“Has anyone said that? ”
It has been mentioned, on this post and others (e.g. specifically saying that someone knows some parents whose son likes dolls and pink and is being told he is a girl. This is wrong, and obviously shouldn't happen) that people transition because they think they ‘can’t be x gender because they do y and so must be trans’
I do understand the critique of ‘gendering’ things, I don’t believe that anything should be ‘for a girl’ or ‘for a boy’ (clothes, toys, activities, jobs, school subjects) and also don’t think that we should ‘encourage girls into more ‘male’ areas, like STEM, just let people like what they like.
“Okay, so if it's not about traditional gender stereotypes - clothes, activities, behaviours - and it's not, as you say in your next paragraph, about biology, then what exactly does it mean to be a man or a woman? Can you define those two genders? (Identifying as both or neither still seems to require that there's some essential male- or female-ness to define oneself against, so I'm wondering how you'd do that if not by reference to biology or stereotype)”
That is hard, because I’ve kinda always ‘felt like a girl’ despite not having been brought up ‘especially girly’. I can’t know whether I would have felt the same (and been trans) had I been born a boy. For me, I kinda see it like my sexuality. I’m asexual (maybe aromantic too) and I therefore don’t experience sexual attraction, I just don’t have that built in to me, clearly many many people do, but I don’t and so such sexual relationships and to an extent romantic ones too just feel ‘not right’.
It isn’t really my place to say how all trans people feel (especially as I am not trans) but I do know that if I were to begin to dress as a boy, have people refer to me as a boy, go through gender reassignment surgery to become as close to physically male as possible. I’d still feel I was a girl. People who transition understand that they cannot ‘become men/women’ but they feel that their outside matches their inside.
“Vagina-owners are female/women.”
Not all women have vaginas, and not all people who have vaginas are women.
“Having a vagina is a key indicator of the biological state of being female. It just is. Vagina ownership and xx chromosome ownership normally go together. Vaginas and womanhood have a very very close correlation. That's science, not oppression.”
You’re right, vagina ownership does have a very close correlation to womanhood, but it’s not “you have a vagina therefore you are a woman”. Sexual organs are very varied, some to the point that a gender identity is selected at birth and the child undergoes surgery to make that gender ‘clearer’ but that doesn’t always match how the person feels as they grow up, this does suggest that there is some importance in the brain…although it may not be fully understood yet, I definitely don’t think we can say it’s enough to have xy or xx chromosomes.
As for the use of English, language does change, continuously, and other languages have different words for things, sometimes words English just doesn’t have. I do think that English is a bit lacking in this regard, but it’s the best we got at the moment. I guess that may change and who knows what will happen in the future.
“loops if you mustn't assume the gender of anyone without asking them, how do you go about saying for example
"90% of boys in the region attend school while only 30% of girls do"...
…”When boko haram raid a village, they typically murder the boys and abduct and forcibly "marry" the girls"
???"
“I'm quite serious. How should these things be talked about, without assuming anyone's gender? If you can answer me that in a way that makes sense then I will be a lot happier, and start to use it in conversations where people were previously grouped and treated according to their sex (dick/cunt).”
This kind of goes with the ‘language’ thing above. You could though, just use ‘children/people raised/identifying as…’ before those statements and they would still make sense, and you wouldn’t be making assumptions about their genders, just statements about their presentation/treatment?
“Or by using "gender neutral" language.
So far I have seen attempts that I am not at all comfortable with, for example referring to girls as "menstruators" which feels extremely reductive and also is biologically a bit iffy anyway.”
I agree some of those are weird, and a bit eh… but a lot of the time we use gender neutral language anyway, so using ‘honoured guests’ or ‘gentlefolk’ instead of ‘ladies and gentlemen’ or the group name e.g. class, year Xs, brownies, cubs, swimmers. Individually, you can just ask their preferred pronouns?
“I am really serious. How are we to talk about these things, which happen because of SEX, in our post sex world?”
I guess, if you know that all the people in a room identify as women (it’s a group for women identifying people only for example) then ladies/women is fine, but there are always other options. You can say that ‘women identifying people face this more than those identifying as men”
“One tiny thing I feel the need to point out. A few people have referred to hormones that postpone puberty as a 'safe' option, one which 'leaves no lasting effects'. Fact is, we don't know how safe they are yet, there has not been any sort of study and they are being prescribed off label.”
Didn’t know this, I do think way more research needs to be done then, and less radical options offered. Counselling and letting children wear alternative school uniform, go by a different name and pronouns etc…