A formal process
I still say people are confused about this.
Campaigners have welcomed a decision by a private girls’ school to allow students to use boys’ names and wear boys’ clothes should they wish under a new “gender identity protocol”.
Oh golly, a girl can wear jeans and call herself Jack. Couldn’t she do that before? Perhaps the school had a very narrow uniform policy which meant she couldn’t wear jeans, and now the school has made it less narrow. Good, but that’s not “a new gender identity protocol.” It’s just wearing trousers instead of skirts.
St Paul’s girls’ school in west London, whose former pupils include the MP Harriet Harman and the actor Rachel Weisz, will now consider requests from students from the age of 16 to go through a formal process to be known within the school either as boys or as gender-neutral.
Thus making it seem as if girls who don’t go through “a formal process” are girly-girly all the way down. I’m still not convinced that’s a gain.
The move is a response to pupils questioning gender identity and an attempt to ensure the safety and wellbeing of pupils who “don’t want to identify as one gender or another”, the high mistress Clarissa Farr told the Sunday Times.
But it’s not questioning gender identity – it’s reinforcing it.
Sue Sanders, chair of Schools Out UK, called it a “sensible and smart” move. While enabling students to decide which gender they wanted to be should automatically be protected under the Equality Act, it was a positive move to be welcomed – particularly as it came in LGBT History month, she added.
“The gender fluidity of young people has become more pronounced in the last three to four years; there is a growing confidence in young people to challenge binary constraints,” she said. “This is really about organisations keeping up with how people are perceiving themselves – this is part of the whole process of exploding those gender boxes.”
But it isn’t. It’s the opposite. Saying girls who don’t want to wear skirts are therefore not girls is the opposite of challenging gender constraints. Making girls who prefer to wear trousers – and calling that “wearing boys’ clothes” – is not “exploding those gender boxes,” it’s locking people into them and throwing away the key.
So are girls now allowed to wear trousers, or not? It’s not clear.
Oops, I mean–girls who identify as girls.
Understanding of puberty and the effects thereof has undergone a decline among young people in the last three to four years.
You’re welcome.
Just out of interest, has ‘tomboy’ been elevated to a trans category yet?
Yes, obviously it’s vitally important that we divide people into different sociocultural groups on the basis on what genitals they happened to have been born with. I mean it’s just intuitively obvious that the sky would fall in if we didn’t use different nouns and pronouns for people born with innies and outies — never mind that roughly 99% of people in our lives will never see our genitals, and never mind that most professions do not require skill in using our genitals to operate equipment, it is apparently obviously absurd that we should question dividing people up into “boys” and “girls” on the basis of genitals.
As an old bloke, I give thanks that kids today apparently see so readily the idiocy accepted without question by their elders.
“Girls” is a gender constraint. (Sorry to mansplain, but if I don’t then I’m “drive-by”.) Using different nouns for male and female humans is gender. The only reason we do that is patriarchy. Their is no essential difference between saying we should label people born with vaginas as “girls”, and saying people with vaginas should wear skirts. The nouns “girls” and “boys” exist to promote the idea that people should be sorted into classes on the basis of their genitals.
Saying girls who don’t want to wear skirts are therefore not girls is not reinforcing gender constraints, it’s questioning the partriarchal idea that “girls” are defined by their genitals in the first place. It’s recognizing that “girls” is, and always has been, in practice, a cultural idea, not a taxonomy.
(And if you don’t believe me, I ask you to consider — when you encounter a pre-pubescent child — do you make a determination about their gender by sneaking a look in their pants, or by the way they present culturally?)
Silentbob, why do you think “girl” is a sociocultural group?
Sometimes I wear skirts. Sometimes I wear pants. What gender am I? “Who gives a rat’s ass?” would be a great answer to receive, but unfortunately The World sees things slightly differently.
Silentbob: Societally-perceived gender shouldn’t be an issue, and yet it is. What ingenious solution to that issue are you proposing here? Are you proposing that just ignoring/erasing that issue will make it go away?
SilentBob, you apparently managed to avoid this thing we call a “locker room”, as well as a “dorm room”, situations where people get naked in front of people who they expect to have the same genitalia. It is a rather unnerving experience for many people, having to get naked in front of unrelated people for the first time, but the notion that “Well, we all have the same genitalia, it won’t really matter to them” is important for making it less stressful.
George in the Famous Five stories wore boys’ clothes and used a boy’s name back in the 1940s. It’s been recognised for quite some time that some girls do like to be called Jack & not wear skirts.
This is really not the blog to make that pretense, i.e. that OB is insisting that girls and boys need to be kept as socially distinct groups. Ratherm I think her position is the exact opposite, that girls and boys (and men and women) ought not to be treated as different creatures with distinctly different personalities at all. As such I cannot help but consider this a wilfully dishonest characterisation.
As a young child I had short hair for a girl. At playgroup, me and my friend sometimes played a game where we got married. I was always the groom. My friend insisted that this was right because she had long hair and I had short hair.
