Without having to go back
Another thing about that CisPrivilege Check List – item 22.3.1 again:
I was trained into whatever gender was appropriate for me, and so I am prepared to live in my current gender, without having to go back and learn vital skills I was not taught when I was young.
That’s privilege because trans people don’t have that: they were not trained into their “appropriate” gender, so they are not prepared to live in their current gender without going back to learn vital skills.
But isn’t it supposed to be trans-exclusionary for women to point out that trans women who grew up as boys don’t have the experience of being the lesser, the subordinate, the inferior, the feeble, the not very bright sex? And that that’s why sometimes feminist women want to be able to talk to each other about having grown up being the lesser, the subordinate, the inferior, the feeble, the not very bright sex?
Trans women have always been women, we’re told. To say otherwise is transphobic, isn’t it? Isn’t that too what we’re told?
I’m not sure all of this has been carefully thought through.
H/t Mr FP.
I don’t find it particularly contradictory. I think there are two different levels at which these observations can be made.
While growing up, a trans person is socialized to understand the societal norms applied to men and women. And they know that they violate those norms, because their affinity is for the gender they weren’t assigned at birth. This is why a trans woman points out that they weren’t actually “socialized as boys.” They were always defective boys. Sissies. Nancy-boys. Wimps. And an assortment of other slurs.
However, a trans person is not raised learning the skills that go with their gender identity. For women in our culture, that means skills like caring for one’s hair, applying makeup, how to walk in heels, how to date, etc. A lot of that stuff is bullshit, of course: women are expected to do those things, and they shouldn’t be expected to do any of them if they don’t want to. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of little things that women just know, and trans women have to learn the hard way. By not knowing those things, they mark themselves as “other.” They stick out like a sore thumb. They’re rejected by cis men because they fail to perform their assigned gender role, and they’re rejected by cis women because they perform that role incorrectly in subtle ways that cis women tend to find alienating.
The one level is about expectations like nurturing, peacemaking, deferring, etc., etc. The other level is wearing a skirt but sitting like a man (think Huck Finn). Trans people know all about the former, but the latter is as daunting as eliminating your native accent when speaking a foreign language.
Disclaimer: I don’t know any of this firsthand. I’m going by what I read and am told.
Cis-men I know grew up getting mocked our beaten for not fitting into their assigned behavior well enough– for having friends who were girls, for reading, for being sensitive, for liking bright colors. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe they were boys, it’s that they didn’t think being a boy should have to mean they had to fit a mold. You don’t have to be trans for toxic masculinity to make life hell for you, and to be constantly told you are defective.
Cis-women grew up being told not to have adventures, be too competitive, too smart. We grew up being told that pretty and virtuous were the most important things we could be. We never saw someone like us in charge of anything more important than a classroom. And yet some girls couldn’t help themselves but be those things. We also can’t all walk in high heels and can’t get our hair to behave (so we cut it short) and our makeup always comes out lopsided.
So you can call me defective. A feminist say heels, makeup, and pretty hair are less important than my degree in mathematics and high scores in Scrabble.
Gender is a problematic concept. For everyone.
Samantha Vimes, exactly.
But we don’t all just know them. Really, we don’t.
‘caring for one’s hair, applying makeup, how to walk in heels, how to date’
I’m female by default, but don’t have any of these skills. Having XX chromosomes/secondary sex characteristics/a uterus somehow didn’t magically grant me this expertise. I also didn’t learn to cook or clean growing up. I learned these skills, and any of the other magically feminine skills I do happen to possess, like anyone learns anything–through reading, being explicitly taught, and trial and error.
You make some points, A Masked Avenger @1. But… doesn’t exactly what you’re saying play right in to the topic that people socialized as boys or girls were not taught the intricacies of being girls or boys? I mean, you’re basically making the point. If socialization as a gender IS a thing, then it’s a thing. If people have to go back after the fact and “learn how to be a gender” then they didn’t get socialized into it. Right?
WRT to being “socialized”: as a defective male person, I certainly experienced that, too. I was certainly “defective as a boy” when I was growing up, since I was small/weak/what have you. But, yet, I still got the socialization as a boy, and I still learned the lessons of how to act as a male person. I still suffer from that, as a result. You can get the socialization without meeting the standard, that should be obvious.
I just want to say that the bulk of this comment is really, truly, offensive. Hair? Makeup? How to walk in heels? How to date? Jesus fucking christ on a raft. This is how you define “being a woman” ? Is this not the antithesis of what so many feminists have been fighting against for so long?
Regarding “what women ‘just know'”, I think that the comments of many women here contradict that. Many women are not “raised learning the skills that go with their gender identity”. Nor was I raised “learning the skills of being male”. It seems like you’re trying to make a definition of gender based on how people were raised. Good luck with that.
