Just often enough to make things awkward
Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart wrote a piece for Slate in April about “the shifting, porous border between butch and trans.“
Butch women aren’t men—except for the ones who transition to male, which happens just often enough to make things awkward for everyone involved. It’s awkward for fellow butches who feel strongly that they are not men, for trans men who seek to distinguish themselves from masculine women, and for butches whose understanding of themselves evolves in ways they hadn’t expected it to—each group challenges the self conception of the others. Many masculine women remain happily within the female gender for their entire lives and experience no discernable dysphoria. However, there are also butches who experience discomfort with their female gender or who seek to change their bodies to attain a more masculine appearance.
It’s a muddle, so she talked to some people about it.
Shay strongly identifies as a lesbian, and she doesn’t object to being called butch, although she’s never felt strongly drawn to that description.
“I guess I’m butch, but that’s not in the front of my mind. I’m a woman, no doubt, and for most people I’m more like a ‘butch lesbian’ because I’m not girly at all,” Shay told me. Commenting on society’s apparent need to label, she observed, “There are feminine people and masculine people, but they only call it something when you’re going against what people expect you to be.”
Shay is confident in her identity as a woman, clear and comfortable about her own masculinity, and knows enough about trans identities to know that she’s not trans.
Society does have a need to label…and society is us. It’s not out there somewhere, it’s us. I have that need to label, even though I don’t want to. I reject it, I nudge myself to reject it, but it still pops up.
H, an online acquaintance who requested anonymity, describes herself as a “straight butch” and occasionally as genderqueer. She describes her current identity as “a woman who is masculine in as many ways as possible—a woman who embraces masculinity,” but things were not always so simple. In college, H tried transitioning to male and was passing consistently as a man before she realized that, in spite of her masculinity, she didn’t want to stop being female. She blames her struggle to accept her own femaleness on the way that our culture has made very little room for masculine straight women and half-jokingly complains that her life would have been far easier if only she’d been attracted to other women.
Maybe, but on the other hand our culture has made way less room for feminine straight men. I can wear jeans all I want, but man can’t wear skirts without a lot of grief.
I spoke with Lauren, a 35-year-old, married lesbian who has considered transitioning to male at several points in her life. I also spoke with Jay, a trans man in his early 40s who identified as a butch woman for many years and transitioned only recently. Both Lauren and Jay described having felt uncomfortable with being seen as girls in childhood (and a current reluctance with having their last names used for this article), they both described sensing that they’d found a home in the gay community in late adolescence or early adulthood.
Lauren says that she considers transitioning to male “every few years. …. And, every time I come up 35/65 … right up to the line, but not quite over it.”
It’s a continuum rather than either/or. Some people come up with certainty, but not all.
In between, or perhaps outside of, the categories of masculine woman and transgender man there lies a third option, that of genderqueer or nonbinary identitiy. Kyle Jones, a butch genderqueer blogger in his early 50s, went through name and pronoun changes and has been on testosterone long enough to consistently pass for male, but he continues to consider his history of femaleness and feminist activism to be a big part of his identity.
That interests me because it’s only around feminism that I can say I “identify” as a woman. Otherwise I would say emphatically that I don’t. But before you start shouting at me – this is what Urhquhart’s subjects talk about.
Kyle has occasionally been on the receiving end of hate mail from female-identified butches who object to a trans person using the term butch. We spoke about the tensions between the “three camps” of butch lesbians, trans men, and masculine nonbinaries. “People get tired of having to educate others, and it can turn in to really bitter feuds and arguments,” he told me. “We all want to be seen, we all want to be recognized, and there is way more that we have in common than that we have different.”
I understand that people get tired of having to educate others. Been there. (Still there, for that matter.)
Butch is a legacy identity, dating from a time before we understood gender as something that could change or fall between the poles of male and female. Individuals who identify as butch, or who have identified that way at some point in their lives, may now find themselves on different points along the gender spectrum. In the long run, there may be no way to save this dinosaur of an identity—or butch may eventually be nailed down to a single point rather than encompassing multitudes. For the present, however, what butch means depends on which butch you pose the question to, and it is rare to find two butches who will give you the exact same answer.
