Elinor Burkett wrote a think piece for today’s New York Times.
She asks if women and men have different brains, and notes that an affirmative answer to that question has been known to elicit heated dissent.
But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.
“My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.
This was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner was greeted with even more thunderous applause.
And some doubts or questions or amplifications, from Laverne Cox for instance.
And from Burkett.
A part of me winced.
I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.
There’s a tension. I’ve said that before, and I might say it again. There’s a tension between the idea that gender is socially constructed and we get to shape it any way we want to, and the idea that it’s firmly binary and we are one or the other with no overlap or shaping allowed. This whole thing is just riddled with tensions, and it’s not transphobic to try to think about them.
That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.
It has, and that’s one thing that some feminists feel uneasy about. It’s not transphobic or trans-excluding to say that.
Brains are a good place to begin because one thing that science has learned about them is that they’re in fact shaped by experience, cultural and otherwise. The part of the brain that deals with navigation is enlarged in London taxi drivers, as is the region dealing with the movement of the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.
“You can’t pick up a brain and say ‘that’s a girl’s brain’ or ‘that’s a boy’s brain,’ ” Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Britain’s Aston University, told The Telegraph last year. The differences between male and female brains are caused by the “drip, drip, drip” of the gendered environment, she said.
Along with a bunch of other drip drip drips. The gendered environment is obviously not the only one, but it’s equally obviously one.
THE drip, drip, drip of Ms. Jenner’s experience included a hefty dose of male privilege few women could possibly imagine. While young “Bruiser,” as Bruce Jenner was called as a child, was being cheered on toward a university athletic scholarship, few female athletes could dare hope for such largess since universities offered little funding for women’s sports. When Mr. Jenner looked for a job to support himself during his training for the 1976 Olympics, he didn’t have to turn to the meager “Help Wanted – Female” ads in the newspapers, and he could get by on the $9,000 he earned annually, unlike young women whose median pay was little more than half that of men. Tall and strong, he never had to figure out how to walk streets safely at night.
Those are realities that shape women’s brains.
By defining womanhood the way he did to Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Jenner and the many advocates for transgender rights who take a similar tack ignore those realities. In the process, they undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us. And they undercut our efforts to change the circumstances we grew up with.
In other words, some trans women embrace the very definitions of “woman” that feminists have been trying to shake off for (I would say) well over a century.
The “I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by other trans people doesn’t work any better and is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.
I have; I have tried to imagine that. It makes me cringe every time. Why would it be so cringe-worthy? Because the young (or old) white man (or woman) would not have had the experience of being seen and treated as a black person.
But that ship has sailed. Fine; I wish it a safe voyage, a safe and happy and scenic voyage. But I would like to go on being able to ask searching questions about gender and the status of women. I would like to go on being able to talk about women.
Even the word “woman” has come under assault by some of the very people who claim the right to be considered women. The hashtags #StandWithTexasWomen, popularized after Wendy Davis, then a state senator, attempted to filibuster the Texas Legislature to prevent passage of a draconian anti-abortion law, and #WeTrustWomen, are also under attack since they, too, are exclusionary.
“Abortion rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue,” wrote Emmett Stoffer, one of many self-described transgender persons to blog on the topic. It is “a uterus owner’s issue.” Mr. Stoffer was referring to the possibility that a woman who is taking hormones or undergoing surgery to become a man, or who does not identify as a woman, can still have a uterus, become pregnant and need an abortion.
Accordingly, abortion rights groups are under pressure to modify their mission statements to omit the word woman, as Katha Pollitt recently reported in The Nation. Those who have given in, like the New York Abortion Access Fund, now offer their services to “people” and to “callers.” Fund Texas Women, which covers the travel and hotel expenses of abortion seekers with no nearby clinic, recently changed its name to Fund Texas Choice. “With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the group explains on its website.
I think it’s ok for people who provide services to make sure they’re not accidentally excluding trans people. It’s when we’re talking about (and/or working on) the politics of abortion that I think we really need to go on talking about women, because the politics of abortion is inextricably linked to the subordination of women.
The landscape that’s being mapped and the language that comes with it are impossible to understand and just as hard to navigate. The most theory-bound of the trans activists say that there are no paradoxes here, and that anyone who believes there are is clinging to a binary view of gender that’s hopelessly antiquated. Yet Ms. Jenner and Ms. Manning, to mention just two, expect to be called women even as the abortion providers are being told that using that term is discriminatory. So are those who have transitioned from men the only “legitimate” women left?
Are trans women better (truer) feminists than cis women?
