Please help me untangle why gender is such an issue

[nomorecrumbs]

I see myself as an old-school feminist, I believe that people should have equal opportunities regardless of their sex, and if people do not want to conform to gender stereotypes then more power to them. In fact I reject a lot of gender stereotyping as it’s socially, not biologically, prescriptive to me and I don’t think gender scripting should be pandered to.

Where I get muddled is trying to understand why trans people seemingly want to change their gender. In doing so, aren’t they conforming to societal notions of what it means to be a “woman” or a “man”? Why isn’t this just biologically based rather than socially, as to me the social aspect can be a load of bollocks?

E.g. I would love to ask a M2F trans why they “feel like they are more female”. Is it because they prefer pink, long hair, feminine clothes, traditional womanly traits? If so, why not stay a biological man and do these social things anyway? Is it fear of peer rejection? I don’t see why they have to just conform to gender stereotyping, basically, and wish any sex could just wear and do what they want without being pigeonholed into “genders”.

I’m concerned all this talk over gender is just reinforcing potentially damaging social stereotypes of what it means to appear male or female.

'Hard numbers are uncertain in this area but the estimate is that about 0.01% of the population of the UK have gender dysphoria. If 0.3% of the population is trans, this means that about one in 30 trans people have gender dysphoria. In that case, who are the other 29 people?'

I suspect the other 29 are made up of a combination of:

• People who are intersex
• People who are made to believe they must be the opposite gender because they don't fit into society's stereotypes (particularly regarding who they are attracted to)
• People (overwhelmingly men) who are sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as the opposite gender
• People who reject society's gender stereotypes and therefore attempt to identify out of them (and may identify as non binary)

There are probably a few other scenarios that I can't currently think of. One difficulty, which I'm sure most on this thread recognise, is lumping all of those people in together as T, believing they are all the opposite gender and that they should therefore be treated at all times as the opposite sex. It is simply nonsensical.

I genuinely feel for anyone who is unhappy in their body for any reason and of course believe they should get support to find happiness. I am not at all convinced that the current ideology is the right way to ensure that happens.

Positrans:

I don't mind splitting by sex in some cases at the moment, but I see trans woman as female, so that's not a problem for me.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying there are no differences between male-bodied and female-bodied people if they both identify as women? How does that work?

Brain transplants isn't quite the right analogy. Consciousness transplants is closer. Particularly given the context is all about the dualism and the dissociation.

If I woke up in a man's body tomorrow, I would feel like me in a man's body. As opposed to today, when I feel like me in a woman's body. The hormonal weirdness would probably unsettle me somewhat as I'm used to naturally cycling female hormones, but I would still feel like me. Because I have dissociation issues, and me is the inside not the outside.

midge I do find it telling on these threads, the lack of acknowledgment that we're being shoved out of the woman club, from the people doing the shoving. Perhaps this thread will be different?

I think my gender was something I was born with, and that is normally aligned to sex

The word you are looking for is personality.

Not a wider load of sexist bollocks in which we must perform certain behaviour or tasks.

@DickKerrLadies

Gender identity is a continuum - people come up with different names for their own experience of it. There can hundreds, thousands or even one for every person - it's doesn't matter.

But if gender identity is simply a person's own innate sense of what sex they are, how can there be hundreds or thousands? There are two sexes (and genetic variations but I'm not qualified to talk about those, others on here have more expertise than me), in what way is it a continuum?

Exactly this.

I don’t want to contribute to a pile on, positrans, you’re engaging respectfully and intelligently which I appreciate, and which is quite rare in these parts from those with your point of view.

But this set of beliefs has to be treated as a topic akin to religion in a secular society. You can believe what you want, but you can’t compel others to those beliefs. I’m a gender apostate if you like, and I am going to resist your attempts to frame my life with your worldview by claiming I dont have a gender identity because “agender”. I don’t have one because I don’t believe in them, no more than I believe in souls.

There’s plenty of science seeking to demonstrate the sections of the brain that correlate with religiosity and religious experience, but proving they exist doesn’t make God factual. Same with gender identity. (Also keen to see those links)

Why does the required respect for someone’s identity not stretch to me and women like me?

@TyroTerf

Brain transplants isn't quite the right analogy. Consciousness transplants is closer. Particularly given the context is all about the dualism and the dissociation.

If I woke up in a man's body tomorrow, I would feel like me in a man's body. As opposed to today, when I feel like me in a woman's body. The hormonal weirdness would probably unsettle me somewhat as I'm used to naturally cycling female hormones, but I would still feel like me. Because I have dissociation issues, and me is the inside not the outside.

midge I do find it telling on these threads, the lack of acknowledgment that we're being shoved out of the woman club, from the people doing the shoving. Perhaps this thread will be different?

Why do we even do analogied which are based on dramatic fantasies?

