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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

A question for Transmen and Transwomen

999 replies

SpiritOfEnquiry · 09/07/2020 14:01

I have name changed for this.

I'm not sure whether this is the best board (or place on the internet) to post this but I gather it's watched by many people so I'm hoping to get an answer from people with first-hand experience one way or another. This is not intended to be in any way goady, there just seem to be so many different understandings of what makes someone 'trans' and I think it's important to know what we're talking about.

I'm generally and genuinely curious about how transmen and women view their own desire to present or be viewed as the opposite sex to which they were born.

Leaving aside anyone for whom presenting as the opposite sex is a sexual thing (I gather there are complicated rules on speaking about this on this board and don't wish to be offensive), my current (no doubt very basic) understanding is that it must fall into one or both of two categories:

  1. Dysmorphia in the sense of being uncomfortable or horrified by your physical body, or parts of it, as are people who feel a deep revulsion towards a healthy limb.
  1. A feeling that you are a man or a woman, regardless of your body, and wish to be treated as such.

The first category I can get my head around to an extent. I don't pretend to know the reasons or best response but I can understand what is being said.

The second causes me more problems and I am curious to know how transmen and transwomen think of it to themselves. What, to you, counts as 'living as' a woman or man? What, in your view, is the difference between being treated as a man and treated as a woman? If you lived in a society where the expectations ascribed to each sex we're different, or you'd received different messages about that growing up do you think you'd feel differently?

Particularly:

A) Do you believe that there are in fact (perhaps even in science) internal feelings/traits etc. common to all women or all men regardless of the society they live in that you, as someone biologically of the opposite sex unusually share, making you therefore really a man/woman on the inside? Or perhaps
B) Do you feel that 'feeling like' a man or woman is indeed based on sexist stereotyping of the society in which you live but, while that stereotyping is alive and well, it's more comfortable for you to describe yourself as being the opposite sex than to try to present as the biological sex you are but live outside of the stereotypes?

Doubtless I'm stepping on landmines left and right, here, but I truly can't find my own way through the difference between "living as a woman" and sexist stereotypes, and rather than immediately conclude that there isn't one, I'd be very interested to hear others' thoughts.

Thank you in advance.

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FireUnderTheHand · 13/07/2020 20:26

On your thought experiment - I have no inner sense of being feminine (gender) but I every day experience the outer material reality of being a female human (woman).

Waking up in a man's body would be just that - I won't lie I would likely play with the new equipment to experience it, I would definitely pee standing up, but I am a shortish person at 5'4.75" (at least where I live) and very short for a typical male. If I woke up and that male body was also tall I would go out an experience the world as a taller person who happens to be male with far fewer threats to my personal safety - so maybe I would do my running at night (my preference as it is sooooooooo hot during the day here) or in secluded places (also my preference - unlike now where I have to avoid anywhere that is dark or secluded as female women runners tend to disappear here when not in plain sight).

I work in the financial sector so being in a man's body would seriously help in my career realm (right now I am seen as an 'ice queen', 'bitch', 'aggressive' when being 100% polite yet firm while the men get to puke their toxic masculinity all over everything and take credit for my ideas). Shit maybe that is how I could have received the $25k bonus for MY WORK that a man received because he parroted my idea and then took credit for my work even though it is strikingly obvious that it was my idea and my work hence the author and implementer of the program. Also, it would be great to not have men sexually harass me in an attempt to shut me down, to attempt to make me submissive because I am not what they see as a 'proper woman'.

Beyond that I think I would just be me - I usually cut the grass at my house (FYI many people enjoy the instant gratification of completing that task) and grow/tend the edible plants... I also do the cooking and handle the finances. I play video games, three weeks ago I stripped our dining room table and chairs and refinished them - 'I don't always do things considered "masculine" but when I do I am still a woman'. These are things that people do - not specifically women or men.

So, honestly, waking up in a man's body... well it would just be my body with some advantages and disadvantages just like now but different. Hope that helps.

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 20:28

@FireUnderTheHand

really odd questions wow

  1. i imagine most women aren't embarassed of their bodies because they want to be men? really not the same

  2. not sure you can really call that dysphoria, sounds more like dysmorphia/normal puberty. Them being ridiculed is obviously grim but not my experience. don't care about sensation and yes I know the risks.

  3. yeah I know that, I've read a lot of people's experiences and I don't think it would bother me really - would be better anyway. that's pretty rare but I'd cope.