The struggle to move beyond such stereotypes is far from over, and trans activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.
If that’s the ultimate message of the mainstream of the trans community, we’ll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight to create space for everyone to express him-, her- or, in gender neutral parlance, hir-self without being coerced by gendered expectations. But undermining women’s identities, and silencing, erasing or renaming our experiences, aren’t necessary to that struggle.
Bruce Jenner told Ms. Sawyer that what he looked forward to most in his transition was the chance to wear nail polish, not for a furtive, fugitive instant, but until it chips off. I want that for Bruce, now Caitlyn, too. But I also want her to remember: Nail polish does not a woman make.
Nor does the absence of nail polish make a man. I was fascinated by the paraphernalia of Being a Grownup Woman when I was a child, but once I was old enough to start deploying it for real, I got sick of it in a heartbeat. Some women like it; some don’t. Drip, drip, drip.
“My
brainmind is much more female than it is male”Better?
But atheists usually believe that the mind is a function of the brain, don’t we? My brain isn’t fixed at birth, it can be altered by many things, including our choices of what to learn and how to think.
The unintended but super-disturbing consequence of omitting the words “woman” or “women” when talking about abortion and reproductive health is that it covers over the fact that the war against abortion and contraception are attacks on women qua women. Not attacks on “uterus owners.” Attacks on women. That these attacks also harm trans folks does not make the ideology suddenly not an attack on women.
You can bet that those on the attack are not contemplating anything remotely like the idea that people are people with legitimate interests regardless of how we talk about gender. They are not making fine distinctions between those who have uteruses and those who don’t, and those who have penises but who are women. They are committed to imprisoning women (women!) for being women.
Folks—there HAS to be space to talk about this. It HAS to be OK to acknowledge this problem. It’s dire. It HAS to be possible to take this on squarely—as the attack on women that it is—without providing (unintended—I’m not imputing malice!) a cover for anti-woman demagoguery.
More succinctly: Scolding people for talking about women’s reproductive rights is the gender equivalent of the white guy who comes in to a discussion of police murder of blacks with #AllLivesMatter.
^ Oh, good one.
She asks if women and men have different brains
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter. Ultimately the nature/nurture debate ought to boil down to: “so what?”
Neither Caitlyn Jenner nor Diane Sawyer are neuroscientists, as far as I know. And neither knows very much about the brain. And I would venture to say that neither knows much about the mind. Or potential relationships between the brain and the mind. Appealing to the brain when you know nothing about it is superficial crap. Jenner is talking about wishes, fantasies, desires, yearnings. Not about the brain. She is not able to explain jack shit about the brain.
Thank you Elinor Burkett, Ophelia and Josh for tackling this topic.
“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the group explains on its website.” Here’s what I want to know: How many trans people in Texas have ever needed an abortion? They still, as far as I know, have every right to an abortion. They do get pregnant w/o planning to. I imagine they have the same risk of bearing a child w/a disability (I know possibly ablelist but this is why amniocentesis is offered and used). But how many could there have been? Ten? Fifty? Transmen who want to conceive have to stop taking testosterone. They face a resumption or exaggeration of the gender dysphoria that contributed to their trans status in the first place. Sometimes they are receiving medical care that considers their specific hormonal and psychological issues. Yes, they may have felt excluded by “Fund Texas Women” but I would still like to know how many of them were. (No one knows the number of transmen who have conceived). It does not seem like the biggest issue related to pregnant trans men. So why insult all women? I don’t get it. And here’s something kind of interesting: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/11/07/362269036/transgender-men-who-become-pregnant-face-health-challenges
I thought I had been through just about everything related to trans issues through having a husband who transitioned and having to figure out how the fuck to live with it. I did a lot of work and I figured out a lot of stuff. But the new wave of trans activism is repellent and I fear ignorant and right wing.
Nail polish? Is that it? I know lots of guys who wear nail polish.
You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you, Ophelia?
Bolding added.
Not all trans men take testosterone.
The notion that all trans people undergo medical transition is a myth. So is the idea that trans men and trans women all live out exaggerated gender roles. The latter may have seemed true at one time, when the medical gatekeepers of transitioning only accepted those people who were the most gender conformist in their presentation. Those days are rapidly ending, if not (I hope) already gone.
I don’t think there’s any more ignorance or
right wing thinkingauthoritarian thinking than you’ll find in any movement.Trans activists really have been grievously attacked by a small but determined coterie, notably Cathy Brennan. A few respond with understandable rage and hypervigilance.
Yes. Yes, this is problematic.
