Why can't I claim I'm black or disabled, but can claim I'm a bloke?

[SirChenjins]

I'm none of the above btw...

I realise that sounds flippant and I genuinely don't mean it to be. Can someone please explain in simple terms (I'm still very much learning about the whole gender issue so realise I should probably know this) why I can't claim to be any of the other protected characteristics (and rightly so - because I'm not) but somehow we've got to a stage where I can call myself Mr Dave and everyone is expected to go along with it? Are we likely to see more cases of people challenging the other protected characteristics as time goes on?

Nascent gay children and lesbian girs have long expressed cross sex feelings. This has always been part of the struggle in coming to terms with sexual orientation.

It’s equally dangerous to assume that you don’t need to ask questions or investigate things because the patient isn’t in the target ethnic group.

Categories for disease risk can help but when you start reifying them and claiming that a disease is a Jewish disease or a black African disease or whatever it becomes just as problematic and discriminatory as refusing to take women’s health seriously.

The thing is, it never actually helps to elide the issues around sex and race. It’s totally different. And disability is another kettle of fish entirely.

Which is why we are in a situation where people are asking questions like the OP. The answer is a whole bunch of power relations and social issues that mean we perceive a claim to gender totally differently to a claim to race. Ironically, we see the one with a much better biological basis for rejection as fair game.

Can you provide a reference for that. So far studies presented have been fatally flawed; ignoring homosexuality, impact of drugs know to affect the brain, have studied dozens of brain measurements so the difference is likely to be down to chance in the very small sample size, claiming ‘more similar than other males’ to mean ‘the same as women’, ignoring inconvenient participants...

Lady brain arguments are not new. They’re just dressing them up in different science these days.

Great question. Well, it's really similar to being gay, lesbian, or bi.

The claim that trans women and men insist they are and always have been biological women or men is largely an Aunt Sally. Some trans people do say this, but in my experience most talk about it in a much more nuanced way, as people whose lives have involved a voyage towards becoming the gender they have always felt or known themselves to be.

This involves physical transformation to a greater or lesser degree because without it you can't experience the societal role or be accepted as the gender you are - including, but not restricted to, who you are when you have sex.

At the root of the current wave of transphobia is an uncritical acceptance of the gender-critical, biologically determinist position, which denies that the socialisation and lived experience of gender is as real as biological sex.

Gender IS real in the same way that orientation is. Just because it's experienced cognitively, emotionally and as a relation to your body, rather than a fact about your chromosomes and what they do, doesn't mean it's less real - because if you insist it is less real, you're saying only genes matter; cognition, emotion and endocrine make-up dont. Nature -defined very narrowly - triumphs.
The opposite to nature is not 'Nurture'; that implies people become trans because of traumatic or adverse experience and is, essentially, a pathology.
To say so opens the door to saying that's why people are gay, too. What lesbians and gay men have done is to successfully propose that it doesn't matter whether sexual orientation is innate or not, 'disordered' or not: I may have been 'born this way' to some extent, as a dreamy, slightly masculine kid, but that's not the issue. The issue is that I didn't decide to be a lesbian through confusion or adversity or rebelliousness, but because I experienced a largely somatic, hormonal rush of sexual longing when I, a girl, saw other girls and not when I saw boys. I then took a decision later on to socialise those feelings by adopting an identity called Lesbian.

I do not know what it's like to be trans; I've always been OK about inhabiting a female body. But I'm prepared to believe that for trans people, the clash between their body and their nature is as visceral, as immutable, and at times as profoundly ego-dystonic as I, growing up lesbian, found my sexual orientation to be.

The only difference between me and a trans person is that my orientation to others as sexual objects didn't fit society: their orientation towards themselves as sexual subjects doesn't.

But that's as far as I'll go: I don't presume to imagine what it's like being trans. Neither should you.

You see how far we've come from dying on the hill of 'men are men and women are women and nothing can change that'? As scientists often say, I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.... But you need to read beyond these echo chambers and be open to conflicting ideas and thoughts.

So yes it is very different to claiming to be black or disabled.

Hope that gives you something to challenge the orthodoxy of these threads. :)

I don’t have a source other than Wikipedia (and some lady on Quora who says she’s a biologist). Looking at the Wikipedia article on the Stria Terminalis, it does sound as if the number of people studied was very small. Also, the sexual diamorphism of the BSTc was only seen in adults, whereas some trans people experienced gender dysphoria in childhood. So more research is needed.

I absolutely believe that people can feel more affinity with the other gender or with no gender. The rules about hairstyles and dresses and makeup are arbitrary and can change with fashion (just look at men in 17th century France) so may not even necessarily reflect your gender affinity. And your sexuality is your own business, provided you keep it to consenting other adults.

Biological males should not pretend to be biological females though. And should not impose upon areas where women are biologically vulnerable (toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres) or into the field of women’s sports.

In response to @MishyJDI and in particular your comment “At the root of the current wave of transphobia is an uncritical acceptance of the gender-critical, biologically determinist position, which denies that the socialisation and lived experience of gender is as real as biological sex.”

My view is that there are certain situations (eg womens sport) where biological sex matters and therefore that the position of Stonewall et al to conflate sex and gender damages womens rights. That does not mean that I think that people should not be free to live the way they want ( subject to not harming others). Does this view mean that I am transphobic?

