Academics worldwide
Oh please.
Academics? Why academics? That makes it sound as if it’s a technical term, and a product of expertise and research. It’s not. It’s a political label, and a very silly one. It puts a modifier on sex to make pretend-sex seem more legitimate and science-based and…you know…real. It puts it there to make it seem as if “trans woman” and “cis woman” are just two kinds of woman, when in fact the “trans” in “trans woman” literally means “not.” You can’t use “not woman” and “woman” to mean two kinds of woman. Trans women are men who
- identify as
- pretend to be
- want to be
- wish they were
- fantasize they are
- play at being
- imagine they are
women. There is no need for a pseudo-technical word to express not being that kind of woman but the other kind, the kind who just is a woman.
Furthermore, “cisgender” is of course not “used by academics worldwide to mean “not transgender” because most academics, like most people, don’t talk about the subject at all, and have no interest in it.
There is no need for a word to say “women who are not pretending to be women.” No need at all.
Wow. That tiny proportion of the population really are insisting, insisting, that the rest of the world utterly centre them in every single aspect of or societal interactions. The narcissism is staggering.
Isn’t it though?
“Cis” doesn’t mean “non-trans.” It means “identifies with the gender assigned at birth.” Or, worse, “identifies with the sex assigned at birth.” In both cases, it grants legitimacy to Trans Ideology, which is exactly what’s in dispute.
It would be like wanting atheists to be okay with being called RAGs — “Rebels Against God.”
Well, it means both. It’s a bullshit word in any case, so it can’t pretend it has only one meaning.
which is what makes so useful – it means “non-trans” by definition. It also means “happy with your gendered assigned at birth”, also by definition thus enabling us to prove that gender is a special trans thing and everyone else should just butt out.
QED.
Which is exactly why they cannot define me as cis. I am fine with my sex; I have no beef with my sex. But gender? I’ve been kicking against that ever since that Easter that I realized all the girls were wearing pink dresses, and that pink Easter dresses mean you cannot play, you cannot roll downhill, and you cannot sit in any comfortable position (and as for those patent leather shoes…don’t get me started).
‘“Cis” doesn’t mean “non-trans.” It means “identifies with the gender assigned at birth.” ‘ Contrariwise, fine, if that’s what ‘cisgender’ means, everyone is trans. There is not one person in the world who achieves conformity with every gender stereotype (even assuming that were possible, given that every culture has its own gender stereotypes which change over time).
‘Academic’ – and of course the people who make claims about the supposed academic authority of terms like ‘cisgender’ are playing into the hands of those who we should get rid of the study of the Arts and other dubious subjects at school and university & confine education to STEM subjects.
And now I’m going to make a heartfelt complaint before flouncing off never to come here again! People keep referring to TIMs here, though not admittedly on this thread, but I could feel the presence of the term in it. ‘TIMs’ makes me feel uncomfortable, unsafe and threatened. I have been literally FUCKING CRYING MY EYES OUT every time I see a mention of the TIMs, and this thread, too, brought bloody great tears to my eyes. In fact, I decided to bugger off some weeks ago, when the first ‘TIMs’ that I noticed appeared and made a mental notice of resignation, then and there. Now the notice period is up. So there!
I was an academic for years. I don’t remember my fellow computer scientists being credible authorities on gender theory.
Yes. That’s exactly what it is and it’s very clarifying to call it that. Let’s keep calling it that. It’s not the same as sex, and it’s not the same as gender either — it’s another thing. Your sex is your biology; your gender is something like the degree of relative masculinity/femininity you exhibit in your social context or whatever; but if you call yourself trans, that’s altogether different: it’s just your pretend-sex. (And I’ll gladly concede there’s a legitimate place for that sometimes: sex and gender are a contentious social landscape and some people reasonably feel caught on the faultlines. Adopting a pretend-sex can even be sanctioned for psychiatric reasons, and surgeries to help it along can be covered by the state and I’m perfectly ok with that.)
Calling it pretend-sex immediately, vividly cuts through the bullshit in the transwomen-in-sports controversy, doesn’t it. It cuts through the bullshit with “trans kids” too. “Pretend” has no place in elite athletic divisions, and “pretend” is no justification to permanently modify kids’ bodies.
And talking frankly about transgender as pretend-sex can really help us properly frame the two opposing views the academic left holds about transgenderism: on the one hand, the feminist “gender-critical” view that says trans ideology reinforces gender stereotypes, is socially regressive, and harms women’s rights and protections; and on the other, the Judith-Butlerian “gender performativity” “queer theory” view that says trans is all about smashing binaries and fucking the sex and gender faultlines up, and that in doing so it’s making women and men more equal in society.