Paris Lees, a British journalist and transgender rights activist, has written about this. Lees transitioned in her twenties. She describes the effect of the new hormones on her body as bringing on something akin to a second adolescence. But as she was older and in a paying job, she was in a position to indulge herself more than the average teenager possibly could. I imagine Caitlyn Jenner feels similarly– and has an even greater opportunity to indulge, given her wealth– and as her transition runs its course, I expect her attitudes will change and mature. Right now, I’d say she’s feeling a certain amount of euphoria, a sense of relief after spending much of her life in conflict with her own body. To many cis women who’ve spent their lives agitating for the right not to wear nail polish, Jenner’s fascination with same must be infuriating. But if Lees is right, it’s a side-effect of a second adolescence. And anyone who can stand over everything they said and did as an adolescent is either a liar or a very boring person…
No. The rage and “hypervigilance” of for instance HappiestSadist is not “understandable” as a consequence of Cathy Brennan.
This really isn’t the right place or the right day to tell me how “understandable” this shit is. I did / said nothing outrageous, and a little knot of people are shredding me on the basis of lies.
Lady Mondegreen – I did know that medical transition is far from the only route to transition and that many transitions proceed only until the person feels comfortable and him/herself. Trans women at least take varying amounts of hormones and hormone antagonists. I did not know that not all transmen take testosterone. Could you direct me to more information on this, please?
Thank you.
Let me be clear: I don’t think what HappiestSadist is doing is “understandable” at all; I think it’s bullshit, and I think they’re an asshole.
I was responding to luzclara’s characterization of “the new wave of trans activism.” I don’t think HappiestSadist represents them.
luzclara, sure. Give me a little time; busy right now.
It is a complicated issue. It is important to support all groups but that can lead to a watered down message for one group. Trans genderism has been around since there were humans but the idea is fairly new. It may be we just don’t have the words yet to describe what it is like. I know I’m cis gendered but I don’t really know why. My identity more than just being about female. Before Ms. Jenner transitioned she was identified by many different terms such as athlete, motivational speaker, etc. But now she has been reduced to one identity of female
Jenner wants to fit in what culture says women are. Feminists want to change culture. The conflict here is clear.
Feminists have a problem with the ideas Jenner embraces in the same way they have a problem with page 3. Disliking Jenner’s or Cox’s oh-so-sexy photoshoots is no more transphobic than disliking page 3 is anti woman.
We had the same thing happen a while back with a pilot who said that now that she’s a woman she uses white matter to think instead of gray matter and that made her dumber but also kinder. A carbon copy of what well-meaning conservative men think about women. This is not surprising. It’s what you would expect an average person who’s been a man for 50 years would say.
Rather than bashing them maybe I’d give them the book Gender Hurts.
@luzclara, can’t find any in-depth discussions of the topic. But I know through reading and talking to people that not every trans person chooses medical transition.
Here are a couple of links that make my point, though neither discusses alternatives or the reasons for them in any detail:
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7977335/trans-myths
(See “Myth #3.)
Actually, you can, and if Gina Rippon is a neuroscientist she should know better.
In particular, the preoptic area of the hypothalamus includes something called the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus, so called because it is larger in males than females in all mammalian species studied. If you know what you’re looking for, you can look at sections of a rat brain and sex it at a glance.
This nucleus apparently has something to do with sexual behavior, at least among males (females are harder to study because the effect of anything you do may vary across the menstrual cycle). It’s less likely that the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus has anything to do with other sexually stereotyped behaviors, such as buying too many shoes or refusing to ask directions.
The nearby Suprachiasmatic Nucleus is the main timekeeper for maintaining circadian rhythms. In humans it’s reportedly more elongated in females, and more spherical in males. Less clear-cut differences have been reported in the ventromedial hypothalamus and elsewhere.
I don’t want to make too much of these sexual dimorphisms. However if you’re ideologically attached to the notion that male and female brains are identical, then you’ll just have to drop that attachment. Sorry, but the facts say otherwise.
“Rather than bashing them maybe I’d give them the book Gender Hurts.”
Oh for the love of god.
Sorry, my second “link” embedded.
It’s amazing how quickly, completely, and quietly women are erased. They just don’t count, you know? There’s one man in a yoga class and the (female) teacher uses “he” because to misgender the lone man would be … what? I’m not even sure. Criminal? A rip in the fabric of space-time? The end of the world? There are hundreds of thousands, millions, of women in Texas to whom abortions can be relevant. There might be a few dozen trans men to whom it’s relevant, so, ZOMG, above all be sure not to misgender them!
What in HELL is going on here?