When I started school I once tried to join in with a game with some other girls. They told me that I couldn’t play because I wasn’t a girl. I wished I had worn a skirt that day because then they would have known that I was a girl.
The point of all this is that young children are often pretty confused about gender and have a very superficial idea of what makes someone male or female.
Yeah, I can’t see why the right solution to this problem wasn’t ‘wear whatever style of bottom covering you choose, and cut your hair however you want’–for everyone.
Recent studies are consistent in showing that the single healthiest response to a child who expresses a desire to go by names & labels associated with the opposite gender (and who express this desire intensely and persistently, year over year) is to just let them.
Just published earlier this month:
Mental Health of Transgender Children Who Are Supported in Their Identities
From the OP
But that’s not enough. In the public school district my kids attend, about 9 years before they started, there was a 7th grader who attempted to transition. Though no dress codes existed which allowed the school to “crack down” on this, the middle-school principal responded by dictating to all teachers that the child must be referred to by her masculine birth name and masculine pronouns exclusively. Want to guess at how much success this girl had in convincing peers that her name was Michelle, when she had to respond to “Michael” on all role-calls? The resulting environment was so hostile that the girl wound up having to switch schools entirely.
Case in point, “Letting a girl wear trousers and call herself Jack” does not encapsulate all this type of policy does to foster a healthy and safe learning environment for transgender children.
That said, yes – I think it’s highly problematic when dress codes enforce gender norms. It’s an asinine policy that forbids any girl from wearing pants (or, for the matter, any boy from wearing a skirt). For that matter, the very idea of segregating boys and girls into separate schools stinks to high heaven. But I fail to see the rationale that says “any accommodations for transgender children should be disparaged, unless and until all other forms of sexism are eliminated as well”.
@guest #11
First-hand accounts are not welcome here, but I can assure you that for at least on transgender boy, short hair and jeans did nothing to solve the “problem”.
Oh good, an “I don’t see color” argument from Silentbob. Always lovely to get that from so-called progressives.
When I see men make posts like ibbica @ 6:
I have to wonder: does he really believe people ought not “give a rat’s ass” about his gender? Or would he consider it disrespectful for others to ignore his self-proclaimed gender identity (and associated labels and pronouns)?
I see no problem with that. My gender is my business, and if people didn’t care about gender, we might not need women’s rights movements anymore, because it wouldn’t be relevant.
Now, if he had said people don’t give a rat’s ass, I would find that difficult to accept, because they obviously do. And if we didn’t do that so much, there might be less worry about pronouns; people could use any pronoun they wanted, and people wouldn’t get all hot and bothered. Your son could be he without having to have a lot of fuss about it, just like I don’t get all hot and bothered when people misgender me (I have a somewhat deep voice, so on the phone, and with a name that could be either sex, I am often addressed as Mr).
It’s the whole concept that gender matters that leads to all this problem. If gender didn’t matter, then people could freely be, wear, do, and be called what they want.
@Silentbob
Yes and No.
“Girl” meaning “immature biological female” is more than sociocultural. It identifies the humans of whom the majority will grow up able to carry the next generation within their body and give birth to them. That is a biological reality. “Boy” meaning “immature biological male” identifies the humans of whom the majority will grow up able to provide the other 50% of the biological information needed for a biological female to conceive a child.
These categories can, in the vast majority of cases (upward of 98%), be accurately identified by looking at a new born child’s genitals.
This is basic science. The basic biological point of of being able to identify the two sexes is so that compatible reproductive partnerships form. Compatible reproductive partnerships exist in every single mammalian species and the vast majority of non-mammmalian species. In all mammalian species we have studied, sometimes the process identifying a suitable sexual partner goes awry and you end up with what farmers call “shy breeders” and in human beings we call “homosexuals” (disclaimer: I think it’s actually a little more complex than purely biological in humans – we are born at a much earlier stage of development than most mammals resulting in a much more plastic brain). While being homosexual is absolutely “natural” (for whatever that’s worth) and certainly nothing to be concerned about – after all, the world is hardly short of breeding pairs of humans – from a purely biological standpoint this is something that has gone “wrong”.
The rest of it – the girls like pink, boys like blue, girls like dolls, boys like cars, girls cooperate, boys compete, girls are caring, boys are rough and tumble – that is almost all sociocultural. I say almost all because of that biological need to be able to easily identify a compatible breeding partner. However, that small amount of behavioural (and visual, pheromonal etc etc) doesn’t override the fact that male and female are all more similar than we are different.
So, saying only girls who “identify as boys” are allowed to wear trousers etc is reinforcing an artificial binary. If a girl wants to wear trousers, cut her hair and call herself George then why not? These are sociocultural markers that emphasize a gender role that we assign to a biological sex. Pretty meaningless. However the fact remains that she is a biological female, belonging to the class that gestates new humans inside her body. Many, many parts of her body and her body’s functiuoning are tied up with that – and no amount of surgery or hormones can change the fact that her body is architecturally and physiologically female. Give her surgery and hormones and you don’t get a man, you get a woman who has had a double mastectomy and is taking testosterone supplements.
