Path dependence
An interesting point made by Les Green at Semper Viridis:
Of course gender is not fixed at birth. Simone de Beauvoir was right that no one is born a woman. Possibly, no one is even born female. Sex is cluster-concept, a bundle of attributes, some of which do not develop until puberty or later. And gender is another cluster-concept. Gender is constituted by norms and values that are conventionally considered appropriate for people of a given sex. Gender is a lot more vague than sex, and a lot more historically and geographically variable.
But gender has another interesting feature. It is path dependent. To be a woman is for the pertinent norms and values to apply a result of a certain life history. Being a woman is not only ‘socially constructed’, as they say, it is also constructed by the path from one’s past to one’s present. In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name, by having been made to wear girl’s clothes, by having been excluded from boys’ activities, by having made certain adaptations to the onset of puberty, and by having been seen and evaluated in specific ways. That is why the social significance of being a penis-free person is different for those who never had a penis than it is for those who used to have one and then cut it off.
And those things, and many others, are important; they make a difference; they shape how one experiences being a girl and then a woman. They’re not nothing.
More on path dependence, by Stephen E. Margolis and S. J. Liebowitz.
Path dependence is a term that has come into common use in both economics and law. In all instances that path dependence is asserted, the assertion amounts to some version of “history matters.” Path dependence can mean just that: Where we are today is a result of what has happened in the past.
Being a woman is path dependent because it’s a result of years of being a girl. Being a girl is path dependent because it’s a result of preceding years or months or days of being a girl. We are what our pasts make us.
That’s one reason, probably the main reason, I don’t think people can just become something radically different by uttering the words (except in cases where uttering the words does the work – “I am abandoning my religion” for example). That’s why I refused to answer that stupid “yes or no” question the way I was ordered to. That’s why I made the distinction between the ontological and the political meaning of the words, which some people found so very over-intellectual and shameful of me.
History does matter.
Pure drivel. “Blank-slatism” is every bit as naive as “essentialism”.
Nothing about my son was radically different – or really changed in any marked way – when he transitioned. What changed was the world around him finally just let him be himself. Is “uttered words” really what you think it is to be transgender?
Is six years of it enough to make someone be a girl?
Hit “Post” too soon, meant to finish with: If we’d just stuck to our guns for one more year, would I have a daughter today?
I should add, lest it seem I’m essentialist myself – there are undoubtedly personality traits that my son has today that were markedly influenced by his nearly 5 years of what I’d call “femininity conditioning”. His “happy place” is embracing certain aspects of that conditioning without fear or anxiety that it will undercut his affirmed gender. But the one thing that has remained steadfast is his insistence upon being a boy and being recognized as such. He is a living, walking, breathing contradiction to the idea that being a boy or being a girl is merely social conditioning.
If a name my daughter “Roger” because I really wanted a boy, and raise little Roger on a farm hunting, shooting, and driving a tractor, and she wears boxers and blue jeans but never a dress, will feminists kick her out of the collective when she gets to college? Or will Roger’s breasts and vag be enough to secure entry?
And if Roger has a sibling born with a penis, that I named Sue to toughen them up, who declared herself a girl at age three and transitioned at age 5, and arrives at the same college after growing up wearing dresses and baking pies with her mother the farmer’s wife, will she be accepted? Or will her penis cancel out her breasts and the path of her life?
And this mythical “path”: is it really shared by a tomboy from the Bronx, a Southern belle, and the princess of Monaco? Does a calico dress equal a burqa equal cornrows and a tam? Or are you conflating wildly disparate things because they also happen to people with a statistical likelihood of menstruating?
I remember being struck by research that suggests that the path dependence starts even before we’re born–researchers asked couples who were soon to be parents to talk about their as yet unborn children, and got lots of answers like ‘it will be great when our son is born, we’ll play ball and fix cars etc.’ and ‘I can hardly wait to have a daughter, we’ll be close and share everything, and cook together and get dressed up etc.’.
“We are what our pasts make us” is not “Blank-slatism”. My past includes the past of the DNA that went into me as a fertilised egg.
@David Evans #6
That’s obviously not how “our pasts” was used in the context of the post to which I was responding. And such a tortuous stretch of the English language that it’d probably make lawyers cringe. When someone says, “Tell me about your past”, what do you suppose they want to know? Are you baffled as to whether that person is inquiring about the experiences you’ve lived through vs your genetic composition?
How is it drivel to say that our past experiences shaped us? The science is still out on the nature side of the equation; there’s no consensus evidence that gender has any biological basis, just anecdotal evidence. I don’t think that a very strong case can be made for essentialism being a dominant shaper of self identity, but it does seem that socialization has an enormous influence. So if it is a spectrum, with one or the other being the dominant influence in most people, I would lean towards saying that it is socialization and experiences–our past–that makes the most difference in the outcome of one’s identity. That’s hardly drivel.
I don’t think that anyone is insisting upon gender identity being “merely social conditioning” here. For my part, I think that it’s the dominant factor, as I said above, but there are clearly traits in personalities that are evident from a very young/tender age that didn’t get there through socialization.
@MrFancyPants #8
Yes, rereading my post was what compelled my follow-up point in #3. I do think socialization is hugely influential in how many personality traits develop. I’d even call it the dominant factor of nature vs nurture. But that’s a far cry from “exclusive” (even moreso from “universally exclusive”, as is implied by “we are what our pasts make us”). The notion of exclusiveness was the “drivel” to which I referred.
Perhaps you interpret it differently, but to me “Being a girl is path dependent because it’s a result of preceding years or months or days of being a girl” reads exactly as an insistence that gender identity is merely (perhaps “solely” would be better here?) the result of social conditioning.
And yet I said
But you saw only drivel and blank slatism, which gave you another opportunity to have yet another tantrum about “my son.” I’m tired of being bullied that way.