Gender means different things to different people. it cannot be measured or observed and there is no clear definition; unlike sexual orientation which is simply finding that you are attracted romantically and sexually to people of the same sex as yourself.

Feelings, by nature, are not "immutable" which is why many people go on to find that transition hasn't cured their dysphoric feelings, and in fact has made their feelings worse. What people feel about themselves or about anything at all most often changes with life experience. Identity is not a static condition, it is an evolving locus on which we hook both lasting and transient conceptions of our self. Much of our self identity only exists in relation to other people and in response to certain situations and events.

Sex, literally, is biologically determined. As is much that stems from sex.

"But that's as far as I'll go: I don't presume to imagine what it's like being trans. Neither should you"

Of course no-one knows someone else's direct experience, which is why it makes no sense to suggest that gender is as real as sex. You can only experience sex by being in a sexed body; all else is pure imagination or projection. And a sexed body is readily measurable and observable. Sex is instinctively noted too; operating beneath the level of superficial consciousness.

We can of course understand the experience of what 'being trans' means by listening with empathy to those who are explaining their 'process' or their path to transition; and also by listening to the testimonies of de-transitioners, who most often have developed some over-arching perspective on their feelings too - in the light of subsequent experience.

Depends how it manifests. I would say no, unless it is unreasonable and against the science.

Without being too specific, I have worked on projects which were only open to those who identified as disabled. The majority of those who successfully applied for and benefited from the programme were very tenuously disabled, tbh..it's not quite as different from the gender bollocks as you would hope.

So why can't we say that "race" is about more than just biology then? Someone's racial awareness, sense of being such a race, is "real" in some way. Just as someone's gender identity is.

So that still leaves open why we don't allow trans racial identification.

Personally I tend to think that gender is "real", and that's another reason why many trans people will fail to qualify as being "women" or "men". They just don't come off as authentic and so they are neither "women" in a biological sense or a gender sense. They may legitimately have a gender identity of a woman, but identifying as something doesn't make you that something.

Actually, I thought I can identify as any nationality I wish -in that sense of the word where nationality doesn't equal citizenship, but feeling identification with.

It just doesn't have many implications in real life and doesn't expect anyone else to do anything differently around me.

In my country (central europe) declaring "other nationality" was a standard way to get around one stupid outdated law regarding legally allowed names. So many people did it (just for the one bureaucratic purposes and only on that one form ) that the law was updated and now anyone can choose more freely.

The thing with the "lady brain" argument, even if it's correct that there is a difference with some people's brains, is what actually follows from this?

You could just say, "there is a biological basis that encourages some people to have this delusion or sense of dysphoria".

That seems far more reasonable than that such people are really "women". Rather, they have a brain defect and they deserve our sympathy and medical treatment perhaps, but "brain difference" is not enough to make someone a woman or man.

Were you working on SNP list MSPs?

"Actually, I thought I can identify as any nationality I wish -in that sense of the word where nationality doesn't equal citizenship, but feeling identification with"

Yes, the main bug bear is the phrase 'identifying as', rather than 'identifying with'.

We can all feel a certain affinity for certain types of thing, in that aspects of what that thing represents to us we can feel aligned with. But identifying with, or having sympathy with is not the same as directly being. When we identify with we tend to focus on certain fragments that attract us or that we feel comfortable with.There is far more appreciation, sympathy and empathy involved, rather than appropriation, when you identify with something.

The irony, of course, in suggesting that there might be a biological basis for claiming a cross sex identity, is that it undermines the refutations of biological determinism.

Not read all of the thread but basically follow the money.

Who financially benefits from you claiming you are black? No one. Not even you.

Who financially benefits from claiming you are the opposite sex? Hmmm, maybe all those drugs and treatments and operations will line someone's pockets whether as a decision maker or big pharma stockholder. You might benefit as a tw due to taking womens jobs too. Its so depressingly familiar. Its just fucking money.

You can claim to be any of those things but it wouldn't make you any of those things.

Having said that, there aren't very many women going around demanding they are a bloke and getting away with it.

Show me one woman with long blonde hair and makeup on who isn't laughed at if she says 'I'm a man called Dave' It doesn't happen.

It's all political.

Also, ironically, ethnicity and disability are far more open to interpretation than sex.

It's all political and it's all a bit silly.

There are other motivations than just money - sex.

Can someone please explain in simple terms (I'm still very much learning about the whole gender issue so realise I should probably know this) why I can't claim to be any of the other protected characteristics (and rightly so - because I'm not) but somehow we've got to a stage where I can call myself Mr Dave and everyone is expected to go along with it?

You can claim to be gay or religious too, also protected characteristics.

Sorry I think I could be clearer - I suppose I just mean there are "take your word for it" protected characteristics which are sexual orientation, belief and gender reassignment.

Race and disability are a bit of a grey area - some element of identification in some cases.

Sex, marriage, age, maternity are all pretty unassailable.

Yes, @Bamboux. I have had some experience in this area too and would agree.

Bloody fed up of the IdentifyAs crowd tbh - usually means a tenuous but highly exploitable link to whatever comes next.

I have a significant enough hearing impairment that needs accommodating in nearly all circumstances. It is not my identity but an inescapable limitation. Meanwhile, my SIL is profoundly deaf and part of the Deaf community. Communication and connection being a profound need for us all it is part of who she is, the person she has become, the culture she has flourished in. She doesn't 'identify' as Deaf though. She unequivocally is.