Incidentally, if I’d attended this school when I was in my early teens, I would have been very strongly tempted to declare myself identifying as a boy as a protest about girls being forced to wear skirts. It’s the kind of thing teens do when they’re cross and trying out new roles.
Can’t really tell from the phrasing you used there, but if your question is actually directed at me then I for one yes, really believe that it would be great if no-one gave a rat’s ass about my gender. Problem is that yes people do use it as a guide for how I should be treated. But then, most people place me in the ‘woman’ box so any such ‘gendered’ treatment typically ranges anywhere from mildly annoying to awful, which sure is a big part of why yes I’d prefer people not fuss over what gender box they think they should place me in.
(Feel free to use whatever pronouns you like for me. No, I really don’t care which ones you use. I do greatly prefer being spoken to directly (‘you’), rather than being spoken about, though.)
Jesus christ, Silentbob (@ 4) – you’ve always misunderstood what I say, but I’ve never before seen you do it that comprehensively.
Um, yeah no, that’s not what we gender critical feminists believe, Silentbob.
We believe the exact opposite, in fact. We believe that liking societally-coded “boy stuff” and preferring trousers to skirts does not exclude an immature person with ovaries from the category “girl.”
To be very, very clear: we’re the ones who believe that “boy” and “girl,” “man” and “woman,” “male” and “female,” are biological categories, not sociocultural ones.
This puts us in opposition to many transactivists.
Further to #21, the idea that male / female are purely biological sex words (and hence carry no gender connotations) while boy / girl / man / woman are gender words with gender connotations is precisely what this blog rejects. Boy / man simply mean juvenile male / adult male, and likewise girl / woman mean juvenile female / adult female. Throw the baggage out the window.
@Lady Mondegreen,
You’ve backed up your comments previously with scientific studies. I’m curious – what’s your take on the study I linked above? It suggests that transgender children who are permitted to socially transition experience significantly less of the anxiety, and none of the depression, typically found among transgender individuals.
Putting “best interest of the children” first, and appealing to science-based findings, do you have a basis to suggest that there’s a better approach to raising transgender children than simply allowing them to go by the names (John/Jill, Mark/Marcy), labels (boy/girl, brother/sister, etc), and pronouns of their preferred gender? Alongside, of course, the same freedom that should be granted to all kids: the freedom to dress, play, talk and act however they want, gendered-norms be damned.
TBH, up to the point where you have a problem with that; with parents who make that choice for their kids or individuals who have chosen that path for themselves, I’m one transactivist with whom you’re probably not in serious opposition.
@iknklast, @ibbica,
Unfortunately, gender is baked into our language: we have mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters; boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, and husbands; aunts and uncles. We talk about “her” and “him”, and whether some thing is “hers” or “his”; and whether she said it or he did. Without great effort, casual conversation about other people is next to impossible without constant references to their gender.
I appreciate and take at your word that you’re unbothered by being misgendered; however, most people do not take it lightly at all. I forget the article, but there was a case where Ophelia responded to an article written by an androgynously-named woman and mistakenly referred to the author with masculine pronouns. In very short order:
1) Two commenters called her attention to the mistake
2) Ophelia edited the article to correct the pronouns.
So it would seem, contra to your personal preferences, that even in these circles – correctly attributing the gender of individuals is a “big deal”.
Kevin, what do you mean by “simply allowing them to go by the names, labels, and pronouns of their preferred gender”? I don’t see how “allowing” even comes into it. Obviously people of any age can go by any names, labels, and pronouns they like.
Kevin@12:
I’m not a mental health expert, so I don’t have any comment to make about this topic in general. I just want to say that, to me as a researcher, that study that you cite rings some alarm bells. The concluding paragraph alone contains very surprising language. Perhaps it’s normal in mental health research fields to describe one’s work as “novel” and further investigation of the same to be “of the utmost importance”, but it’s certainly not so in any other field with which I’m familiar; telling one’s peers what they should think is generally frowned upon.
I probably don’t have to say that “recent research” is not usually a magical golden key of insight. It’s the consensus over time that matters. In the late 1970’s there was plenty of “recent research” that demonstrated the health benefits of smoking tobacco.
@Ophelia,
This would be an example of “not that”:
Even more extreme, of course, are the cases where a kid’s parents themselves adopt the same policy with respect to how their kid will be referred (with the power to demand compliance of other parents, their kids, teachers, etc).
Allowing it means saying, “Okay, fine. I guess we were mistaken. You are a boy.” Then leaving the struggle behind and moving on with life.
‘I appreciate and take at your word that you’re unbothered by being misgendered; however, most people do not take it lightly at all.’