I'll consider the analogy as worthwhile the day we have documented evidence of an individual waking up in a different body.

Until then I will file this all under the term 'belief' and 'ideology' and not give it more consideration as something I should be giving anymore serious thought and consideration to.

Every human comes out of a woman who was born a woman whether they identify now a fucking octosexual unicorn or not.

No man ever has to worry about the impact of pregnancy or childbirth on their body even if they now identify as a woman.

Saying that sex is not binary is interphobic and this has been stated repeatedly by people who are intersex that saying this is hurting their interests and they are actively being used in a way they dislike to uphold an ideology which again hurts their interests.

We are what we are physically. Who we decide to be is something else entirely and is about personality not reinventing our sex or what sex is.

midge I do find it telling on these threads, the lack of acknowledgment that we're being shoved out of the woman club, from the people doing the shoving. Perhaps this thread will be different?

This is such an important point.

As soon as you include any male person - no matter how he identifies, no matter how "sincere" he may be - in the female group you will be excluding some of those females.

Excluding females from their own group so that males can not only be included in that group, but required to be centred within it.

No. That's unacceptable.

@Positrans

No one knows exactly how they have that innate sense. That's still being unravelled.

All I can tell you is that by the age of 4, I had a sense of there being boys and girls in the world, and the feeling that I was one of the girls, and that was coupled with certain parts of my body feeling like they didn't belong to me. The feeling that I was girl was my secret but it was a constant throughout my childhood into adulthood. Thanks to the wonders of medical science, my body doesn't feel weird any more.

Humans are social animals and social animals have social groupings, so it makes sense that there might be some instinctive sense of which group you are in.

Last thing I saw about the science was posted on Twitter. It was this link to the Endocrine society:

www.endocrine.org/advocacy/position-statements/transgender-health

Which says:

The medical consensus in the late 20th century was that transgender and gender incongruent individuals suffered a mental health disorder termed “gender identity disorder.” Gender identity was considered malleable and subject to external influences. Today, however, this attitude is no longer considered valid. Considerable scientific evidence has emerged demonstrating a durable biological element underlying gender identity.1,2 Individuals may make choices due to other factors in their lives, but there do not seem to be external forces that genuinely cause individuals to change gender identity.

Yeah, citations please.

You are radically overstating the evidence for a cross-sex identity being 'a durable biological element', especially given that the brain is plastic, and responds/changes to social and other external input.

Its irresponsible to over claim like this. Unless you misread and overstate available evidence, there is no way to confidently assert causation.

It's a valid hypothesis, that dysphoria emerging in early childhood and persisting through puberty and into adulthood, has a neurological basis, but studies looking at the brains of post transition adult individuals and finding some similarities with the brains of same-sex oriented adults, is far from a strong indication of causation.

but I see trans woman as female, so that's not a problem for me

Seeing trans women as female is often a problem or even an impossible ask for other people though, and surely their feelings matter too.

Yes, that's where this very thin ideology falls down.

Have whatever gender identify beliefs you want about yourself, change them at will, twice a day if you like.

But those beliefs exist in addition and are separate to the biological truth of male and female sexes and the legal protections afforded women on the basis of sex.

They do not replace, alter, nudge, weaken or in any other way compromise those facts.

@Elsiebear90

Of course, but I don’t think the only difference between myself and a man is my physical body. I don’t think the only reason I am feminine is because of a coincidence or because I was raised to be this way, and that if you were to transplant my brain into a man’s body that I would be happy to live life as a man once I got used to it because really I’m no different.

What the heck else of you is there but your physical body?

Look, it's not complicated. You have a sex, you will experience some sex-linked behaviours and tendencies, mostly around reproduction, and then you have a personality which forms around a temperament.

Depending on your sex, you will be shaped by one or other of a set of sex-stereotypes, to a greater or lesser effect.

It's all either body or society, unless you believe in non-material essences that exist outside of the body aka religion.

Ugh, using valid above in a colloquial sense - should have chosen a better term.

@Elsiebear90

Yes, but femininity is usually linked to being female, obviously some women are very stereotypically masculine (going against societal pressures) and aren’t trans, but I don’t think me being a feminine female is a coincidence or social conditioning etc and that if I was raised to behave like a stereotypical man I would do that happily and have stereotypically male interests. I think my personality is linked to me being female, rather than a result of being socially conditioned and that I couldn’t have been raised to be different and behave more “manly”.

No, the performance of femininity is imposed on women.

I would really like to know what I’m supposed to be feeling to know what my gender identity is, because I feel like a spectrum of things throughout the day- some in common with women, some in common with men- and I’m not at all sure which of those feelings gives me my gender identity.

