Special snowflake edition
The Guardian asked “young people” around the world how they “define” their “gender.” The result is what you would expect from such a ridiculous question directed at such a demographic.
Some days Daniela Esquivel Asturias, 21, wakes up feeling feminine and puts on a dress or lipstick. But on others Asturias feels much more masculine and the thought of wearing a skirt induces an overwhelming sense of dysmorphia.
“I would be equally comfortable with a male or female body. My male personality is more outgoing than my female one. It’s like having both male and female energies and some days a mix of both,” Asturias says.
GASP
Oh my god have you ever heard anything so original and fascinating and new ever in your life before? Have you ever encountered a human being who had different moods before??
The student from Costa Rica is gender fluid, and doesn’t identify with one gender, instead fluctuating between feeling more male or female.
Unlike all the rest of us dull plodding not-young people who have always 100% “identified” with one “gender” our whole lives.
It’s hard to explain, Asturias says, before referring to the way society tends to define gender, on a spectrum. “At one end is being male and the other female, and you kind of move between the two, and usually remain in the middle.”
This is just one of the individual stories sent to the Guardian as part of a survey inviting millennials to define their gender.
Next up, the Guardian will report on an astounding new trick you can do where you add yeast to flour and make something they’re calling “bread”…
Young people are increasingly challenging conventional gender stereotypes
Let me stop you right there. No they’re not. They may think they are, you may think they are, but they’re not. Much of the time what they’re actually doing is reifying conventional gender stereotypes so that they can boast about being outside them.
This idea that nobody challenged gender stereotypes and rules until a couple of weeks ago is so clueless it’s a scandal.
OMG! I wear a dress maybe one or two times a year – if that. I never wear lipstick, not since I was 28. Does that mean at 28, I suddenly stopped being a woman, and started being a man? I thought it was just because that was the age where I got divorced and could be my own person instead of the trophy wife my ex wanted me to be…and I complied for too long.
No, wait. I am a woman, whatever the hell that means. I don’t identify as male (but I’m not sure I identify as “female” either). Gender isn’t a spectrum, it isn’t a fluid identity, it is a social construct. If I wish to wear sweatpants and a t-shirt, that doesn’t change my gender at all, it only means I want to be comfortable, which should be a prerogative of both genders (and that’s why I would never dream of wearing a tie if I were going to do “typical male” dress).
I refuse to be identified by the lack of a dress or lipstick.
By the way, that “bread” thing sounds interesting. How does that work? ;-)
I’m pretty sure it’s a theorem that if you give people a meaningless concept, they’ll project all sorts of ideas onto it, just as they will a blank slate or an inkblot.
See also: spirituality, energy, vibrations…
I just watched that video of a Christian woman in Alberta who did a transgender washroom (that’s bathroom to you Yanks) rap. It was an obnoxious rap but anywho, I left a comment on the video saying trans should have their own washrooms, men their own and women their own. This was met with immediate MEN screaming at me. Of course it’s not good enough to have your very own washroom, you gotta be able to invade women’s and girls spaces or it’s not FAIR DAMMIT!
*headdesk*
This is not some new experience; they’re just coming up with new words. This basically sums up my experience with gender (and I struggled with wondering if I was trans for like three years before realizing it): “I’m a woman, but the gendered expectations don’t apply to me at all. Those gendered expectations must be bullshit.”
This is how this supposedly new wild thinking goes: “I’m a woman, but the gendered expectations don’t apply to me at all. I must not be a woman after all.” And that’s somehow held up as the epitome of self-realization, actually redefining who and what you are because it doesn’t fit the stereotype.
FFS. Some days I wake up feeling a bit tentative and uncertain. I feel uncertain and wrong footed all day. I’ve come close to tears when aggressively challenged at work. Other days I feel confident, cheerful and invincible. When challenged on those days my response can be assertive to the point of ruthless.
Am I a man or a woman? Or, am I a man whose temperament and mood changes?
I think gender is a load of bollocks social construct. Which doesn’t make it’s existence any less real. Frankly I think almost everybody other than a few caricatures of stereotypes are gender fluid to some degree. The sheer oblivious disinterest so many people have in anything that occurred prior to their social awareness crystallising never ceases to astound me.
Reading the Guardian paper, I noticed with horror the fragment about “a group of people who claimed they defined their gender as an attack helicopter”. I was just about to ask “Which one of you, old grumps, did this? Who dared!??”
So now I know.
“My male personality is more outgoing than my female one.”