I don’t know if that’s true–I’ll add myself to the list of people who couldn’t care less what pronoun/title people use for me (in fact, as I’m not interested in being ‘Ms/Miss/Mrs’ I randomly pick one of these, Dr, Mr, Lord, or whatever when filling out forms where a ‘title’ is required–I know at least one organisation or company that addresses me as ‘Wing Commander’). And I also suspect that a lot of the people who do have strong reactions to being misgendered are reacting to whatever negative associations or stereotypes they relate to that gender (e.g. referring to someone who thinks of himself as male with a feminine word associates that person with weakness, irrationality, shallowness, incompetence, submissiveness, etc.)–that’s the only kind of situation in which I’ve ever seen anyone react negatively to someone making a mistake with a gender pronoun or label.
In my grandfather’s day, all children wore dresses and long hair until they were four. My eighties’ kids wore T-shirts and shorts (or dungarees), as did their friends. Yes, ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, are biological categories; social gender norms – ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ and cultural dress codes – are boxes imposed on top of that basic knowledge and are what most of us here are fighting against.
Pre-puberty, there is absolutely no need – with the important exception of medical care – to treat children of either sex as different, let alone inferior. Let them all wear the modern uniform of T-shirt and jeans, allow them to grow their hair to whatever style and length they choose (half my sons currently have long hair, although they’ve each tried different lengths from none at all; my grandsons all change theirs on a whim) and dye it any colour they please. Stop policing how small children dress; how, with whom, and with what they are allowed to play; and stop telling them that some subjects and behaviours come more ‘naturally’ to one sex rather than the other.
Wearing trousers and being called ‘Jack’* didn’t used to be considered weird at an all-girls Grammar school in England in the early 1970s, at least amongst what would these days be referred to as ‘the nerds’. Adults generally stayed out of the affairs of students, unless there was bullying involved. Compared to modern teens, we seemed to have a great deal of freedom to express ourselves, even though we had a school uniform.
We seem to be going backwards at an alarming rate – with people inventing ever tinier boxes; enforcing the strict gender gender norms of the fifties that made so many people, including transsexuals, very miserable; yet at the very same time expecting women to allow unreconstructed straight males, MRAs in drag (but not always even that), to take their few remaining safe spaces; and (weirdly enough to the transnarcissists) there are plenty of trans people who don’t like the way things are going and we’re siding with the so-called ‘TERFS’.
_____________________
(*Or, in my case, also ‘Ken’. Add me to the list of people who couldn’t care less which pronouns are used about me. Those used to me are ‘you’, ‘your’, and ‘yours’)
@James,
I appreciate that; however, I must note that my own alarm bells sound at “‘recent science’ has gotten it wrong in the past” (though that’s typically followed by “science used to say the world was cooling”). :-)
Where I think the researchers of this study are coming from is:
1) There is evidence that condition X vastly increases undesirable outcome Y.
2) Anecdotal evidence / case studies suggest that treatment Z may improve outcomes.
3) This study is the first to directly test treatment Z.
4) The results indicate overwhelming support: in N=72 sample size, treatment Z completely eliminated the increase of Y in subjects having condition X.
I wouldn’t think it’d be unprecedented that when researchers find a major improvement in outcome from a never-before-tested treatment, said researchers might use language with a tinge of “Hey everyone, check this out!”. But then, I’m not all that privy to the social graces of published research.
Kevin – you didn’t understand my question.
@Ophelia,
It’s more a testament to the relative powerlessness of the child in question. When rubber hits road: most teachers will not start calling a hitherto-girl-named-“Marcy” by “Mark”, nor switch up pronouns, at the sole behest of the child.
And if the child chooses to go by “Mark”, and does so by refusing to answer to “Marcy”, the child’s refusal to respond to their “real name” will be considered insubordination (and treated no different than the disruptive child who insists they be addressed “Your Majesty”)
Amusing-ish aside: our son transitioned a day before we had the opportunity to meet with his pre-K teacher; she was greatly relieved to learn what a transgender child was – until then, she’d spent a day becoming convinced that our son was mourning the loss of a twin brother and trying to pretend he was still alive.
Anyway, for kids, parents are given tremendous leeway in dictating how their kids will be addressed (another common situation is that of carefully managing the last-names attributed to step-kids in school); teachers tend to follow the lead of the parents; and other kids follow the lead of the teachers.
Unless we take “go by” in the loosest sense, e.g. saying “I go by Kevin-the-Awesome” when nobody actually calls me that, I’m not sure what aspect of your question I’m failing to address.
I am so, so tired of this conversation.
Kevin: It’s my understanding that you have a trans child. From what you’ve said about your child, it is my opinion that that child is a girl, not a boy.
Here’s the thing. You can change my mind about this. Here’s how. Provide a definition of the word “boy” that (1) is coherent, (2) is not circular, (3) is not unfalsifiable, and (4) applies equally well to your child and Prince George.
If you can do this, I will change my mind.
(Ophelia, if this is too combative, I’ll withdraw it.)
Kevin@30:
My reference to tobacco was intentional, in that it was one-off “studies” (scare-quotes due to the fact that they were funded by tobacco growers) that claimed to demonstrate the positive health benefits of smoking tobacco, in direct opposition to the then-growing consensus. At the time that “science used to say the world was cooling” (viz. the ~1970’s) there was as yet no firm consensus about the long-term direction of climate change, and as a result, new studies were not automatically considered to be gospel. However, now there is an overall scientific consensus about climate change, and serious people don’t question the broad elements of supporting studies just because they are recent.