If all this is happening in the cause of progressivism and anti-bigotry and tolerance and all that good stuff, how about not stuffing women under the bus every chance there is?
Surely being unbigoted about women is part of being unbigoted about genders? Or, as Josh said far better, “More succinctly: Scolding people for talking about women’s reproductive rights is the gender equivalent of the white guy who comes in to a discussion of police murder of blacks with #AllLivesMatter.”
@mck9: I’m not a biologist, but it is has been my understanding that for human sexual dimorphism the differences *within* each sex are much greater than the differences *between* the average/typical representative of each sex for most (if not all) biological metrics. Is that not the case for the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus and Suprachiasmatic Nucleus?
I also found Burkett’s piece to be thought-provoking. When trans individuals say things like “my brain is different,” or “I was born with the wrong body,” it would seem like trans people would be more acutely aware of the social construction of gender than these types of statements would indicate. But to me it sounds similar to when some gay or lesbian individuals say “I can’t help it; I was born this way” or “I didn’t choose to be this way.” In either case there’s a defensiveness there, a response to the popular accusation that the sexual preference or the gender is being chosen, with its unspoken suggestion that people shouldn’t be making personal choices–which should itself be challenged whether or not there are biological factors to sexual orientation, and/or gender. It seems like over the past few decades gay men and lesbians in general have been able to become much less defensive. Maybe growing acceptance of trans people will also allow them to spend less time talking about how they’re biologically doomed to their plights.
I agree with Burkett that male-to-female trans individuals haven’t experienced being women in the same way as those who were assigned female status at birth, and can never know what it’s like to be indoctrinated as a female over the course of a lifetime. But there is a flip side to that. Perhaps those who suddenly experience female status after a lifetime of male privilege will be more conscious of the privations of second-class citizenship than those of us who have never known anything else, and will be more motivated to change that. They could be powerful allies in feminism for that reason.
Though of course issues of female reproduction are inseparable from both gender in a patriarchal society and biological sex. It’s not reasonable for male-to-female trans women to be included in such issues for the same reason that it’s not reasonable for men to expect parity in decisions about abortion: there is a biological limitation there.
But I don’t know how common the examples of extremism and unreasonableness described by Burkett actually are among the transgendered community. There are extremists in every movement, and while they can be useful in pushing movements along, their views can easily be misconstrued as the mainstream views of a movement. Maybe there’s a serious division in the making, or maybe not.
There’s a tension between the idea that gender is socially constructed and we get to shape it any way we want to, and the idea that it’s firmly binary and we are one or the other with no overlap or shaping allowed. This whole thing is just riddled with tensions, and it’s not transphobic to try to think about them.
[…]
Ophelia: Thank you for posting this. You have voiced an uneasiness that I share. I have been reluctant to speak about this myself for fear of not being able to articulate my position without unintentionally causing hurt and offense to people I care about. But I too ” would like to go on being able to ask searching questions about gender and the status of women.” I too “would like to go on being able to talk about women.”
I have to disagree with you, Josh, on the “not all white men” equivalence. The #notallmen and similar is about privileged people hijacking a discussion. The trans men who need access to the women’s health services do not have privilege. It’s a different dynamic.
I think the Republican war on women IS a war on women. They certainly don’t care if trans people get caught up in it because they hate trans men too. But then again, trans men are barely even on their radar so far – unlike trans women. We do need to be clear on that. But we do also need not to exclude trans men and nonbinary folk. I’m not sure what the solution is.
Assuming gender is nothing more than a social construct, what does it even mean to say that one identifies as a woman or a man rather than with one’s biological sex?
theobromine:
The average man is taller than the average woman, but there’s a lot of overlap. It’s not hard to find some women taller than some men. The sexual dimorphism in the Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus seems to be more pronounced.
According to Hofman and Swaab, the nucleus in males has an average volume more than twice that of females (0.182 and 0.084 cubic mm, respectively, with standard errors of 0.0222 and 0.0116 cubic mm). I.e. there was very little overlap.
Some of that difference comes from the fact that men’s brains tend to be bigger, because their bodies tend to be bigger, and there’s no reason to expect brains to be exempt from that tendency. However men’s bodies and brains are not bigger by a factor of 2.
Age is another confounding factor. In both sexes, the number of cells in this nucleus peaks at about age 4 and then declines. In males it declines slowly until about age 50, and then starts to decline more rapidly. In females it declines sooner, more or less plateaus, and then starts to decline again at around age 70. Thus the difference is pronounced during her child-bearing years (and again in old age). When you lump all ages together for purposes of comparison, the results you get will depend on the mix of ages. Since Hofman and Swaab didn’t publish the raw data, it’s hard to know how age may have affected the results.
