still assume that they're a girl because that's what the body is. But if someone who has girl gear has a male identity, we start to demand that they 'prove' it, and the only way we know how is through roles and activities that the person "should" like, regardless of the fact that we don't do that for everyone else.
This is a problem with the way some places (Canada, for example) require that people undergo a year of therapy or more before being permitted to undergo gender reassignment surgery. I've been told by trans friends of mine a requirement of that therapy is that you spend a good amount of time "living as" the gender you are transitioning to, which in the eyes of the therapist almost inevitably involves dressing and acting in accordance with gender norms for that gender.
So if you are transitioning into a woman, they're going to expect you to try to pass as a woman and dress in skirts and paint your nails and otherwise do a bunch of stereotypically feminine crap.
It colossally misses the point on a level that is sort of astounding.
There's also a little bit of gender essentialism in transexuality, as it needs to assume that there are certain things inherent in each sex/gender to assert a need to change.
Yeah, it was the same here. I think it's changed (or, at least, has with hormones). I am woefully underinformed which is hilarious given my situation.
It's also pretty dumb in that it basically requires you to live as a woman with the body of a man before they let you change the body, which isn't really a useful experience. Unless you are very specifically lucky, the hormones are kind of necessary for the whole ordeal to work out.
You could say that, but it's kind of a misuse of the term, As commonly understood, trans stuff requires there be an inherent identity that is pretty much immutable. But not really much else - maybe a specific body map, or something. That's not what is academically understood by gender essentialism though - "gender essentialism" is more about there being a definite essential difference between men and women, and that manifesting in many ways. Gender essentialism is saying that Barbies are for girls because dolls are inherently for girls, or that being a woman is about housework because that's essential to being a woman. It's the idea that you can't attribute to culture various gendered roles and such - they just are masculine or feminine, and masculinity and femininity are about those things, which cannot be separated.
Basically, gender essentialism is more about the idea that you can't meaningfully separate a lot of the junk that is gendered in our society - it's all mashed together that way because of some inherent quality. Men are like this and women are like that is a gender essentialist notion. "Men feel like men and women feel like women" is not really a statement of what behaviors and entities are inherent to what genders, so it doesn't really apply. You can even phrase it gender neutrally: One is what gender they feel like. You can't do that with "Domestic chores are for women."
It's mostly about figuring out how things work, not categorizing them (well, except for cladistics) and it's turned out that reproductive systems are much more complicated than are appreciated.
Science is a fuzzy science.
Not so much as far as my point. As far as humans go, at least, there's a male and a female. A male and a female have the proper systems between them to produce a child. A male and a male do not, nor do a female and a female. That much has not changed.
You should really really read Joan Roughgarden's book Evolution's Rainbow. I feel you will like it quite a bit.
A quote from Douglas Futuyma (a very prominent evolutionary biologist, if you aren't already aware) in a review of this book that I posted in the "feminism definition" thread.
Life is far too complicated to be easily categorized into anything useful. At its cleanest, there will be an 'other' category.
Some people don't want there to be gender definitions at all. Some people want there to be, but they want to be a gender definition other than what biology seems to have given them. Some people want there to be, but subservient to biology. Even the ones who vote for the same politicians and have the same groups supporting them are going to have logical contradictions among them in terms of the ideal nature of gender. So be it. Primarily it should be about letting people do what they want and preventing anyone from getting hurt.
Maybe that means that it's harmful and regressive for a biological female to engage in gender-based stereotypical female behaviors, whereas it is brave and progressive and honorable when a male decides to engage in gender-based stereotypical female behaviors. Yeah, it makes no sense. Whatever. Just try to be nice and let people be.
1. Can you really call a man who is with a preop transexual woman straight? I would say no.
2. Is there anything wrong or bigoted about saying you would not date someone if you found out they were transexual (let's assume no desire for kids anyway)?
3. Is it wrong to think of transsexuals as different from other members of their chosen sex? Does preop/postop matter?
4. How do people who are supportive of transexuality feel about those stories of men with families leaving them because they want to live as women? How about where the man makes the choice, and when the family is not accepting he leaves and becomes a woman? To me, it seems really selfish in either case.
You meet someone who looks female, and you find her attractive. Even naked etc. Sex is good. You enjoy her personality/company etc.
If you then find out that she's a post-op transexual, and that changes your opinion of her, then yes I'd say it's bigoted.
Even so, if that situation happened to me, would it effect me? I'd like to say no, that I'm above something so petty, but I'm not so sure.