There is as yet no consensus about many (most? all?) transgender issues. Moreover, statistical social science research is often unreliable in the sense that finding correlations may never result in uncovering causal mechanisms. Serious researchers go to great pains, in such situations, to keep their language neutral. When they don’t, there are immediate concerns about potential hidden conflicts of interest in much the same way as my aforementioned tobacco studies had. I’m not suggesting that that is the case here, just that the language in this study is at best unconventional and unduly self-aggrandizing for what appears to be such a small sample and, in the authors’ own words, the first study of its kind. Who knows, maybe the PI is just a poor editor. At any rate, I would suggest that it would serve you better to treat these things more critically, especially given that you are a layperson in the field. Confirmation bias can be a real bear.
Kevin @ 32
Ok, so let’s talk about that. Do we actually want teachers doing X at the sole behest of the child? The child age 6 or 7 or thereabouts? It depends on what the X is, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not necessarily always the case that a teacher ought to switch a child’s names solely because the child requests it? Maybe it depends?
Of course children are powerless, but it’s not in their interest for teachers to start pretending they’re not.
The aspect of my question you didn’t address @ 27 was the fact that it’s not about going by, it’s about other people saying. We’re all at liberty to “go by” anything we like; that doesn’t mean we can always successfully demand that other people either address us or refer to us that way. There’s a little rhetorical shift you did @ 23 that obscured that fact.
@Kevin Kirkpatrick
The study says that the children they looked at who were “supported in their gender identity” did fine compared with non-trans children on measures of depression, and had only slightly elevated anxiety levels.
I think that’s fine as far as it goes, and it certainly makes intuitive sense to me that children who are supported by their parents and teachers will show less depression and anxiety than children who are not.
As the study’s authors admit, though, it leaves a number of unanswered questions. Three that are uppermost in my mind:
1) What about children who are loved and supported, and allowed to “present” however they like, but are not encouraged in their insistence that they “are” the other sex?
2) Is it easier for a child to be accepted as the other sex, because being openly gender nonconforming (“I’m a boy, I prefer to wear dresses,”) is still socially unacceptable?
3) Most importantly–what are the long term consequences? How many of these children who might have desisted, will go on to puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery? Most children with early GID do desist, but I’ve seen it claimed that children who transition young almost invariably go on to puberty blockers and hormones. This is a problem.
I don’t claim to have answers to these questions. And if my #2 is correct, I don’t pretend to know what the best course would be for parents. Little children can’t fight society all on their own.
I think we’re far from having definitive answers yet. I don’t envy you having to navigate this morass, Kevin. But I do think the most important thing is that children should know they are loved, loved and supported for who they are, and it sounds to me like your child has that.
BTW, have you seen the BBC documentary yet? I thought it was excellent.
@Kevin K
I remember that, and I was one of the two. I’m glad you mentioned it, because I noticed at the time that some commenters took the correction as evidence of the mighty importance of using “preferred pronouns.”
That was not why I spoke up. My reason? Only a small percentage of world leaders are female, and doubtless we all share an implicit bias that associates “world leader” with “male.”
That’s why I corrected the “misgendering” of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-Wen. I wanted people to be aware of her sex.
Ahhh, that’s what it was – I didn’t remember it myself.
I was thinking about that genre as a neglected aspect of The Pronouns Issue. You know – when somebody on the news or in conversation mentions a judge or a CEO or a doctor and then in the next sentence says “she” – and you’re surprised, and furious at being surprised. That. I still do that, and it pisses me off. We still live in a world where “judge” and “CEO” mean “he” and it’s surprising when they don’t.
#33
Yes, this all seems weirdly familiar… There are probably more, but those are enough. This topic has been done to death, and the comments from then are still applicable today.
Ophelia, #38. That reminds me of the old riddle about a man and his son being in a car wreck. The boy is seriously injured and is rushed by helicopter to hospital for surgery. His father, being only slightly hurt and travelling to hospital by ambulance, is still en-route when the boy arrives. As the boy is taken into theatre the surgeon sees him and says “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son”.
The question was, of course, if the boy’s dad is still in an ambulance, why did the surgeon make that claim?
It always surprised me that so many people wracked their brains for increasingly convoluted explanations before reaching the obvious one.
Back to the OP; have the school’s administrators thought about the most obvious problem here? Once the girls have donned trousers and cut their hair the school will recognise them as boys. The school is an exclusive girls’ school, so do the boys now have to leave the school or does it change its own status and begin to identify as a mixed-sex school?
Logically, if the trans pupils are allowed to identify as boys but are allowed to stay there, and if the school remains single-sex, then the message that the pupils will get is that they are merely being humoured rather than accepted as boys.