You talk as if I’m personally harming and tormenting your son, Kevin, and I really am fed up with it. I’m not doing anything to your son. Your son is not the only person on earth with a stake in how we talk and think about gender. Please stop using him as a bludgeon.
I’m tired of it too. You have emotional blinders on with regard to your son that are so strong you read accusations where there are none, you create hyperbole that your conversational partners never even implied, and you come girded to do battle not conversation.
You’ve been a complete dick, Kevin, to be frank. You are unwilling to see that other people here are not your enemies. You’re completely unable to distance yourself enough from Daddy’s Protective Feelings long enough to consider a point rather than to disparage it.
You are obviously intelligent which makes it worse. It’s willful at this point. Can you just stop it?
Maybe I should counter everything you have to say with “NUH UH MY OWN NIECE IS TRANS SO WHAT I SAY IS RIGHT AND IF YOU DISAGREE YOU’RE A CARICATURE OF THE WORST BIGOTS.” Would you like that Kevin?
Shorter me: Stop with the emotional blackmail. It’s wrong.
@ A Masked Avenger
I think perhaps you missed the bit about path dependence being part of a cluster concept (the author claims that gender is a cluster concept). A cluster which INCLUDES but is not limited to path / history. Path / history is therefore a necessary but not sufficient determinant of gender.
You’re referring to the “and many others”? Huh. Where’d the “many others” disappear to later on, in “Being a girl is path dependent because it’s a result of preceding years or months or days of being a girl”? They’re important you say? How important are they with respect to a transgender woman running for president of a women’s organization?
I was on a road trip when the trans-gender issue blew up in your face, so I missed the ‘discussion’ on FTB until sides had hardened.
Could you point me to the post where you made the statement that some people found so objectionable, and to the 1st few posts where people argued that you had done something very bad?
Delay in posting. #15 is response to #10.
I don’t mean to be a dick or a bully. Help me out here. I see a statement that starts, “Since swans can only be white…”, and I’m looking through a window a black swan waddling around my back yard, how should I respond?
“There goes Kevin again, bullying us by talking about the black swan in his back yard.”
Of course no statements are being directed at my son. That’s not how stereotypes work. Statements and sentiments are expressed about people who are transgender, broadly, which directly contradict my son’s [and OFTEN overlooked and elided in criticisms of my responses, those of which I have heard from numerous other transgender kids and parents thereof] experiences.
@Josh – it was a bit delayed, so you may have missed it, but I did respond to your original “emotional blackmail” comment directed at me. On the chance you did miss it, I’m not going to repeat myself, but rather link:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/stuck-on-the-belief-that-truth-will-save-you/#comment-2620174
#14
Path-slash-history is necessary but not sufficient? In that case can you address my question about the diversity of paths actual women follow?
As for “not sufficient,” do you mean that XX chromosomes are also required? Or a vagina? Or a certain statistical likelihood of menstruating? And is there any case in which you would exclude someone because they lack the requisite path who DOES have a vagina and menstruate?
It sounds like “path” is retroactively blessed by ability to menstruate, in that no menstruator will be told she’s not a woman, but a penis haver will be told either that they lack the correct path, or else that path is necessary but not sufficient. If so, it sounds like disingenuous bullshit.
Blah blah blah, Kevin.
That is not only a wild mischaracterization of what Ophelia and others have been saying, but also a pretty wild mischaracterization of the objections to what you say, Kevin. For shame.
Guess we’re done then, Josh. For what it’s worth, I’m willing to pick this back up anytime, let me know if you have a change of heart.
Kevin K @17,
Can you spell that out for us? What is the statement in the OP that you think is the equivalent of “All swans are white?”
Because I think the problem here is that you’re taking complicated questions of culture and language (what does it mean to be “a woman” or “a man”? How does one become one?) that have subjective elements, and assuming that YOUR opinions on those definitions and questions are correct, such that the problem reduces to one of objective fact. Then you proclaim your son’s existence as a factual refutation of any contrary views.
It’s as if I waded into a debate about “what makes someone a feminist” and said, “I don’t understand what you all are talking about. I’ve got Christina Hoff Sommers right here in my backyard. Therefore, you’re wrong and that person over there is right. Glad I could straighten that out for you all.”
It’s your OPINION that your son is indistinguishable in any way that matters from the category of “boy.” It’s no doubt a deeply felt, sincerely held opinion, informed by a great deal of thought and experience. It may be an opinion that I would agree with — I don’t presently hold a firm view on the subject. But it is not an objective statement of fact like “this is a black swan.” And your conflation of fact with opinion is part of the problem here — in my opinion, of course.
Exactly what Screechy just said, Kevin. Your subjective experience of your son does NOT REPRESENT a comprehensive theory of gender, or even a valid refutation that socialization is not the overwhelmingly dominant factor in gender identity. That you keep presenting it in that way is at best annoying, and generally bullying.
@MrFancyPants
Shameful would be deliberate misrepresentation. To this point, you’ve not even deigned to show what I’ve misrepresented, much less cited anything that reeks of deliberate misrepresentation. As I’d said in my immediately-prior comment, directed specifically to you, the sentence “Being a girl is path dependent because it’s a result of preceding years or months or days of being a girl” is a white swan sentence. Black swan: I know of a child who was named, dressed, and treated like a girl for the first 5 years of life – and he is not a girl.
How am I mischaracterizing this in claiming it’s a situation wherein I pointed out a counter-example of a flawed stereotype, and was subsequently accused of bullying/being a dick.
As for “and others have been saying”… some more “white swan” comments that’ve compelled me to speak up (list self-plagiarized from a response to Josh):
in Dreger’s words: “The mistake they make is then to assume that every child who expresses doubt about his or her birth gender assignment should simply be “affirmed” by parents and clinicians in their “new” gender”.
in Holm’s words: “The bizarre thing for me is that these beliefs (which seem to run something like ‘if a child likes something traditionally associated with the other gender, they are that other gender’) quite blatantly buy into the most antiquated ideas on gender. A child that puts a dress on is a girl!”
