While other women are fair game for it
Samantha Rea says there was the Twitter lark about #IfMenHadPeriods and then there was the inevitable ridiculous reaction to same.
It was a bit of fun, but not everyone thought so. One Twitter user wrote, “While this highly cisnormative hashtag is trending, I want to remind everyone that trans men do exist + some have periods.” Another complained, “Men do have periods. Not every man is cis and it’s disgusting for people to still be assuming that they are.” There were numerous other tweets along these lines.
I’m sorry, Social Justice Warriors, but here’s the science bit: Men don’t have periods – women do. That’s biology. It doesn’t matter how we identify, what we wear, who we sleep with, or which pronouns we prefer – our reproductive organs simply don’t care.
Some people have decided that’s not how we define “women” and “men” any more. They’ve decided it no longer is to do with reproductive organs, it’s to do with declaration. Period. If you say you’re a man you’re a man, therefore menstruation isn’t something only women do any more. It used to was, but now we know so much better. How? People on Twitter telling us so.
You cannot choose your sex, and neither can you change it. Gender is a set of stereotypes associated with each sex. They’re society’s ideas about how men and women should behave, and how they should appear. A woman may prefer the stereotypes associated with being male, but identifying as a man won’t stop her getting pregnant, and nor will it necessarily stop men from treating her as a woman, in the very ways she wishes they wouldn’t.
In Canada, also in May this year, a woman who identifies as a transgender man was sexually assaulted by a taxi driver. The victim of the assault has been quoted as saying: “I think he just didn’t care that I was a trans man… he still continued to call me a woman even though I had explicitly told him I was a male and I had been transitioning for a while.” It’s almost as if the victim thinks that identifying as male gives her an opt-out from sexual assault, while other women are fair game for it. But it didn’t matter how she identified, the taxi driver still recognised her as a woman, and he still sexually assaulted her.
And the issue there isn’t that he didn’t care that the victim was a trans man – it’s that he didn’t care that the victim didn’t want to be raped.
Instead of trying to “opt out” of being a woman, in order to avoid the worst bits, how about working towards a safer and more equal society for everyone – regardless of how they identify. Nobody can actually change sex, but what we can do is challenge the gender stereotypes, and break down the cultural constructions that leave women lying in the wet patch.
And that leave men thinking they’re entitled to rape women.
Or treating men and women differently in more general ways.
Pay differences, difference in how we listen to people, expectations of deference, allowing men greater range of class differences while not respecting any woman who isn’t ladylike, how we socialize, etc., etc. It’s all about gender, and if we didn’t make sex act as a proxy for so much else, there would be a lot less reason for people to want to deny their physical reality.
Oh and… say we say that trans men are men, they are NOT a large enough percentage of men for it to matter politically. That is, they don’t have the clout to make other men respect females (even if they weren’t perceived as female). There’s no amount of letting trans people define themselves that changes the POINT of #IfMenHadPeriods. So the argument is nothing but a derail, a literal #NotAllMen.
Suppose there was a hashtag #IfWhitesMetPoliceBrutality. While it’s true that there are white people who do get met with police brutality, it hasn’t been common enough for whites to start rallying against police brutality, which is the point of the hashtag.
So can Rachel Dolezal be black now if she still wants to be?
No no no no no no no no no no no. Of course not. That’s completely different.
@ 3 sailor1031
Srsly? This again.
No, Rachel Dolezal can’t be black because race is genetic, it depends upon parentage. (Unlike sex, which is hormonal and is not dependent on parentage.)
She can, however, be African. Were she to move to an African country, take up citizenship, renounce US citizenship, live as the locals live, and have a strong identification with Africa as her new home, there would be no good reason to say she’s not African. Because “African” is a cultural identifier, not a race. And one need not be born in Africa to be African. (Or vice versa. Richard Dawkins, for example, was born and lived in Kenya until he was eight years old, but it would be perverse indeed to insist he must forever after be called African, rather than English, on the basis that his geographical location at birth is a “scientific fact”, while his cultural identification is “just a feeling”.)