There's also the betrayal argument, that she should have said so at the beginning of the relationship, so it's okay to break up with her for that. I don't agree with that, it's not like she murdered someone. Nobody goes into a relationship with every personal detail upfront.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
@Feral
@Arch
@Shivahn
I think there is something genuinely puzzling going on here, and it's articulated pretty nicely in the OP (Organ you can tell me if you think what I'm getting at is similar to what you were).
Namely, the puzzle comes from the idea that once we sever the connections between, on the one hand, gender and biological sex, and, on the other hand, gender and social roles, then there's nothing which is left over for gender to even be. Once we've discussed both biological sex and the often interlinked social roles, we've exhausted everything there is to talk about: there's no third axis admitting of a new set of variables (or at least, if it is, it needs explanation and demonstration). But then what does it even mean when a trans person says they have the wrong gender?--how do we make sense of that claim?
I read some of this perplexity into what feminists like Germaine Greer say: she understands what a biological male means when he says that he wants to inhabit the social roles normally attached to women--the clothes, the mannerisms, the forms of address, and so on. He would like to act and be treated in those ways. But she does not understand what he wants when he says that he wants to be a woman, over and above acting and being treated in those ways, or, equivalently, when he says that the reason he wants to inhabit those social roles is because, actually, he already is a woman; and now, he simply needs to express what he always already was in a social manner. Greer's only way of making sense of this is to attribute to him a view wherein being a woman is to possess some sort of special feminine essence, and that this special feminine essence of his necessitates that he step into those traditionally feminine roles. But as a feminist, she categorically rejects the idea of a special feminine essence which necessitates traditionally feminine roles. Indeed, she thinks it's fundamentally sexist.
(Of course--and I think she goes wrong here--attributing to him that mistaken belief does not mean that he's a bad person, or even that his desire to transition is wrong. At most it means he's afflicted with some form of false consciousness. But people misunderstand themselves all the time).
So, in short, the puzzle is: how do we interpret transpeople's claims that their gender doesn't match their social roles in a manner that's consistent with feminist claims that gender alone has no bearing on what social roles are appropriate?
Of course, in some cases this interpretation is easier than others. For instance, it is easy to understand the body dysmorphia case Feral described above. We understand what such a person says when they say they feel like a woman in just the same way we understand what a phantom limb sufferer says when they say they feel like they have an arm (or, perhaps more apt, like an alien limb sufferer says when they say they feel like an arm is not really theirs).
It's also easy to understand "I want to be / already am a woman" as just a convenient paraphrase--a sort of shorthand for "I want to act and be treated in these manifold social ways that are currently normally applied to females." And, by and large, I think that's a desire worth respecting. It's not clear that the decompressed version of this paraphrase will be as politically potent, since it makes out the issue to be one of desire, rather than identity, and we tend to feel less obligated to fulfill other people's desires than we do to accomodate other people's identities. But it is at least unmysterious.
What's more mysterious is what it means to claim that one's gender really is one sort of way, and that now one need bend one's life to accomodate it. How does that jive with the basic feminist insight that no one never need bend their life in any particular direction because of their gender?
That's a big detail though, right? Personally, I think ending the relationship would be a reasonable reaction, similiar to how I think it would be reasonable to end a relationship with someone if you found out about any other major hidden secret. I also think there is something very dishonest about not telling your partner this (especially before sleeping with them).
What if you are dating someone who is preop and you are getting along as described above an even engaging in non intercourse sex acts? Is it bigoted to break up with them when you find out they still have a penis?
1. Can you really call a man who is with a preop transexual woman straight? I would say no.
That man is straight. Let's assume the woman dresses female, acts female, and otherwise fills the role of a female. A gay man likely would not be attracted to that at all. Genitals don't mean everything in a relationship. There's much more to it than what kind of sex they have. Saying otherwise is denying the identity of the trans woman, which ties into your third question.
2. Is there anything wrong or bigoted about saying you would not date someone if you found out they were transexual (let's assume no desire for kids anyway)?
Mortious answered this rather well with that scenario. Holding that thought as a general rule, though? I guess it seems bigoted, but everyone has preferences. It's a bit like saying "I wouldn't ever date an Asian girl." Someone might tell you that you need to not confine yourself to certain groups of people, but I don't think people would say it's bigoted. Dating is a rare case where you get every possible say in who you will allow for yourself.
3. Is it wrong to think of transsexuals as different from other members of their chosen sex? Does preop/postop matter?
It's wrong to "other" someone or deny their identity, yes. There's differences in life experiences and biology, but those shouldn't restrict someone from being the gender they feel they are. Think of the word trans like any other adjective, like "tall man" or "red-haired girl." It denotes a certain set of expectations, but does not make a trans person different in the sense of gender. Genitalia do not matter. Don't place so much importance on them.