Confirmation bias may also rear its ugly head. Hypothalamic nuclei typically have fuzzy boundaries, some more than others. Drawing dotted lines around them involves judgment calls. If you’re expecting to see a big nucleus, or a small one, it may be hard not to nudge the dotted lines accordingly. It’s not clear from the Hofman and Swaab paper whether the people doing the measurements knew the sex of the brains they were measuring.
Finally, the numbers are small, making it hard to do good statistics. Hofman and Swaab had 13 males and 17 females. In fairness, this kind of morphometric study is extremely tedious and time-consuming to do, especially with big brains like humans’. It would be hard to get as large a sample as you’d like.
Despite these caveats, sexual dimorphism in this nucleus appears from this and other studies to be quite real and quite pronounced. If it is any comfort, the dimorphism is less pronounced in humans than it is in rats, where the male’s nucleus is 3 – 8 times as big as the female’s.
Alethea, that’s a good point and it shows where my analogy stops working. I don’t think it stops working totally, though. It’s factually true that the effect—regardless of the lack of privilege trans men have, in context, which I am not disputing—is to stop discussion of women’s issues *as women’s* issues. That’s real. It actually happens. And being in a less privileged position doesn’t change that this effect is real and obvious to see. I’m trying very hard to make it clear I’m not assigning blame.
“I’m not sure what the solution is” could be my everyday Mantra(TM) lately.
mck9: All of that can be true without making the original point meaningless. In ways that we tend to conceive of these things and talk about them, it’s not possible to “pick a female brain” apart from a male. These folks aren’t talking about the thing you’re talking about. They’re talking on a much more generalized and fraught level.
It can be simultaneously true that:
a. Features of brains may sexually dimorphic
b. The features of brains that society talks about AS IF they were sexually dimorphic are not.
Can we stipulate this and move on?
Transmen who want to conceive have to stop taking testosterone.
Huh? This makes no sense to me. Plenty of trans people start hormone therapy (if they do so at all) later in life, often after having children. Jan Morris fathered five children before she transitioned. I should think there are probably loads of trans men who’ve been pregnant. It’s also possible for some men to get pregnant while on testosterone, though if they want to continue the pregnancy they have to go off T for the duration. In any case, birth control and abortion are still often of direct personal import to a trans man.
Jeanette @ 22 – great comment.
I think you’re right about the examples of extremism and unreasonableness – I don’t think they’re representative. I think they’re just loud, and belligerent.
There are certainly many cis women who agree with Caitlyn Jenner. I get ticked at them, too. I don’t know why I should be more ticked at Jenner because she is trans.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand I never said you should.
josh @29:
I’m not so sure that they aren’t. They may not be talking about hypothalamic nuclei in particular, but the original subject was whether men and women have different brains.
Answer: Yes they do, in at least one respect, allowing of course for various exceptions and anomalies.
At a minimum, this particular nucleus is apparently involved pretty directly in sexual behavior, and maybe in hormonal regulation. We don’t know what else it may affect less directly.
There are likely to be differences that we don’t know about in other parts of the brain — probably with more variability because they’re not so directly linked to reproduction.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were differences in the brains of at least some trans people, and gays and lesbians for that matter — things we haven’t noticed, or don’t know how to notice. I was intrigued by another study from the same lab, comparing a sample of gay men to a reference group, presumably of straight men. The Sexually Dimorphic Nucleus didn’t look any different, but the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus was about twice as big as usual. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the full paper.
There is a notion in some quarters that the developing brain is some kind of blank slate, to be inscribed with gender roles by experience and social conditioning.
We already know that the brain is not a blank slate. We just don’t know what is writ there.
Ophelia@33: seems to me Elinor Burkett does, though. Why else would Jenner be her jumping-off point and not a zillion cis women who’ve said the same thing?
I think part of the problem is the conflation of identity with all of the cultural baggage that’s come to be associated with being a man or a woman. I’ve always felt that I’m a woman, felt that my woman’s body was “right,” and this has never had anything whatsoever to do with my preferences, interests, emotions, or abilities. I didn’t question whether I was a boy because I liked sports and math and had no interest in dolls or having children. I wasn’t confirmed in my girlness because I nurtured (stuffed and real) animals or liked playing with other girls or dancing. The thought that I might actually be a boy simply never occurred to me, and in the years since, as I’ve learned about people whose experience was very different, I understood them but still never shared that experience. And I believe this is true of everyone: people understand their identity, however complex that might be; they don’t develop that identity on the basis of what they like or what interests them. I’m sometimes a man in my dreams, but I don’t wake up confused about my identity.
