Consquences of self-identification

[MrsKCastle]

Sorry if this has already been done. I've been doing a lot of thinking about current trans thinking in the media.

As far as I understand it, this is the predominant view:
Anyone can be man or woman, male, female or neither. It doesn't depend on your genes, appearance or potential ability to hear young. What's important is how you identify. We should always treat people as they identify, with regard to how we speak about and treat them, and what spaces/roles we allow them to access.

What I'm interested in, is how this self-identification will or could change society. I'd love to hear your thoughts as I think it will help me to get things straight in my head.

So far I'm thinking:
No more single-sex schools
No more single-sex hospital wards
No more single-sex clubs, whether that's Brownies or exclusive golf clubs
Anyone can apply for any scholarship or award, regardless of sex

What else?

Just finished the gender/science article, Fela. Really good, thanks! All the points about the ways gender conditioning influences the "self" are well worth further investigation.

I'm not particularly sympathetic with anyone's belief that they are actually the opposite sex than the one they are born into, though I do sympathise with certain people more than others due to their personal circumstances and how supportive they are of women's rights to exist as a separate class of people. I find it a massive appropriation when they try to claim that they are women and that all that entails is something they know about as much as we do. Everyday Feminism has conniptions if you eat mindlessly consume other cuisines as that apparently is a form of cultural appropriation. Yet somehow this appropriation is OK, and actually we should be really really grateful for it.

They cannot know they are a woman, they have no first hand frame of reference for what being a woman would feel like, or indeed whether there is any coherent shared feeling of being a woman which isn't about the biological realities of our lives and our socialisation as girls and women, something which they haven't received in the same way and rarely affects them in the same way.

Agree we rubbed along much more easily in the past.

Transsexualism really belongs back in the sixties. We should have reached the stage now where anything goes in terms of socially acceptable male and female presentation. After bowie, glam rock, Duran, Adam ant, spandau, Annie Lennox, all those bouffant man, even Dollar, you'd think we'd come a bit further than this pitiful scenario we're dealing with today.

Venus I agree with everything you said

I'm still here, just overseas right now and on dodgy wifi.

Plenty to read so I'll be posting shortly :)

@sillyolme - there is no correlation between sexual preference and gender identity. I'm pansexual, which means I'm attracted to all genders. Quite a lot of trans people I know are on the bisexual spectrum (I run a bisexual support group), and your statements erase bisexual people. Where do they fit in your andro/gynophile world?!?

The GRC is a good differentiator, however they are complex and unwieldy to obtain and require two years of 'real life experience' which isn't always appropriate. Medical sign off gets a trans person a driving license in their new gender. This to my mind is an appropriate differentiator between a trans person wishing to live in a different gender and a person just 'feeling a bit feminine' that day.

There must be a balance between protecting women and giving them safe spaces and allowing trans women access to those spaces. I don't feel unilateral access to anyone identifying as trans on the day is appropriate either, especially if I'm in that space as well (trans people are also vulnerable don't forget).

With regards to us 'not knowing as much about being a woman' - everyone has their own lived experience. I don't claim to know everything about being a woman but I have my experiences of how I feel. How is my experience any less valid? Who is the authority on femininty? I've experienced plenty of things that other people haven't and the same is equally true. How many of you have actually met and talked properly to a trans person rather than dismissed them as some kind of freak?

Hormones and surgeries - some people can't get everything they want for medical or financial reasons - is excluding them fair? Passing privilege is a pipe dream for some people and there are some non-trans women who have been misgendered due to having masculine features (or simply being tall!). So you can't police gender like that.

Simply reducing being female down to the possession of a vagina reduces women to a single body part and in some ways that bows to patriarchy.

I feel the bathroom debate is massively overplayed and is blatant fear mongering. Just look at Hb2 in North Carolina - it's hate legislation trying to masquerade as 'concern' for women. It's being promoted by right wing Christians (ironically primarily men) rather than radical feminists and is trying to dilute LGBT rights in preference for 'religious freedom'. There aren't any cases of trans people attacking women in bathrooms, and this is just trying to reinforce the massively incorrect perception that trans women are just male perverts wearing women's clothes!

I think trans access to changing spaces is much more of an issue that needs discussion.

And lastly gender isn't just about the clothes you wear.

There must be a balance between protecting women and giving them safe spaces and allowing trans women access to those spaces.

There's nothing self-evident about this. There WAS a sort of balance - but it was in the gift of the kindness of women, and was abused. Transwomen need to take that fight to the transactivists. Until they do, I won't feel they're at all serious about women, only themselves. And this comment - 'I feel the bathroom debate is massively overplayed and is blatant fear mongering' proves me right.