>> “They were always defective boys. Sissies. Nancy-boys. Wimps.”
That’s the particular contradiction right there, isn’t it? The idea that getting stuck with those labels is a symptom of being “really” a woman – or being bad at cosmetics makes one “really” a man – seems like a pretty sexist assumption coming from people that would like to claim to be not-sexist.
“Trans women have always been women, we’re told. To say otherwise is trans-phobic, isn’t it? Isn’t that too what we’re told?”
Its not what I have been told. Trans women are women because they “identify” as a woman and declare it so, regardless of how they were born or socialised.
Its trans-phobic to believe in your secret heart that this is bullshit, even if you support such a woman’s right to live as she pleases.
I find the comment of B Lar above quite illuminating.
The standpoint seems to be as follows:
1. There are indeed differences in socialization between trans women and AFABs, but they are not that important!
2. Trans women *are* women (not necessarily “have always been women”).
3. Therefore, the type of socialization doesn’t determine your gender. It may still play a role, but the transition from “this-and-this type of socialization” to “a woman” is NOT automatic.
4. It’s trans-phobic to believe in your secret heart that 2 is bullshit (see B Lar).
Now, you say that:
I think ‘the other side’ simply disbelieves you on this point. They probably see you as promoting the experience of “being the lesser, the subordinate, the inferior, the feeble, the not very bright sex” as your hidden characterisation of a woman – in your practice, even if not explicitly in your theory. After all, conversations about the experience of “being the lesser, the subordinate etc.” are seen by many as quite essential to feminism. When excluding trans women from conversations on such crucial topics, when creating your separate groups (composed of AFABs wanting to talk “to each other”), what you really signalize is that you do not see trans women as women “in your secret heart”. You are like all-white clubs, excluding black people on the pretext of the need of sharing ‘our peculiar, oh-so-important white experience’ (sorry, dear, but you are not quite our class!). Therefore, you are transphobic.
[As I said, B Lar’s comment was illuminating and don’t blame me for trying to do my best! My own opinion? It’s a total and hopeless clusterfuck. Ah, by the way: just don’t ask me what 1-4 exactly mean, pretty please!]
there are hundreds of little things that women just know, and trans women have to learn the hard way.
It is more oppressive for trans women, obviously, because they get less support learning this shit and more (even more) opprobrium for failing to learn it – but it is utter utter bullshit to say that “women just know”. Women, be they cis or trans, do not “just know” a great many of the things regarded as somehow an essential part of performing femininity – and there are some, such as automatically deferring to men, softening our words with a smile, apologising for being interrupted etc. etc. which we would be better off not learning/having inculcated. And isn’t that the point?
Yes, there is undoubtedly such a thing as cis privilege – but that should not be used as a reason to reject feminist efforts to question gender performance and thereby actually try to undermine gender performance demands and cis privilege itself!!! ffs.
Ariel, your 2nd point is not quite correct (as far as I have been made aware), and it should instead probably read “people who identify as woman are women”.
I don’t think its as much of a clusterfuck as you imagine… Its probably the case that as society gradually stops policing gender, that instances of people experiencing dysphoria will reduce, since there will be less internalised penalties for experiencing life outside your gender “norm”. Old ideas of gender performance will become quaint and archaic, and we can get on to the business of just being us rather than trying to be what others expect us to be.
The only possible problem that I can see is that of general society rejecting TG identity-as-reality theory as making no fucking sense, and carrying on policing gender as ever before, but with MORE disdain for those unjustly pigeonholed. However, since (as far as I can see) everyone is swallowing IaR without chewing, the future is looking pretty bright…
… except for feminists of course. A new cudgel will be developed when the TERF one wears out, you can be certain of it.
Voriank, #6:
Dafuq? What person do you know who uses labels like “sissy,” etc., and simultaneously claims not to be sexist? I’m stating the objective fact that gay men, trans women, and other such folk are routinely slapped with precisely those labels. They are rejected by straight cis men because of their failure to perform masculinity as expected. These people doing the labeling are real, and they make no claims whatsoever of being “non-sexist.” Quite the opposite: they are quite specifically saying they don’t want to associate with “queers” or [insert slander here].
If people who identify as women are women and I don’t identify as a woman (most of the time), than am I not a woman?
If I’m not, what am I?
These are the thoughts that got me banhammered on another blog site.
Here are the times I identify as a woman:
when I have to pee, cuz there’s no way I can manage a urinal
when I menstruate (dang thing won’t shut off even after over 40 years)
when the doctor sends me annoying notes about PAP smears and mammograms
when I purchase pants because men’s pants gap at the waist so badly that I’d have to alter each pair to keep pine needles from falling into my underwear.