I just don’t think there’s a connection – I don’t think trans women know they’re women because they like nail polish or weddings or whatever is associated with women in their culture. I think they know they’re women, and then, like everyone else in the culture, often have (stupid) ideas about what that entails.
None of the nonsense associating women with some things and men with others is the fault of trans people. They can reproduce it, as we all can, but the problem is with the culture generally. So when I as a feminist challenge some aspect of patriarchy – including the media or public response to a trans woman – I’m not trying to lay the problem at their door.
I didn’t read the Jezebel thing, or your post about it, Ophelia, or any of the surrounding arguments, but I did read Alex Gabriel’s post here at FTB, and in general I don’t think I agreed. I almost commented at his blog, but pretty quickly decided it was a bad idea given the probable appearance of the asshole flash mob. You’d think they’d have enough spaces what with Pharyngula, the Pharyngula FB group, the Atheism+ forum, all of their own FB pages, etc., etc. But no – they have to swarm comment threads everywhere they can (where have I seen that before…?) to squelch discussion by launching attacks and throwing out misrepresentations. I’m not at all happy with Gabriel for giving them another space in which to do it.
Anyway, I found his post strange and unconvincing. He asks at one point something like “Are compliments only acceptable for cis white women?” It’s a bizarre question. The point isn’t about compliments, but about a culture we inhabit as women. Women raised as girls,* from the very moment we’re born, are responded to based on our appearance. We’re looked at, watched, assessed, compared, judged, commented on in our presence or absence, chastised, warned about our fate as we age, instructed on how to be properly decorative, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And we see this happen to other women. There’s no escape, and it’s unimaginably tedious. We all have one life, and we have to put up with this bullshit?
Compliments aren’t something separate from this problem – they’re part of it. Within this system, every compliment carries several messages to women: “I have the right to assess and comment upon your appearance,” “You should heed my opinion,” “Your value is in how you look,” “You should respond positively,” “You can always face a different judgment,” and occasionally “I’m threatening.” In this perverse environment, some compliments I outwardly greet with a smile meet with an internal “Go fuck yourself.” But like almost every woman, I’ve been shaped by this culture – of course I can’t just leave it behind practically speaking, but I also can’t just erase all of my responses to it.
And this is terrible. We all like compliments. In all cultures, people work to make themselves attractive (and this can be fun when it’s not felt as an obligation or necessity or impossibility), and enjoy it when others express appreciation for their efforts. But our system of appreciation of physical beauty is so distorted in so many ways, and especially when it comes to women, that we can’t separate even an ostensibly complimentary focus on a woman’s appearance from it. I would trade never being on the receiving end of another compliment for an end to this system, for a culture in which equality reigns, in which appearance is just one part of how everyone is seen, in which tastes aren’t shaped by commercial interests, in which “dressing up” is for special events, in which no one is derided or held back for not measuring up to anyone else’s standards of attractiveness.
So…the cover. I’ll say at the outset that I’m thrilled for Caitlyn Jenner. I hope she lives in happiness every moment of her liberation, with her family by her side. I’m also thrilled for the innumerable other trans people her brave decision will help. I’m not interested in her political views, which, judging by the Sawyer interview, are fairly conservative rubbish. But I honestly had forgotten even that she was an Olympic athlete. When I googled and was reminded, I had a memory of the 1976 Olympics, at which Bruce Jenner won the decathlon. I was glued to the gymnastics, where 14-year-old Nadia Comăneci received a perfect 10 and the gold. I was awed. When they had a tour of the gymnastics Olympians across the US, my best friend and I went and were enthralled. They were strong, athletic, and impressive girls. Not once did I think they were boys, or that we were boys for thinking how fantastic it was. It was just another step in the “this is part of what it is or can be to be a woman – we’re not restricted” advance.
I won’t judge Caitlyn Jenner on her choices; nor do I think she’s responsible for all of the commentary that surrounds the VF cover. I’m not saying she did it wrong. But she was a world class athlete. It would have been amazing had the cover shown her running (does she still? does she have injuries?) or doing something athletic. It would have been great had she contributed to the understanding that “woman” is expansive, not an essence but an existence, not a corset but a leap.
* Obviously the identity-experience issue is complicated: men raised as girls and women raised as boys, for example, have more complex experiences.
I have occasionally wondered if we went wrong changing from “transsexual” to “transgender”. A few trans people have described the body dysmorphia of not having your mental map match your body – this gives immediate easy understanding. Think of phantom limbs. It’s a problem. By all means go fix it how your brain wants. This is easy.
