What If I'm Wrong?
Everyone need to explore that question on occasion. In my case, I've spent the last 10 years disagreeing with the transgender "party line" that has developed around sex versus gender -- that gender (how one identifies) matters, whereas sex, if it even exists (instead of just being binary reductionistic rhetoric), is unimportant and nobody's business. "Trans women are women", goes the party line; "trans men are men; and what someone has inside their underpants isn't any concern of yours".
I have dissented with that, saying that, first off, I identify as a male girl, or male femme, and I'd feel just as erased if people started treating me as indistinguishable from cisgender women as I do when people treat me as the same as cisgender men. My lifetime experiences and the specifics of my situation that make me who I am involve not just my sex and not just my gender but the unorthodox atypical combo of the two.
I have said that the mainstream transgender attitude -- although it superficially says that your physical sexual morphology does not matter and shouldn't be the focus of anyone's attention -- it's actually expressing the fear that if someone happens to be woman or femme but their physiology is of the sort that a crowd of random strangers on a nude beach would call "male", then their gender is less valid than if they had the physical configuration that those same strangers would describe as "female". So we should be polite and not pay any attention to the physical structure.
I've said that attitude is fearful and actually sexually conservative, and that what I'm doing is more progressive and radical. I'm demanding acceptance as a femme and being in-your-face about being male of body, not seeking to present as female.
So... about the possibility of being wrong...
What if the route to true sexual equality, and attaining a world where the physical parts you were born with do not matter as far as determining who you get to be, lies with the species as a whole learning to ignore sexual physiology?
What if the route I'm proposing doesn't work -- either because people won't let go of gendered expectations if they take notice of a person's physiological construction or because with an observable difference they'll make generalizations, and even if they aren't the same generalizations we'll be reinventing gender all over again?
Whenever I think about a world where people don't know or don't notice a person's sexual configuration, and are forced to set aside their gendered expectations and just deal with the person as a generic person, I am reminded of the Ms. Magazine story from the 1970s, X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. I regarded it as an adorably cute what-if sort of tale to get folks thinking about sexist expectations and all that, but I have also said that in real life it would mean putting everyone inside burquas and chadors and making the body something that one should never see, and that didn't seem like a healthy situation.
But the transgender activists I'm referring to aren't saying "the body is not to be seen" but rather "the body is not to be acknowledged". That's an important difference. They're saying learn how a person identifies and treat them accordingly and tune out any awareness you might have about the person's physiology.
Is that possible?
I think it's definitely possible at the individual level, possible that this one person or that one person could do so. We learn what is and what is not significant. We live in a culture where it isn't of very huge significance whether one is redheaded or blonde or brown-haired. I can easily believe that someone who doesn't have any better visual memory than I do might be unable to recall whether a person they saw had this hair color or that.
There's a mental process of categorization, in which we encounter a stranger and make some snap judgments so as to have something to go on as far as interpreting them. This describes the worst of stereotyping but it is also, less egregiously, a reliance upon our human skill of pattern recognition. It isn't all bad. Even recognizing a living organism as another human depends on this process. Interacting with someone as an undifferentiated human isn't terribly practical, not when we can narrow it down, not when we're prepared to reevaluate our snap categorization if it doesn't seem to apply after all. Age is important to some extent, as is culture and the possibility of a different language being spoken and a host of other such things. Could we learn to suspend expectations based on sex and enter into each such interaction fresh, with no generalizations?
Perhaps that's not so different from what I'm asking. The trans activists are saying people should learn to not assign anything on the basis of so-called sex, which may not be as apparent and as perceived anyhow. I am saying people should learn of the possibility of gender identities other than the most common for a given sex -- that if they encounter a male person, they may expect masculine, they may expect a man, but should be prepared to re-evaluate if subsequent experience indicates that that may not be the case, and they should know of the other, less common possibilities.
Maybe I'm just splitting hairs unnecessarily with this disagreement. Undeniably, transgender social rhetoric has changed the world, and I benefit. I live in suburbia -- in a northern and socially progressive state to be sure, but in an area that has its share of Republican voters and Catholic (in particular) socially conservative citizens. Yet I go out in public in a skirt and no one says anything.
Is the world substantially safer for a kid such as I was as a kid growing up today? Do I need to establish the specific identity that I conjured up for myself in 1980?
I'm still inclined to think that I do. I don't think that the me that I was at 13, 15, 16, 19, would ever have identified as transgender. Perhaps as nonbinary but that's not sufficiently out there, any more than genderqueer is. And the mainstream transgender approach just strikes me as...fragile. Incapable of withstanding the contempt of common-sense evaluation. I think my approach is considerably less so.