@midgebabe

perhaps but that's not how I took it really - if I was secure as a woman I would have just thought it was a weird comment, instead of 'hmm I really like being called a man'. It's not like things like that happen often either, that's the only example I can think of.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

maybe not but it is the effect it has. Surely it would be more productive to write to journalists/medical boards etc. rather than inadvertently hurting trans people. I'm sure you're right in some cases but for every trans person who isn't empathetic there will be many more who are.

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 20:29

@Ereshkigalangcleg

I mean, I am not every trans person ever, I am just one man and not responsible for the 'trans lobby'...

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 20:30

@FireUnderTheHand

cutting the grass is just great isn't it! but again yeah that it interesting

Ereshkigalangcleg · 13/07/2020 20:31

maybe not but it is the effect it has. Surely it would be more productive to write to journalists/medical boards etc. rather than inadvertently hurting trans people

I'm not setting out to hurt trans people, inadvertently or otherwise, I am setting out to defend the category of woman/female. I, as a member of the oppressed female sex class, have just as much right to my feelings, rights, language and priorities as trans people have to theirs.

And no, I rarely see empathy from transactivists.

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 20:34

@Ereshkigalangcleg

Yes of course you have the same rights to everything but saying 'women and trans men can get cervical cancer' is not erasing anyone.

How are you defining 'transactivist'? Is that just any trans person?

FloralBunting · 13/07/2020 20:35

I get called mate all the time (tall for a woman, hair cut usually by a barber in a culturally 'male style', collared shirts, boots, etc.) I get a little kick from it sometimes, mostly it makes me smile. The kick comes from the idea that I might pass as a split second for a bloke. There's probably a lot to unpack there for me, actually. I hugely identified with the men in film romances, for example, and when I was a very young teen, before developing female secondary sexual characteristics, loved being mistaken for a boy (very often because it meant I felt more comfortable about my growing awareness of attraction to other females).

You have indeed stressed a lot that you believe your sense of male gender identity is not based in stereotypes and you've mentioned your dysphoria. I'm suggesting that you are influenced by the system of gender more than you consciously acknowledge - we all are. You've spoken about a sense of bodily discomfort and detachment that many of us can recognize from our own experiences.

Most of us here will be able to examine our own lives and analyse where the gender system has influenced us without even being fully aware of it. It happens from the womb onward - people make gendered assumptions based on a baby's kicks, for goodness sake.

I don't know why you think you are a man. You seem an intelligent and thoughtful person, so no, I don't think you think you are a man because you like mowing the lawn. I think the fact you like mowing the lawn is completely irrelevant to an innate gender identity or sex and is simply your personality - but I am suggesting to you that you mentioned it as an example of something you associated, however loosely, with the gender 'man', so therefore you have definitely internalized culturally bound ideas about gender that have nothing to do with innateness at all.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 13/07/2020 20:36

Black women who have experienced female genital mutilation, being cut as young girls, are being told not to call it that by transactivists and trans allies, because it's "transphobic". To be critical of your movement for a minute, things like that really don't do it any favours whatsoever.

Women are never going to let our female experiences be detached from the reality of our female bodies and we need the language to frame it as sex based oppression, which it is.

midgebabe · 13/07/2020 20:36

I know it's not how you took it consciously , and indeed it may have felt a bit of a relief , a positive thing but it's highly likely that similar sentiment has been expressed over the years to you because that's how stereotyping works. Subtle. Insidious.

I don't believe it's possible to untangle, I do think you are correct that there should be much more mental health support on this whole area. I think it's great you are actually talking to us oldies about it, whatever your final conclusion you will have explored.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 13/07/2020 20:40

Yes of course you have the same rights to everything but saying 'women and trans men can get cervical cancer' is not erasing anyone.

"Only females get cervical cancer" means exactly that. It wasn't "only women get cervical cancer".

How are you defining 'transactivist'? Is that just any trans person?

Any trans person who I perceive is campaigning for their perceived rights. Just like I am a feminist activist for defending women's established rights.

wellbehavedwomen · 13/07/2020 20:41

Alex I'm really tired so this may be incoherent and rambly, but I am going to try to explain this to you as it feels from this side - my side.

However I do think some GC things can be a bit reductive - the cervical cancer # in my opinion was just a bit mean.

See, here's the thing: some women are, and speak, Gujerati. It's very important, clearly, that they can access excellent medical care, and we need leaflets, translation services, and medics who understand the language and the cultural needs to see that that happens.