Lady M – I saw the BBC documentary. I found out about it when one of my friends shared a petition to have it “reviewed by independent experts” before broadcast. Needless to say, they had suggestions on who those experts should be. The petition falsely claimed that Zucker was not an expert and used the closure of his clinic and the controversy as reasons it should not be broadcast, when that is the subject of the programme. I immediately set it to record.
One thing that bothers me a lot in these debates is that transactivists consider a course of action that will lead to lifelong medical treatment, sterilisation and extensive surgery to be more desirable than a child learning to accept their body and to accept that one need not conform to stereotype. Attempts to achieve the latter are bizarrely referred to as “conversion therapy”. Their attitude is to set young children on the path to transition and treat anyone who questions this is treated as scum. This is completely irresponsible. Then there’s the claim that one mustn’t pathologise trans people but that they must have medical treatments or they will commit suicide. Which is it? I appreciate that the stigma of mental illness is a factor here but this reasoning also comes from the gender identity doctrine, where gender is a quality of the soul. (OK they sometimes talk about brains but they never claim it’s a neurological illness).
I think this is an interesting case in bringing out very clearly the difference between a feminist and a transactivist take on the gendered-clothing issue.
The transactivist take here is to say: there is girls’ clothing, and boys’ clothing, and girls who sign up to be boys can wear boys’ clothing.
The feminist take is to say: these types of clothing are defined as school uniform. Pupils wearing either of these types of clothing are in uniform, so no problem; there is no need to define pants as “boys’ clothing” or skirts as “girls’ clothing” at all.
Personally I think the latter would be far more accommodating, since the situation in the OP doesn’t seem to help girls who might want to wear pants _without_ having to define themselves as boys in order to do so; nor indeed would it help a trans child who might not want to attach a large “I am trans look at me” banner to themselves just so they can wear pants.
Bluntly, a lot of transactivism currently looks like trying to end apartheid by insisting that some black people be allowed to redefine themselves as white. That doesn’t actually address the underlying problem.
I really think this is more of a generational thing. Here’s an anecdote as evidence. I was watching an old (to them, pre-historic) episode of Star Trek with my kids and explaining who was who as it went. Dr McCoy appeared in sick bay with his rather sexy mini-skirted nurse. ‘That’s Dr McCoy’, I told them. ‘Which one?’ replied my daughter.
@All,
Apologies for my delayed response. For me, this is a very high-stakes issue (especially in recent weeks, in lieu of recent political developments). I’ve found that my off-the-cuff responses are… less than constructive.
@Cressida,
I sense this is like the Creationist who’s willing to pay 1 billion dollars to anyone who can show them just one piece of evidence that evolution is true. Nevertheless; here’s my working definition of boy/girl:
Boy: a child whose preference* is for others to refer to them by masculine pronouns (he, him, his) and labels (brother, son, etc).
Girl: a child whose preference* is for others to them by feminine pronouns (she, her, hers) and labels (sister, daughter, etc).
* For children too young to express such a preference, this defaults to the preference of their legal guardian.
I believe this addresses your criteria (at least, those I can make sense of)
(1) is coherent (check)
(2) is not circular (check)
(3) is not unfalsifiable (incoherent…. what would it mean to “falsify” a definition? If the definition of “bird” is “an animal with feathers”… is that unfalsifiable? If not, what would “falsify” it?)
(4) applies equally well to your child and Prince George (check)
C’mon. You don’t really mean that, do you?
As for “is it the best definition?”. I believe so. We use words to convey information. When it comes to a word’s definition, there’s no “right” or “wrong”; there’s only an assessment of “more useful” and “less useful” in conveying pertinent information (in accordance with surrounding context). When I introduce my son as “a boy”; I am doing so to convey that he his preference is for me, and everyone else in his life, to refer to him by masculine pronouns.
Now let’s give your definition a fair shake; I presume it’s:
Boy: A child who was born with a penis.
Girl: A child who was born with a vagina.
What value is there in embedding information about children’s genitals into such a commonly-used term? Say you tell somebody “Kevin’s youngest child, whom he refers to as a ‘son’, is actually a girl.”. By your proposed definition of “girl”, what factual information would that person now possess that they did not have before? Why is it important to you that they know this – were it not baked into your definition of “girl”, would you feel compelled to convey the information explicitly? Of what use would it be?
[NOTE: The same questions apply, should you choose to go with the “XY vs XX chromosome” definition; do you feel compelled to tell others what a child’s blood type is?]
Frankly, I don’t care if you think I have two boys, two girls, or two giraffes for kids. But I do care* that when you speak of them, you do so in a way that’s respectful of how they identify themselves. Were you to insist upon using female labels or pronouns for either of my two sons (or male pronouns for my wife, sister, or mother, once they’d been introduced as such), that would come across as deeply disrespectful, if not belligerent. It’d be on the order of me insisting on referring to you by “Cressie” against your wishes.
* Note: I said “I care”. Of course I have no control over how you choose to treat others.
Kevin, “falsifiable” means “can be tested and proven to be false,” more or less. So yes, your definition fails. Preferences are completely internal and not externally verifiable. It’s not much different from saying that a boy is someone with “a masculine soul.” I can’t prove or disprove that, and we sure as hell shouldn’t be basing public policy on what amounts to a religious belief. I have preferences for lots of things, but that doesn’t mean they’re worthy of legal protection.