4. How do people who are supportive of transexuality feel about those stories of men with families leaving them because they want to live as women? How about where the man makes the choice, and when the family is not accepting he leaves and becomes a woman? To me, it seems really selfish in either case.
It's very complicated. Often those women will start families, and try to live as men and start thinking they'd be able to suppress their feelings. This isn't the story all the time, but it doesn't really work that way. The feelings tend to grow stronger, and leaves the person feeling completely miserable. So, they do the only thing that will make them feel better. Is that really so selfish? Taking care of yourself so you don't live a life of complete sadness or seek alternate destructive paths? You have to understand they're only doing what they must. Sometimes, the families stay together even! Though, it's understandable if the wife wants to leave because she's not a lesbian. They can do what any other divorced couples do with custody. If they refuse to let the trans woman into their lives but she is willing to provide support and care, how is that selfish? That's their issue to deal with. When you get married and have kids you do not give up your right to be who you are.
It might be a big secret, but is it important? If she was a secret kkk member, and being a kkk member is a "bad thing" for you, then sure, break up with her. If she was secretly irish, that shouldn't be a problem. Why should the fact that it's was secret for a period of time matter, unless you have an issue with the nature of the secret.
As for pre-op, you're not sexually compatible/you don't find penises attractive? Being physically attracted to someone is an important part of a relationship, and little things (haha) can be a deal breaker. Physical or mental incompatibility I can see, but how does a previous gender (something she couldn't even control) effect that?
And I'm guessing that the pre-surgery/surgery/post-surgery process is quite long and difficult. Not staying together for something like that is fine.
I'm ignoring commitments here like engagements and marriage for now.
Edit: I quite like @Ethereal Illusion's answers to those questions. With Q/A 4, I'd also add it's probably comparable to other divorces. If you're not happy as a couple, is it more selfish to remain unhappily married (and whatever destructive habits slip in) or get divorced and try to move on? Even the best solution doesn't mean it's a good solution.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
The reason I chose that hypothetical, is because up until that point the relationship is good, and she's 100% indistinguishable from being born female. So if the only thing that changes the nature of that relationship is that she's transgendered, that's what, I feel, makes someone bigoted.
The reason I brought up that I don't find the secret important, is that it's necessary for the hypothetical. That's a separate issue from whether the transgender aspect is important.
Previous threads on this subject have devolved into tangents on the size of secrets, when it's revealed, the nature of the secret etc.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
When you mentioned biological sex, were you including brain sex? There is likely a biological component in the brain that can correspond to sex. You might find this part of a Stanford lecture interesting, discussing some possible evidence: Skip to 1:23:50 if it doesn't automatically.
Trans people want to be thought of as their identified gender. They want to know others see them that way. So, they take up roles that will express that idea. Culture assigns a gender value to a role, so it becomes adopted by those wanting to appear as that gender. I think that's the only thing that's really happening here, regardless of if the person is trans or not. There's no feminine essence requiring traditional roles, and a woman can perform whatever role she wants. Though, if doing that causes society to do something like refer to her with male pronouns, she might be dissuaded from doing it in the future.
As for your last question, it's still just a problem of interpreting gender in very simplistic terms. Many trans people just change their physical self and nothing else, which fixes the dysphoria issues without changing much, if anything, in the way they live. Alternatively, consider a trans woman who's always wanted to participate in female roles before transition, but did not because she feared the stigma she'd face while presenting as male. After transition, she's not bending her life because she now must act as a woman, but rather it's just something she's always wanted to do.
1. If genitals aren't important, why ever get the operation? It seems to me that manipulating another person's penis is not an activity straight men engage in. At the very least, it seems to imply a pretty fluid sexuality. Put another way, if a straight man engages in a sex act with a cross dressing homosexual man who he just met, without knowing, is that a "straight" encounter? What if a straight man seeks out transsexual women who are pre op, but is not attracted to or interested in men who regard themselves as men?
2. I agree that it is ok to have rules on who you will date which would make people uncomfortable if they applies to friends or hiring decisions.
3. There is a limit to respecting the identity we choose though, right? If I claimed to identify as black, I don't think anyone would respect that self identification. I know there are obvious differences, like it actually being possible to adopt the appearance of the other gender, but I don't really follow why it is bigoted to say "that is a transgender woman" instead of "that is a woman." I think it is a distinction with a difference, akin to how we regard biological women with natural breasts differently than those with implants.
