“Everyone has a gender identity”
This helpfully isolates one point of contention.
https://twitter.com/ILoveUTigerLily/status/1036185866018811906
No. Really not. Everyone has a sex, a complicated one in the case of trans-sexual people. “Gender identity” is a neologism and what it names is just an idea about the self. It’s a particular, local, time-specific, constructed, contentious, culture-bound idea about the self, and one which not everyone signs up to, to put it mildly.
You might as well say everyone has a height identity or a species identity or an age identity. You might as well but you wouldn’t, because “activists” have not yet declared that that is 1. a thing and 2. mandatory for all. But they have declared that about “gender identity,” and that’s a pity, because it’s not true.
And it’s a “particular, local, time-specific, constructed, contentious, culture-bound idea” that not even its proponents seem able to articulate or describe.
Strange how they refuse to accept societal labels for themselves, yet insist that I am ‘cis’ and have some gender Identity thing I don’t have. Is it really so difficult to grasp that a person can be man or woman yet not necessarily match the stereotyped for either?
@#1: “And it’s a ‘particular, local, time-specific, constructed, contentious, culture-bound idea’ that not even its proponents seem able to articulate or describe.“
Wut? The very first sentence of the Wikipedia article says, “Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender.“ Which proponents did you ask?
OB said “what it names is just an idea about the self”. True; any functioning adult, at least in any human culture I’ve ever heard of, has an idea of either “I am female”, “I am male”, or, “I am neither male nor female.” What’s contentious about that?
OB: “You might as well say everyone has a height identity or a species identity or an age identity.” Yes, precisely. People don’t generally question someone’s height or species or age; but they do sometimes question someone’s gender.
@#3: I think you might be new here. Let me assure you that you’re not raising new questions. We’ve been over it.
@#4: Thanks. You seem experienced here; would you mind showing me the ropes? I’d really appreciate a summary of the discussion, or even just some links. Thanks.
@#4 Tom Phoenix our host here usually includes a short list of ‘related posts’ at the bottom of posts, including this one, that you may find useful to refer to.
Only if you take words like “male” and “female” to mean something biological (having physical traits more representative of fathers than mothers or the other way around), excactly what we’re not allowed to do according to gender ideology.
If calling somebody “male” or “female” is to make a claim about what’s going on inside their heads (i.e. the only allowed interpretation in Genderspeak), it is no longer true that any functioning adult has an idea of either “I am female”, “I am male”, or, “I am neither male nor female.”. I sure as hell am not a “man” or “male” If being a “man”/”male” says anything about my way of thinking and feeling.
@3: You’re right: I wasn’t very clear.
Yes, your gender identity is your “internal sense of gender.” And that means… what?
We’re told that it is not necessarily linked to your anatomy or to your comfort or history (or whatever) with your socially mediated or prescribed gender. (It’s not, we’re told, about preferring to dress or behave the way men or women in your time and place do.) In which case, what is it? If you eliminate biology and culture, what are you left with?
@#3:
“Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender.“
Can you explain what that is? What is gender and what does it mean to have a personal sense of gender?
To me it doesn’t make sense because I see gender as a set of norms imposed on people according to their sex. E.g. as a male bodied person i am expected (in my culture) to enjoy sport or drink beer or be assertive or be in charge of money in my household etc. It’s not about me having a personal sense of something, it’s about society already having, before i am born, a set of written or unwritten rules, some rigid and some flexible, about how people of each sex are to behave.
See here for a better explanation than mine: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#GenTer
“any functioning adult, at least in any human culture I’ve ever heard of, has an idea of either “I am female”, “I am male”, or, “I am neither male nor female.” What’s contentious about that?”
What’s contentious is you haven’t distinguished between sex and gender. Determining sex is a matter of biological fact, personal sense doesn’t come into it. Human beings are of the male or female sex or occasionally intersex.
Determiming one’s own gender is different. Maybe that is more personal but there is a debate over whether gender is something socially constructed or something innate, and over whether it’s a system of oppression or an expression of one’s true identity. I’d be interested to hear your views.
“People don’t generally question someone’s height or species or age; but they do sometimes question someone’s gender.”
People don’t generally identify their height, species or age based on how they feel. But some people identify their gender in that way.
What is different about gender, compared to those other traits, that means it can be self-identified or chosen?