In John the Drunk’s words: “The activists, who seem to demand instant surgery after the First Cupcake or the First Toolbox, are engaging in an absolute cartoon version of gender essentialism”
Am I mischaracterizing statements like these as false stereotypes?
Kevin @24:
The bolded part is a factual statement (making the reasonable inference that “named, dressed, and treated like a girl” means “named, dressed, and treated in the manner our culture generally considers girlish”).
The italicized part is opinion. Or, if you prefer, it begs the question. (Or invites the question. I never get that right.)
Kevin. Your anecdotal statements about your son do not represent anything but opinion. Understood/agreed? For every statement you make that “my son is a boy” I can google up a variety of “I transitioned and now I regret it” stories. Both are opinion. You’re not making any gender theory revelations by continually stating that, and you’re definitely not contradicting or refuting any known science. If you want to be taken seriously from here on out, you need to leave your anecdotes out of the equation completely. Because the rest of us do. (And you’re fooling yourself if you think that you are the only person reading this who knows a transgender person.)
I’d be a lot happier accepting statements like “my son is a boy” in reference to an XX child if “is a boy” was capable of being defined. I only know what trans activists mean by this in terms of negation- it doesn’t mean physical sex, it doesn’t mean self identity, it doesn’t mean recipient of socialization and upbringing, it doesn’t refer to the way others treat the subject.
Patrick (but not singling him out):
There *is* a definition of “boy” that doesn’t require twisting your brain into a pretzel. We all know what it is. The question is why we’re being gaslighted into doubting it.
#28 Cressida, please do enlighten me as to this ironclad definition.
Reading ‘scientific’ argument about nature versus nurture always feels odd. It’s as if people can’t quite recollect their own back stories.
“The child is father of the man”, as they used to say but never would now since we know so much better.
BTW great to hear once again from the spittle-flecked keyboard of Josh, the Official Spokesgay.
There was a little girl at my sons’ primary school who declared that she wanted to be called Keith from now on, so we did of course.
Everyone knew about it but I didn’t realise it’s supposed to be such a big deal or I’d have kept track. I can’t remember how Keith dressed.
Because we’ve noticed that applying that definition rigidly causes a minority to experience misery and off themselves?
There’s also a plain and simple definition of “marriage.” Also, “consent.” There are lots of plain and simple definitions that feminists would have us change.
So, the black swan was treated like a white swan for 5 years, and yet they have no memory of being treated as a white swan, no emotional reactions to things that might have been influenced by their previous time. In fact, their memories are retroactively of having been treated like a black swan by everyone the whole time. Interesting. We must make notes for our time travel project.
I think we need Fuzzy Set theory to tackle gender issues. “Yes or no?” isn’t the right question. A trans woman is considerably more of a woman than a cis man is. But since what a woman is is *not* a simple and well-defined category, but a category created out of many, many traits, not all of which all women have or do not have, we cannot say who is a woman or not without any kind of context of what the question means and why it is being asked. Furthermore, with fuzzy sets, maybe trans folk would understand why so many women say they are not “cis”… because we are so aware that we transgress against many traits that are considered part of being a woman by society, or that we embody the traits unwillingly due to pressure.
I guess I didn’t write a very clear comment. I understand that some people say “is a boy” means “has a penis,” I get that some people say “is a boy” means “is part of the boy caste.” I’m fine with people defining terms however they want, and I’m fine with discussing things with them using the terms that they want. I meant “is a boy” in the trans activism sense- that lacks a stable definition, and is mostly defined by negation.
I don’t think there needs to be one true definition. We don’t need that for other things. I just get irked by people who seem to believe that there IS a one true definition and all the other ones are wrong and bigoted… but don’t even have a definition to hold up as their own candidate. They just act like gender is this ineffable personal essence that one just magically “knows,” and if your gender and social treatment doesn’t match up, well, obviously that will cause intense psychological damage.
That’s not an explanation, and I don’t buy it. I buy that they feel that way, I don’t buy the explanation for why they feel that way, and I know for a fact there are trans men and women out there who don’t feel that way, so it can’t possibly be the whole story.
And Avenger swoops in with more BS emotional blackmail. There is no evidence that sensible definitions regarding sex cause misery. How could that even be extracted in a world that pushes and violently enforces rigid gender norms from birth? Continuing to push the traditional, conservative, patriarchal concepts of innate gender and gender roles is what propagates misery.
Samantha Vines @ 32 & 33, yes, and thank you. Where those looking at the world as either black or white vilify those who claim to see gradations — or, even, gasp, colors! — a Fuzzy Set theory could be very useful.
@Screechy Monkey & MrFancyPants – are those standards applied universally, or just in regard to commentators whose viewpoints don’t jive with the communal sentiment? Ophelia’s blog articles are often centered on anecdotes. What were the articles about Anna Lee and Fran Cowling, if not anecdotes? Or the weird 40-somthing guy written up for identifying as a 6-year-old girl? I’m chided for “begging the question” in stating “the child is a boy” in response to “Being a woman is path dependent because it’s a result of years of being a girl.” That’s not question begging? I will grant the subjective aspect to my stance (though I stand by there being objective grounds for how I use the word “boy” or “son” – see below), but it sure would be nice to see at least an acknowledgement that they’re often responses to comments on the same level.
Not to mention, I’d be far less inclined to speak out from personal experience if there were any sense of repudiation when blatant stereotypical language is used, e.g. “The activists, who seem to demand instant surgery after the First Cupcake or the First Toolbox, are engaging in an absolute cartoon version of gender essentialism”. Should I not be compelled to address such statements?