Notice that all the above involve my physical body, not my mental image/identity of myself.
So, if I identify as a not-a-woman, and I have the body of a woman, what gender am I?
If a TG woman ia a woman, full stop, am I a man, full stop, despite my plumbing and body shape? Despite how society treats me? Despite my higher risk of uterine, ovarian and breast cancers?
If it’s all about identity, and clothes, hair, makeup, high heels and dating, then I’m definitely not a woman.
Maybe we need more gender words. When I worked at Western State Hospital in the 80’s (the largest mental hospital in the state) their admit forms had 9 genders. Of course using more than two would make some people not ‘whatever gender they identified as’ full stop, and hurt people’s feelings.
MrFancyPants, #5:
That’s kind of a dumb statement. Are black girls socialized the same as Amish girls? Are all people equally influenced by their socialization?
Socialization is part of culture. You might as well have said, “If culture is a thing, then it’s a thing.” But that’s also obviously a stupid statement. There are: black people who hate hip-hop and love country music; southerners who hate grits; Mexicans who hate spicy food; French people who hate wine; Polish people who hate pierogis or haluszki.
Interpreting any statement about culture or socialization as a universal or absolute statement is… (pause to sort through adjectives)… quite misguided.
Samantha Vimes, #2
Indeed. Specifically, I was mocked and beaten for having friends who were girls, for reading, for being sensitive, and for liking bright colors. So you may be interested to know that your statement is not news to me. Thanks for the news bulletin, though.
The price of my non-conformity was being ostracized by my male peers and growing up essentially friendless. (In my small town, I wasn’t lucky enough to find a social group of similar people, so I had no social group at all.) And in the process, I failed to learn hundreds of skills that now I must learn the hard way as an adult. When I try to fit in it tends to backfire. For example, I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a homoerotic aspect to “male bonding,” but that doing it wrong–and therefore being read as “gay”–carries severe repercussions? Or that male social interactions involve dominance displays that, if done wrong, either label one as an “asshole,” or worse, come across as plays for the top of the pecking order? And that a play for the top of the pecking order meets with severe reprisals? I don’t know how the rituals work, because I was never allowed to participate in them, and now men often think I’m either trying to fight them or fuck them? Yep, it’s fun.
NOTE! I’m not trying to sympathy wank here. I went on to earn a PhD, and I almost get along with my peers, because most of the time it’s my intellect that matters and not my social skills. I’m an upper middle class cis white male with a family of his own, so although my circle of friends is ridiculously small, nevertheless I’m not exactly suffering here.
I can certainly imagine, though, what would have happened if I showed up to school in a dress. I don’t know first hand, but I can imagine. And I can certainly appreciate the privilege of being beaten into submission, rather than being beaten to within an inch of my life or to death.
> “What person do you know who uses labels like “sissy,” etc., and simultaneously claims not to be sexist?”
That is not the words I typed, is it? I said the assumption that being the recipient of such labels is an indicator of being “really” a woman – “because their affinity is for the gender they weren’t assigned at birth”, in your words – is a sexist assumption. It’s like saying the sissy-callers are onto something that’s factually correct.
I’ve seen plenty of people that would claim to oppose sexism make that sexist assumption. I think that’s the contradiction you didn’t find.
There’s one clear communication problem here. Trans people see being “trained” to perform the gender associated with our biological sex as “privilege”. Feminists see that exact process as oppression.
De Beauvoir famously pointed out that as woman was “made not born” which refers to the process of socialisation into a gender role based on physical sex. There’s a logical contradiction here: either gender is a set of expected behaviours that one is socialised (trained) into in which case a woman is an adult female human being who has grown up on the receiving end of that socialisation and part of that was learning along the way some things that might include make up and walking in high heels etc. Or a woman is just anyone who has that subjective internal sense of “womanhood” regardless of biology.
If being woman is a process of socialisation then trans women can choose to learn the abilities natal women are forced to learn on the way but that’s the same process as natal women go through – none of us know this stuff by magic! In fact many of us in our young years are hurt and despised for not performing well enough. If womanhood is some mystical internal “sense” then these things should be inborn.
Either way, I don’t see privilege (or logic).
cazz, it is possible to be something other than man or woman.
If I had been better informed in my younger years I might have explored the possibility of being agender. Though I might have decided to retain the female identity just out of bloody-mindedness (as in yeah, so here’s a woman who doesn’t fit your criteria 1-23, what are you going to do about that?). I’m OK with identifying as female, but less OK with identifying as woman. But I’m not sure what exactly about it grates on my nerves.
cazz, rather than ‘have the body of a woman’ I’d phrase it as ‘having a body typical of a woman’ or ‘typically female body’.
Exactly; that’s it in a nutshell.