Way to challenge those conventional gender stereotypes, Radical Youths!
I carry around two separate smartphones for my male and female personalities. The female phone is pink and has lots of emoticons and cat photos; the male phone is blue and very state-of-the-art, except that it has no mapping aps because my male personality hates to ask for directions.
And I don’t limit my rejection of binaries to gender, either. This morning I was feeling very vegan and had a banana for breakfast; for lunch, I let my omnivore side out with a roast beef sandwich. There’s no telling what I might eat for dinner tonight!
I suppose it’s going to become necessary to carry around a complete change of clothing in case our gender changes while we’re away from home.
What are male and female energies? How do they differ from one another? And why are people listening to these attention-seekers instead of laughing and telling them to have a good talk with themselves?
For time immemorial there has been a ‘rulebook’ consisting of two lists of emotions and behavioural traits. Boys were to express all those in list A, and suppress those in B. Girls were to do the opposite. When boys got a bit weepy or expressed an interest in sewing they were told to stop being girls: when girls got aggressive or wanted a carpentry set they were told no, it’s not lady-like.
Surely no adult takes this age-old bull so seriously that they really believe the lists to be immutable, and that they actually change gender according to mood.
Just to clarify, I have no doubt that there are many genuine transgender’s people out there, and they’re being done no favours by the snowflakes who think they need to change their clothes with each change of mood.
Or am I wrong in my long-held belief that not suppressing the ‘wrong’ thoughts, etc. makes me a more rounded, better person? Have I spent my life denying my gender fluidity, or am I just a bloke who understands that emotions and all the rest aren’t gendered, they’re just part and parcel of being human.
Why yes, I have heard of that before… but did you notice the new twist? The outgoing times are explicitly identified as male, and is put on display via clothing: pants, leather jacket, backwards (eyeroll) baseball cap. The female mood was not described (which might be due to the phrasing of the question when interviewed, or may be telling in and of itself), but can be inferred to be not-outgoing, and is displayed with a flowery blouse, jewelery, and of course makeup.
The essentialist core of thought-free progressivism at its finest.
Oh and did you notice the cheapening of dysmorphia? There are kids out there distressed by dysmorphia to the point of wanting to cut off the unwanted anatomy, but this special fucking snowflake uses it to describe sometimes not wanting to wear a skirt.
Oooh, how awful that would be! You’re at the meeting in slacks and tie, and right there in the middle of Agenda Item 3 you turn womanly. And there’s you without Mod Cloth, or even a tube of lipstick. How will anyone know who you are?
Ties are comfortable. It’s the stiff collar on men’s dress shirts that push against the throat.
Samantha – is that the case? I don’t know. I never wore either. In any case, I’ve never known a man who really liked the damn things.
Ties are fine (although I virtually never wear them).
It’s that damn top button.
“I suppose it’s going to become necessary to carry around a complete change of clothing in case our gender changes while we’re away from home”
Layering…..
I would have actually thought of outgoing as the female stereotype.
Girls are so *social*, you know! If one of them is sitting alone, reading, she’s really lonely and you should go over and try to fix her self-esteem.
That boy sitting by himself? He’s probably designing some computer code, or doing some other thinky-brain thing. Because boys are smart, but girls are emotional.
Grr.
Girls get trained to meet social expectations. Boys often get to decide for themselves.
Who gets steered into jobs as receptionist and other jobs where “outgoing, friendly, sociable, people person” is part of the job description? Who is the night watch, the lighthouse keeper? Is a lone wolf a woman or a man? In short, women are obligated to do public emotional work greeting people and putting them at ease, even if they are introverted by nature. Men are allowed to be outgoing, but they have social permission to be introverts.
I do menswear from time to time. I quite like ties, but a traditional shirt felt like I was choking.
I bought my husband 4 silk shirts for Christmas so he wouldn’t have to suffer that feeling anymore. (And I could borrow them.)
I ran this by some male friends and it seemed like a lot of them hate ties for *symbolic* reasons. It’s a display of formality that constrains their behavior. Sort of the sartorial equivalent of our training to be ladylike, but they can drop the act when they take the tie off and I would say de-ladylike-ing oneself takes at least a few months.