Interesting. Even with all the tsuris…we live in interesting times. I hope we can have more and more of the gender spectrum, and less and less fighting over it.
Hm. I don’t like this framing. It suggests that there’s a spectrum of maleness and femaleness that contains within it the spectrum of “masculinity” and “femininity,” such that (full? real?) male and female are the extremes. I don’t think that’s the case. The article focuses on “butch” people, but I’m sure plenty of people AFAB transition without any sense of themselves as “butch” (not to mention as lesbians), and plenty of people AMAB transition without a sense of themselves as “feminine.” They’re just different things (I’m reminded of Stephen Jay Gould’s argument in The Mismeasure of Man about these sorts of assumptions about spectrums and extremes…).
I think the awkwardness and hostility amongst the groups described in the article (I’ve only read your quotes) probably stems from this spectrum-within-a-spectrum view, and that we should abandon it along with notions of “masculinity” and “femininity,” which categorize people’s feelings and behaviors and such in terms of a hierarchy. I see no need for people to try to fit their characteristics, sense of self, goals, and desires into this oppressive framework.
I’ve learned a lot from reading this. Thank you.
Isn’t the lesson simply “I am what I am”? I say simply but I know it isn’t simple for those involved. What I mean is that we can’t have nice neat boxes. It’s like the left/right continuum in politics. Its far too simplistic to mean anything. We need extra dimensions – as for example the Political Compass. I suspect gender/sexuality is much the same – male/female, butch/femme, gay/straight come immediately to mind, but I’m sure there are others.
I understand that the original intent of feminist studies was to learn about social constructs in order to undermine the societal pressures that keep certain categories of people as ‘less than’ other categories. By destroying the heavily-labelled boxes, everyone gets to build their own box, and by raising people to see boxed constructs as unimportant when evaluating other people, like eye colour is, we could have a far more egalitarian society.
Unfortunately, we aren’t anywhere near that yet. The people with the power are still designating boxes in terms that favour their staying in power.
Similar things happen with both race and gender. Firstly, we have a system of oppression that marginalises a class of people defined by external appearance. Some people in that group fight the oppression by pointing out that they are no more deserving of oppression than any other people, band together with other people designated the same box, identify closely with their box and declare pride in their identity.
Some people try to fight the oppression by pointing out that the box is an artificial societal construct, and that race and gender, the way they are expected to be performed, aren’t real.
The first group feels that the second group is attacking their identity like the true oppressors attack their selves, because the two are conflated in their minds.
An example of how I think it might go:
A: “You’re not White, therefore you are less than me! (And I have all the power, so you cannot challenge me.)”
B: “Wrong! I’m Black, therefore I’m valuable! I’m proud to be Black.”
C: “I think that’s wrong, there is no such thing as ‘Black’, it’s an invented category.”
B: “How dare you side with A! You are trying to destroy Black people!”
I can see both why B accuses C of attacking them (because they are, biologically, Black), and why C is baffled at the accusation (because ‘Black’ as a societal construct is merely a tool of the oppressor).
The thing is, that race and gender are both real and non-real at the same time, depending on the definition in use.
Whether people are designated ‘White’ or ‘Non-White’ is a political decision. But Black people risk vitamin D deficiencies when living in Scandinavia, and White people risk sunburn and skin cancer if they move to tropical areas so it is reasonable for doctors to take note of someone’s biology when deciding how to treat them. However, there are people of all shades of colour so there is in no sense a clear demarkation line that says “On this side, people are White, on this side they aren’t” (there have been many historical attempts to draw such a line, and it has fallen in different places. Even that palest of peoples, the Irish, used to be considered non-white). Thirdly, there is certainly no biological reason to assign different societal values to people.