I’m glad so many people responded to A Masked Avenger, so I don’t have to – but I will nevertheless echo them in saying “not me, mate.” I don’t “just know” those things. I was sort of fascinated by some of them just before puberty, because I associated them with being GrownUp – but then I went off them at about 14. I never learned them properly, let alone being trained in them…although my older sister did try. Once I was in my 20s they basically just felt like drag, and I’ve never looked back. I’m straight and cis but none of those things are anything to do with me. The way I sit on public transport has everything to do with manners and nothing to do with gender – I sprawl a bit when I’m in no one’s way, and I withdraw everything when people are going down the aisle.
I’ve watched some videos of women “training” trans women to perform Woman better, and they horrify me.
‘Trans women have always been women, we’re told. To say otherwise is transphobic, isn’t it? Isn’t that too what we’re told? ‘
Which would mean that they were trans-women BEFORE they knew it personally? So they time-travel back and police themselves into the Correct attitudes and feelings from AFTER?
@Voriank:
Sorry, correction then: what people are you claiming go around saying, “People call me sissy! That proves I’m really a woman!”?
@cazz–yes, those are some times when I ‘identify as a woman’. Some other times I do: when I suddenly realise I’ve permitted myself to speak too loudly, too competently, too directly, and thus made the man or men in my vicinity uncomfortable, irritated or angry. When it’s made clear to me that I’m taking up too much physical or conversational space. When the response to something I say is a demeaning, condescending or belittling comment instead of an engagement with the content. When I’m threatened with violence. When I realise that my expectations aren’t going to be met because they conflict with other people’s expectations of my gender.
To be clear, you’re not insinuating that I’ve ever claimed that girls are born with innate, instinctual nail-polishing skills, right? Hopefully you’re not insinuating that. I certainly never said it.
I did use the phrase “just know.” I meant it in precisely the sense that I “just know” how to drive a stick shift, or how to type, or how to tie my shoes. I know things because I have been drilled in them sufficiently that I don’t have to think about it.
There seem to be multiple misunderstandings packed into this sentence. First, plenty of exceptions exist, and nobody ever said differently. In case you missed it, *I* am non-conforming, and *I* was never trained in a lot of those things.
Although note that I was trained in some, because although I had no friends, I did have a Dad. I actually remember being taught the correct way to pee, for example. There is a definite etiquette to urinal use, and if you suddenly found yourself equipped to use one, you would quickly out yourself as someone who has no idea of the proper way to use a urinal.
Look, none of this is remotely controversial: it’s enormously hard to pass as the other sex. All sorts of clues quickly give one away. None of them are innate, inherent, or biological; they’re all learned etiquette, mannerisms, or skills. If you dressed me in drag, put makeup on me, etc., I would look like a woman–but I would never be mistaken for one. Starting with the way I sit and the way I walk. And obviously there are women who sit and walk similarly to me–and they’re slurred as “mannish,” or accused of being a man in drag.
How do you label those meetings where the discussions are being had? “Cis-privileged women only” or “women only”? Do you see how the latter term is so painful to the trans community?
And this is what you’re not quite getting.
The messages you’re talking about aren’t delivered, generally, in small enclosed rooms where the boys can’t hear them. They’re part of our culture, our media–they surround and inundate us constantly. That’s pretty much the definition of how patriarchy works, isn’t it? Hell, that’s how men in a patriarchy learn what role women are supposed to perform.
Which is where pre-public trans women end up getting caught. They identify, internally, as women–so they take all those cues to heart as being about them. They internalize the definition (and benefits) of masculinity, too, but they never actually get the feeling that those messages are about them. “Boys are better at math” never gets applied, mentally, to their self-image.
Now, this isn’t a perfect cut. There’s the case of the classroom, for instance–the closeted trans girl will be treated as a boy by the teacher, and thus be more likely to be called upon than her cis girl classmates. But she’ll be less likely to actually try to be called upon–she won’t raise her hand, because she’ll have still internalized the message that girls aren’t supposed to do that.
Trans men and women end up with this horrid melange of messages, then, which don’t make sense regardless of whether or not they actually accept the patriarchal presumptions behind those messages, because they are contradictory and confounding.
Eliminating those messages is vital to moving forward as a society. But recognizing people trapped by them is a matter of battlefield triage.
I don’t label them. I’m not an administrator of anything, so it’s not my job to label meetings.
Oh yes they are – they’re delivered when women or girls are the only ones present as well as in mixed settings; they’re delivered in the family; they’re delivered by mothers and sisters; they’re delivered in the gendered sections of shops and in gendered shops; they’re delivered in magazines aimed at girls or women; they’re delivered by teachers; they’re delivered by school nurses; etc etc. They’re also delivered by the whole culture, yes, but not exclusively.