@Patrick
Definition. “Boy”: a child who prefers others refer to them using male-gendered language and, when a boy/girl distinction is made, claims “boy” to be the best-fitting descriptor (hopefully that doesn’t pretzel-fy your brain :-) )
No need to bring genitals into it. No need to bring chromosomes into it. No need to bring clothing, toy preferences, affinity of colors, desire for ballet over football, or any of that racket into it.
Language is a tool – we use it to convey useful/accurate/helpful information. And it is a subjective tool – there aren’t objectively “right” and “wrong” definitions of words carved into the fabric of reality. But there are definitions that are more effective than others in conveying helpful & useful information. In the vast majority of social contexts (work, school, neighborhood gatherings, whatever), other people’s genitals are of no concern. Information about one of their 23 chromosomes is about as useful knowing their blood type – how often does that come up in conversation at the workplace? As to their personal preferences for clothing and activities – those are extensions of a person’s personality and should be discovered via “getting to know someone” – not inferred from their gender.
However, one thing that repeatedly comes up in social contexts: how do we refer to someone in the third-person? The need to do so using gendered words is a sucky, but pretty inescapable, aspect of our language. As such, how another person prefers to be referred *is* useful information – far more useful than knowing whether or not they were born with a penis. It sounds trivial, but the vast majority of people do have a preference for being called a “him” or a “her”; in most of us it’s a strong enough preference that we’ll immediately interrupt and correct anyone who gets it wrong; and for most of us, it’s deeply insulting to have others treat our preferences of gendered referents dismissively.
That said, I do get that context matters, and I do think it’s sensible to use genital-based definition of genedered words in some contexts. Kind of like we know “theory” means different things in different contexts and recognized “evolution is just a theory” as conflating those contexts. Specifically, there are areas where it gets very tricky to speak plainly while respecting preference-based gender definitions. So when discussing things like sexual assault statistics, women’s health care (including abortion rights), and in certain sports where sexual dimorphism comes into play; then sure, “men” and “women” are more information-packed if used to describe biological sex characteristics. Similarly, in the context of women’s shelters, I don’t think the charge of “Transphobic” is merited in distinguishing how transgender women are assisted (though I do think kicking transgender women to the streets is a far cry an appropriate reaction).
But in the ocean of all forms of social interaction, I see no case for making genital-based gender definitions the primary/universal classification scheme of “what we should mean by woman/man/girl/boy”. Most of the time, preference-based definitions capture exactly that information which is useful (and unharmful); hence my choice to treat it as “default”.
Then you can have a Mensa sort of group–made up of people for whom P(woman) is in the 98th percentile. They could call themselves “Real Womanly Women Born Women Who Are So Totally Womenly.” Perhaps other women could look to them for guidance and direction.
Now for fuzzy set membership we need a P() function. We can shut up those trans-activists by assigning P() = 0.51 for anyone who declares that they’re a woman. We can add 0.20 if you had a vagina at birth, and deduct 0.04 per inch for enlarged clitorises. Add another 0.20 for menstruation… That gets us to a 91% probability of being a woman. It needs quite a bit more tweaking, of course: as it stands a trans man (calculated as 1.0 – P()) would be identified as a woman at P() = 60%. We need bonus points for girl’s names, deductions for androgynous names, a catcall bonus, etc. This will take work to nail down rigorously.
But we have the main thing figured out: trans women are 51% women, but only after having their penis removed. A trans woman with an average sized penis is approximately 31% woman, which is to say 69% man. Huh huh… I said “69.”
Oh, were you serious about using fuzzy set theory, or were you just bullshitting?
Kevin- You think you’ve just explained things, but you’ve explained virtually nothing, and subtly undermined yourself along the way.
To start with the most obvious part: If “boy” just refers to the set of people who prefer to be described and thought of as “boys,” its meaningless. I mean that directly- when your child says that he prefers to be described and thought of as a “boy,” your child is saying that he prefers to be described and thought of a person who prefers to be described and thought of as a person who described and thought of as… ad infinitum, without ever grounding itself.
After that you bring up male-gendered language. But that just foists off the actual problem onto the word “male.” Does this word MEAN anything? Does it refer to anything about the world?
Or maybe a better question- does it mean anything to your child? And do you disagree? Because if this explanation you’ve given is correct… you should.
The more interesting part of your comment is about context. And yes, I’m happy to use people’s preferred pronouns to refer to them, because my relationship with them is generally on a level where that makes sense.
But… context. How about this context- You’ve literally shown up on a blog devoted to the concept of women as a social caste and political bloc. This blog has a 100% coherent (not necessarily 100% right in every regard, but certainly coherent) world view and explanation for why and how its using the word “women.”
If your comment is what you really believe, you owe OB an apology. Because your comments here amount to little more than an assertion that the context in which you use gendered terminology is more important than OBs, so she should shut up about things that are important to her. And you’ve tried to advance that point of view by making factual claims that in this post, where you appear to adopt an almost error theory of gender, you admit aren’t actually true.
Kevin K,
Thanks for the acknowledgement that your views are subjective. It’s a big help in getting this discussion to go somewhere.
I don’t think I’m advocating for any double standard. As far as I can tell, Ophelia hasn’t been going around declaring that any particular anecdote in a blog post is a factual, “black swan” refutation like you have. She may use particular examples as the basis for an argument, but she makes the argument explicit, and we can all agree, disagree, or otherwise pick over the argument accordingly. Your tendency — which you made explicit in your previous posts in this thread — is to declare that your son is absolute PROOF that your views are correct and everyone else is wrong. Which leads to two problems.
First, you’re in complete control of all the “facts” regarding your son. I doubt that you’re lying about any of this, but like any human being — especially in discussions regarding their children — you could be biased, exaggerating, omitting things that aren’t helpful to your point, etc. When Ophelia cites a news article, we can at least read the entire article for ourselves, and possibly do some research to see what other facts are available about this person. That’s not an option when the discussion is your son, nor do I suspect any of us want it to be, as it would be rude and intrusive to pry into a particular child’s life.