The same applies to gender. On the one hand, there definitely are biological differences between people which influence medical care, and there are people with biological bodies that are between the two categories of gamete-producers, or include both. It is now known that, as well as the effect of sex hormones on the development of the body, brains are more heavily influenced by sex hormones than was always understood, and are affected by hormones at a different stage in utero; so there is a biological reason for a brain to have a sex, which may or may not match up to that of the body.
Rather than calling it brain ‘sex’ though, this phenomenon is usually referred to as brain ‘gender’. This means that any discussions of gender as a social construct crashes headlong into people’s sense of self, in exactly the way that discussions of race do.
And thus we come to other words of self-identification. These can also be understood very differently by different people using the same word. People can get very attached to their self-identifiers, such that disagreement can feel like attack.
It gets so heated, that we can no longer even agree to discuss our definitions without accusations of denying other people’s very beings.
I have no idea how we can get around this.
(Not while some people are determined that discussing ‘-isms’ and ‘-phobias’ exactly the same as perpetuating them.)
When you say “it’s only around feminism that I can say I ‘identify’ as a woman. Otherwise I would say emphatically that I don’t,” I very much relate to that.
I’ve seen people arguing that AFAB women have been perfectly fine accepting the gender binary and fine with the conception of what a “woman” is all along, but when it comes to trans people AFAB women are suddenly gender-questioning. That’s fatuous. We’ve had the identity of “girl” and then “woman” imposed upon us all along and we’ve come together as feminists to do something about the oppression that grows out of that imposed identity. That’s not the same as having accepted it all along.
I am in the middle of reading Robin DiAngelo’s excellent book, What Does It Mean To Be White?, and she addresses some of these concepts with respect to race very well. She illustrates how attempts to be race blind, well meant as they might be, ignore systemic oppression and the lived experiences of members of marginalized groups. She also points to the American focus on individualism, which feeds into the idea that “all I can do, all I need to do, is not personally be prejudiced,” which does little out nothing to address systemic concerns. And she addresses the binary view of “racist=bad, non-racist=good” viewpoint that focuses on assigning or refuting labels of individuals rather than addressing systemic issues.
Much of this I see reflected in the gender debate. Certainly the argument over labeling individuals as sexist (or TERF, for that matter) does not address systemic oppression.
I’m still processing what I have read, and I have a bunch more to read, but it is giving me reason to reconsider my own identity, and the importance of it to me. (FWIW, I am a cis straight light skinned male, and I consider myself black, by virtue of having a black father, and by the One Drop Rule, although I have people argue with me about it.) I haven’t concluded anything, just raised a lot of questions.
I think the only times I really self-identify as a woman are when I’m reminded that I am, and these reminders happen pretty regularly. Here’s a somewhat recent example:
http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/
Having never experienced other people’s performance reviews, I had no idea until I read this that getting a performance review wasn’t supposed to be all about trashing your personality–I figured it was a thing for people, because I’m a person, but have now been made aware it’s a thing for me because it’s a thing for women and I’m a woman. I wrote an essay on management theory years ago that I only recently realised I could have titled ‘ways in which I thought I had male privilege, because I assumed I was a person and that the theories I was working with applied to people, and then discovered that they only applied to men.’
I like Uruquart’s piece, especially that she pointed out distinctions that I have wondered about, and had long discussions w/lesbian friends about. One friend, who is about one generation older than I am, has referred to the increasing visibility of trans men in particular as “genocide” against lesbians – that comment has stuck w/me especially since I found it such an odd view and I had to do mental work to figure out her position. So it is excellent that Uruquart wrote about her observations and investigating, and that Ophelia reported it. Pay attention to what Ophelia says about having to “nudge” herself to reject the need to label. We humans evolved the handy skill of labeling and categorizing the world b/c the world is full of stuff going on all the time. We needed to focus sometimes – clear a way through the stuff bombarding us – to survive, and we tend to use nouns, classifying nouns especially, to keep our brains from exploding. But we do not HAVE to only use names/classes – our brains are big and full of cool skills, and one of them allows us intentionally to nudge ourselves to reject the categories, as Ophelia comments above. Where she uses “nudge” we could add “work, think, analyze, reflect, avoid-self-centeredness” about categories. We are set up to use all of our thinking skills, rather than only the ones that are easy or feel like they are natural. Some of us don’t, or haven’t learned how to yet, but that ability is in there.