So no, I don’t believe that what you call pre-public trans women do get exactly the same messages that girls do.
By which I do not mean “therefore they have it easy.”
Ironically, we have just switched sides. Yes, I accept that you received lots of messages, some in female-exclusive settings, some that I (as a boy) was in no way exposed to. Certainly.
But what’s this about “exactly the same messages”? Select any two girls at random; did they receive “exactly the same messages”? Consider a middle-class suburban white girl from the Midwest, and a poor black girl from a single-parent home in the projects in some coastal city. Were the messages they received more “same” than the messages received second-hand by the suburban girl’s brother? Of the three, which two have the most similar conception of what it means to perform femaleness? Which of the two would have a better chance of passing as a girl at the suburban white girl’s school?
I can’t remember which first-wave feminist said, “The differences among men and women are much greater than the differences between them.” (Was it Betty Friedan, in congressional testimony?) That’s applicable here too. While boys are not taught to perform girlhood, there’s a very wide variation in how girlhood is performed in various subcultures. A boy would have trouble passing as a girl with a similar background to himself, but a girl would also have trouble passing as a girl from a different subculture. Like the midwestern white girl and the poor black girl, or a valley girl and a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey.
And yes I realize that my examples bring in markers of class and ethnicity as well. But they’re intertwined. There’s a reason that black girls are accused, specifically, of being “unladylike.” The import of the criticism is that they aren’t girling correctly.
I meant, as a group. Girls as a group, as opposed to pre-public trans girls. Trans girls who are pre-public are going to miss a lot of the messages that girls as a group get.
I missed a lot of those messages myself, for a variety of reasons. I went to a tiny, very academic, all-girls [after the 3d grade] school. My mother was a magazine editor. I was nerdy and solitary as a child and for all but 5 years of my childhood we lived in the country; I wandered the fields instead of playing well with others. I was always bloody-minded.
John the Drunkard, what trans folk are telling me is that they were the gender they ended up identifying with before they knew it, yes. This may make one wonder what the likelihood is that their identity will change yet again, and what that says about their past selves. But the way I see it, the claim is that we have a ‘true’ gender identity which we need to discover to be at peace, and that for some of us the path to that discovery is more complicated.
A Masked Avenger, I don’t know what you thought I was saying, but I was saying that your being *trained* by being beaten, mocked, and ostracized was not a privilege. Not getting killed was an advantage over what some trans and gay men experienced, yes. But the training itself was an evil you endured. No one here is saying that trans people shouldn’t be protected, that they shouldn’t be allowed to identify as they like, etc.
What we are objecting to is the glamorization of gender socialization and people insisting our experiences be filtered through their lens.
Also, I can’t believe you got all indignant that I dared to tell people that I’ve seen men suffer from socialization when you have *experienced* it, like I was talking down to you specifically rather than apologetically bringing up The Menz on a feminist subject– and yet you then go and tell *us– primarily a group of women talking about how we can’t conform to gender expectations that well– that sometimes women who don’t conform well are called mannish. Well, thanks for mansplaining THAT to us, I’m sure that wasn’t common knowledge.
Gender conformity confers privilege (even on women in a patriarchy) versus nonconformity. But “at least not being a fucking faggot” ALSO confers enormous privilege. It entitles me to be bullied instead of murdered for my lack of masculinity.
Privilege is a relative term, and it’s many-dimensional.
Ophelia: I didn’t mean (and apologize if I put it in a confusing manner) that there are no closed-door sessions where gender-enforcement occurs. But are the messages there in some way unique to those settings–or do they mostly just re-iterate and reinforce the same messages delivered elsewhere? (I do recognize that such settings might give the messages more potency; I’m specifically asking about content, though.)
I guess what I’m asking is if the variance of messaging about ‘what girls are’ that you acknowledge occurring in-group for ‘all cis girls’ is necessarily smaller than the variance between that group and the group ‘pre-public trans girls’. And hoping that the prior sentence isn’t a completely worthless word-salad.
A masked Avenger, I wouldn’t call what gender-conforming women get an overall privilege. Women gain some things and lose others when they conform, and conversely when they don’t. Individual women have to consider the trade-offs based on their personal circumstances.