But it's a useful exercise to consider that maybe I'm making too much of a minor distinction in how to express an idea. I'll give it more thought.
-------
Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/78691.html#comments
I have dissented with that, saying that, first off, I identify as a male girl, or male femme, and I'd feel just as erased if people started treating me as indistinguishable from cisgender women as I do when people treat me as the same as cisgender men. My lifetime experiences and the specifics of my situation that make me who I am involve not just my sex and not just my gender but the unorthodox atypical combo of the two.
I have said that the mainstream transgender attitude -- although it superficially says that your physical sexual morphology does not matter and shouldn't be the focus of anyone's attention -- it's actually expressing the fear that if someone happens to be woman or femme but their physiology is of the sort that a crowd of random strangers on a nude beach would call "male", then their gender is less valid than if they had the physical configuration that those same strangers would describe as "female". So we should be polite and not pay any attention to the physical structure.
I've said that attitude is fearful and actually sexually conservative, and that what I'm doing is more progressive and radical. I'm demanding acceptance as a femme and being in-your-face about being male of body, not seeking to present as female.
So... about the possibility of being wrong...
What if the route to true sexual equality, and attaining a world where the physical parts you were born with do not matter as far as determining who you get to be, lies with the species as a whole learning to ignore sexual physiology?
What if the route I'm proposing doesn't work -- either because people won't let go of gendered expectations if they take notice of a person's physiological construction or because with an observable difference they'll make generalizations, and even if they aren't the same generalizations we'll be reinventing gender all over again?
Whenever I think about a world where people don't know or don't notice a person's sexual configuration, and are forced to set aside their gendered expectations and just deal with the person as a generic person, I am reminded of the Ms. Magazine story from the 1970s, X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. I regarded it as an adorably cute what-if sort of tale to get folks thinking about sexist expectations and all that, but I have also said that in real life it would mean putting everyone inside burquas and chadors and making the body something that one should never see, and that didn't seem like a healthy situation.
But the transgender activists I'm referring to aren't saying "the body is not to be seen" but rather "the body is not to be acknowledged". That's an important difference. They're saying learn how a person identifies and treat them accordingly and tune out any awareness you might have about the person's physiology.
Is that possible?
I think it's definitely possible at the individual level, possible that this one person or that one person could do so. We learn what is and what is not significant. We live in a culture where it isn't of very huge significance whether one is redheaded or blonde or brown-haired. I can easily believe that someone who doesn't have any better visual memory than I do might be unable to recall whether a person they saw had this hair color or that.
There's a mental process of categorization, in which we encounter a stranger and make some snap judgments so as to have something to go on as far as interpreting them. This describes the worst of stereotyping but it is also, less egregiously, a reliance upon our human skill of pattern recognition. It isn't all bad. Even recognizing a living organism as another human depends on this process. Interacting with someone as an undifferentiated human isn't terribly practical, not when we can narrow it down, not when we're prepared to reevaluate our snap categorization if it doesn't seem to apply after all. Age is important to some extent, as is culture and the possibility of a different language being spoken and a host of other such things. Could we learn to suspend expectations based on sex and enter into each such interaction fresh, with no generalizations?
Perhaps that's not so different from what I'm asking. The trans activists are saying people should learn to not assign anything on the basis of so-called sex, which may not be as apparent and as perceived anyhow. I am saying people should learn of the possibility of gender identities other than the most common for a given sex -- that if they encounter a male person, they may expect masculine, they may expect a man, but should be prepared to re-evaluate if subsequent experience indicates that that may not be the case, and they should know of the other, less common possibilities.
Maybe I'm just splitting hairs unnecessarily with this disagreement. Undeniably, transgender social rhetoric has changed the world, and I benefit. I live in suburbia -- in a northern and socially progressive state to be sure, but in an area that has its share of Republican voters and Catholic (in particular) socially conservative citizens. Yet I go out in public in a skirt and no one says anything.
Is the world substantially safer for a kid such as I was as a kid growing up today? Do I need to establish the specific identity that I conjured up for myself in 1980?
I'm still inclined to think that I do. I don't think that the me that I was at 13, 15, 16, 19, would ever have identified as transgender. Perhaps as nonbinary but that's not sufficiently out there, any more than genderqueer is. And the mainstream transgender approach just strikes me as...fragile. Incapable of withstanding the contempt of common-sense evaluation. I think my approach is considerably less so.
But it's a useful exercise to consider that maybe I'm making too much of a minor distinction in how to express an idea. I'll give it more thought.
-------
Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/78691.html#comments