Second, there’s the emotional blackmail that people have referenced. You have often implied (and sometimes more than implied) that anyone who disagrees with your views on gender generally is either accusing you of lying about your son, or is a heartless meanie who wants your son to be forcibly dressed in girl’s clothes despite his protests and tears. I get why you would do this — this is an issue near and dear to your heart for obvious reasons, and what is for many other people an abstract discussion has real and personal implications for you. But I think what Ophelia is telling you is that she doesn’t run her blog for the purpose of making you comfortable, or for providing or purporting to provide you with parenting advice or instructions. What you do here sometimes has the feel of a Christian coming on to an atheist board and lecturing everyone that “I know Jesus is real because His love saved me from being an alcoholic who abused my family, and you say he’s not real, so you want me to beat my family again and end up drinking myself to death!” I’m exaggerating, of course, because in general you’re a thoughtful commenter, and the rest of your comment above about how to define gender is thought-provoking. But you’ve expressed incredulity at Josh and Ophelia’s criticisms of your approach, so I’m trying to explain what that looks like from my point of view.
A Masked Avenger @39, I took Samantha Vines’ posts to be what they appeared to be, hyperbolic commentaries on black/white, yes/no thinking. So, yeah, bullshitting.
But after reviewing your
hyperbolic commentaryformulation on the fuzzy set theory, I have to reconsider your question…If you change the variables and adjust weightings to be less, er, asshole-ish, and if you change the purpose to try to foster useful thinking and dialog (remind me, again, who is trying to shut up trans-activists?), I would support this type of thinking far more than the black/white, yes/no thinking demonstrated by some trans-activists who (ironically, given that you appear to believe that we want to shut them up) have tried to banish folks like Ophelia from the dialog. You demonstrated far more thought in creating your mockery here than those who stick with the, forgive my use of the phrase, binary thinking that leads to that type of banishment.
Kevin : according to your definition, “boy” is a 100 % content-free word. Are you sure that’s what you really mean?
Assholish? The weightings were generous. People have conspicuously refused to answer my repeated question: under what conceivable circumstances would anyone here tell a person with a vagina, who menstruates, that she is not a woman? Or that “woman” is a fuzzy set, and she’s less woman than these other women over here?
The fact is there are no such circumstances conceivable. People like that are automatically 100% woman, no quibbles, no bullshit about fuzzy sets, and no bullshit about “path” regardless whether they were raised in Bahrain, Bombay, Beverly Hills, Birmingham, or whether they were aboriginal, royalty, slaves, or anything else. Instead there would be posts like the OP idiotically suggesting that all these 100% women have followed paths that are genuinely comparable.
We only break out the fuzzy sets when we want to denigrate someone’s womanhood. Even women who are sterile, or post menopausal, or whatever, won’t be treated to this nonsense; instead they’ll get a carefully reasoned explanation why they still count as 100% women.
David #29, “juvenile male human.”
There are certain things about the paths women follow that are comparable. For instance, in most (if not every) countries, the default human is male. This means that, regardless of whether the culture things women should wear burkas or crowns and tiaras over bathing suites, the message is that there is a particular way to be a woman. In every culture I am familiar with (except maybe some indigenous cultures that might have had more gender equality), the experience of woman is to be an afterthought, or a slave, or a lesser being. These are not exact experience, no. Culture varies. But the overall experience of being a woman is to be subjected to messages that are designed to let us know “our” place. There are varying levels along a spectrum, and varying levels of rebellion, but there are also consequences for rebellion, for not fitting the proper mold. This is what is comparable, not the exact details of what color they are expected to wear, whether they are supposed to show cleavage or cover to the eyes, or whatever. Those are merely the tools that are used to establish the “proper place” of the female in a given society. In western societies, women have gained some success in fighting against that, but the battle is by no means over.
Kevin – I think you’re being disingenuous. You say that gender is whatever a person says it is. Okay. That can work as a determinant of what name/pronouns to use. But I suspect your son had some concept of what “boy” and “girl” meant to him when he decided to live as a boy. If there is no sense of what each gender is, then there is no meaning to gender transition. The problem is, getting a definition pinned down of what “woman” means. Even though it may be a fuzzy concept, it has some meaning for those choosing to live as woman (or a man). So I think it is fair to issue a bit of a challenge here and ask you to be a bit more honest and upfront about what exactly it means to be a “boy” or a “girl”. Otherwise, it is just a game we’re playing where I get to be the shoe and you get to be the Scotty dog. I don’t think gender is that insignificant for your son, for any trans person, or for that matter, for a great many people who are not trans.
Many of us who are not trans do not experience gender the way we are expected to. I don’t wish to go over my history again, but believe me, your son is far from alone in having experienced social problems because of gender identification. For women who choose to be “different” than society expects, the consequences can be harsh, harsh enough to kill in some cases. I was lucky; I failed in my attempt to destroy myself, and found myself instead sitting across from a gentle, helpful psychiatrist who seemed to have trouble understanding why such things were a problem. Did I want to transition to male? No, that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t feel like a male. I didn’t feel like a female either. I felt like…pond scum. That is the actual word I used. Pond scum. A grotesque mutant, in the body of a female but wanting to do science, wanting to work outside the home, not interesting in having kids (though I did eventually have one, and do not regret it, that was not my goal in life.)
So I am going to join the chorus in asking you to define your terms. And saying what people identify is….that’s a phrase that’s helpful to you, but doesn’t answer the question. If I say I am a woman, what am I saying? I have some idea what I mean by that, but it’s clear that there are a lot of different definitions, and so we end up talking past each other. What does your son mean when he says he is a boy? That seems a fair enough question, because I am sure he has some idea what a boy is in contrast to a girl, otherwise there would be no reason for him to identify as either. He says he is a boy, I will accept that, and should I ever meet him, I will refer to him by his preferred name and pronouns. But it still leaves the question – what is a boy?