#3 Tom,
Does it bother you that the explanation given is self referential? The question ‘what is gender’ remains unanswered. It is easy to see the worthlessness of such a formulation with a simple word substitution:
“Wut? The very first sentence of the Wikipedia article says, “Flargon identity is the personal sense of one’s own flargon.”
I trust you see that this has no explanatory power at all.
And imposing those views on me before I am old enough to question the imposition. By the time I reach an age where I can determine my own likes/dislikes, I am already going to have received so many messages about what is expected of me that those expectations will color my likes/dislikes, at least if I want to fit in with my peers (and most young people do). For most people, gender roles seem obvious, because they are so entrenched in our society that it looks like they are “normal”…and doing something different makes you “abnormal”.
In a society where parents have “gender reveal” parties after finding out the sex of their developing fetus, and everyone buys “gender appropriate” gifts, how is it possible that we could ever find out what is innate, what is cultural, and what is just plain bullshit?
Tom @ 3 –
But to me that’s just jargon. As I said in the post – we have a sex, a brute material fact like our species, family, order, etc (we are great apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, etc).
We also have a big ol’ autobiographical history of what we do with that brute fact, how we understand it, what we think of it, what we are told about it over the years, how much we conform to what we are told or rebel against it, and so on and so on. I think “gender identity” is a rotten label for all that, especially now that it is loaded with so much absurd baggage and enforced with such ferocity.
I of course have that autobiographical history, as everyone does, but that’s not what the Woke Foke mean by gender identity.
It is encouraging to see so many responses that I think I agree with.
@#8: “If you eliminate biology and culture, what are you left with?” & @#10: “The question ‘what is gender’ remains unanswered.” & @#12: “But to me that’s just jargon.” & @#9: “I see gender as a set of norms imposed on people according to their sex.”
That last sounds about right to me. (The link in #9 was helpful. Thanks.) I think of gender as a component of one’s culture. Many cultures proscribe certain words or garments or actions for certain genders.
If you already reject the idea that gender can mean anything other than biological sex, or if you find the definition of “gender“ to be too muddy to be useful, or if you think that a “gender“ is just a collection of cultural stereotypes and sexist expectations, then of course “gender identity” can’t mean anything. Right?
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@#9: “What is different about gender, compared to those other traits, that means it can be self-identified or chosen?”
Here we come to the nub, perhaps.
There is a lot to criticize about the political and cultural movement around “gender identity“. But one big thing it has going for it is that the idea has some historical parallels that I will get to in a moment.
I do not know yet what side I will come to support in the end, but the only way to be fair to the actual human beings involved is for their culture (I.e. our culture) to figure out what, if anything, the words “gender“ and “gender identity“ are going to mean.
I don’t know whether it’s right that people can “choose“ a gender. But I think people can feel that a gender is an intrinsic part of their being, and it may not agree with the biology of their body. For those people, I want a culture that is compassionate, and helps them. (Maybe what’s best in the long run is some far-off future feminist paradise in which there is no such thing as gender. I dunno. But we will never live in that world. We have to help one another in this one.)
There is a lot of anti-trans sentiment on this website. I’m not on that side; as I said I haven’t yet made up my mind. (And I don’t think the only other position besides anti-trans is necessarily pro-trans.) I think that some feminists feel that feminist theory would become much simpler if trans people did not exist. But our goal should not be the simplest theory, but what’s the best for people.
Sexist cultures are full of biased ideas. Trans people can’t help but be exposed to those ideas any more than anyone else can, and some ideas will stick after repeated exposure. As feminists, we can oppose wrong ideas, like “I’m a woman now, so now I’m submissive and passive, and I spend most of my efforts on pleasing men.” I do not know what it means to be a woman, if it means anything at all, but I’m sure it does not mean that in any universe I care to live in.
So, which personal traits “can be self-identified or chosen” in a culture, albeit with controversy? Two come to mind. (Please, no one think that I am arguing that either of these is precisely analogous to being trans. No analogy is perfect; that is why it is an analogy.)
Both gay people and left-handers were told, in various cultures and in various eras, that they needed to act like “normal“ people, that they could be like everyone else if they really tried, that their self-reported feelings were wrong or impossible. They were told that they were bad people for living their lives the way they wanted to live their lives.
It is one thing to be anti-trans, but I want to see better arguments today than the bad ones that people of the past had against gay people and left-handers.