Freemage, I think you’re not quite understanding what Ophelia is saying. It’s more than the media. It’s more than the messages you hear. The messages we get are all around us, often unnoticed in any real way, subtle. My father refusing to teach me how to start the lawnmower. His paying for my brother’s college on terms that were much more generous than mine. Being kept in the dining room on Christmas with the women while the men went into the living room and talked about interesting things. Being the last one served. Being asked to make the coffee at the meeting. Many of the messages aren’t “girls wear nail polish” “girls wear high heels”. They are subtle; the people delivering them may not realize they are delivering them. The people receiving them may not realize they are receiving them. It is in the way my major professor in my doctorate talked to me in a fatherly manner, like a pat on the head, while being good buddies with his male students. It’s in the way my boss peed off the end of the boat the first time they took me out for training (marking his territory?). It’s in the way that another boss asked me, the person with the highest level of education in the entire business, to water the plants. It’s the way that my current boss has looked at a building in which all but two of the employees are women – and appointed the two males as building captains. It’s in the way that my seniority is ignored at work, and everyone turns to the male who has been there half as long as I have when they want someone with authority (we have equal authority; I just rarely have the opportunity to use mine). These are messages that are often unseen, but have a huge impact. I think this is what Ophelia is talking about. She can correct me if I’m wrong in my attempt to read her mind.
iknklast @33
On the bright side, your boss might have been treating you like a mate…
:-)
‘It’s in the way that my seniority is ignored at work, and everyone turns to the male who has been there half as long as I have when they want someone with authority’
The older (and more senior) I get the more I notice this. I had the expectation that the more experience and expertise I developed in my profession the more respect and privileges I’d earn…I never noticed the ‘*offer is true for men only’ fine print until relatively recently.
Actually, relative to this post, I should point out that that message that women don’t get to have ‘normal’ career patterns wasn’t consciously communicated to me–or at least not so I understood it–until very recently. Messages about my profession and career were, to me, largely couched in terms of ‘people’, and it never occurred to me that I didn’t fall into that category. Any deviation from what ‘should’ happen I ascribed solely to myself and my individual circumstances–it really is only recently that I was able to look back and see how being a woman reduced my life chances in the career path I chose.
The following short exchange between A Masked Avenger and Anat
nicely epitomizes so many bitter quarrels! Do MA and Anat contradict each other? Obviously not: it can be both a privilege in a relative and restricted sense (on a particular dimension) and not an ‘overall privilege’. Elementary, dear Watson. Is there anything here worth further discussion?
Ah, let me say it clearly, because it was probably unreadable (yeah, internet sucks!): my last question was just a pure unmitigated sarcasm. Evidently, there is. The word ‘privilege’ has been used as a cudgel for so long that now no one – I mean, no one – wants to be on the receiving end. Sort of… understandable, isn’t it? Nobody wants a black eye, multi-dimensional or not.
(Incidentally, I find the whole phenomenon more tiresome than funny. Also: the quoted exchange is evidently *not* a quarrel.)
Freemage:
Ophelia:
Not the same, but probably quite enough of them to be perfectly aware of how exactly society views women. And for a trans girl, that’s a simple case of being a skilled impostor who just hasn’t been found out yet.
It’s not exactly the same, but growing up in a foreign country while blending in well enough that the locals don’t notice you’re not one of them has some quite similar aspect. I’ve heard enough racist and xenophobic remarks and rants to have understood from an early age what many people would think of me if they could see in my facial features or hear from my accent that I wasn’t actually born in Germany. I didn’t need to be on their receiving end (as for example my Turkish-heritage friends) to know that those things apply to me just as much.
Anat, suddenly your understanding of “privilege” is identical to a white redneck straight man’s? “Show me my privilege, so I can cash it in and stop working this shit job every day!”? Wow.
It’s hard to believe you don’t understand the basics of intersectionality. Perhaps it’s as Ariel said–you just don’t like the word being applied to you. So suddenly you deny that straight women are privileged over queer women, and whites women over black women, and rich women over poor women, etc.. Gender conforming individuals are privileged over non conforming ones.
I have no idea what you mean by “overall privilege.” A rich straight white cis male TV producer doesn’t even get “overall privilege”: if he happens to be Jewish, he lacks the privilege of living without antisemitism.
A Masked Avenger, not what I said at all. I was not comparing a cis woman to a trans woman, I was comparing a conforming woman to a non-conforming one. As in a cis woman who conforms to gender norms vs a cis woman who breaks them.
Many trans folk are very gender conforming, it’s just that the gender they are conforming to isn’t the one assigned to them at birth. Many cis-women, and not as many cis-men are gender non-conforming. Cis-women face the dilemma of how closely they should conform to gender expectations. Some of us don’t particularly value many of the items on the privilege list thus finding the balance tips towards less conforming. I have the privilege of being able to make some of these choices, but then I have the disprivilege of needing to think about it in the first place. (Actually I don’t think about it as much. Some things are ‘I’m expected to what? Fuck that!’ Others are ‘never knew that was expected, let’s pretend I still don’t know’ and others are ‘yeah, that’s what I’m actually doing, never realized it was a gendered thing’)
Now obviously a trans woman also has to figure out to what degree she should conform to the expectations of the female gender, and she has the added consideration of whether this bit of incomplete conformance will be the one that makes more people find it hard to accept her as female. So the balance tips towards greater conforming, especially in early years.