Grauniad
You
That idea (nobody challenging gender stereotypes) is not what’s being expressed in the quote above. Nowhere is the author asserting that only young people are challenging stereotypes, that this only started a few weeks ago, or that there is only one way to do so. It is simply quite literally saying that recently more young people (that is, more in quantity) are doing so (when, presumably, compared to some earlier time); this is hardly controversial stuff, there is no sinister message, and nobody from the past is being chided for insufficient challenging. What is the point of misrepresenting it, but to argue against an assertion no one, including the people interviewed for the survey, one of whom made it quite clear that nobody “invented” trans people but that they have always existed, has made? The survey targeted young people, so it stands to reason they’re the focus of the article. Referring to young people, treating them as a demographic, is not an automatic slur against the unyoung. Waking up to bigotry as one ages and matures is not a crime, and is, presumably, something we ought to encourage rather than bitterly scorn.
Do you find the notion that as they get older people become more interested in politics “clueless” or simply obvious? If it’s the latter, why are you offended?
This idea of “genderfluidity” may not be a bad thing in the long run. If someone considers themselves to be a mix of genders they may be less inclined to think that one is superior to the other. I’m not sure whether they’ve thought that deeply about the problems of gender though, outside of their own self-expression.
Having worn ties since I was five (they were part of the uniform of every school I attended) I know a second solution to the collar problem, Samantha. Buy bigger shirts. Yes, the silk ones are nice – but expensive. Ignoring the rule that says that if you can get two fingers into a fastened collar, it’s the right size (that rule should be kept for pets whose collars don’t stretch from collar-bone to chin), I have consistently worn shirts two sizes too big and not had a problem. It makes doing up that top button easier, too.
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As for those Special, Special Sneauxflayques thinking that changing their mood is exactly the same as being transsexual – they can just stop it. You can’t be temporarily trans. And, while we’re on the subject of stopping stuff, they can stop saying that the temper tantrum they threw when that shop assistant ‘misgendered’ them was an ‘autistic meltdown’. They aren’t an ‘undiagnosed Aspie’, they’re selfish arseholes who are blithely trampling all over the lives of people with genuine problems fitting into society, to give themselves extra points in the stupid game of Oppression Olympics they are playing with their like-minded friends.
And they can stop calling older feminists ‘transphobic’ for seeing right through them and recognising their behaviour for the attention-seeking bullshit that it is. Older feminists are the ones who have been making it possible for transsexual people to feel less despair about our lives, and more hope that the future could be brighter, by steadily working to destroy the patriarchal constructs that say girls wear dresses and make-up, and boys don’t. That girls are simpering sex-toys and boys are assertive human beings. Constructs that the narcissists are just as busy re-building, in their narcissistic myopia. They are the ones being transphobic, by insisting that ‘girl-dick’ is a thing, when giving their penis a twee name spits in the eye of actual trans women with actual dysmorphia.
That word, ‘appropriation’ that they have been flinging about with abandon, applying it where it doesn’t belong, on behalf of people who don’t feel that their culture has been appropriated? Perhaps they should try applying it to their own behaviour. Oh, look. It fits. It seems that the charges they are levelling at everyone else aren’t merely spurious, just mis-aimed.
Ariel, if it’s any consolation I seldom feel like that. Mostly just tired now days. Not sure what gender that makes me.
Rob, then we are probably of one and the same gender – whatever it is.
From the OP:
I know what you mean but still … this is a very harsh diagnosis, maybe too harsh. I have this stubborn impression that neither “challenging” nor “reifying so that they can boast about being outside them” does full justice to them. Playing perhaps? Acting out? Is this the missing element?
If challenging the stereotypes means rejecting them altogether, then I agree that it’s not what they are doing. What they do is more similar to trying them out – playfully, but at the same time very seriously (have you even seen how deadly serious children can be when playing?).
I try to see it as a play where conventional “feminity” and “masculinity” function as not much more than toys. Sure, it’s easy to mock them, to laugh at phrases like “my male personality is more outgoing than my female one”, but is it essentialism? At least to my eye, it’s more like kids playing with fire. They are all into the old language, yes, but just look how they use it! They clearly reject the rigidity of social constructs, believing that no road is blocked – that they can become anything they want. In their hands, feminity and masculinity turn into toys, to be picked up at will by anybody. Essentialism?
Many of you are complaining that they didn’t invent anything. Perhaps this playfulness – this readiness to use (on such a scale!) the old categories as toys – is their new invention? I don’t know. And even if not … sorry, I still remember myself in my 20s, with so many “new discoveries” made by me which were in fact about as new as the stone age. Were you really that different?
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine an angry retort: “Ariel, you are saying all of this just because your daughter is on her way to become one of “them”. To add to the horror, you probably also consider them cute!” Fortunately, no one will say it. It’s just my imagination.
