The exploratory mindset
An interesting post from July that I didn’t see at the time – by Joel Nowak –
So I am watching this thing play out on “Free Thought” Blogs where a blogger is being harassed and bullied to the point where she may well leave the site because a pro-trans activist who was “monitoring her” saw her post this thread to a facebook gender critical group about how questions such as “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” may be overly simplistic and “anti-thought”. I do not know this blogger but I feel for her predicament. For simply starting this discussion, not even on Free Thought Blogs, members there are accusing her of a “thought crime” and demanding that she be expelled from the community immediately. Those demanding her expulsion are insisting that of course all transwomen are women. Fair enough … however I do have something to say here.
I am still trying to sort things out for myself, but part of my lived experience was that I was for a long period of my life a transwoman who identified as female.
And then he changed.
It was also something that, in my case, I outgrew because I realized that how I defined myself and how I came to understand the roles of sex and gender in my life had changed as I grew older. One thing I realized for myself, and this is very important for MY identity today, is that I was NEVER female in any way. I am male. I always was and I always will be. Now I know that by my saying that a lot of people will say “Ok this was a guy who just believed he was a transwoman and was mistaken.” Ok, you can think that if you want, but I assure you I WAS a transwoman. It is actually uncomfortable for me to say this, especially since I am doing the guy thing right now, but that is part of who I am and I can’t really be in denial about it.
This is one example – just one of many – of why I decline to answer “yes or no” questions unless they are such simple questions that it’s not a problem. What he says there is complicated. How we think of ourselves is complicated, and it’s subject to change over time. It’s a mistake to be absolutist and doctrinaire about it.
And I also think that is why I get a little peeved when I see all of this identity policing going on. When I see people like this current blogger getting beaten down for asking a fair question I am watching the same forces at work that make it hard for me to try to explore my own identity. Through intimidation it becomes yet another source of shame, scaring me back into my shell … almost.
See? See? This is what I mean, it’s what I’ve meant all along and still mean. We get to explore. We all get to explore, cis as well as trans, trans as well as cis. What the fools at Purethought Blogs did to me does not foster a climate friendly to exploration.
My journey has been real. I won’t let anyone define what sex I am or have been at various stages of my life based on their notion of political correctness. I am male and always have been … no matter what surgeries, legal name changes or social changes I have been through over the years. This is how I define myself. This is my right. You can define yourself as you please. That is absolutely your right as well (and you too should defend it!) However, people should not be punished for asking questions based on honest and respectful intellectual curiosity. That usually ends up pretty poorly for all of us.
Exactly so.
I’d been mulling broaching stuff around the periphery of this a while. Around the time I did a thing on why this really wasn’t likely to be good for the network (I wound up focusing more vaguely on the cost to the site’s reputation, as it’s a large thing to get to), this, too, was bothering me. What this sort of thing does to the spirit of inquiry. But it was a big thing to do right. Still is.
But as a start, anyway: we already know, unsurprisingly, I think, that surveillance tends to curtail creativity, beyond other rather more direct costs to quality of life. There are studies I could cite. Oddly enough, previously mentioned at FTB, I think, mostly…
(And this, also oddly enough, is one reason (of many reasons) I think religions generally bad things: the social environments they can create can be so stifling. Communities inevitably have some of that character anyway–we’re never really ‘ourselves’ among others, and the community we ourselves build even imagining we brought the best of ourselves to it can still make us very different people than we might like to be otherwise. This is too ubiquitous and too much of being human ever to simply criticize too naively I think, mind, as a bad thing, entirely–you might as well complain we’re maddeningly reliant on oxygen–but add the counterfeit authority of unquestionable divine sanction to that dynamic, and it goes, I think, some pretty awful places, a lot of the time. And even at its mildest, there’s an aesthetic disgust I feel about such essential a fraud, such a brazen construction of an entirely illegitimate authority, considering these very real costs. It’s one thing to so tangle up and silence people’s consciences due to the unavoidable conflicts between what they might like to say and do and what the community legitimately may be able to bear, quite another, I think, to make those rules so deeply arbitrary, so non-negotiable, to make such sweeping claims about the source of that authority. The strength of our societies, I think, since we’ve begun to discard that notion is their adaptability, their evolveability. Yes, it can go some scary places, too, but at least we have that greater freedom to work things out between ourselves, and make things work, and simple, obvious directions toward egalitarianism, away from hierarchy, we can start to follow those. Tho’ I digress. With some reason.)