Excuse me, but sex has no genetic component? Strange, that. As a biologist, I learned that sex is based on the x and y chromosomes, and how many of each you have; the hormones are then released based on your genetic sex. Now, that isn’t to say it is always clear cut, and that there is never anything confused about the genetic/hormonal actions that contribute to sexual characteristics, but to say that sex is strictly hormonal…
Now, let’s say that sex is hormonal while race is genetic. These are both biological concepts. We are being informed that biology doesn’t matter in sex (or gender; some people seem to mix those terms up a lot, depending on what’s currently useful), it’s “what you feel like”…it’s identity, not biology. So if we reject biology as a determinant when it is hormonal,. what makes us suddenly turn around and say biology is king when it is genetic? That’s a non-answer. It’s ridiculous, in fact, to enshrine biology in one place (skin color) while rejecting biology somewhere else (shape of the genitalia).
If identity is mutable, then identity is mutable. If biology is king, then biology is king. We can have a spectrum, and be nuanced, but we can’t draw arbitrary lines around certain things and say, OK, here biology/chemistry rules; over here, it’s what you feel like you are that counts. In the end, this comes back to the oppression Olympics. Because African Americans have been more oppressed than women, people can decide to be women if they weren’t born that way, but they can’t decide to be black if they weren’t born that way.
This is incoherence.
@Silentbob #5
I’m coming from the bio-sciences side and I agree with everything iknklast said.
I think you mean that biological sex is not dependent on ancestry rather than genetics whereas “race” is. The problem with your argument is that in biological terms “race” is a very woolly concept – to the point that from a biological point of view scientists are starting to reject its usefulness in describing anything outside of the social/cultural arenas.
My own feeling is that Rachel Dolezal can be black in the same way that a trans woman can be a woman. There is a personal identity – which has nothing to do with anything other than personal feelings. There is perception by society. If a trans woman can “pass” as a woman or Dolezal “pass” as a black woman then they are living those roles and being treated as those roles by society. A biological male who prefers to live as and be perceived as a woman seems to have a claim on being a woman socially. Dolezal lived and presented as an African-American woman and was treated as such by her peers and by society at large. Socially, she was a black woman.
There is a difference. In over 98% of human beings there is s definite way of establishing biological sex. Whatever a trans person does in the way of body modification, it will always be possible to establish – usually fairly easily – which biological sex the trans person is. It’s much harder in the case of race. Some people with African ancestry are as pale as me (and that’s the old white in summer, blue in winter joke). Unless we can trace their ancestry back and establish the “race” of their ancestors there’s no way of definitively ascribing a “biological race”. And if we try that we’re on some very dodgy and unpleasant ground that leads to words like mulatto and octaroon.
Is Rachel Dolezal black? Yes and no. Is a trans woman a woman? Yes and no.
Also…
You say that as if it were obvious and conclusive and simple – but it’s not. People can immigrate and become citizens to/in many countries, but they remain in many senses Originalcountrian. It’s as Steamshovelmama says, yes and no. It’s not, therefore, yes or no.
The notion that one can control reality according to one’s Deeply Held Beliefs, or even one’s Twue Feewings, is a hugely damaging concept that has taken root all over the culture.
Actual trans people get to be irritated by the clumsy assumptions they bump into. But there isn’t a ghost of a chance of this deranged, rigid, pseudo-essentialism actually being of any good to anyone.
The glibness of this is more startling the more I think about it.
As if that were all there is to it. As if that were actually why people were furious with Dolezal.
It’s a lot more complicated than that.
The core reason people were furious with Dolezal, as I understand it, is that if you don’t grow up black you don’t know what it’s like growing up black; if you haven’t always been black [accepting for the sake of argument that you can become / identify as black as an adult] you don’t know what it’s like always having been black; that being black involves an extended, lifelong, detailed experience of oppression that you can’t just identify your way into sharing. It was nothing to do with being “genetic.”
That reminds me of another discussion. Can’t. Think. What.