Simply reducing being female down to the possession of a vagina reduces women to a single body part and in some ways that bows to patriarchy.

Drivel. My biology is the marker: it's the necessary and sufficient condition of femaleness. I am treated a certain way because of it; but my personality is not by it. Its limitations are not inherent, but imposed.

I don't think you're a freak. You are creating a straw man argument. Not being a women doesn't make you a freak. Nobody here has said or suggested you are a freak. I do hope you aren't accusing anyone here of calling you a freak. You should withdraw that.

It doesn't bow to patriarchy any more than suggesting that anyone with a penis is a man bows to patriarchy. What tosh. It does rather speak to the fixation that (some) people who identify as trans have for prioritizing body parts, though.
Perhaps we should stick to chromosomal identification if patriarchal reduction of bodies is problematic?

But we agree on one thing - being a woman is fuck all about the clothes you wear. Or indeed anything else you need to perform in order to get a GRC. That is what is so damaging to women. Men are being forced into a limiting definition in order to earn the right to call themselves woman, which in turn is cementing damaging and limiting gendered stereotypes and making it harder for women who refuse to conform to stupid gendered norms. Just when we were trying to break out of them.

Our world (and what is deemed appropriate for our sex) is becoming smaller and more confined by you forcing your way into it and demanding to identify as same. The cage I have been living in since birth is getting more rigid. Because you are defining what my sex entails.

The whole situation is ludicrous.

Wear what you what. Call yourself Sharon. I will use whatever pronouns you like. (And I do. But fuck me, it's the thin end of the wedge)

But start fighting these stupid gender rules, these stupid 'real life tests', this garbage that makes you conform to someone else's idea of what constitutes woman.

Gender is the cage that women have been fighting to free themselves from for centuries. And you are reinforcing the damned locks.

It's not about you. It's about women.

I have friends who identify as trans. We get along fine. I have no issues with any individuals. all this 'oh you clearly don't know anyone who identified as trans' is a steaming pile of horseshit. It's nonsense.

I am not anti-trans. I am pro-women.

All you transgender warriors are fighting the wrong fucking fight. You are making it worse. Start fighting AGAINST gender, not reinforcing the bullshit. For fuck's sake. Have the courage to smash the stupid gender rules, not fight for the right to conform to a different set of stupid gender rules.

It's ridiculous.

Don't think that by mentioning the patriarchy it will make the woman of the year posing in a fucking corset with a penis seem like a good idea. It really won't.

Gosh this this this.

for ponti

there are some non-trans women who have been misgendered due to having masculine features (or simply being tall!)

You're so close to getting what we're on about, transmum, and yet so far away, too. I have been "misgendered" due to my height many, many times over the years. But it doesn't matter. I don't care. It changes nothing about my day, I just laugh and carry on. I don't have a hissy fit and demand that the bigot that called me Sir DIAF. Because I know I'm a woman, and my identity as a woman is built not just on having a vagina, but by my XX chromosomes, the shape of my pelvis, my breasts, my socialisation as a girl and a woman, the catcalls I've had in the street since I was twelve years old, the joy of my female friendships, the pain of being sexually assaulted, and all of the accumulated forty-plus years of being a female. Do you see? I won't deny you your experience, it's yours, but your experience is in the context of being a gender non conforming male. Don't conflate them. Don't assume that your feeling "not male" catapults you immediately into "female".

And YY to pontification.

I'm a bit disappointed with the way that things went with sillyolme, too. I had hoped that there was going to be a mature, interesting discussion, as it's so unusual these days to get beyond the dead end of "transwomen are women, end of discussion SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP DIAF BIGOT".

But then it went down that cul de sac again with "a woman is whoever is accepted as a woman", which is no more sophisticated than "a woman is whoever identifies as a woman" because all that does is shift the locus of identification from internal to external, and in the process erases biology AGAIN in favour of feelings. Nope. And you can't make all of a dozen posts on your first visit to a website over the course of one evening, including spamming dozens of links instead of actually interacting, and then accuse the entire website of trolling you! That's not how online debate works.

I thought there was some interesting stuff on your blog, silly, and you've thought about it a lot, but I don't think there's anything like the evidence to support your biological theories that you believe there is, given what we know about the application of gender stereotyping of babes in arms, and how differently we treat boys and girls from the second they are born (and before, to be honest). I can see why you believe what you believe, but I think the jury is still out on that, and likely to remain out.

Yes to what pontification and freshwater say.

We have had two transwomen come on this thread who identify as women but won't tell us what that actually means in any concrete way.

Really wanting to be a woman and or passing does not make one female. And anyone who thinks it does has anti-women values.