Uruquart’s piece raised another thought for me. I have mentioned other times and in other places that my experience of trans-hood, via my husband, who was AMAB and now lives as a somewhat androgynous woman, has been very personal. Even though I was supportive of his need to find a place of peace and satisfaction w/his body (via hormones and some minor surgeries) and pissed off at a world that didn’t accept him, I was quite naive about the effects his/her transition was going to have on my identity and presentation of self to the outside world. To my surprise, it was very odd and jarring to know that I was not a lesbian but to be perceived as one. This is an ongoing, albeit now small, issue in my life. And it is not a political statement about gender and sexual desire variation in the world. It is a personal statement about my experience. Most of the time I think “well fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” There’s no Hallmark card category for my life, probably a good thing.
Uruquart gives us some of the personal side while acknowledging that the public and political arenas are out there and cannot always be ignored. This is what I want to read and talk about. She and Ophelia raised topics that need talking about if we want to move away from ignorant categorizing and cruel name-calling. And if we want to engage in good conversations about the topics that interest us. And if we want to use our way cool big brains to advantage.
This is a great discussion.
I tell you what – I can’t be all bad when I can set off discussions as good as this.
Anna Lee Kage @ 8 – I don’t think you need to worry about the damage it might cause just to have this discussion. I think it’s not having these discussions that causes the real damage.
Following up on Ophelia’s comment to Anna Lee Kage @ 8 – would you be willing to share what, in this particular discussion, you think might be damaging? My impression is that people have been hesitant to speak their thoughts on gender (often on their own gender experiences) for fear that they will be branded bigots, or they believe there is no discussion to be had, because no good person would want to have it. This is destructive too.
I can see that commenting on someone else’s blog can be considered damaging, especially if that blog is intended to be a safe space. But a civil, thoughtful discussion of matters that affect all of us? On a blog that makes no claim to being a safe space?
Something I’ve often seen is that A will become furious with B, not because of what B said, but because A believes that terrible things necessarily follow from B’s speech. But B may not believe that those terrible things follow from what B said. For example, some trans people believe that they can prove their identities are valid if scientists can establish a physiological basis for gender identity. If I disagree about the findings of a particular scientific paper, it doesn’t mean I think trans identities aren’t legitimate. I already believe that of course they are legitimate, because they say so. If neuroscientists can find physiologic correlates of gender identity, great, but if they can’t, so what? In this scenario, A and I have something to learn from each other. This is better for everyone than having A simply shut me down.
Ophelia’s been fostering an atmosphere in which A and B can hash things out. That’s all too rare in the blogosphere lately, and I think it outweighs any potential damage that could follow. But I am interested to hear your views – maybe we can learn from each other.
Claire Ramsey has made a very thoughtful comment, with a lot to consider.
I’d like to comment on this in particular:
because it perfectly illustrates something I said a while back. I’m invisible to everyone.
Trans women are criticised if they are straight, for being gay men in drag.
Trans women are criticised if they are lesbian, for being straight men wanting to prey on women, lesbians in particular.
And trans men are criticised if they are straight, for denying that they are really lesbians. Honestly, how can it be a ‘genocide’? Who’s killing anyone?
Nobody ever says anything about gay trans men. It’s as if we are either invisible, or they don’t want to acknowledge our existence. I do wonder why.
Not a problem.
tiggerthewing – I have been wondering about trans men in general, gay trans men included, and their potential contributions to the discussion. And especially whether they were represented by the terf/name calling/pseudo-investigative reporting of FB likes, etc over the last weeks, or had decided for whatever reasons to not get involved. I don’t recall seeing anything explicit, and for all I know, among the so called “trans activists,” trans men either do not exist, or are seen as living life in a bowl of cherries b/c they are men, or are as you say invisible.
