Your innate, invisible gender identity
When beliefs about “gender” topple into full-on woo bullshit.
It’s a reply to a comment at the Huffington Post (which provides a link to the comment but not the reply, go figure):
With respect, I would suggest that how the world relates to you has nothing to do with your femininity. Femininity comes from within, not from without. How others may or may not perceive you has nothing to do with your innate, invisible gender identity. That identity is self-determined (at least in an emotionally healthy person), and external forces are simply that: external and, for the most part, extraneous. Oh, it’s nice when other people validate and affirm your femininity, to be sure, but other people don’t deserve to be allowed to determine it for you. Your femininity is a direct result of an innate and very personal awareness. The influence of others in this regard is only relevant to the degree that you permit it to be. Speaking only for myself, no one but me gets to determine the extent of my femininity. What other people think about it is irrelevant–because it’s my life, my body, and my identity, not theirs.
No. That’s completely wrong. It’s nonsensical.
How the world relates to you has everything to do with your gender, because gender is social. It’s not a magical inner feeling, it’s the hierarchy that frames women as subordinate to men. There is no such thing as “innate, invisible gender identity” – you might as well talk about fairies and goblins. Gender is not self-determined, because it is, again, social. It’s imposed. It would be lovely to be able to say the imposition is external and therefore extraneous and have it be true, but it isn’t true: women are socially constructed as the subordinate inferior sex, and that’s why we’re still arguing about it after all this time.
This is the politics of idiots, in the Greek sense – a private person who lacked the skills to participate in public life aka politics – the affairs of the polis. Claiming that gender is just a thought in the gender-haver’s head, independent of other people, is idiotic in that solipsistic way.
Also self-defeating since there is no reason to give legal rights, medical treatments or anything else on the basis of self-determined invisible identity. It would be like giving absolute freedom of religion. Just as there could be no laws if everyone could do whatever they believed was right, there could be no meaningful distinctions between people if anyone could join any category they liked just by claiming to identify as a member.
While I believe what you wrote is true, I think at this point I’d like it if people with genders that are difficult for others to discern got to a place where they could accept that their special individual gender was purely an internal matter which didn’t require validation from everyone they interacted with, and were willing to be longsufferingly patient when the rest of the world responded to them according to the gender they appear to be (though of course ideally that response wouldn’t vary by gender).
Yes, that would be good.
I can see why it’s difficult, I think. If you feel “wrong” as your natal/assigned sex and not “wrong” as the other one, then being seen as the other one is probably an important part of feeling not “wrong.” But as the demands for validation keep ratcheting upward, they get harder to meet.
That would be like giving Donald the title because he inwardly feels he IS the President?
Echoes of Paul Simon’s Loves me like a rock.
I commented in a previous post that someone I know has fallen into this mindset–he (presumably? not sure) (formerly reasonably satisfied with ‘she’) flipped out because someone called them ‘love’ and that was ‘misgendering’. I just heard a (cis) man called ‘love’ today; it’s a pretty normal address for both genders if you’re in the part of the country where people say it.
It just misses the entire point that gender is externally imposed in the first place. People feel bad about their gender because it’s a no-win game that everybody gets forced into playing, not because there’s something fundamentally different about them deep at the core of their being. Trans-women don’t feel bad because their “femininity isn’t validated,” they feel bad because society tells them that they have to change their name and body and identity if they want to enjoy “feminine” things.
Wipe away all that nonsense about internally-derived femininity and you’re left with “love yourself no matter what other people say.” Great advice, but it’s like this is just an attempt to dress up kindergarten-level ideas in college-level language.
@5: Not sure of this, but isn’t “love” generally used by straight men only to women (not sure about children)?
If so, then the person in question took offense because of their perception of the other person’s gender and orientation?
Latverian Diplomat – no, I don’t think so. My husband gets called “love” by waitresses (possibly searching for a better tip?). I never get called love by anyone, and I am a straight woman. Not sure why; maybe it’s my forbidding demeanor? The fact that I still have blood around my mouth from my latest kill?
/s
‘…how the world relates to you has nothing to do with your [color]. [Race] comes from within, not from without.’
So that cross burning on your lawn is really just your Invisible, Innate….?
I agree, but I think the real solution is to address the error in thinking that happens before we get to this point. It’s very simple, and it’s so simple people have a hard time believing it. So much fraught conversation has happened that most people assume that there must be a “there” there.
What people need to understand is that they’re talking about personality. Not “gender.” There is no such thing as “various genders.” There is no such thing as “non-binary-gender.” There is no such thing as “a gender that is difficult to discern.” There are only two genders that have any operational meaning in this world. And they’re a hierarchy.
What does vary infinitely is personality. The entire point of feminist analysis was to wake us up to the fact that “gender” is foisted on us by artificially associating personality traits with the body’s physical sex.
This, so much this:
@8: Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that as used by straight men, they only say “love” to women.
I didn’t mean that women or gay men never say it to both men and women (I suspect they do).
If so, the only reason to feel “misgendered” by being called “love” is if it’s a (presumed) straight cis-man to a transman.
Meanwhile in Canada, provincial courts are gender-policing 4-year-old’s clothing choices: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/medicine-hat-judges-ordered-4-year-old-not-to-wear-girls-clothes-in-public-1.3816829
How does a 4 year old even understand the “gender” of an item of clothing except based on arbitrary societal norms?
#6 ZugTheMegasaurus
From the article that inspired the comment that inspired the response that inspired the OP.
Are you sure you’ve got the foggiest idea why “trans-women” feel bad?
What a fatuous question. It’s not as if that one sentence is typical of the discourse around trans women.