How to weigh a feeling
Here again – trans people can absolutely say what it’s like to have gender dysphoria, but no one else can. Trans people and trans people only know what gender dysphoria is and what gender nonconformity is and that they are different and exactly how they are different.
Let's be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had "gender dysphoria" as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria, not because they believe it, but because it is useful to muddy the waters.
— Casey Explosion (@CaseyExplosion) January 5, 2019
Let’s be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had “gender dysphoria” as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria, not because they believe it, but because it is useful to muddy the waters.
But why? Why would that be true? Why should we believe it? Why is it the case that they know all about what it’s like to be what we are, but we don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be what they are? Where did they get this absolute knowledge that we have no access to?
TERF women claiming "I got made fun of for being a tomboy" is the exact same thing as "I wanted to die because everyone kept calling me 'she,' and that's not who I am" need to check themselves. You have no goddamn idea what dysphoria is like.
— Faith (@RoseOfWindsong) January 5, 2019
TERF women claiming “I got made fun of for being a tomboy” is the exact same thing as “I wanted to die because everyone kept calling me ‘she,’ and that’s not who I am” need to check themselves. You have no goddamn idea what dysphoria is like.
How do they know that? How can they know that? If their experience is a black box to us, how can our experience be a transparent box to them? Do they have magic powers?
Sorry, but none of this adds up. It’s true that we can’t know what anyone else’s experience is like from the inside, but that applies every bit as much to trans people as it does to everyone else. All we can do is talk and describe, and we’re all on the same footing that way. I think it’s probably true that my experience of pretending to be a lot of boy characters (as well as a lot of girl characters) as a kid, and of hating skirts and dresses, was not miserable enough to qualify as gender dysphoria, but I’m not at all sure about it, because it’s not clear exactly what gender dysphoria is. It’s a Feeling in the Head and there’s nothing more precise about it than that.
We’re not lying and we don’t need to check ourselves.
From the same place Trump gets all the things he knows that no one else knows?
Seriously, these people are so self-centered that one begins to believe they have no Theory of Mind. And I worry that it’s catching.
In reality, though, it’s no different from the young 20-something white male that has patiently explained to me (a 58-year old female) what it was really like to be a female in the 1980s, and to others about how Black Lives Matter is exaggerating about the difficulties of being a black man in America. This is, quite simply, male entitlement (and in the case of the race issue, white entitlement).
And how does Faith Neff know that none of us ever felt like dying when someone called us “she” with that damn sneer in their voice that rendered “she” as an insult, almost a curse? When people made fun of us for menstruating? When people wouldn’t let us do the things we wanted to do because they were “boy” things? Maybe Faith Neff needs to check herself and realize she has no goddamn idea what I, or you, or any other person that is not herself has experienced.
And let’s be absolutely clear, Faith, autogynephiles often admit they did just fine as little boys. Often as grown men, as well. Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl, wrote about accepting herself as a boy and enjoying “boy” things and activities in childhood.
So did Serano have gender dysphoria, or not? If not, why is it that some trans-identified males experienced gd as kids and others didn’t? Hmmm?
What I find very revealing is that gender dysphoria is usually described in terms like “the distress a person experiences as a result of the sex and gender they were assigned at birth” or “a conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify.” Note that both definitions combine ‘distress caused by sexual anatomy’ with ‘distress caused by societal expectations placed on one on the basis of sex.’ Should they not be considered distinct? This is part and parcel with the general conflation of anatomy with inner identity crap, and shouldn’t mental health professionals take pains to isolate and individually treat different sources of distress? This strikes me as caving in to the transactivists, especially with the second quote there: ‘physical or assigned gender’. The word for physical gender is sex ferfucksakes.
Regarding the ‘distress caused by societal expectations’ portion of the definitions, I’m not at all convinced there is any difference between gender dysphoria and a resentment of the restrictions placed on a person on the basis of their sex at all, except that there is a gradient of distress experienced individually. They differ only in degree rather than in nature, and the only way to probe this that I can see is to ask the question ‘to what degree did this distress degrade your quality of life?’ There is no way anyone can say that your distress is not sufficient to be considered gender dysphoria, as the degree of distress felt is entirely subjective to that individual. Trans people positioning themselves as the ultimate arbiters of what people feel internally and how they describe it can fuck off.