The reason I think this is an issue for a lot of us is that we hear a lot about being a woman, and for quite a few of us, the answers to that question seem to count us out of being a woman. Am I less woman than a trans woman because I apathetically accepted my birth sex? I don’t think so, and I don’t believe you think so either. I think it would be an act of respect for this group if you would quit offering up your son as the sole data point in answering such questions. As someone indicated above, we each have our data points, but they are nothing but anecdotes. My experience does not invalidate your son’s, but his does not invalidate mine.
Yes, at a high enough level of abstraction, almost anything can be equated. (In mathematics, this is called an equivalence relation, and they can be defined in arbitrarily many different ways. Any partition of a set into disjoint subsets defines such a relation, and vice versa.)
You defined the relation in which two life stories are equivalent if the person is not the default in their society. That’s a decent stab, but you don’t really mean it: the default is male, yes, but also heterosexual and of the ruling race/class/tribe. A black, trans, or gay man’s path is equivalent to a woman’s path by that definition.
You’ll find, if you try to make this rigorous, that there’s no way to define “path” so that women’s paths are all included and paths not belonging to women are excluded. That’s true even with my hand-wavey list, which doesn’t even include any matriarchal societies. There are a few societies today where only women are allowed to own property, for example, but I doubt any feminist would want to exclude them. They would probably debate whether those women are oppressed, because for example women are still responsible for child rearing in many matriarchal societies.
Masked Avenger @44
The problem with unequivocal statements of fact is that a single example, even an anecdotal one, proves them wrong.
As I noted in a recent related thread on my partners behalf, and as others noted relative to themselves, women do receive negative feedback from others, including other women, when they do not conform to traditional ‘womanly’ behaviours. One example that I did not explicitly state, but which is of the same tone as examples I did give, was the “You’re not a real women until you have children”. I’ve heard more than one women receive this and my partner has had it more than once (back when we were of more obviously breeding age). Nowadays it’s just the awkward pause that comes after a negative answer to “Do you have children?”
All this despite my partner being biologically female to all appearances, dressing in a feminine manner (even when in unisex clothing), wearing makeup, having long hair etc. Of course she goes though all the less visible but still ‘woman’ identifying traits such as menstruation and associated mood swings, she’s had a range of complications that only people with a uterus will ever experience etc etc et fucking cetera.
The point is not that she or any ‘natural born’ [1] woman has it worse than a trans woman. The point is that it is not a one size fits all black and white, ‘no-one would ever challenge your belonging to woman category’. All it takes is one example to knock that down and I alone have a dozen or so covering my partner and at least 3-4 female friends.
Life is messy and complicated and a whole bunch of messy and non-quantifiable stuff goes into both gender identity and gender perception. Other people DO make judgements on what they see of your appearance, behaviour and life choices. So, path may not be strictly determinant, but it most certainly does matter. Quite a lot in my opinion.
We are the summary of our life experiences and if it is self evident that two people from within essentially the same demographic group can be wildly divergent (I put it to you that is the case), then it seems more than reasonable to assume that being trans* (which is not a common pathway at all) may well lead to both different self-perception of what gender means and a different expression of that gender.
That is not to negate the validity of trans people or their lives or experiences. It is not to say that the groups of trans and ‘natural born’ women do not have enormous overlap in many many ways. It is to say, or perhaps suggest would be better, that the needs, attitudes, behaviours and responses of the two groups and their many many demographic subgroups may well not always overlap 100%.
I’m really struggling to see how feminism can be truly effective and goal focused movement if it is not allowed to openly critique gender and its consequences for women. I think it is ultimately self destructive for the trans* movement to try to insist that gender not be discussed and deconstructed, while at the same time making gender identity a core plank. The two groups have huge areas of overlap. Support each other in those battles. The primary one being surely that your sex and/or gender should not determine your rights, treatment or opportunities in life.
There is precedent for this. Many biological men identify either as feminist or feminist supporters and we arguably have even less in common with women feminists.
^ *cheers*
Feminists are saying that, are they? Because maybe you need to reread my question.
Which women, who currently menstruate, is Ophelia prepared to call not a woman? Or less of a woman? On the grounds that she didn’t follow the “woman” path?
You’re a conversational asshole, A Masked Avenger.
This is going back the the conversation we had weeks ago. Your deftinition of gender here is simply the thing you call yourself when asked ‘what is your gender?’ which is quite empty of anything descriptive.
And that led me to believe that gender has no meaning when stripped of the essentialism component.
Masked Avenger, we’re both at risk of slippage here. Firstly, I did miss the ‘here’ in your quote. That ‘here’ does imply feminists, although we do get the odd drive by from some clearly non-feminists. I’ll stipulate to saying that no-one ‘here’ would say any such thing. That a women with a vagina who menstruates is a women, at least biologically. It is worth noting that people here have been very open to wider definitions of womanhood than that though. People here have also been very open to wider and more inclusive definitions of gender than that. At this point I’m beginning to wonder, are we talking about biological sex or gender, or some hydra headed composite of the two? Secondly, why have you slipped in the bit about who Ophelia is or is not prepared to call a woman? That is slippage, because your quoted statement was the much more generic ‘here’, which includes the commentariat and it was to that statement (minus the ‘here’) that I responded and that you have in turn responded to. Lets leave Ophelia out of it for the moment because I don’t presume for an instant to speak for her.
So, those points made, I still stand beside my comment. Here’s why. This blog and commentariat do not exist in a bubble. We may debate, try ideas out, argue and at times disagree, but at the end of the day we are seeking a framework that can actually be usefully employed in the outside world. I doubt (very much) anyone I call a feminist would deny womanhood on the grounds you describe. At the same time there are certainly women who self identify as feminists, who jump through hoops to avoid describing a person who has a vagina and who menstruates as a woman for fear that by doing so they exclude a trans person from that definition. Similarly there are women (and men) who, whether they identify as feminist or not, do and have denied that a person who has a vagina and who menstruates is NOT a REAL woman because no babies. Other readers can come up with other similar examples by the bucket I’m sure.