I wish we could go back to the old days of transsexuals, no transing of children and very little transing of women (which on the whole is lesbian conversion therapy). All this post-modern queer theory bullshit is dangerous and regressive. I believe it also encourages and feeds narcissism.

Its frustrating ( on both sides, I'm sure ) that its hard to have a constructive debate with those trans posters with whom we could make common cause in many areas. But we are almost always going to reach an impasse at the central question 'what is a woman'. If someone thinks 'Who is the authority on femininity?' is a relevant question then they're barking up the wrong tree. 'femininity' is irrelevant to whether or not you're a woman.

It's a great article garlic. It tickled new that it was originally linked just as a graph by someone as "proof" that less girls in STEM is down to choice and shouldn't bother us. The idiot hadn't actually read it

transmum if my toddler asks what a giraffe is and I say it's an animal with a really long neck, is that me reducing a giraffe to its neck?

there are some non-trans women who have been misgendered due to having masculine features (or simply being tall!)

Agree with freshwater here. I am only 5 foot 8 but i have been misgendered a number of time

Usually by someone who glances and sees taller than an average woman and short hair

I do double check the mirror in case i left my tits at home...but its not usually that

Sounds like this is heading the right way and I do agree with what pontification says.

I'm not trying to define what being a woman is - far from it. I'm saying I identify with a lot of the traits I see from my side. I'm not trying to reinforce a gender binary or stereotypes. I don't identify as some who wants to wear dresses, frills, pink or any of that rubbish. One of our standing jokes in my trans group is that trans women are the ones in skinny jeans, not dresses.

The GRC process tried to reinforce that gender binary (and hence patriarchy). Most of what trans people want is along similar lines. It used to be the case that rocking up to your gender clinic appointment in a skirt was mandatory - otherwise you weren't being 'feminine' enough!

In fact deciding where you fit on the gender spectrum is one of the challenges trans people face once they figure out they don't fit in their assigned gender. It's incredibly hard to explain in terms that someone who isn't trans can understand (this is why I ask if you've met a trans person, it's not meant as an accusation).

For me when I identified as male I was depressed, withdrawn and a shadow of the person I am today. Coming out as trans has lead me to be a vibrant person, able to do things I never imagined doing as a boy and discovering a whole new part of myself that I had been hiding pretending to be something I wasn't.

I feel far more like myself when presenting and being accepted as female.

It's incredibly hard to quantify that.

Being misgendered as a trans person is different to being misgendered as a non-trans person. Most non-trans people are pretty comfortable in their gender identity. Being misgendered then is viewed often as an amusing mistake (I'm obviously generalising here - there are probably non-trans people who are affected by it). As a trans person when you are still possibly questioning your own identity sometimes and seeking little nuggets of external validation to help you. Being misgendered is a micro aggression. A tiny element of bullying (intentional or otherwise) and it can be the death of a thousand cuts.

Accidental misgendering isn't the end of the world - a polite sorry and moving on is fine. It's the deliberate (and often emphasised) misgendering that really hurts.

It's for this reason I really appreciate people who are willing to use my preferred pronouns and name, and don't spend the first hour of meeting me asking me what my real name is (ironically the only person that asked that was male).

What "woman" traits do you identify with transmum?

Also I'm not trying to reduce women to their genitalia - I'm just quoting what other feminists have said before (that one was Germaine Greer I think - saying you can't be a woman if you didn't have one (she may have used a few extra adjectives))

Being misgendered as a trans person is different to being misgendered as a non-trans person. Most non-trans people are pretty comfortable in their gender identity. Being misgendered then is viewed often as an amusing mistake (I'm obviously generalising here - there are probably non-trans people who are affected by it). As a trans person when you are still possibly questioning your own identity sometimes and seeking little nuggets of external validation to help you. Being misgendered is a micro aggression. A tiny element of bullying (intentional or otherwise) and it can be the death of a thousand cuts.

This goes the other way as well, i think the problem is that you think misgendering is worse one way than the other

For whats its worth i agree with you, accidental misgendering is not the same as someone doing it on purpose to be mean

But it doesnt just happen to transgender people

Sorry

Should really say that its great that you are coming on to explain your position on things

It didn't sound like a quote when you said Simply reducing being female down to the possession of a vagina reduces women to a single body part and in some ways that bows to patriarchy.

Female is a biological descriptor in securely dimorphic species. Genitals is one of the ways (even the main way) you quickly tell male and female animals apart.
Humans are animals. Why is it so offensive for the same rules to apply? There is no value judgment in vulva = female, penis = male. It's just a statement of biological fact.

I can understand your desire to live and present as female and that's OK with me. But insisting that transwomen ARE female is just incorrect.