What we don't do is insist that all needs, for all women, should be framed so that they suit first and foremost the needs of Gujerati women. Nor are they aiming all medical materials around eg family planning to meet the cultural and social needs of observant Catholic, or Orthodox Jewish, or Muslim women above all else. When arranging breast screening advice, nobody stops and wonders if it's sensitive to phrase all literature for women who have already lost one or both breasts to cancer. (Bluntly, they're expected to woman up and get on with it, in that last case.) It's aimed at the wide average. It's aimed at the majority. We would hopefully have smaller leaflet runs, and training, to meet the needs of smaller minority subsets within that larger group, so their needs can be sensitively and respectfully met, too. You don't create a leaflet, though, for millions and millions of people, and a site directed at their needs, and frame the whole thing in a way that suits one specific minority. Especially if that makes millions of women feel dehumanised.

The only minority with the power to force all other areas affecting women's lives into pretzels, to serve that tiny minority, are led by people born with penises. I'm sorry, but this is part of a far wider assault on the language commonly and ordinarily used by women for generations, in order to define our lives and our experiences; the aim is to alter the definition and understanding of the very word 'woman' so it no longer refers to a sex class at all. At its core, what it is about is the very word 'woman' itself, as meaning a female person. It's an assault on the connection between sex and category, in order that people born male may claim it. And that is not in the interests of women born, if you consider oppression based on sex, and males to be the oppressors - which is very, very extensively evidenced. It erases women as a sex class. That's explicitly the end point aim, actually. To replace sex with gender identity. And that is a threat to women's capacity to defend our rights, if you believe oppression is based on sex. You've talked about men treating you poorly, and that sexism impacted you as soon as you left a single sex environment. Your gender identity hasn't determined your oppression, then, has it? Biology has.

You know how claiming to be colour blind is racist, because if you can't identify race as a factor, you can't name the racism either? Sexism and sex is the same. It matters, and therefore saying only female people - not even women; biologically female people - have cervixes should not be seen as hate speech. I find the erasure of women as a sex class more than upsetting, quite honestly. I find it alarming. Again, I totally respect the need to provide alternative literature and sensitive care to you. That shouldn't mean the care to all the rest of us, and our ability to define ourselves at all by our biology, is recast as hateful. It's essential to our defending ourselves from patriarchy. Because we can't defend what we can't define: the definition of woman matters. Asserting that definition matters.

I would completely support sensitive, thoughtful leaflets for trans men who need cervical smears, mammograms, and contraception, and I would also welcome training for practice staff on how to send reminders that respected the gender identity. Pain should never be caused wholly avoidably. But what about women's pain, in being dehumanised to the point that we are no longer allowed to define ourselves as a sex class - just a selection of body parts - especially when we believe naming that class is essential if we are to be able to assert our interests, as a group, and name our oppression?

Nobody, I hope, wanted to be mean to trans men with that one. It was a push back against the colonisation if women, as a definable group of people. A small minority of people born male seek to define what a woman is. To allow that would be, in my view, the ultimate in patriarchal oppression, quite honestly. It isn't okay for people who have lived from birth with male privilege to start demanding that women stop using perfectly ordinary, perfectly essential everyday language to determine who we are, solely so they can co-opt it. Woman is the word always used for us. It isn't okay to render the very word itself, in relation to our biology, and our health, and our liberation struggle, problematic, and only to be used in contexts male people have pre-approved.

It really, really is not about being hurtful to trans men.

Anyway, again, sorry this is so endlessly long and rambly. It's been a horrendously long day. I hope the general gist makes sense.

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 20:43

@FloralBunting

yeah that is interesting/unpackable (if that's a word haha)

yes, I obviously know about gender roles but I'm saying that that is not significant to anything. Everyone knows what is stereotypically male/female, and yes I've said it makes me happy when I do 'male' things. If I didn't have an innate sense of gender then why would I like to do random 'male' things?

Ereshkigalangcleg · 13/07/2020 20:44

You know how claiming to be colour blind is racist, because if you can't identify race as a factor, you can't name the racism either? Sexism and sex is the same. It matters, and therefore saying only female people - not even women; biologically female people - have cervixes should not be seen as hate speech. I find the erasure of women as a sex class more than upsetting, quite honestly. I find it alarming.

This. And this is precisely what JK Rowling was saying.

Thanks for putting it better than me. I'm taking a break for a bit.

midgebabe · 13/07/2020 20:47

You might like Male things and being recognised as Male because it means you are not being recognised as female, so the assumptions that people might make for females are removed from your shoulders

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 20:50

@Ereshkigalangcleg

I agree with you on that, again I am not every trans person and don't love everything that some trans people argue for. I'm not really that bothered about the cancer thing, of course I know what 'female' means I just think it was a pointless exercise.