I’m a cis transfeline double mochaiatto.
Ariel – I think it would be easier to accept that they were being playful if it weren’t for the extremity of the policing of older feminists that is done by so many of these younger generation, shouting TERF at anyone who suggests that gender isn’t essential, which makes the entire women’s movement pre-now TERF. They are playing with stereotypes, sure, but perpetuating them at the same time. I don’t change from male to female if I ditch my skirt for sweat pants, or if I stop wearing lipstick (as I did two decades ago). I am sick of being told that being “cis” makes me somehow privileged, as though the abuse I received for the past 50 years for not being “feminine” enough constituted cis-privilege. As though being relegated to a lesser portion of society is somehow cis-privilege.
And Mookie? I think much of the point had more to do with the promulgation of stereotypes than any butt-hurt that they were claiming to have invented something. Ophelia was simply making a sarcastic comment about the overarching situation in current intersectional feminism, not just about this article. The real problem is the idea that not following the female gender stereotype even for a short time means you are male, even if only for a short time. I don’t like to speak for Ophelia, so I will say that is IMO.
tiggerthewing, thank you for expressing something I’ve been thinking for years. How insulting it must be to genuine transgendered people to see transgenderism turned into a fashion statement I can’t imagine. And then there’s the self-diagnosers, labelling themselves with anything that might get them extra attention or that they think will allow them to do or say anything and be free from repercussions.
Food allergies, ADHD, Asbergers, autism, Tourettes; I’ve seen all of them self-diagnosed. Hell, ADHD and Asbergers are now the go-to phrases for parents desperate to avoid having to admit that their kids are little shits, or that they, as parents, may have failed their offspring I know the following is just my own experience but I know many parents who claim ADHD for their kids – but haven’t had professional verification – when it’s blatantly obvious that the only deficit of attention is from parent to child.
These people are an insult to genuine sufferers.
I think that the best (?) example I’ve ever seen was from a blog commenter who claimed to suffer from that well known psychological disorder ‘siwoti syndrome’, not as a joke or a bit of self deprecation but as a bona-fide, medically recognised syndrome on a par with Asbergers, which they also claimed, along with ADHD, autism, Tourettes, and OCD. Just one person! Because it’s not enough to say that one is a bit of a perfectionist prone to tantrums and fond of an argument, etc.
s. J. Obsessive – that’s totally the case. As someone genuinely diagnosed with OCD, I absolutely hate seeing it made a joke or a mockery by people who have some little habit, and don’t realize how debilitating OCD can be. And every student I have suddenly announces “test anxiety” or “learning disorder” when they do badly on a test, though they have no diagnosis, and no symptoms.
Mental illness is not, should not be, an excuse for just any old thing you don’t want to admit you got wrong.
Not sure why people in this thread (and the linked article) are talking about ‘dysmorphia’ – it is dysphoria. The former seems to be a reference to Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is a mental illness, whereas the latter in the context of Gender Dysphoria, is no longer considered to be a mental illness, as often whatever mental dysfunction experienced by transgender individuals turns out to be related to the way they are treated by others.
My kid went through a stage when he identified as ‘non-binary’ (genderqueer, not genderfluid, in his case). He says he experienced top dysphoria (ie dysphoria about having noticeable breasts) in some situations but not others.
I have met several parents of trans children who say their kids were initially formally diagnosed as having ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorders, and the children became much better adjusted once they transitioned (often social transition was sufficient to bring the change).
tiggerthewing #22:
“the rule that says that if you can get two fingers into a fastened collar, it’s the right size” – I thought that was bondage ropes, not clothing?
Ariel #24: they’re not 4 years old. Kids that age will put on a dress and say “look I’m a girl now!” or tell you that you’re a boy because you cut your hair short (not “mistake you for a boy”; claim that cutting your hair made you a boy). Teens and twenty-somethings should know better.
For me, gender presentation is 100 % playing dress-up (and I have a hard time understanding how it could possibly be anything else). When I’m at home or just don’t care what I look like, I’ll wear something comfortable: T-shirt and sweatpants/loosely fitting jeans, or a loosely fitting dress like the one I’m wearing now (kaftan of the type that’s just a rectangular piece of cloth folded in half w/a hole for my head + seams up the sides to keep it from falling off). At other times, I’ll dress “like a woman” or “like a man” or even “like a dyke” which, to me, pretty much means “like a man” except with a tighter shirt so my tits are obvious (and obviously meant to be noticed).
