Originally a comment by A surprise to many on The art of the question.
What the hell is so difficult about a yes-and-no answer to the “trans women are women” question? For some, perhaps even most, purposes, yes, absolutely. For other purposes (women’s reproductive health, family policy, FGM), no.
This is no different from any other socially constructed group identity. Is Barack Obama African American? Yes. And no. Is the Nigerian immigrant who runs the pizza place near my job? Yes. And no. Is someone with a Jewish father a Jew? Yes. And no. Are messianic Jews Jewish? Yes. And no.
Am I a woman? Yes. And no. Even though I was identified female at birth and have gestated and lactated, there are ways in which I do not feel particularly comfortable being labeled “woman” and in which some people would classify me as not-a-woman. Being a woman is a social identity grounded in part, but only in part, on physical characteristics. It’s not a you-are-or-you-aren’t category.
(Disclosure: I too am a member of the frightening gender discussion group. Anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes reading the group will note that there are many different opinions on gender and trans gender issues held by members of the group. I’ve learned a lot and been challenged to think of better arguments as a result of participating in the group. I’ve found myself agreeing and arguing with Hungerford in different threads on different topics. Gender is not an easy thing to define or analyze, and if we’re going to discard every single writer or forum with whom we don’t completely agree, we’re going to end up putting feminist intellectual history through its own extinction event.)
Surely only a gender essentialist would take issue with that.
If saying “it’s complicated” and wanting to discuss and explore the complexities is beyond the pale–I’d say that’s a handy way of shutting down honest discourse.
I confess to being out of my depth in discussions of gender. Gender clearly IS socially-constructed. Yet it clearly IS somehow or other real, as well, or transgender wouldn’t be a thing. Being a transgender woman is NOT simply a matter of preferring dresses and lipstick; otherwise there would be no such thing as a transgender butch woman, but there are. It’s also clearly NOT about sexual orientation: every sexual orientation is represented among trans people.
I can’t comprehend what it means to “know that you are male/female,” because I don’t particularly “feel” my gender. I don’t have any discernible dysphoria, and I’m heterosexual, so by default I identify as my birth gender assignment–but it doesn’t “feel” like anything. I don’t get it when non-binary people talk about not feeling like any particular gender, because neither do I; I don’t really understand what “being a particular gender” is actually supposed to feel like. Yet dysphoria is actually a thing, so it must feel like something to someone.
It’s obviously an enormously complicated interaction between physiology, culture, and who knows what all else, and I don’t pretend to understand it. I just try hard not to be shitty to people.
Oh hello “white cis TERF”. I can relate. It doesn’t get better.
Now that you’ve seen the righteous lies spreading about yourself (lying is good if it’s the righteous that lie), does it make you wonder what sort of stuff have you been lied to regarding other women? It did me. It’s a very long rabbit hole.
I never thought I’d say this, but can we go back to discussing Richard Carrier’s emissions? Ah, the good old days…
Me either.
There was a comment at We Hunted the Mammoth a few weeks back (I commented on it here before) where someone said that they had found two different groups of people who really didn’t ‘get’ trans issues intuitively. One was the group of people who strongly identified with their gender, assumed everybody else was like that, and therefore that anybody who didn’t identify with their gender was wrong in some way. The other was the group of people who don’t strongly identify with any gender at all, and don’t really understand what it’s like to have a strong identity, particularly one that doesn’t match your physical body. Both of these groups have the same apparent problem on the outside, but completely different ways of getting there, and need different approaches. Especially since the first group is often personally invested in the concept of a gender binary, while the second group will consider the binary to be a default assumption if they haven’t thought about it, but they don’t really care about it to the same extent.
I get the impression most of the original TERF types were in the first group, or at least certainly acting like it: they were being explicit gatekeepers to the concept of ‘being a woman’, drawing boundaries, and in general acting like a mirror image of the problem they were ostensibly fighting against. But a lot of the people here I’ve seen here (including myself) are in the second group; we may make mistakes, but we’re not trying to draw bright line boundaries at all and don’t really intuitively grasp why other people are. Which often puts us on the wrong side of a lot of different lines that other people DO insist on, just because we don’t necessarily see them.
Oh. Yes. That’s exactly it.