I was about to ask whether “radical feminists” exclude trans men but I guess I answered my own question, at least for one elderly radical lesbian feminist – my friend w/concerns about deluded young lesbians transitioning for the wrong reasons. Like you I found “genocide” a difficult and inappropriately loaded term to apply to individual lesbians who transitioned to being trans men. My friend also commented that the only reason a young lesbian would transition was to gain all of the power that men enjoy and proceed to throw their male weight around. (Do they? Is there any kind of evidence that they do?) To her, young lesbians’ transitions were wrongly adding to the number of men on the planet, when in her view, the planet should be able to count on a certain number of lesbian women who stay put, and not end their lives as lesbians to live as men. I was dumbstruck, having observed the difficulty of any kind of transition, that anyone would think that transition involved such a superficial power wish. Of course she was assuming they were deluded and too immature to recognize what they were doing. Sigh.
So I imagine that there are indeed radical feminists who want to exclude trans men. . . or who have a hard time thinking about them. (My only other trans real life friend is a trans man, whose long time partner during their years as a lesbian couple, experienced the discomfort of being a radical feminist lesbian who was suddenly perceived as the partner of a man).
What do you think? Is the invisibility you experience an oversight or rejection by trans activists? Do they intentionally focus only on trans women w/no interest in or sense of solidarity w/trans men? Do allies tend to overlook trans men b/c they are men so what’s their problem? Or do trans men have their own radical battles to fight on sites and blogs I don’t know about? I have wondered what trans men, gay or not, thought about all of the hot gas and nasty accusing and name calling over the last few months. Not that I am yearning to learn about even more nasty ignorant baiting and name calling, but any insights would be appreciated.
tiggerthewing I just remembered something from a long ago “partners of transitioning people” forum I participated in very briefly. It was only helpful, to be honest, because I saw w/my own eyes that my problems were very small compared to those of other partners.
I remember two straight men husbands of trans men. One of them was very uncomfortable, and while I was on the forum, decided that he could not continue to be married to his now-trans-man wife. Primarily, he could not tolerate being seen as a gay man.
The other was making his way through his confusion, having realized that his love and commitment to his partner was big enough to hold the transition and its effects. And that he was big enough that being perceived as a gay man was not a threat to his larger wish to continue his relationship.
Writing this article was very personal, even though I managed to get through it without once mentioning my own gender identity. “On The Shifting, Porous Border Between Butch and Trans” would be a pretty good description of where I’m at now, and where I’ve been at for a while.
I think for some trans people, seeking an intellectual underpinning for gender and transgenderedness feels very threatening. They want basic things, like access to treatment that provides relief from the pain caused be gender dysphoria, or for the broader public to move on from bad jokes and cruelty to acceptance and welcome as quickly as possible. Arguments about what gender is, where it comes from, and why it might work smoothly in one person and less so in another can feel like a delaying tactic or a distraction, or even an all-out attack on trans people’s right to self determination. If the “wrong” answer is arrived at, does that mean trans people can’t change their gender on their legal documents? If the “wrong” answer is arrived at, does that mean that the only treatment available will be conversion therapy? If the “wrong” answer is arrived at, does that mean trans people will continue to be seen as both delusional and willfully lying about themselves at the same time?
For other trans people, or people questioning their gender identity, seeking answers to these questions feels essential. Personally, I have enough trust in the process not to fear that arriving at the “wrong” truth would necessarily mean a diminishment in my freedom or an increase in stigma–but I’m an absolutist on that. Finding out that women are different from men shouldn’t be so terrifying that we scrap equality the day someone finds that there’s an undeniable statistical tendency in the data for women to be more P and men to be more Q, regardless of socialization. The truth is going to be what it’s going to be. It’s us weak little humans that end up deciding certain truths are unacceptable and trying to hide from them.
In the meantime, how can I ever say “I am transgender” if I still don’t understand what I’d even mean by that statement? Having conversations about what gender is and how it functions in people’s lives feels very urgent and necessary, from where I’m sitting. That doesn’t mean that there’s a single right answer out there that’s going to be found any moment, ending the discussion. Still, forming an understanding of the different arguments and views that are out there and interrogating all of them, including the ones that make me uncomfortable, is non-optional for me, personally.