But gender? Isn’t gender performative? How can you be the wrong gender; you just go ahead and do what you want? Be femme or butch or neither or both as you wish. Sure, there is social stigma attached to appearing the wrong gender, but that’s bigotry, and we shouldn’t have to change ourselves to please bigots. Sadly some people in reality have to do that to survive, but we still don’t have to buy into the bigots’ world view.
I’d really welcome trans perspectives on this. What even is gender?
SC, may I share your comment (with attribution) on Facebook?
Yes, of course.
Thanks, SC.
Irene to clarify, I was referring not to transmen who transition later in life after conceiving and giving birth as women but to young transmen who are living as transmen, who wish to conceive and who are taking testorerone. This is probably a limited proportion of the trans population, and that was my point. And I would still like to know how many trans men conceive and give birth. I would be surprised if it were “loads” if late transitioning trans men who were formerly female mothers of children are eliminated. To be honest, though it’s not my biggest concern, merely a curiosity. I think the Texas fund’s reasoning is flawed but any person who needs reproductive health care of any kind should have access to it, in Texas and in the rest of the world.
Lady Mondegreen, thank you. I had to think it through. The list of myths about trans people is pretty useful, I think. Where do you stand on the division of gender into gender orientation, gender identity, and gender expression?
I have to say, this article lost me with all the misgendering (“Bruce” in a lot of places, “Mr. Jenner” in at least one of the pullquotes). I get that it’s tricky to navigate if you’ve not had to give it any thought before, but if you’re wanting to write a piece with this particular topic, especially for the New York freaking times, wouldn’t you do the research to make sure you weren’t really fucking it up?
I freely admit that I have fucked up in the same way, out of sheer ignorance of the conventions. I was called on it (nicely, for the record), I listened, did some more research, and have taken the corrections to heart.
luzclara one of the articles I found features a trans couple who had children together. It doesn’t specifically mention testosterone treatment, or the cessation thereof, but one could assume that would have been necessary.
fwiw: http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/meet-bowsers-transgender-parents-raising-sons/story?id=28228493
@luzclara, you’re welcome.
Makes sense to me. It’s important to understand that those things can be teased apart. A lot of people of my generation (and older), including feminists, tend to assume that all trans woman, for example, are “girly.” It’s not true, but it seemed true at one time, because society didn’t recognize other ways of being for trans women. Doctors certainly wouldn’t authorize medical transition for people who were, say, tomboyish lesbian trans women.
But really it doesn’t matter what I think about these things, does it? I propose Ophelia invite some trans women to take the floor. And then maybe she can host some good faith, non-abusive discussion between trans and cis feminists. I don’t like seeing the assholes poison the discourse. There is real pain and misunderstanding on both sides.
I think that’s a terrific idea, although I suspect then ‘good faith, non-abusive discussion’ part might be hard to regulate.
The ‘brain body mismatch’ notion is a reasonable way to insist that trans identity is a Real Thing. But as a neuro/psychological explanation it veers off into 50s sci-fi.
Too bad the idea has been reified into an obligatory belief. I’d recommend looking at ‘Galileo’s Middle Finger’ for an example of ‘activist’ creeps smearing and stalking a (pro trans rights) researcher for daring to even think about questioning a metaphor run wild.
Seems to that, metaphor-wise, the problem is that they (Jenner et al.) are conflating mind with brain. Common, but leads to a bad metaphor.
Identical twins can have different brains, as can straight/bi/gay/asexual people or even left/right handed. Differences are always possible, but I don’t buy the idea that gender makes people utterly alien to each other while other traits don’t. Unless I’m misinformed, an ovum doesn’t have a gender until it’s fertilized and begins to grow, and both female and male grow out of the same type of ovum. About the only place where you’re going to find vast differences is where developmental issues exist (i.e. birth defects, malnutrition, abuse, etc.).
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I can’t answer 20+ different posts that I want to respond to, so I’m giving a general answerr:
I can only speak for myself and have only met one transgendered woman personally, but I’ve never had the “trapped in a man’s body” feeling. A lot of my life I’ve wished I had been born a woman, other times happy as a man. I have to wonder if some/many who want to transition also vacillate between the gender assigned at birth and the preferred gender, that it’s not a definite feeling or desire to live as the one opposite gender.