In it’s application to the real world context of your statement I believe my comment is still valid and does not unduly put words in your mouth either.
Apologies if this comment is a little rambling and disconnected. I’m at work and terribly distracted by the things I should be doing, rather than the things I find important.
For noticing that the argument in the OP is bullshit? A very simple question easily exposes that it is. All AFABs are 100% woman, and this “path” stuff is designed to exclude the various folks who weren’t AFAB. Asking which AFABs are less than 100% woman rings this out quickly, and as a bonus debunks sloppy appeals to fuzzy logic. Asking what makes the path of a Saudi sex slave the same as the path of a Mosuo matriarch, as distinct from the path of an effeminate gay man, shows the problem with this concept: the only way to characterize “paths” that unifies all women’s experience while excluding gay, trans, intersex, etc., is to explicitly invoke the fact that the former are all experienced by AFABs.
To counteract your expansive interpretation of my question. I wasn’t asking whether the Ayatollah would say some women aren’t women. We both already know he would.
But secondarily, because her OP tries to argue that what makes trans women less than women is that they didn’t follow the woman path. If that were a serious claim, it would follow that either all menstruators followed the woman path, or else that some menstruators are not fully women. Let’s stipulate that trans men would be happy to be called “not women,” and consider only menstruators who identify as women.
But note that the OP is also arguing that trans men are really women, since presumably they followed the woman path.
Note that #54 is a reply to #51. Sorry for lack of attribution.
@Screechy Monkey. I do see your point. Going to think on it. I don’t want to be the guy sitting at the bar telling everyone, “the aliens ARE real – I saw em’ with my own two eyes!” (and yet – as I’m sure you can understand… *I* don’t think I am that guy…). Anyway, I will be giving it a lot of thought; and greatly appreciate the insights.
@Patrick, Holms, & Amrie
Omitted from my definition was the objective / biologically-driven basis for that preference. Specifically, one’s sense of being a male or female member of the human species. I omit it because the definition does not hinge upon it. However, I do feel there’s a lot of evidence that *something* influences our preferences for being seen as a male or female member of our species beyond social cues alone. As I’ve detailed before, I think that though only a small fraction of humans exhibit transgender behavior (that is, preferences for gender that directly contradicts blanketed social conditioning from birth) they do so
* in high enough numbers,
* with enough conviction,
* in a sufficiently consistent manner,
* and under even the most intense (even abusive) gender conditioning imaginable… that it’s entirely plausible to suspect the existence of *something biological* beyond social conditioning at play.
So yes, my definition of “boy” is, based on whatever combination of nature and nurture led to what a child’s preference might be; if that preference is “boy”, that child is a boy.
Right. Ok then. Why did you argue with me? I said this:
“They just act like gender is this ineffable personal essence that one just magically “knows,” and if your gender and social treatment doesn’t match up, well, obviously that will cause intense psychological damage.”
You disagreed, but now you’re saying this:
“However, I do feel there’s a lot of evidence that *something* influences our preferences for being seen as a male or female member of our species beyond social cues alone.”
And then you go on to concede that you’ve no idea what this “something” is, except that it is “biological” in some unstated way, and “beyond social cues,” which is ye olde negation issue again. So yeah, you completely agree with me about the ineffable thing, you’re just comfortable with it. Why did you dispute the point?
As for the argument itself- you’re talking to a community of people, many of whom have backgrounds in the weirder versions fundamentalist or evangelical American Christianity. Many of us have seen LOADS of people, exhibit INCREDIBLE conviction in a VERY consistent manner through INCREDIBLE suffering… in things that turned out not to be true. The inference you’re drawing isn’t valid.
I’m going to take a stab at this, because this is the definition that currently works for me–a woman/man/boy/girl is a person who is treated as such according to the prevailing social norms of the culture in which ze lives. Some people adopt the appearance/behaviour/whatever of the gender they are/want to be/feel most comfortable as in order to elicit the treatment appropriate for this gender; others struggle against the objectionable parts of this treatment while not concerning themselves about their own gender.
guest #59, your definition boils down to gender = gender stereotypes. As in, “woman” = “person who embodies feminine gender stereotypes.” I’ll let you decide if you’re OK with that.
@ Cressida #60
I think in terms of defining “woman” as an oppressed class #59 has it somewhat right, and this is where “transwoman” as a class is distinct. Unless a transwoman is successfully passing as class “woman” then their oppression can only truly be attributed to their class as a “transwoman” (or trans as a class) plus whatever other ticky boxes are in effect.
This is where intersectionality has been forgotten; it addresses the importance of the identification of discrete classes via the ticky boxes, not the idea that the more ticky boxes you’ve got the more Oppression Olympics gold medals you win.
Let me be clearer. Suppose there’s a man who lives his entire adult life in drag. He fully passes as a woman. He tells everyone he’s a woman. Everyone treats him as a woman. But he himself personally, in his own brain, doesn’t identify as a woman. It’s just a game he plays.
Is he a woman? According to guest #59, he is. I hope it’s evident that he is not. Therefore, the definition fails.
Masked Avenger @55, to quibble I think I would describe my interpretation of your question as mildly expanded, rather than expansive. Dragging the Ayatollah into it is straw mannish, not to mention the fact we have enough garden variety assholes and misguided types locally without having to import any 1%ers.
Frankly I really don’t follow your claims at all. I’ll let Ophelia argue for herself, but I don’t see her making the claim that trans women are lesser, just that by dint of having taken a different path to arrive at a similar place, they cannot claim to represent of posses the same life experiences as a natural born women (incidentally is there a better way to phrase what I mean there?).