And so, I write the scary articles that could make people uncomfortable or angry anyway, and I try my best to do so in a way that demonstrates as much genuine empathy and humble curiosity as possible.
Color me confused about this whole idea that having a discussion can be damaging. Or, heaven forfend, even a debate. Why should any topic be off limits or totally off the table? The whole idea of harmful topics seems like an excuse to stifle the free exchange of ideas.
Want to debate whether I should have rights? I don’t really see how it’s debatable but I also don’t see how it harms me at all if someone else thinks it is. Want to debate if I’m really a man or woman? I don’t, but again it doesn’t hurt me in any way if someone else does.
Also look I’m sorry, but if someone wants me to accept their self proclaimed identity then they are going to have to accept that I would like to discuss, and yes even debate some of this along the way. Not out of malice or bigotry. Just because discussion and debate are integral to how I interface with the marketplace of ideas and how I come to grips with new information.
If we can’t discuss and debate something then we are being asked to accept it on faith. That’s not something I want to be a part of.
[Sock puppet comment deleted]
It currently seems that in some circles the only people not allowed to discuss gender are Ophelia Benson and anyone who agrees with her that we need to have a discussion about gender, regardless of the particular definition of gender in use.
The most alarming thing has been watching a cis man bullying a woman, and not merely getting away with it but being praised for being a defender. Of whom? He’s already shown his disdain for trans people by calling anyone who wants to have the discussion ‘tokens’ and by publishing his distortions of what was said and done by Ophelia in a manner that has apparently left many trans people worried for their safety, convinced by his words that she is not just transphobic, but actively out to get them.
Honestly, who gets to benefit from this behaviour?
Not Ophelia, who was simply carrying on the tradition of freethought.
Not Freethought Blogs, who have now lost two thirds of their best bloggers.
Not trans people, who will now be saddled with the label of being afraid of debate, a label which properly belongs to the people who misinterpreted the original situation, whether wilfully or carelessly, and passed on the misinformation to the detriment of freethought.
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Human biology studies seem to be coming up with a picture of people’s self-concepts, or ‘mind’ as being an emergent property created by the complex interaction of body and brain. I know that studies into whether brains had sex differences were roundly condemned when they were being used to justify the dominance of one sex over another. But if we take that out of the equation, and look at brains without any kind of agenda to attempt to ‘prove’ that female brains are inferior (or autistic brains, or African brains, or…) then there is some exciting research being done.
Whether all of our character traits are hard-wired from before birth, or whether we are a tabula rasa, which were the original options, I think has been soundly answered by “YES!”; in other words, our personalities are a bit of both. We are born with certain character traits wired in by our uterine environment. These get modified, strengthened or weakened, by our experiences during and after birth to a greater or lesser degree. Those include internal, such as hormonal, as well as external experiences.
I fully understand why people are afraid of further knowledge being misused, but we should be finding ways to avoid the misuse, not the knowledge.
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I have limited experience of arguing about gender. I belong to a lovely small support group of trans men and women IRL, but don’t do any trans activism; and as for online stuff – well, mostly I discuss atheism and health related stuff.
I’m disabled, autistic, and have several chronically illnesses, so I lack the spoons to engage with the wilder shores of feminism.
As far as my relationships are concerned, those are private.
Seriously. I said that to Claire the other day – you know who else this bullshit is not good for? Trans people. It’s terrible for them.
Dear tiggerthewing – Nothing that I wrote in response to your post above should be taken as an inquiry about your private life. If that is what you saw in my response, I was terribly unclear. Many apologies if anything I wrote seemed like prying. I was attempting to say that you need not feel invisible in this discussion, and that if you wanted to participate I was interested in some topics you might know about. But of course no requirement on my end that you engage with any of it.