S. J. Obsessive #27: It’s not that uncommon for people who have Asperger’s, ADHD, Tourette’s or OCD to also fit the criteria for one or more of the other conditions. I’ve also met one person who was diagnosed with all of the above, + epilepsy, migraines and suspected bipolar disorder (plus a number of somatic health problems; he had a rare congenital syndrome). But to be diagnosed with Asperger’s, ADHD or OCD those traits/behaviours must actually cause serious problems. You’re not just a bit of a neat freak, you have to call in sick because you’re tidying your cutlery drawer and you can’t get it right and you can’t leave until it’s Just Right unless the house is on fire and possibly not even then.
Ah, well, amrie; I wouldn’t know anything at all about bondage, so I’ll take your word for that. =^_^=
Sorry, Anat – I used the word ‘dysmorphia’ (never having used it before) because it was in the quoted article. I should have put it in quotes.
Dysphoria is wanting, as a ten-year-old, to look as if one has a penis so badly that one puts folded handkerchiefs in one’s knickers and fantasises – but having enough knowledge of the world to do it only in bed, at night time, so one doesn’t get told off or mocked. Wanting not to have breasts so badly that one is hoping for a cancer diagnosis at every mammogram – and feeling disappointment when the letter comes back ‘all clear’. Feeling a sense of shock when a woman confesses that her biggest fear of breast cancer is the thought of losing her breasts, when all along one thought that the fear of death was paramount, and getting the breasts lopped off was a consolation. Wishing that the words were true when a toddler, seeing the shrunken, post-breast-feeding bosom declares “They’ve nearly gone, now, Mummy!” Getting a diagnosis of pre-cancerous ovarian tumours and, when asked “What would you like us to do?” by the gynæcological surgeon, declaring “Take everything out. All of it.” and then feeling happy when they do. Never, ever being comfortable in one’s body. Being delighted when addressed as male. Applying make-up for an occasion when it is expected, then looking in the mirror and not recognising the person looking back; but playing with online photomanipulation software to add a beard, and thinking that it looks grand.
Not wearing a dress one day, and trousers the next, and pretending that makes you trans.
tiggerthewing, my understanding is that there are people who experience gender dysphoria for some phases of life but not others. Quick googling picked up this example. This person isn’t speaking of changing clothing styles as the essence of her gender-fluidity, but of a wish to be perceived as a man during those times that her identity is male.
Thank you for that link, Anat. That is a very different experience to mine. I can easily pass as male when I shave my head, or even when my hair is very, very short. I used to have waist-length hair. I shaved it off for charity about eight years ago, when arthritis made it increasingly difficult to manage. But since it was usually tied back and under a crash helmet, it wasn’t obvious. And, at 171cm, I’m not too short to be perceived as male; especially when on a motorcycle.
I spent most of my life desperately trying to be the person everyone else wanted me to be, to the extent that when well-meaning friends would say “Just be yourself!” I had literally no idea what they meant. I was incapable of answering the question “Who am I?” without just rattling off a list of relationships to other people.
Getting diagnosed, in my late forties, as being on the autism spectrum gave me a big part of the answer; finally admitting to myself the long-repressed knowledge that I’m transgendered gave me the rest. I know who I am now, not just what (offspring, sibling, spouse, parent, grandparent, motorcyclist, musician, artist, feminist, republican*, socialist, etc.).
I’m glad that this blog exits. It is hard to try to discuss the subject elsewhere on the internet, because of the TERF wars.
Having read a few of the comments on that article, what most of them seem to be describing is a desire to break out of the binary boxes that society astonishingly still tries to force people into, but instead of seeing it that way (that gender is a societal construct, assigning stereotypical behaviour to one or other sex), these people seem to think that trained behaviours are actually innate, and by expressing behaviours usually assigned to the opposite sex, that automagically makes them a member of that sex, if only temporarily.
Feminist theory says that, on the contrary, there is a massive range of human behaviours and personalities, and none are the exclusive property of one sex; rather, that certain behaviours and attitudes are either encouraged or suppressed from a very early age depending on the perceived sex of the child and that we should work to stop that grooming of children into strict gender roles. Back in the 80s and early 90s, when I was raising my own offspring, I really thought that we would get there by the turn of the century. But then came the backlash and my own offspring are having a tough time fighting for equality on behalf of their children.
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*In the original sense of not being a monarchist, not as in the USAian party political affiliation.
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