Because how can you believe transgender is helping to make women and men equal in society if you don’t believe they’re distinct to begin with? The distinctions between men and women are at the core of sex inequality — pregnancy, body strength, etc — and cannot be ignored or erased. This is the trick of the Butlerian view: sex — real, biological sex — is still there: deep down they still believe in it. It’s just they seem to think the path towards sex equality involves this weird detour into pretending it doesn’t exist. They seem to think jumbling up sex with gender in some big performative circus, mangling words and definitions until they’re meaningless, will throw a wrench in the whole outdated system and the ultimate outcome after the dust has settled will be a breaking of the chains. Performative gender and pretend-sex are therefore synonymous — to the queer Butlerians, when they see someone adopting a pretend-sex they see someone performing a radical act of rebellion which helps bring society closer to sex equality and freedom. (I, on the other hand, simply see a confused or distressed homosexual, a paraphilic heterosexual, a hipster, or a predator, but that’s because I’m boringly attached to reality.)
But what does this future outcome of sex equality entail, the one the queer theorists presumably want? Presumably it would have to eventually revert back to acknowledging that women and men are actually distinct, what with women being capable of bearing children and all, and presumably we’ll go back to having words to distinguish men from women, and presumably those words will eventually revert back to “man” and “woman”, or what was the point of the whole damn exercise? Erasing sex isn’t the same as liberating it. So when all is said and done they can’t really think trans women are women; it’s just that it’s mandatory in the present state of things to say they do, because we’re in the midst of some great big stupid “queering” project.
The problem, then, is in the gender-theorists’ conflation of gender-bending (which I’ve always loved) with transgender (which always, always had an uncomfortable whiff of sex-stereotype regressiveness to me, even back in the ’90s when I made a living bussing tables at a trans bar for tips, cigarettes, and the occasional shot of Sambuca on the house, and they couldn’t even pay me a wage, so hard-up were those hard-knock, lovable transladies). My gods are Bowie and Prince, and I always adored Eddie Izzard. Who didn’t revere Annie Lennox’s gender-bending music videos back in the MTV heyday? But of course Bowie and Prince never insisted they were any less men because they wore dresses and embraced femininity, and likewise Annie Lennox never said she’s not a woman. Boy George chose his stage name deliberately, and YouTube has a great interview clip from the ’80s of him slamming the suggestion that he’s any less of a man for his feminine demeanour and presentation.
Eddie Izzard once embraced that same gender-bending attitude — “they’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes: I bought them!” — but sadly, he’s lately concluded that he was really a woman all along — I guess they were women’s clothes, eh Eddie? — and isn’t that so symbolic of this whole mess we’re in? He once so cleverly demonstrated the distinction between sex and gender presentation, and now he’s decided he was wrong and sex and gender were never distinct after all.
The gambit only works — the idea that affirming Eddie Izzard as a woman undermines sex stereotypes rather than upholds them — if you know it’s not really true, if you know he’s really a bloke and it’s all a performance. The idea that Eddie Izzard is really, truly, fundamentally, all-the-way-down, in-all-ways-that-matter a woman because he struts in stilettos and a skirt and wears mascara is absolutely, unambiguously sexist; the gender-critical view is undoubtedly the correct one here because how can anyone think it’s progressive to say that woman equals high-heel shoes and clothes and makeup? But the queer theorists manage to square the circle because all-the-way-down they still see Eddie Izzard the way he used to see himself — as a gender-bending man! They just think if they shuffle the language up at the surface around words like “sex” and “woman” and “female”, and make a big show of believing it all, it’ll all trickle down into sex equality somehow.
Look at that! It’s like trickle-down theory for sex! It just dawned on me the parallel: just give the
richmen what they demand and this will somehow work out for everyone else. No wonder so many transwomen are Republicans!It’s probably worth reading twice :)
Speaking for myself, my enjoyment of that excellent exposition surely exceeds my curiosity regarding Artymorty’s sockpuppeting.
hahaha awww, you’re both sweet. I’m so glad you enjoyed it, Papito. I enjoy your comments always and it means a lot that you enjoyed my stupidly-over-long one today. Glad to have made a friend in you here. Cheers!
It is definitely worth reading twice. And after reading Artymorty’s comment (twice – I have!), I’ve decided not to flounce off in high dudgeon.
So now you’re going to flounce off in low dudgeon?
Boom-tish.
Low Dudgeon sounds like it should be a village near where I live.
I just discovered quite unintentionally that there’s a neighborhood in Madison, WI, called Dudgeon Monroe.
I have a vintage British Rail poster advertising the bracing air in Upper Dudgeon.
