What to do about the cues
A further thought occurs to me, pondering this business of Justin Weinberg and his heightened (and in my view exaggerated) empathy for t philosopher (who claims to be a trans woman) along with his barely detectable empathy for women and other subordinated categories of people. Imagine being made to feel bad about yourself the way t philosopher is, he tells us. So I ponder what it is that makes t philosopher feel bad. According to tp it’s terfy women talking about sex and gender, but I was attempting to look behind that.
So I thought about the fact that academics have to stand up in front of groups of people, small groups or large or both, and lecture at them and/or discuss with them.
So, yes, I can see how that would be freighted for a trans person. (It’s freighted for others too though, of course. What is an academic supposed to look like? Oh, you know – corduroy jacket, beard, pipe, pallid skin.) One of the big hurdles for trans people is the voice, and academics have to use their voices a lot. In other words teaching is quite likely a very self-conscious activity for trans people, over and above the self-consciousness that can afflict anyone.
What would the ideal be? I guess that students and colleagues and everyone would just smoothly accept the trans teacher as her/his chosen gender, with no lapses of memory or any other kind of glitch.
But the difficulty there, it seems to me, is that people also and at the same time have to accept everyone else as her/his chosen gender, with no lapses of memory or any other kind of glitch. I’m thinking it’s not all that easy for human beings to do both of those things at once. We have to internalize a lot of cues to who is which sex starting in infancy, and we also have to learn to override all those cues in the case of a very few people.
Is that even possible? Can people internalize both sets of cues, that give opposite results, without ever getting confused or absent-minded?
If it’s not, the result is that the acceptance embrace etc of the trans person as her/his chosen gender is always a conscious overriding of lifelong cues…and the trans person knows this.
So…maybe, even if everyone agreed that trans people are the gender they say they are, end of story, trans people would still feel edgy and self-conscious about it, because they would know people were always having to override the cues.
I don’t know what to do with that thought. My ideal is a different one, in which trans people would be content to identify as her/his chosen gender and leave it at that, without any insistence on “validation” and the like from the rest of the world. I think that would go a long way to eliminate this “anguish” that Justin Weinberg talks about, because it would be so much easier on all parties. It would no longer matter all that much if students were thinking “not a man, a woman” or the reverse every minute of the class, because the trans academic would be at peace with knowing people can’t help seeing what they see and hearing what they hear.
Is that your “ ideal” though — or a fair and reasonable compromise?
I’m still learning about the Gender Critical position. I would have thought the actual ideal would be men ( and women) feeling completely free to appropriate any of the old gender stereotypes they want. It’s fine if a man wears makeup and prefers the name ‘Betty’ over ‘Bob;’ it’s great if a woman fixes trucks and doesn’t feel like smiling all the damn time. Neither one cares about or pays attention to what’s masculine or feminine. Nobody’s “ trans” anything: they’re men and women who just are who they are. The philosophy professor is a man — and he’s lovely.
Or maybe that’s another position.
Though it would also cut down on the edgy anguish, too, of course. And would still bother the religious fanatics.
For myself, having to stand up in front of a group of students and lecture is very fraught. I am naturally an introvert. I am a woman moving rapidly toward the end of middle age. I am not an attractive, slim, svelte 28 year old anymore. And I dress in a manner widely regarded as eccentric in this part of the country. My students do not believe in women scientists. They do not believe that women brains are capable of knowing enough to teach them anything. I am aware of all that the moment I stand in front of the classroom and start to speak to them, to say “Hi, I’m….”. Every woman who teaches at my college has felt similar – the woman who got the comment on her student evaluation form that she was “hot”. The woman who got the comment telling them not to hire any more foreigners. The woman who got the comment “fire her immediately” (that was me). All of us, every day, are conscious of this.
None of us has written a screed against a group of people accusing them of driving us out. We have done what we had to do, and if we needed to cry, saved it until we got home. Others less fortunate in their ability to shut off long enough have moved on, or have used the court system to make changes in the legal culture, but still are unable to make many dents in the culture culture.
I have been experiencing this sort of stuff for 58.5 years now. I don’t anticipate it getting better in my lifetime. When I was in my 20s, I could believe it would get better. It was getting better. But I do not believe we are going to reach a point where women can walk out of the house in comfort, can feel completely safe stepping on an elevator with an unknown male human, or going to a public restroom where we may encounter unknown male humans. Hell, most of us find it difficult to encounter such beings when we are in the grocery store or the street, fully clothed in full sight of everyone and much less vulnerable in a bathroom with our pants down.
Sastra – yes, you’re right, my actual ideal is the one you describe, and I considered saying that, but I went for one a little more of a compromise. It took me several minutes to decide how to word that bit.
‘When I was in my 20s, I could believe it would get better. It was getting better.’
I think it’s worse now. One example off the top of my head–when we were in our 20s there was less expectation that every female person would look like a fantasy porn star (and every man would look like a fantasy ‘successful businessman’ of some category or another); there really seemed to be more acceptable diversity of clothing, hair styles/lengths, makeup options for both men and women.
I can’t help but feel lied to and betrayed by the people who conveyed the explicit and implicit messages we heard in the ’70s-’80s that sexism would soon be a thing of the past.
I’ll amend my previous comment by pointing out a way in which things now are better than say 30 years ago–I hear and read so many more women in the media as experts as well as journalists/hosts, and see so many more women playing real parts, as people rather than plot points (was just listening to a podcast about Killing Eve which made me acknowledge this)–still not full representation, and still not enough representation of different categories of women, but really orders of magnitude better than I remember it used to be.
#1,
For me the gender ideal is where one is free to be a femme man, or to be a butch woman. The elephant in the room is that men who wish to be feminine feel they have to masquerade as women in order to do so. This shows me that the problem isn’t really acceptance of trans-gendered people, but of the patriarchal culture insisting that men have to be manly. So trans-gender men must colonize women’s country in order to exist, which is why they’re so adamant about wanting to be called women.
At least drag queens can go to a gay bar to feel free to be femme men, but then they’re not trying to convince themselves they’re women.
I agree that this is the ideal. I believe that the problem is that trans activism is dominated by people who really don’t want this. It’s not that they disagree with us about the best way to achieve freedom from gender constraints. They want the gender constraints. They are obsessed with fantasies of gender. Abolishing it is not on the agenda.
That’s why the trans movement has taken the direction it has. If it were simply a matter of wanting to smash “gender” and disagreeing with gender critical people about the best way to do it, they wouldn’t express such murderous hatred for “TERFs”. They wouldn’t deny sexual dimporphism and push the “sex is a spectrum” lie. They’d accept or at least deal honestly with calls for more caution in the treatment of gender dysphoric children.