And the networked world, I already begin to think we’ve been very naive about what it’s doing to us. It’s not unconsidered, at all, my withdrawing from it, as much as I have. I think as much as we do learn from one another, people also really need private lives to be creative, to be thoughtful, to be insightful–and there is much in the new media that makes this more and more difficult, I think–constrains and narrows the spaces in which they can do that. As to places–virtual or not–where we meet and discuss and imagine together–if they are watched endlessly by baleful eyes–whether these belong to an official arm of whichever state body or to intractable critics bent endlessly on driving all discussion into a well-defined funnel they define–creativity will not happen, there, and communities we can even stand to inhabit will not form there. Not only will we never be ourselves. We won’t be much of anyone any of us would like to meet.
I’m not much a creature of rallies and sporting events, I think, is part of this, and I’m not much for chanting words already selected for me. Or at least tend to be disappointed (besides, I tend to observe, unsatisfied by where it gets me), when I get to thinking I might have been, to whichever degree. And the web of late seems to me less and less a dorm or drawing room where you can have maybe a few too many glasses of wine and stay up late and say things possibly a bit wrong and possibly a bit ill-considered, shooting around the target a bit, like sometimes you have to do to get anywhere interesting–it seems to me less and less like that, and more and more like such a stadium, such a rally, such a place of placards and slogans. You could legitimately take the position this is about the net growing up and growing in, and becoming more integral to our lives, but I also get to wonder, as the networks become more and more ubiquitous, I wonder if there will even be any such smaller, smoky rooms left, really, anywhere–or if the smartphone will be everywhere, with everything said to go on Twitter or Instagram within hours. I’d wonder rhetorically and innocently how this might change us, but as if any of us are so innocent. I think we already know. Or should.
I hope he didn’t have gender reassignment surgery. Of course, you can resupplement testosterone, and one can always go to a men’s room stall and sit rather than use a urinal and no one would be the wiser.
I’m hesitant to ask since I’m not exactly a regular commenter and I feel this is a bit presumptuous, but this has been bugging me and I’d really appreciate a clarification since we’re on the subject.
When you were asked, whether or not trans women are women, I get your explanation that gender is complicated and that it’s not a simple yes/no answer. Fair enough. So here’s a follow up question: are cis women women? Is the answer just as complicated? More to the point, do you believe there’s some important difference between trans-women and cis-women with regard to them being women? Apologies if this point has already been covered – it’s such an obvious follow up question that I feel it must have been, but I haven’t seen any posts where this was addressed directly.
I know this seems hostile, but I’m actually asking because I like this blog but I’m still a little unsure (and admittedly, uneasy) about your stance on this whole issue. I guess I’m hoping that you can assuage that unease.
Eric O,
To me, the answer to the question “Are cis women women” *is* every bit as complicated as the question “Are trans women women”. It depends on how one defines terms. I consider that I *present* as a woman (more or less by default, and often not very well), but I would not say that I *identify* as a woman. (And I know that others have said similar things here.)
Eric O, yes, the answer is just as complicated. I’ve written about that several times over the past few months, but I’ve written lots of other things too so maybe you missed them all.
My take is very like what Theo said. I don’t really identify as a woman. I’ve always taken it as a brute fact that that’s the box I’m in, but I don’t “feel like” a woman. I don’t feel like a man either. I feel like various other things much more than I feel like a woman.
I don’t pledge allegiance to the claim that there is such a thing as a woman and I know what it is and I know how to define it. That’s not my claim, so I’m not interested in defending it.
I did read some of your blog posts about the complexity of gender, so I suspected that you’d be consistent. I appreciate you reiterating that point, though; it leaves a lot less to doubt.
Ironically, some of the frothing horde of purity-testers at FTB were insisting that Ophelia would obviously have given an un-nuanced “yes” to the question in Eric’s comment #3, ignoring the facts. I was unimpressed.
There really does seem to me to a certain mean-spirited suspicion–if not actual paranoia–afoot, here. Like of course she’s just a blazing hypocrite, and so we can call her the same if we damned well feel like it, to hell with considering the justice of such a claim.
My most charitable interpretation is it’s a side-effect of just too much dealing with downright awful people. Or maybe more neutrally, that the web is just a pretty toxic environment a lot of ways, lately, and it’s making a lot of people just kinda ratty. Twitter feeds and inboxes full of poison, everyone with a head full of it, expecting the worst of each other.
It’s funny, in some ways. It’s not something I would have worried about much from people, in a previous era. Always figured once upon a time the larger problem was people giving too much charity to prominent figures, especially. But it’s as if this crowd has turned it on its head. Like they’ve gone past ‘no heroes’ (good) to ‘all villains, by default’ (not so good, it seems to me).
And maybe, too, that’s a bit of what this is. A bit of overshoot. For all that there’s long been this ethos afoot that reasoning people should be about ideas more than the people carrying them, and there should be no gods, no masters, sure, there’s always some hero worship about. And people clearly felt let down by a lot of that ‘leadership’. So is it overcorrection, maybe? And in place of don’t trust anyone over thirty, it’s be thoroughly miserable to anyone who’s ever been published.