So then people like Stephanie Zvan call you femmephobic.
Having an Established Notion of the identity and nature of trans people has turned around and bitten the whole anti-sexist project.
Apparently ONLY trans people have pre-determined gender. Everyone else is supposedly ‘fluid’ and capable of all sorts of situational changes. But the trans folk embody an essentialism of gender identity that would make the Duggars look like feminists.
Actual trans people, in real life, get to have their own experience of this very new medical/cultural possibility. This may make gender essentialists have Bad Feelings. Tough.
I shrug at the ‘femmephobic’ label. Much of ‘femmeness’ is not for me.
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I’ve said this over and over again, but whatever happened to the sex/gender distinction? Do trans theorists seriously not make this distinction? Have transsexual people ceased to exist?
I really wish some trans theorist would come up with a definition of gender. It’s deeply confusing the way it seems to be now. If trans women are women full stop, then where does the “trans” part of it come in? A trans woman transitions from being a woman to, umm, being a woman? What does that even mean?
In the old terms, if a male-bodied (sex) person needs to transition to a female bodied (sex) person because of their body dysphoria, then fine, easy, she’s a transsexual woman. No problems. She’s a woman. The problems she may experience come from patriarchal standards, in which she’s failing as a woman since she’s not doing gender correctly according to their (bullshit) standards that require women (sex) to act in a specific manner (gender).
But cis women also experience these exact same problems: not doing woman (gender) right according to some male’s standards can get you raped and murdered. (70 women killed this year in Australia so far.) It’s not actually a thing exclusive to trans women. More like “welcome to the club”.
Alethea, the way I understand the current terminology, a trans woman transitions from presenting as male to presenting as female. Along the way she may also transition towards having a more typically female body. But she was female all along, and since it is her body then by necessity it was a female body all along, just not a very typical female body.
Gender isn’t how one acts, that would be one’s gender role.
Is the implication that “each other” means only those who have had that experience i.e. only those who were brought up as women?
I don’t know whether it is trans-exclusionary or not to point out that trans women don’t have the experience as being the lesser – but it is remarkably silly to point it out to trans-women only (It is obviously not silly to point that out in general)
a. Some women wont have had that experience too
b. Some trans folk will have had that experience growing up. Effeminate boys are verbally (and sometimes physically abuse). All butch girls are lesbians after all, aren’t they ?
c. Most trans folk are treated as lesser if not much worse once they come out as trans.
d. Many women include other women’s experiences in their discussions – The feminist doesn’t just say these are my personal experience – they will usually include other experiences that they have read about , that they have seen – is that invalid ? I might not have experienced being personally treated as the lesser , but I did see it around me, even growing up. Are my observations invalid ? Do I need to be excluded too ?
“Transgender” covers anyone who is at any stage of transition, not just what you’re calling ‘transsexuals’ (ie, post-operative). This means it covers trans people who are on hormones, but haven’t had surgery, and even those who may merely be presenting with dress and manner (formerly the ‘transvestite’ label). Under this paradigm, ‘transsexual’ is simply one sub-group among the transgender population.
The reason for the shift is pretty simple. It’s a reaction to the practice of ‘gatekeeping’, in which certain criteria are used to determine whether or not a specific person is ‘trans enough’ to be recognized officially. Some trans people will never have surgery; they don’t want to be kept from having their documents and legal status altered until an event that isn’t going to happen.
This also goes to Anat’s point about gender-conforming acts. Transgender people often have to be extra-conforming, just to have their gender recognized at all. For instance, it’s only very recently that the notion of, say, a trans lesbian or trans gay man was even acknowledged as a possibility by the various professionals involved in transitioning. If a trans woman admitted to one of the mandatory counselors that they are sexually attracted to other women, it was assumed that this meant they were not ‘serious’ about transitioning, and could lead to a roadblock. Since the criteria are often molded by the personal bias of the doctors and psychiatrists involved, there’s historically been a powerful incentive to be as gendr-conforming as possible, just in order to not accidentally trigger a particular individual’s red flags.
@49: There’s a step in the given reasoning which goes “But she was female all along, and since it is her body then by necessity it was a female body all along…” This is only valid if we accept the unstated premise that every female person has a female body… in which case the entire concept of surgical reassignment goes out the window, as indeed does the concept of gender dysphoria. That seems incoherent. Taken as read, you could respond to every person reporting gender dysphoria by saying “How can you feel that your body isn’t right for your gender? If you’re gender X then you have a gender-X body.”
No SAWells. Not at all.