Kevin, isn’t your proposed definition circular?
What makes a pronoun “masculine”? In English, him/he/his are “masculine” because they are used in place of a male noun. Ergo, your definition reduces as follows:
“Child X is male because X believes male pronouns are the appropriate ones to use for X.”
–> “Child X is male because X is male.” (Unless you are arguing that Child X “prefers” male pronouns not because they are or feel “correct,” but because Child X simply likes them better on some aesthetic or other consideration divorced from their actual substantive meaning. In which case, Child X might be male in English because X likes the sound of “he” better than “she,” but female in French because X likes “elle” better than “il”? I think I can safely assume you are not making this argument)
The same is true for the other gender-specific “labels,” e.g., X is male because X prefers to be called a boy, which is the term used in English for male children. Again assuming this is not a mere aesthetic preference for the word “boy” but is based on some substantive meaning, then this reduces to “X is male because X is male.”
@Ophelia
Of course it depends. I’d say it depends exclusively on, “Will it disrupt the child’s learning (or that of their peers)?” That’s why I used the counter-example. Addressing a child with a term of deference, e.g. “Your Highness”, would confuse the classroom dynamic and undercut the teachers’ ability to take charge and direct classroom activity. But a child who requests to go by “Frank” instead of “Francine”? I don’t see how it’d be any more disruptive than addressing a child as “Pete” instead of “Peter”. Of course, if it’s a request that’s completely outside the teacher’s experience, then I’d understand the teacher’s wish to discuss the matter with the child’s parents.
Consider these hypothetical statements a parent of a transgender child might make:
[Quick aside: I think I said this once, but it’s been awhile; “Marcy/Mark” are not my son’s birth/current name – this truly is meant as a hypothetical]
> “Marcy! I just overheard your friend call you Mark. You are a girl and you need to accept that. No more boy names. From now on, if your friends can’t call you by your real name, they won’t be allowed to come over to play.”
> “Marcy. Grandma told me that you told her you were a boy. We’ve been over this. You aren’t a boy, and you know our rule about lying. You’re grounded from television for 2 days.”
> “Mom, I know you think you’re just going along with a game Marcy is playing, but her “I’m a boy” thing is really getting out of hand. She’s becoming obsessed with it, and it’s not healthy. We’ve started her in a treatment program, and her clinician made it clear that everybody in her life – even her grandma – needs to help her get past this delusion. No matter how much she pouts or whines, you need to call her by “Marcy” from here on.”
> “Hello Mr. Freeman, this is about Marcy, in your class. This is her dad. Marcy seems to have taken imaginary play a bit to far, and has convinced herself that, well, that she’s actually a boy…. Yes, exactly! So you’ve seen some of it in the classroom? Anyway, it’s kind of turned into an unhealthy obsession. Marcy is working with a therapist to help her get past this, and one key to successful treatment is consistency. Per her doctor, she is only to be addressed as “Marcy”. If she won’t answer to this, or if you witness her asking anyone to call her anything else (“Mark” is one of her favorites) – or if she’s says anything about how she’s “really a boy”, I need to hear about it immediately.”
Would you say Marcy is being allowed to go by Mark?
@Cressida,
You’re criteria for “definition” continues to baffle me. What is a “falsifiable” definition of “atheist”? Or “excited”.
@Screechy Monkey: “Him” can be defined as “the personal pronoun conventionally used to refer to male-at-birth babies and, from childhood onward, those people who prefer it over other pronouns.”
Screechy Monkey, I think you’re right. I missed that, because the definition of “masculine” is “referring to stereotypes about male people,” and my definition of “male” is “of the sex class characterized by male primary and secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes, and gametes,” where “male sex characteristics” include (for example) a prostate and penis, where “male chromosomes” are XY, and “male gametes” are sperm cells. So there’s no circularity there.
BUT, if your definition of “male” is “someone who prefers masculinity,” then yes, I think there’s a circularity problem. Because “masculine” still means “referring to stereotypes about male people.” So either you change your definition of “masculine” to something with an external referent, or else Kevin’s definition fails both circularity and falsifiability.
@Ophelia,
To clarify “allowed to” a bit further: I’m using it in the sense of “my kids aren’t allowed to ride their bikes without a helmet.” Could they still do it? Of course… but they’re going to be facing stiff consequences for doing so. I think the very meaning of “allowed to” is lost, if one treats the ability to actually do a thing as equivalent to being allowed to do that thing (if I’m understanding that that’s the point you’re trying to make).
Kevin @ 47 – again you ignored the point of my question.
Also – Kevin @ 44 – that penultimate paragraph (and your opening paragraph, for that matter) – that’s that bullying personalization thing you do again, that I have asked you to stop doing, and that you agreed to stop doing. Nobody here is attacking your child. Stop that.