Every academic study by neurologists or sexology academics I’ve read on the brain, transgender, etc always mentions gender identity as ‘innate sense of self as male or female’ and act like we all have it (funny that gender academics and clinicians are behind the times on agender, gender-fluid, etc). Like many here I’ve been surprised by this assertion-I don’t have an innate sense, I just know my biology (I guess the counter would be that I don’t notice because I experience cis-privilege?).
Even the argument that the brain is sexualized after the reproductive system leading to mind-body mismatches seems off to me-how can one have an innate sense of something they’ve never embodied? Personality preferences and quirks being mediated by developmental biology is one thing, but “authentic gender selves” (souls) is another.
I think what people are doing is translating their lifetimes of being told, explicitly and implicitly, that they are F or M, and translating that into an innate sense. We don’t remember the earliest years of being told so it’s easy to think that’s Innate Knowledge…unless you think about it for a few seconds. Apparently many people don’t bother to think about it.
There are many problems with the proposed neurological basis for “gender identity,” but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone address it from an evolutionary perspective: why would it have evolved? It’s supposed to be standard in every human. At what point then is it present? Throughout the animal kingdom? Only in primates? I’m trying to come up with a selective pressure which gave an advantage to people who felt “as if” they’ were the sex they were. I’m also trying to imagine it as a persistent evolutionary accident.
Was anyone, anywhere, predicting or requiring it in any theory before trans people started making the claim? Or, alternatively, were there parts of the brain, or anomalies in brain scans, which were going unexplained until ah, yes — it must be gender identity! I’m not sure, but my impression has always been that great discoveries knit many things together, fit into a process of development, explain multiple things. This whole “it’s in the brain, dammit” theory of gender identity just looks to me like it’s been scrabbled together off in a corner.
Indeed. That’s because it’s political, not ontological. That’s the point I made that caused the final rupture with Freethought blogs – that there’s a difference between socially accepting trans women, treating them as women, going along with the game of pretending they are women [I didn’t say that last bit at the time], and thinking they actually are women. Used to was, the social acceptance was enough, but then the standard became absolute endorsement and agreement and enthusiastic announcement that trans women are women.
It’s political, so the explanations don’t have to take pesky questions about evolution into account.
Sastra,
Good point. I think part of the problem was that early sexology researchers like Money thought it was entirely nurture, made some inhumane decisions to boost his own career (eg David Reimer), and he pendulum swang the other way to entirely nature? Some of this has to be piggybacking off of neural research on sexual orientation and conflating gender identity variability across different intersex conditions with what is going on with people who are neither homosexual or have DSDs.
Studebaker Hoch, I think that probably does play a role – possibly a big role – but it also seems like a lot of it is opportunistic. Hey, this is what I want, grab any argument I hear that will support it, and voila! Big steamy pile of scientifically incoherent “scientific” arguments.
One of the things I’ve been contemplating lately with regard to the transgender cult and trans rights activists is whether transgenderism has some overlap with transhumanism. Is transgenderism an early stage of transhumanism?
Both seek to abolish, overcome, or erase human biology and history to produce an abstracted form of humanity uprooted from its biological condition. Both envision a future in which humans can change their biological natures by the force of will and technology. And both are, for the most part, fantasies of wealthy men.
The sought-after “transcendence” in both cases is a pricey commodity, and also a lie that requires the exercise of power in mandating others to accept it. That means those with access to it will mostly be those who are already wealthy and powerful, and it will include – or embody – an exercise of that power and that wealth.
The TRAs like to talk about “science” being on their side, but what they’re leaving off is that it’s science fiction. Not only that, it’s dystopian science fiction. I don’t prefer a future in which a select group has a different material existence, through a “transcendence” of my human condition, which increases their power over me.
‘Both seek to abolish, overcome, or erase human biology and history to produce an abstracted form of humanity uprooted from its biological condition. Both envision a future in which humans can change their biological natures by the force of will and technology. And both are, for the most part, fantasies of wealthy men.’
I think, Papito, you are spot-on. One need only read a little of ‘The Sovereign Individual: How to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state’ by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg (the Mogg’s dad), which with Ayn Rand’s scribblings is a sort of bible for the libertarian right in the US & the UK, or hear the Silicon Valley cliches that Dominic Cummings trots out as an attractive (to some) substitute for thought, or recognise the attraction that eugenics has for many of the self-proclaimed ‘misfits & weirdos’ who pullulate in right-wing force-feeding sheds, to realise that, yes, it is all fantasy and (dystopian) science fiction, and, unfortunately, all the more powerful for that – as the fantasies of Communism and National Socialism were.
I have been living in Low Dudgeon ever since the Tories won the last election, and nothing that is coming out of Britain or anywhere else is allowing me to get out of it. At least in High Dudgeon there is the satisfaction of exploding about something in the high street.