4. I don't think we can agree here, because I do think it is irresponsible to choose personal happiness over obligations to family. That said, I am not big on divorce either, so the analogy to divorce only reinforces my view of the decision as somewhat selfish.
I don't think this is a tenable position - after all, the central thesis of the progressive and radically progressive positions on transgendered people's is that everyone has a right to their own gender identity and sexual preferences.
If someone's sexual and gender identity doesn't include a preference including transpeople then it's not, on it's face, bigotry. Now, you might argue that only particular gender identities and sexual preferences are valid, but that would be... Problematic.
That's really not what I'm arguing, or I'm not understanding your position.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and for all intents of purposes is now a duck, the fact that it once was a goose shouldn't matter.
I mean people can choose who they want to date etc, but if that one criteria is what changes your mind, then what's the reasoning behind that?
If I imagine myself in that situation, then all I'm getting is a faint feeling of uneasiness. Now would that make me stop dating the person? Probably, but then that probably makes me bigoted.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
What if they're miserable otherwise, wouldn't this be problematic in terms of obligation to family? Sometimes people can serve their family obligation (like their children) in a satisfactory regard, but not as part of the original family unit. It's possible that the familial relationships may indeed be better served by not existing as the initial unit. Isn't it also possible that family can mean different things to different people?
2:
If you actually understand the problem of 1, that should undermind your understanding of 2.
If anyone anywhere can claim to be X, and there are no essential predicates to be found with identification with X, then X is entirely hollow and meaningless.
If I identify as "male" and you identify as "male", but my "male" incorporates "X,Y,Z" and your "male" incorporates "P,Q,R" then that term, "male" is quite useless for conversation, or identification.
I agree with your 1. But I think that 1 is a reason for which 2 needs to be rejected.
Sometimes people are wrong. We are entirely capable of telling them why they are wrong, and providing reasons.
The problem is that persons take the labels to be meaningful, while at the same time their actions demonstrate the lack of meaning to those labels.
My guess is that most persons do not want to be X or Y. Rather, they want the societal repercussions that follow from being identified as X or Y.
And in that case, it might be helpful to talk about what they actually want rather than quibble over the labels.
The problem, I think, is that the labels are a confused shorthand way of talking about something else, and the fixation on labels detracts from actual progress.
On the picture you give, if I understand you right, gender is distinct both from biological sex and from social/performative roles--it's just that people often use the customary social and performative cues as a way of communicating to others what their gender is, as, for instance, when a woman wears a dress in part to let others know that she is a woman. But then the puzzle is: what is this other thing which is distinct from, but commonly signaled by, certain social roles? For instance, suppose that I was wondering what gender I was. I know what's between my legs and all, but biological sex is distinct from gender and hence does not settle the matter. And I know how my behaviors, and my desired behaviors, fit into an overall gendered social landscape: that, for instance, I like my comic books about superheroes, not about high school romance, and that this is something it is often a social cue for maleness. But social roles are also distinct from gender, and hence do not settle the matter. So I am flummoxed. What gender am I? How do I find out? And now I might start wondering not only how I could know the answer, but how there could even be one: it might begin to seem like there isn't anything out there to find out. Once I know both my biological sex and the social roles I inhabit I know everything there is to know, with nothing left over.
This sort of general argument--if it's not P, or Q, then what could it possibly be?--has an obvious limitation. Namely, someone could come in and say: well, it's R (or S, or...). And I'm not trying to exclude the possibility that there is some such R which we can sensibly interpret as gender and which makes all the desired results shake out. It's just that I'm curious what it is, and I think that there is some impetus, given the role that it plays in social and political arguments, on making it clear.
Dysphoria is, I think, the easiest case to understand. What I find more puzzling is the cases which do not include dysphoria--which, I gathered from that link Feral posted, are the majority. It's those that I'm trying to figure out. Along similar lines to the above, we can ask of the non-dysphoric: suppose I decide to start wearing floral dresses and painting my nails. What's the difference between my doing that as a transition to presenting as a woman and my doing that as a man who just happens to wear dresses and paint his nails? Before feminism, the second option was unavailable: you just couldn't be a man who happened to like and do those things, so by doing them, you must therefore have been trying to be a woman. But now times have changed, at least in certain quarters, and so now the question seems pressing.
Of course, I can think of differences that will typically be present between people who self-express as trans and people who just have non-standard sartorial choices, most of which revolve around the strength of the desire and its totality. But what I'm wondering about is which of those actually constitute a difference in gender, and hence, more directly, what gender is.