I like certain things usually associated solely with women (e.g. types of clothing, makeup and jewelry) but I’ve never felt the need to be hyperfeminine. Sometimes I want to feel “pretty”, other times “handsome”, and a lot of times both at once and in varying amounts. Altering the voice is one of the most difficult things, wanting to speak in a normal woman’s voice and not take on any excessive affectations. I look forward to the day we dump gender expectations and nobody cares what anyone else does.
And in response to one specific point, I love my nail polish as well as my eye liner. I wish I could wear them more than just on weekends, but work precludes that.
Fund Texas Women… recently changed its name to Fund Texas Choice.
Meanwhile, the abortion-rights movement has in large part abandoned the (generally successful) banner of “Choice”, apparently mostly because of feedback from (some representatives of) poor black women that they felt excluded from a goal they saw as presented as a consumer option (and the extant “pro-choice” community seemingly failed to convince them to demand that possibility for themselves rather than cede it to the domain of middle/upper-class white
womenuterus owners).If I hadn’t spent most of my life as a progressive-causes activist and seen first-hand our movements’ proclivities to self-sabotage, I would offer the suggestion that these terminological purists get support and marching orders from, ah, hostile agencies.
Yay, I got absolutely roasted for saying this on FTB the other day. Better late than never
“No. The rage and “hypervigilance” of for instance HappiestSadist is not “understandable” as a consequence of Cathy Brennan. This really isn’t the right place or the right day to tell me how “understandable” this shit is. I did / said nothing outrageous, and a little knot of people are shredding me on the basis of lies.”
Welcome to gender critical feminism!
This brings up a good point that gets lost in this discussion, I think. Has anybody stopped to think that maybe trans people use language like this knowing it’s a poor analogy and has problems, because it’s the only accepted thing to say? Most articles don’t have room for a nuanced exploration of what it’s like to slowly piece together an idea of your identity over many years. Most people aren’t willing to hear anything but the “born this way” narrative. And the idea of gender as choice, in the public sphere, is controlled entirely by people who seek to criminalize the daily lives of trans people. Why should we be eager to be shut down, shut out, or demonized? I don’t want to damage feminism or hurt women’s causes, by any stretch of the imagination (and when discussing these matters myself, I try to avoid the ISO Standard Trans Narrative for this and other reasons)… but I can’t really fault people for saying the only thing they’re allowed to say, when the alternative is once again being boogeymen or punchlines and nothing more.
Ephiral @49,
The problem is very deep; we live in a milieu where most people don’t distinguish between sex and gender, believe in gender essentialism, and assign social roles to each gender; people like that lack the conceptual framework to understand the issues at hand. They can’t ‘get it’, even if they’re well-meaning — which many aren’t.
I think this thread is a place where people are genuinely seeking to be informed about this — and don’t forget there are lurkers.
(Also, since I’m not familiar with your nym, I note Ophelia is quite firm with trolls and abusers; they do not get to derail)
John Morales @52: I… may have been less than clear. I’m not criticizing this place by any stretch – I’m a long-time lurker, and comfortable talking here. My point, really, is that the context in which trans people exist forces a choice between the necessary and the good.
If we’re not allowed to say “Well, it took me 30 years, a lot of research, and a lot of deep introspection to figure out what was going on in my head,” (and why not? People get to say that all the time about things that aren’t gender) and we’re not allowed to say “Well, I always knew I was different, my brain was just wired that way”, what is left to us?
Ephiral–yes, it’s an undeniably frustrating problem for trans people, who, at the end of the day, shouldn’t have to explain themselves at all.
And imagine how gobsmackingly surprising it would be if male and female brains (and therefore, probably, psychologies) had not evolved differently, given the different sorts of things they were required to do while they were evolving.
Actually, the things they do aren’t all that different. Take maternal care of offspring: even in species in which males participate minimally or not at all in such care, males often protect the group, and the behaviors needed are largely the same behaviors.
Even sex specific behaviors like nursing are not entirely sex specific–male rats have been observed to lactate around orphaned pups. Females mount other females. That sort of thing isn’t unusual.
In any case the sexes are going to have the vast majority of behaviors in common. Females have to hunt, or forage, or graze, to stay alive, and they have to defend themselves from predators and rivals. There’s rarely a clear-cut division of labor. Nature isn’t a 1950s family sitcom.
I don’t think there’s a single trait outside of pregnancy/birth/nursing that hasn’t been considered masculine in some cultures and feminine in others. Even in western history it often changes: women are really good with numbers, hire them as calculators; then bad flighty & can’t balance a chequebook. Women are highly sexual temptresses, then near-asexual saintly madonnas. Women live for love; or are incapable of genuine love. Weak creatures who pull ploughs and carry water.