@midgebabe

I see where you're coming from but just don't think it applies, again the stereotypes thing is not why I want to transition I really don't care about them.

OldCrone · 13/07/2020 20:54

You seem an intelligent and thoughtful person, so no, I don't think you think you are a man because you like mowing the lawn. I think the fact you like mowing the lawn is completely irrelevant to an innate gender identity or sex and is simply your personality

Is mowing the lawn supposed to be a 'male' thing now? Which decade have we gone back to now? The 1950s? Earlier?

FireUnderTheHand · 13/07/2020 20:56

@alexk3

Very reductionist perspective in light of the rhetorical questions I asked. You think you won't care about sensation later but I bet you will... I didn't either until I did.

Those questions weren't bait (nor meant to be answered on this thread i.e. rhetorical) but you reacted as if they were and cherry-picked the portions you responded to in a pretty dismissive fashion. Cool enough that you wanted to engage but not cool to misrepresent the questions. I look back to your post where you said "I think I know everything" well there you have it.

And, BTW, I wanted to be a boy my entire childhood and wanted to be a man until about 20yrs old... until I stopped hating everything that was wrapped into 'being a woman' as per society/gender roles. So there's that.

LemonadeAndDaisyChains · 13/07/2020 20:59

You do have a tendency to mangle ^ wilfully mis-comprehend what has been said, to suit. Nobody has told anyone to"go away"

Erm.....
You are not female. Not a woman. I will not have you diluting women’s legal protections. Or our voices. Go away and pontificate elsewhere

Did tho
The thread asked for trans women and trans mens voices, this is what trans womens voices on the thread got.
What does go away mean then? Hmm

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 21:01

@wellbehavedwomen

hope your day gets a bit better. My reply is not going to be very long for the same reasons! I do get where you're coming from, genuinely. Using the example of the article JKR retweeted about 'menstruators', which was titled:

'Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate'

As a journalist I would have written:

'Opinion: Creating a world of period equity post COVID-19'

or something like that? and then in the article said women (and trans people) in the introduction. I find the whole 'menstruators' thing as grim as you I imagine. Even in the trans community there's a split, just from my perspective as a trans man a lot of ftm people don't mind things about that just being titled as for women because we don't want people thinking about us in relation to female functions, if that makes sense.

LemonadeAndDaisyChains · 13/07/2020 21:01

Think there's a word for that, telling somebody something hasn't been said when it actually has.
Thank goodness for words on a thread eh, where you can scroll back instead of being made to doubt yourself?

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 21:08

@midgebabe

I don't want to be reconised as female because I don't want to have a female body and I have a male sense of self. Really not because of female social roles.

@OldCrone

it was an example about my idiot brain it's really not that serious.

@FireUnderTheHand

yeah I know what rhetorical means thanks but it was just so wild to me that someone was genuinely asking me such personal stuff that I could not help myself. Especially considering how patronising the questions were, particulalry those about whether I knew about basic aspects of the trans surgeries I've spent years researching. Funnily enough I probably will be dismissive when someone is asking me such weird stuff? no idea what you mean when you say 'cool'... It's not that I don't want to partake in female gender roles I am just not a woman.

alexk3 · 13/07/2020 21:09

@LemonadeAndDaisyChains

at least be grateful no one is asking you if you've ever had an orgasm!

OldCrone · 13/07/2020 21:09

Everyone knows what is stereotypically male/female, and yes I've said it makes me happy when I do 'male' things. If I didn't have an innate sense of gender then why would I like to do random 'male' things?

Are you really asking this question? Because you have a personality. It just so happens that some of the things you enjoy are traditionally enjoyed more by men than women, and I defy you to name one interest you have which is only done by men, rather than mainly enjoyed by men.

Gender is what has traditionally kept women and girls in their place - 'That's for boys/men, you can't do that'. Yes we can.

Do you see now why feminists argue against gender ideology? 40 years ago a woman who wanted to do 'male' things would call herself a feminist and fight for her right to do them. Now she thinks she has a 'male' gender identity and needs to change her body. What the hell has gone wrong?

LemonadeAndDaisyChains · 13/07/2020 21:10

at least be grateful no one is asking you if you've ever had an orgasm!

[shocked]
Bloody hell, personal much? Grin

LemonadeAndDaisyChains · 13/07/2020 21:11

okay my shocked face didn't work, was supposed to be Shock

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