There are 2 different reasons to want to alter one’s body as part of gender transitioning.
One is in order to be perceived as members of one’s gender by others. It doesn’t help to know your body is a female body if other people think it isn’t one and make assumptions about your gender based on what your body looks like.
The other reason is body modification as treatment for gender dysphoria. Yes, your body is a female body, but it doesn’t look like typical female bodies and your brain rebels against it.
If social norms were to change such that people wouldn’t make assumptions about another person’s gender based on looks (and sound, and scent) the strength of the former motivation may decrease. My child doesn’t mind about their looks in an environment they perceive as safe, but among the general public they care very much about being perceived as male. My child occasionally wear skirts and dresses at home or in an all-queer setting, but never to a general venue. And when out in public my child is very self-conscious about anything about their body that may give away the fact that they were assigned female at birth.
As for gender dysphoria – it is a mental state that exists. The exact wording used to describe it is not going to change it.
Freemage you say
Actually no, I’m not saying a person needs to be post-op to be a transsexual. I see no reason not to apply the term to anyone who experiences dysphoria with their body’s sexual characteristics. If that dysphoria is eased sufficiently by hormones and gender-styling, or just top surgery, or some combo thereof, I’m not fussed. In an age where sex reassignment surgery is neither perfect nor free, who am I to judge how far people need to go to ease their condition?
What I am saying is: why do you call this gender, and what do you even mean by gender? And Anat, what do you mean by saying “Gender isn’t how one acts, that would be one’s gender role”? What is gender to you, then?
I see gender as an externally imposed system on top of sex. Socially policed behaviours that are punished when they are performed incorrectly according to perceived sex. Feminist women, trans women, rebel women, lesbian women, any insubordinate uppity woman: we are all subject to social penalties for not knowing our place. (As also are “feminine” men, of course, for being traitors!)
Alethea, if I call myself ‘woman’, ‘female person’, or (at a younger age) ‘girl’, or if I am OK with other people referring to me with such terms then I am of the female gender.
The odd thing is that sometimes I am not quite OK with these terms, but am definitely not OK with the respective masculine counterparts. Which is why I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out had I known at a much younger age that being agender was a thing.
I’m with Alethea – if we hadn’t gone through the stage of having people define ‘transsexual’ as applying only to people who have had medical intervention, we wouldn’t be having this discussion around gender. It makes so much more sense to use ‘transsexual’ to mean anyone whose body is classified as one sex, whilst their mind/brain/self identifies with the other, because ‘gender’ more properly is understood to apply to all the other stuff that is layered by upbringing onto the basic sex pattern. And that stuff is certainly not innate, since it varies so much from culture to culture (including different historical epochs in the same country).
It is true that gatekeepers have decided what is the correct gender expression and performance for individuals to attain, and certain behaviours that have been normalised within my lifetime for cis individuals (such as almost everybody wearing a variation of trousers – shirt – jacket, regardless of age or sex) are still seen as problematic for trans people (and, oddly, children in school – that seems to be where most gender policing happens these days).
If transwomen can only get treatment for being hyper-feminine (according to outdated criteria that never actually applied to most women) and solely androphilic, and trans men can only get treatment if they can prove to the gatekeepers that they are macho, gynæphilic and sporty, that is the aspect of their society’s expectations that they are forced to act themselves into. It’s outrageous.
And totally unfair, then, to blame trans people for the subsequent row about gender expectations, performance, roles and prejudices.
And I particularly hate this idea (wherever did it come from?) that because I identify as a man, that automatically means my body is a man’s body, purely because it belongs to a man’s mind.
Wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong, wrong.
Oh, I suppose in one, narrow, semantic sense it is ‘the body of a man’ since it is a body, and it belongs to a man. But that is just playing word-games, and I find it silly.
I believe that the word ‘woman’ can be big enough to encompass all the groups and individuals who want to be, or have been assigned, a part of womanhood. Some women are born with male reproductive organs, some are born with non-functioning female reproductive organs, some are born outwardly female but with androgen insensitivity, some are tall, some are short, they come in all shapes and sizes, in a wide variety of personalities, with diverse interests and aspirations, a multiplicity of experiences, and the only thing that they have in common is that most societies are set up to classify them as not wholly or completely capable of full personhood and all the rights that pertain thereto. Including the right to be seen as individuals, and not a monolith.
That is the real scandal. Not someone asking “What do you mean by ‘woman’?” (because describe any woman, and you have described that woman, and how much of the description applies to the next woman, or the next man for that matter, is random chance), but the fact that women are not seen as independent individuals and respected as such, but as generic examples of an homogenous class.
Like when someone can say “Oh, well, women… you know what they’re like…” and everyone nods, instead of saying “I have no idea what you mean – women are all different.”