For me, I would never say I am “anti-trans.” I don’t understand some parts of trans theory. And other parts I find incoherent. And I think there is a fair amount of misogyny and homophobia in (the visible, attention-grabbing brand of) trans activism. I am anti those things. I am not anti trans people.
Tom, you have perhaps internalised a certain amount of the propagandistic messaging of one camp: that everyone not wholly supportive of their idea of gender does so out of hatred / fear / revulsion of trans people. I – and probably every other regular reader of B&W – have been called a TERF on various occasions, and I have also seen lists of ‘things TERFs believe’, and I can assure you that those things ascribed to me are wholly alien.
I should point out to you that disagreeing with trans people does not make one anti-trans, because trans people themselves are not a monolithic hive mind; there are plenty that differ in their views of gender from the mainstream. Including at least one semi-regular commenter here.
@#13:
I don’t think it’s helpful to categorise people as pro- or anti-trans.
If you believe in human rights it makes absolutely no sense to not extend that belief to include human beings who identify as trans.
But there is obviously a debate raging over what being trans really is and over whether gender is something we ought to embrace or be liberated from. There are many legitimate positions to take in that debate but i don’t think ‘pro-‘ or ‘anti-trans’ captures any of them.
Tom @ 13 – to be perfectly honest, it’s a little bit insulting to explain that “many cultures proscribe certain words or garments or actions for certain genders” and similar to people who have been feminists for many decades. Trans activism did not invent the concept of “gender as the system of norms imposed on women as women and men as men.” That concept is the very core of feminism. There’s really no need to invent it again from the ground up, or to explain it to feminist women who grew up with it.
You talk as if you’re coming to this subject as if from another planet, discovering it all for the first time, and assuming we’re new to it too. There’s nothing at all wrong with being a novice, of course, but it’s odd to assume everyone else is also a novice.
No there isn’t. That’s the Big Lie in this debate – that disagreeing with the new and constantly evolving ideology of Trans Activism=anti-trans sentiment.
“Gay” and “left-handed” refer to observable facts, even if you (mostly) need specialized equipment to observe anything more than patterns of behavior. Gender Identity does not refer to anything like that.
@#16: “over what being trans really is and over whether gender is something we ought to embrace or be liberated from”
Yes. We, all human cultures, need to figure this stuff out. Just as the proverbial fish cannot explain what it is like to feel wet, I cannot explain what it is to be a man, and a trans person cannot explain what it is to be trans. Maybe we’re all only just human, but I cannot explain what it is to be human either.
I love the idea of a culture being liberated from gender. I strongly suspect that, even if we aren’t born with some part of what I’ll call “the brain’s gender mechanism”, for lack of a better name, that mechanism gets hard wired into our brains at a very early age; it is virtually impossible for adults to learn and consistently apply new sets of pronouns, for example. If our brains are not flexible enough, we may not be able to shake gender from human cultures until some new technology or something comes along.
@#17: “it’s a little bit insulting to explain…”
I heartily apologize for that. When I wrote my response, I wanted to be sure that I covered all of my bases, even for a reader who didn’t have the background that I know that you and many others on this site have. I wanted to be sure everyone knew exactly where I was coming from, even at the cost of being pedantic, and I am truly sorry that I didn’t perceive how that could be insulting; I should have.
It is very good to hear that you and some others on this site feel that you are not anti-trans.
Why do you want to be sure everyone knows exactly where you’re coming from?
The passive-aggressive jab in your last sentence is duly noted.
I want everyone to know where I’m coming from because I don’t want people to misunderstand me. Several people asked me deep questions, and I tried to answer as much as I could.
I truly did not intend any jab. It truly is very good to hear people say that they feel that they are not anti-trans. It reassures me that I may have misunderstood some things on this site. It encourages me to keep reading, and hoping I will understand more of other people’s viewpoints in the future.
Thank you.
But Tom, I don’t say that I “feel” that I’m not anti-trans. I say that I’m not, full stop. I’m stating a fact. It’s a fact that disputing some (or many or most or all) tenets of an ideology is not the same thing as hating or attempting to persecute people who adhere to some or all of the ideology. The one can lead to the other, but it’s not the same thing as the other.
You’re right; I should have said it is very good to hear people say that they’re not anti-trans.