@Cressida,
Just interjecting; that’s not what I said. My son’s disdain for competitive sports, love of all things glittery, enjoyment of wearing earrings, and favorite pastime of playing with stuffed animals in his dollhouse – I consider none of these things (much as they might defy stereotypes of male people) to have anything to do with his gender.
As for the whole pronoun thing: consider other languages have gendered their determinants. In German, there are masculine, feminine, and neutral determinants (der, die, das). “The carpet” is “masculine”. “The family” is “femine”. *That* is the sense of “masculine” with which I say “him” is a “masculine” pronoun.
@Ophelia,
Per #44, that was sincerely meant as an apology/explanation for delaying responses for 2 days or more. I did not intend it as an appeal for sympathy. But I see how it can come across that way. I’ll leave it at, “Apologies for the delays so far. For various reasons, my replies may continue to be delayed in this thread.”
Kevin, I know you didn’t say that “masculine” means “referring to stereotypes about male people.” That’s the definition I use. You, in fact, can’t use it, or else your definition of “male” is circular. If you don’t want that to be the case, then you need to point at a different definition of “masculine,” one that doesn’t include the word “male.”
And no, you can’t rely on gendered pronouns for your definition. That would make the circularity only that much more obvious. You can’t say, “Male” means “preferring masculine pronouns,” where “masculine pronouns” are “pronouns that refer to masculine things.” Or, you can, but you sound silly.
Kevin:
I’m a little curious that you’re conceding that there is such a thing as “male-at-birth,” but that’s perhaps a rabbit hole not worth chasing down at this point.
My real question is, on what basis does someone “prefer” a male pronoun over others? If it’s purely an aesthetic/linguistic preference, then can someone be a male in English, female in French, and agendered in some third language? I thought this was such an obviously silly possibility that I mentioned it only for completeness, but now I’m starting to wonder. Or what about a child who prefers “him” to “her,” but likes “daughter” better than “son,” and prefers “sibling” to either “brother” or “sister” — do we need to consult one of those extensive catalogues of gender identity?
If instead the preference for one set of pronouns over another is because there’s some substantive difference, then what is it, if, as you insist to Cressida, you are not smuggling in cultural gender stereotypes?
At this point, I’m not even really arguing with you as much as trying to understand what your position is.
Kevin #48, unfalsifiability isn’t a requirement for all definitions. I think it *should* be required for the definitions of man/woman because so much research and policy depends on the distinction. For example, if you’re researching heart disease in women, your test subjects should be verifiably women or else the results won’t be comparable across studies.
That’s an clear example, but a narrow one. More broadly, it’s important to feminists who analyze the historical disadvantages women have faced. If you can’t verifiably identify who the women are, you can’t see the patterns of disadvantage and figure out why it happened and what to do about it. You might not think this matters, but I certainly do.
Here’s the boringly conventional definition I employ for relevent words:
Boy: juvenile male. Girl: juvenile female. Man: adult male. Woman: adult female.
[Note that male and female refer to sex rather than gender]
Provided we avoid any stereotypes associated with those terms, they seem extremely easy to use.
Your point here is that boy, girl etc. convey nothing that is useful about a person, in that knowing the genitals of someone is rarely relevant to a situation. Certainly, we do not need to know whether the surgeon or mechanic or accountant or [etc.] is in posession of a penis or vulva when obtaining their services. But it that is your chief complaint about those definitions, it hardly needs pointing out that your definitions offer information that is even less useful; namely, that your mechanic etc. chooses to be called a man because… they choose to be called a man.
As for your definitions, I must agree with the criticisms already voiced: your definition is circular unless it refers to something checkable (anatomy, genetics). And if it is not grounded on such a thing, then what? An inner feeling? Some ineffable essence of maleness/femaleness? But then it too is unfalsifiable.
The description you give of your child might provide clues as to what you mean by gender. So. Female bodied, behaving and presenting in a manner that is at least moderately consistent with the stereotyped ‘girly’ behaviour and presentation (not that I endorse such stereotypes)… but wanting to be called a boy, wanting male pronouns, and wanting a traditionally male name. This is of course not a complete description of your child, but so far it suggests your operational use of gender here is very much circular. Your child is a boy because your child wants to be called a boy. Due to, I speculate, some inner feeling of boyness? That would also make it non-confirmable, unfalsifiable.
As for your question of why bother having words that convey sex characteristics… well, that’s just english for you. We are the inheritors of a language that is structured such that most second person singular references to people include their sex, probably because sex is a population-wide pattern, with people visibly belonging to one or the other category with very few exceptions. It is not strictly necessary for a language to include that information about the referred-to person, but here we are.
The discussion reminds me about a blog post elsewhere that I came across while going down rabbit holes from posts here. The blogger is discussing her ex-husband, who went from being a happy man to being a depressed woman, partly over definitions:
Here’s the full post.
https://transwidow.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/defining-away-happiness/
^ From that blog, I found this useful explanation regarding the uselessness of ‘TERF’ as a label and insult:
https://rebeccarc.com/2016/11/01/the-word-terf/