Dear Steppenwolf, at the risk of sound pedantic, I am reluctant to conflate “woman” with “female” as defined in a dictionary. Additionally, definitions in dictionaries, even the most fabulous dictionaries (I am looking at you OED) are merely tiny statements about meanings frozen in time when they are published. Dictionaries generally do not even attempt to build rich or explanatory contexts around lexical items. And I believe that the discussion of gender is a discussion of the rich contexts. One of them is biology. But the social and political contexts are the ones I am most curious about, even if attempts to use them to explain gender, woman, female end up not to be compelling.
Dear VR Uruquart – Thank you for your post. Thanks for the scary articles and the human curiosity.
If one group of feminists thinks that gender should not be up for discussion, and they manage to prevent other groups of feminists from discussing it, who do they think will continue?
With feminists no longer allowed by their own peers to have an opinion, the ball will remain in the hands of our actual enemies, and all discussion of gender research will take place amongst hostile people such as MRAs, to be spun by them.
The conversation will still be had, but with no feminists at the table to stop it going off into territory that we’d far rather it didn’t.
No wonder the people crowing loudest about this dogpile, and painting trans people as delicate flowers who must be protected at all costs, are cis men.
Steppenwolf @19
“And while I expect that there are few if any behaviour patterns, skills, abilities, roles, or attributes (our genders) that uniquely and necessarily correlate with either “female” or “male”, I think it seriously flawed thinking to try insisting that our biological sexes have no bearing or influence on our genders, or that our sexes are in any way synonymous with our genders. Surely, our genders, our personas, are more than just our biology?”
tiggerthewing @ 21
“I fully understand why people are afraid of further knowledge being misused, but we should be finding ways to avoid the misuse, not the knowledge.”
Great points. Our brains, influenced by genes and uterine environment before birth, are shaped in a myriad of ways by our experiences. They are not complete until our mid-twenties, and retain some plasticity for the rest of our lives.
There’s a lot of talk about male and female brains, and I think it’s another issue that gets needlessly polarized. Feminists see that horrible old stereotypes about ladybrains are being tossed about (mostly in the popular press, I think) and get angry. All too often they overreact and are hostile and dismissive of any discussion of sexed or gendered brains. Trans people, if I understand correctly, then see their identities being mocked and dismissed when they try to explain their experience of being in the wrong kind of body.
I see no reason why a female person who identifies as a man, or vice versa, should imply anything about “man brains” or “ladybrains” in the stereotyped senses. When you look at the results of various tests of mental abilities, most people show a rich mix of so-called “masculine” and “feminine” abilities. Very few are one or the other across the board. Why should a trans person be any different?
VR @ 17 –
I love that comment.
PS All, “Steppenwolf” is a sock puppet of someone who has been harassing me for years. He’s a verbose pain in the ass. If he could write better, his sockery wouldn’t be so obvious.
Sorry, Claire, I know you weren’t prying – I meant to put a smiley or winkey face after that last line, couldn’t decide which and then forgot to do either.
Also, comments are facing something of a delay being shown for me, for some nefarious reason probably involving TERF accountants, so I’m going to make this the last for a while and go to sleep.
Night, all!
Go away, Steersman.
While inexact, I see parallels in the current “aetiology of gender” debates with discussions on whether sexuality is fluid. A few years ago, in online discussions on sexual orientation, it frequently seemed verboten to suggest that, for some people at least, sexual orientation is not fixed. I’m gay myself and I understood the fear: homophobes could seize on any admission that sexuality can be fluid to declare “Ha! See – gay people can change! And so they should!” But the insistence that sexuality is fixed was directly contradicted by people who said their orientation had altered over the years. I don’t recall anyone saying that the changes were the result of a conscious decision (much less because they had undergone discredited so-called conversion therapy), but they were nevertheless routinely shouted down by others who declared that, no, they must have been bisexual all along.
So, to a degree, I understand the anxiety of trans* people (and their allies, of which I hope I am one) about discussions of whether gender is innate or socially constructed: who wants to hand ammunition to people who will gladly use it on them? But attempting to silence the voices of those whose lives tell a different story – or denigrating those who offer evidence that a particular theory may be wrong – is not a very good way to make your point.