Trans sibling in law

[Primrose86]

DH's sibling has just come out as a man. She is 26 and autistic, lives at home with mum, spends life on the Internet, got kicked out of school at 16 etc etc She has plans to go overseas and transition in germany where apparently you can get surgeries on the public health system while living with her grandpa. Her mum is fully supportive of this.

How should I react to all this. Should I start referring to him as my brother in law? What usually happens after people come out. I assume they progress to hormones and surgery but honestly based on what I read, Germany is quite resistant to health tourists who never paid in even if they are citizens. Are people really happy identifying as another gender when they wouldn't look like the other gender?

No, it’s my questions about identity that I was hoping for a response on (posted upthread). My question is about how you conceive of identity as the internal reflection or accumulation of gendered socialisation. That’s not very dissimilar to what most “GC” feminists would argue. Essentially, you’re suggesting that gender identity is an internal self-image formed out of gender as a social process. You presumably argue that gender identity is a real thing, created from the internalisation of social experience. “GC” feminists might argue instead that gender identity is an illusion: it’s a fantasy of the self created by the internalisation of social experience.

In both cases, it still doesn’t really matter whether gender identity is social and real, or social and illusory. The question is, how can a man be said to have a “woman” gender identity in either case?

So female bovines get to use a special word but not female humans

Even though I might have been referring to the woman?

The word female can apply to any species.

I'm a female human, not a female horse.

I’ve wondered how TRAs suggest we should differentiate between female and male animals of any other species.

Genderists of both sexes (note, only two are available) want the term for an adult human female ring fenced for “people who share a woman identity” because some sexist men who know nothing about being a woman and felt alienated by the idea of being a man fancied calling themselves women. It’s not like boring actual female people need the word or anything, anyway who cares if they do?

You're not using that analogy right.

Its a banana identifying as an apple. You're still an apple, but but the banana now wants all the rights of a banana AND to be given the same rights as you, as an apple.

The want to have the banana skin and the apple core. It's not possible and it's harming the apples.

Why is "he your brother in law now"? What has actually changed?

Correct, that’s exactly what I believe. That gender identity is a real thing that is created by internalisation of societal and cultural structure, that none of us can fully escape that, and that I am the physical expression of that identity.

I’m not for example “a daughter,” I’m my mother’s daughter, and that has a difference in my socialisation and identity that you can’t share because you’re someone else’s.

The difference, as you point out, is that I believe it’s real and others don’t.

Because I believe it to be real and not imaginary, I also believe that people of either sex can have a different gender identity and expression. Where they come from, I’ve no way of knowing because they’re personal and individual. I also wouldn’t ask someone to explain themselves.

In my day to day, I would (and do) use pronouns as requested, and have never been either offended by someone stating their gender ID or felt like it affected mine in anyway. You telling me you’re anything, doesn’t change who I am, as far as I see it. I don’t feel threatened by it.

I obviously acknowledge that legal systems can’t be that ambiguous, and don’t pull random trans women off the street into bathrooms, for example. But on a personal level, I’m not bothered if they go in them. That’s not the law, it’s a personal view.

Honestly, I think that this gets us close to the truth about why people persist in believing this shite. We need to believe that we aren't like other animals, and that our lives have some greater meaning.

For much of human history our lives have been organised around religion. In most mainstream religions, including Christianity, people are considered to be superior to animals. God created man in his own image to rule over the animal kingdom and all of that.

Religion also provided a justification for the belief that we all have souls that are distinct from our bodies; souls which survive after the death of our earthly bodies and give us the possibility of eternal life.

Religion also gave us communities to belong to. People who weren't necessarily blood relatives but could be relied on for practical and emotional support.

Now all of that has largely gone out of the window and we are left with every man/woman for him/herself, no village to rely on, just a brief and in most cases unextraordinary life during which we eat, sleep, shit and mate like animals, and then one day we die and our bodies return to the earth one way or another.

No wonder a new religion based on gendered souls and a brand new rainbow family has taken hold.

But we don't share any kind of identity with trans women.

The only thing we have in common is that we are human.