Regarding the other portion, ‘distress caused by sexual anatomy,’ I have a lot more sympathy. If this can be managed or even removed by anti-anxiety medication / counseling, fantastic. If not, there is body modification via hormones and/or surgery. Hopefully, in either case the person will be able to accept their body without it continuing to cause anxiety. I will note however that distress caused by sexual anatomy is a subset of distress caused by anatomy, so why this isn’t considered a form of body dysmorphia is beyond me.
Getting back to the actual OP, I will reiterate: Trans people positioning themselves as the ultimate arbiters of what people feel internally and how they describe it can fuck off.
The problem with these assertions is that trans people have specifically said, on many, many occasions, that to be trans one does not need to have suffered dysphoria. Merely “feeling” that one’s “assigned” gender does not adequately describe one is enough.
Which is very close to the role-conflict commonly experienced by biological females, particularly in our adolescent and young adulthood. In fact, today many of us would be told we were trans.
My daughter is bi. She currently has a friend** who is non-binary. In my day we would have called her a lesbian on the butch end of the scale. “They” are a perfectly pleasant young person who strongly reminds me of myself and the other “gender non-conforming” young women I knew. And I have recently remembered that in my later teen years I would sometimes describe myself as a “masculine-like” girl. I strongly suspect that if I were the age of M and her friend today, I would be calling myself non-binary as a protest against gender roles. (Dressing in a masculine manner would have been a non-starter as I went to an all girls grammar school).
The difference is that noone – or at least no one with access to mainsteam media – was saying “You have these feelings, you are non-binary or trans.” Like so many young women who went through this gender role rebellion, I became a feminist. I came upon the Marxist class based analysis of gender roles and expectations which (mostly) made sense to me. Defining women as “that group of human beings who, based on physical conformation, are presumed willing and able to perform reproductive labour” is a useful definition. Women defined as “those human beings who feel like women” is, as has been pointed out regularly, a pointless and useless “definition”. Interestingly, that class definition would actually include some trans women.
** I was trying to ask M whether she and her friend are dating. I’m still not entirely sure – and it isn’t my business anyway – but I did find out a term for romantic involvement involving non-binary folk. Apparently, one name is “date mates” which I think is brilliant.
Yes, this describes a lot of the women that I know. I was given tons of messages growing up about my proper gender, and they did not include going to college, working as a scientist (really, if you must go to college, can’t you be a nurse or a kindergarten teacher?), or living on my own without a man for over a decade. I was sure that little of what my mother and sisters believed to be appropriate female behavior defined me. Like so many of the trans*, there were myriad attempts to force me into a defined role, including the fact that I was required to take 2 years of Home Ec (by the third year it got so difficult to force me that they finally gave up and let me take Chemistry). My mother started a “Hope Chest” for me when I was ten – ten, ferchrissake. I wasn’t planning marriage at that time, I was trying to figure out what puberty was and when I had to worry about it…
Meanwhile, as women stand at risk of losing some pretty major rights, a significant portion of the people who need those rights are siphoning themselves off into the direction of “centering trans” in the women’s movement, and refuse to consider women’s rights worth fighting for, only “human” rights, which seems to be more and more defined as “all people who are men, and those who think they are women even though they weren’t born women”. The rest of us are dismissed as being “cis-women” which seems to have become synonymous with evil to way too many people (We have always been viewed with suspicion by the right, of course. Now the left is free to brush us off and tell us to STFU, too, by redefining woman to mean everyone but women).
PZ and the horde are saying some awful things about you over on Pharyngula. I would like to have gone and try and reason some sense into that crew but I’ve been unfairly banned from there.
Apparently you are illogical and a TERF (not a true feminist).
That’s so 2015.