Because it isn’t just down to my interests (reasonably broad and applicable to both sexes) or the happiness (or not) I feel about my body or appearance. It isn’t even how well I feel I shape up as a female person, so what is it? What am I supposed to be feeling so I know whether I feel it or not?

I will not hold my breath on an answer.

evidence of the ‘well studied’ and ‘scientific’ and ‘fact

Did this turn up, ive looked but i cant see it

I may have missed it

It is indeed pointless trying to impose any strict binary on sex or gender identity. The science simply doesn't support it

Coming back to this from earlier - there is no such thing as binary sex- because while it’s become dogma now, I really need to point out again what an extreme statement this would have been, say 10 years ago.

Did anything change in the last decade about how babies are made?

No.

Humans are sexually dimorphic (DSDs are variants, and do not disprove this rule). It’s how we reproduce, and that is literally all that sex describes. A truly modern society looks it straight in the eye, and works towards ensuring that no one suffers disadvantages because of their sex, because of their actual or perceived baby making capabilities, with all the attached baggage. Pretending it doesn’t exist or subsiding it under amorphous “gender” sends us backwards.

Cartesian dualism, which is what you’re describing - the mind and the body being separate entities- has been debated for hundreds of years and has some fatal flaws that haven’t been resolved, and still aren’t being resolved in this latest fashionable iteration.

@RufustheSniggeringReindeer

evidence of the ‘well studied’ and ‘scientific’ and ‘fact

Did this turn up, ive looked but i cant see it

I may have missed it

Not yet, still waiting.

Thank you daisies

Gosh this is exciting...like waiting for Christmas, though i hope there are less sleeps

I totally agree with you!

Calling me 'agender' doesn't strike me as something that will result in productive dialogue, nor will contructing straw men out of questions i have asked in good faith.

Where are the studies where billions of people have had the concept of gender identity described to them, and have agreed with its epistemological roots and disclosed they identify with having a gender identity?
I think they usually observe that they have a sex, as I do.

@positrans I'm not sure whether you're still here or not but I have the following, fairly blunt position I'd be interested to hear you thoughts on:

I don't have the slightest interest in a stranger's inner sense of their gender identity (howsoever defined or whether such a thing exists or not), or inner sense of themselves as anything at all, or in general. Someone's personal sense of, or beliefs about, themself is matter of supreme indifference to me unless I happen to have a personal relationship with said individual.

What I do care about in relation to people I don't know from Adam is how much of a threat they are to me or my children in a given situation. There is plenty of objective, verifiable data showing that people of the male sex carry out violent and sexual crime at an astronomically higher rate than people of the female sex. There is plenty of objective, verifiable data showing that people of the male sex are on average much stronger than people of the female sex. These two facts alone put me, a female person, at greater physical risk from make people than from other female people. Without getting into concepts of privacy and dignity, these are two significant reasons why female people and male people have been and are offered separate facilities and services in certain situations.

Based on the studies I have seen to date, transwomen continue to offend at the same or very similar rates to male people who don't consider themselves to be anything other than men. Based on studies I have seen to date, transwomen retain a significant physical advantage over female people.

Why, in your opinion (if indeed this is your opinion!), should gender identity - in which I have zero interest and which changes neither significant underlying risk factor - be privileged over sex when providing separate facilities and services?

Thank you!

I would love to ask a M2F trans why they “feel like they are more female”. Is it because they prefer pink, long hair, feminine clothes, traditional womanly traits?

You've nailed it, OP.

It's a really binary way of thinking.

I really try to understand, if I were to accept that sex is a spectrum, what the implications and results of this would be. I’d say that, up until recently, most people would agree that there have been two sets of people - the ones getting pregnant and the ones doing the impregnating, i.e. the two sexes. So if instead it were a spectrum does that mean that if two people are too close on the spectrum they can’t produce a baby between them, (even if one were of what we would say was the male sex and the other, the female sex?) Does it mean the two people need to be at the opposite sides of the sex wheel (I’m picturing a colour chart wheel here!) to be successful in baby making? I just don’t understand what it would mean for sex to be a spectrum! It’s not like we can make something else besides a baby so to my mind, there’s only two outcomes - baby or no baby. Its not as if a trans person coupled with a person of the opposite gender has ever produced a baby between them without any outside help.

If you are agender

Then what is your sex

If you follow the logic of some posters on here

You don't have one?

I am in my fifties and have never met a single person with a gender identity aside from a trans identifying person.
Not one of the women I know or have known has this mysterious inner identifying-with-womanhood feeling. They just are women, of all personalities and interests.

I feel like a woman (I'm biologically female). I can't really describe how or why I feel it (in a similar context as trying to describe the colour red without using the word "red"). I just feel like a woman inside my brain and my body, and I'd be very uncomfortable if I were somehow transported into a male body as an example. So I guess I do have some form of gender identity and I'm not transgender