I have more in common with women, trans men, and regular men than I do with trans women.

Fair enough, thanks for pointing it out.

Someone being a banana apple doesn't change if I’m an apple though, does it.

They’re not changing my fruit status, or telling me I have to be something else.

I’d like to think that my apple skin is a bit thicker than being affected by that anyway.

If it changes what an apple is, you no longer have a word to describe what you are.

If it’s an internalisation of social and cultural structure, and we are all deeply affected by how society genders us, then how can a man possibly have a gender identity of “woman”, if he’s never been subject to being gendered as such? He presumably also has an inescapable gender identity, formed over years of life, as a man. If gender identity is real, how is it possible for him to set aside the one he already has (which is also real), and instantly acquire another that he hasn’t been socialised into?

In your model, there’s actually less room for individuals to exist outside the gendered structures of the social world, no?

You still haven't told us what all women have in common, though.

We have done that.

If you want there to be a word "woman" for a class of people that doesn't include "men", you have to define that word so it includes all women, and doesn't include any men.

We just want to know how YOU define it, since you're so set on us not telling you how to define it, you have to have an alternative definition.

If your definition "is only true for you" then it isn't a definition of woman. It's a definition of Mary Brown from Hemel Hempstead which is all fine and lovely but if there is no class of woman, there cannot be sexism, so we cannot fight sexism.

Again, personally, I refer to trans women as just that, a category of woman.

That doesn’t change you being a woman, in whatever that means for you.

I also used banana apple, in the analogy we’re labouring, for the same reason.

The difference between trans woman and woman, IMO, is biology. Which I don’t dispute anyone having.

I have answered how I define woman, and female, and why I see them as different.

Sexism is based on sex, female, which we all share and isn’t something I’ve ever attempted to deny having.

So we can still fight being discriminated against on the basis of sex, because that’s not the same as gender.

I don’t know if it’s instantly acquired and set aside, or developed in the same way that everyone else’s is.

Whether that’s because of their own experiences, a disconnect in some way between their biology and identity, or because they recognise the socialisation of females and actually identify with those more than the male ones, I have no way of telling you because I’ve never claimed to be trans.

I can’t associate, certainly not fully, with an experience I’ve never lived.

But if you're an apple that a banana has previously bruised (if we're carrying on this ridiculous analogy you started), you don't want bananas, whether they believe they're now apples or not, in places you as a biological apple are supposed to feel safe.

That's the point.

Only If the law can define sex.

A squashed banana is still a banana not an apple.

Also apples don't tend to be vulnerable from violence from bananas. Nor are they are risk of getting pregnant.

Not last time I checked unless theres a pointless philosophical argument that has nothing to do with human adult females about bananas and apples.

And if you face discrimination based on gendered expectations, the last thing the perpetrator is worried about is your feelings about your identity. They are making a judgement based on their own beliefs/socialisation.

They are vulnerable to over ripening if placed next to a banana - but perhaps you can take an analogy too far!

If the law can't see sex, then the law can not take action against sexism.

Equally if the law can't see sex, then the law can not take action against.... drumroll... transphobia.

The law MUST see sex in both cases to identify women from men and to identify transpeople from non transpeople.

Otherwise I can just claim your comments on this thread against me are transphobic because I'm trans. You couldn't argue that I wasn't trans.

Things have to have definitions and meanings in law not legally illiterate philosophical concepts without defined boundaries.

A woman is a woman is a woman.
And thats based on sex. This is biologically provable, its written in law and it has broad public consensus and understanding.

Its just people trying to sound clever or virtue signal to their tribe, that say anything remotely difficult.

Hey, I didn't choose the analogy, I've just tried to use it to help make sense of a PPs claims that TW are a category of woman (banana apples are a kind of apple, she says).

I'm pretty sure though, if you hit an apple hard enough with a banana, it would leave a mark. I'd try it, but fruit is too expensive and DD eats it like I have unlimited money.

Maybe oranges would be better. Although they don't leave a bruise, if you hit someone with them. A random fact from my degree (which has no use in this discussion, being actual science....).