There might well be some trans women who could be said to have followed a very nearly prototypical route to womanhood. For instance by identifying very young as a girl, having had puberty blockers and having been raised and treated as a girl from that age and then having gone through hormone and reassignment surgery etc. conceivably they could have a pretty similar path. Having been raised a boy and lived as a man, then transitioning later in life? Not so much. You could certainly transition to the broad category women, but you could not claim to have the saturation in lived girl and women experience. Surely that must be acknowledged?
Cressida: I don’t think you can pin down the definition of “woman” like that. That person would be a woman in one sense (1.many/most statements about how women are treated would apply to them) but not others (2.no risk of ovarian cancer, 3. not raised as a girl, 4.doesn’t identify as a woman). 1 and 4 are true (to varying extents)for a lot of people even though 2 and 3 are not – including some people here. Even if we’re not trans.
#64 amrie, I don’t agree. Pretending to be a woman and therefore being treated as a woman doesn’t mean you are a woman. If I pretend to be schizophrenic and I get committed and I experience the way doctors and other health care workers treat schizophrenic people, that does not make me schizophrenic. Your “sense” #1 does not work.
Cressida: “Woman” and “schizophrenic” are two very different words. Woman is a natural category, so it’s prototype-based (like bird) and/or family resemblance based (like game). Schizophrenic is a medical term, so it’s (formal) definition-based.
Plenty of nice and interesting observations in this thread. More than enough of them for the reader (like me) to feel completely lost.
Gender as a personal ineffable essence? Well, that doesn’t sound good. A broad-brush “sameness of path” relation, bound to remain either forever vague or – as soon as we do enter the details – excluding not just trans, but also not a few AFAB women? No, that doesn’t sound too good either.
I don’t know if anyone here will share my angle – probably not – but for me one of the most forceful voices in this discussion was that of a trans woman from the original thread (the link given in the OP). In particular, the following words of susanreimers resonated strongly with me:
I like this comment a lot, not so much because of the details* as because of its flagrant unashamed pragmatism. I read it as saying: “sure, polish your definitions as you want, analyze examples and counterexamples, debate or no-platform each other until you are all drunk with bliss, please be my guest. However, as long as you are not able to sway the public-at-large, you are irrelevant to me”. In effect, susanreimers is saying that this is not about a fringe group of progressives and their quarrels, but about the public-at-large, which comprises friends and families, sure, but also crowds of strangers in a bar, composed of people who are mentally miles away from any gender-studies class. How to sway them? What will they buy into? What can be sold to them, realistically speaking? What’s our best chance of being effective? For someone like susanreimers, it is such questions that are crucial.
I have nothing against scholarly debates about the ontology of gender, no, absolutely nothing. At the moment I would love it only to be recognized how limited such debates are in their influence – how ghetto-like they still sound (if they sound at all!) to the public-at-large. Such a recognition could take much of the heat off the bitter quarrels on the left, to everybody’s advantage. Yeah, I know that it’s nothing more than a fool’s dream.
*As for the details: I’m not sure whether susanreimers is right. Is it really easier to convince a crowd in a bar that Caitlyn Jenner is 100% woman than to sway them into believing that she occupies a new “gender box” – and as such, is also worthy of respect and shouldn’t be discriminated against? Or perhaps we should try instead to convince them that there are no “boxes” at all – maybe this is more feasible? Which of the three is a realistic goal, in your opinion? As I said, I’m not sure at all!
Be that as it may, these paths seem to me more similar (in their common goal of fighting against discrimination) than dissimilar. All that is missing now is the followers of all the paths attacking me solidarily for this opinion :)
You can’t say what counts as “effective” unless you first clarify what you want, and what isn’t important to you. Optimization presumes a goal.
There are some trans activists who view that goal as something like “fairness in housing and employment.”
There are others who view it as “any suggestion that I am not 100% the gender and sex with which I identify in every way and every context causes me intense psychological harm, so society must be taught to not even think that unless it literally can’t be avoided for medical reasons.”
It seems unlikely that the best strategy for the first will also be the best strategy for the second.
To be clear, and to confirm what Rob said @ 63 – I absolutely do not think trans women are “lesser.” A Masked Avenger @ 55 is straying into filthy waters with this disgusting claim:
#66 amrie, I don’t see how that invalidates my point, which is that “people treating you as if you are” X doesn’t mean that you “are” X. I maintain that that is not a good definition of being X.
We can quibble about whether or not this was intended, and I accept Ophelia’s word in #69 that it was not intended, but nevertheless that is the effect. Which is unfortunate, given that her reasoning in the OP is bullshit. There are two fatal flaws in the reasoning in the OP.
First, there’s no such thing as a “certain route” followed by women: there is an enormous variety of routes, and any aspect you select of one woman’s path will be contradicted by some other woman’s path. For example I mentioned (and seems to have been ignored) that: a Mosuo woman is allowed to own real estate and men are not; Mosuo women have no husbands; and men raise not their own children, but the children born in their mother’s household.
Second, ALL “natural born women” will be recognized as equally women, and nobody will cavil that the Duchess of York, or the Empress of Japan, or the aforementioned matriarch, have followed a different path from a dalit woman in India. Any pretense that there is “a” path women follow can only make sense if you restrict your attention to a narrow subset, such as middle class white American women, and then only barely. This hypothetical “path” is more or less pure horseshit. Since it’s horseshit, you can’t disclaim any political agenda by observing that “facts are facts.” These aren’t facts. They sound good on the surface, because one thinks of oneself and the girls one grew up with and imagines that there is such a thing as “the girl experience.”
Since all menstruators (and any non-menstruator with a doctor’s note explaining the lack of menses) will be credited with this fictional “girl experience,” regardless of their actual experience; but testicle havers and the XY chromosomed will be told that they lack this fictional “girl experience,” again regardless of their actual experience. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the thesis of the OP is at best sloppy thinking, and at worst a bit of sophistry to justify a foregone conclusion.
Patrick #68, you are right. When writing my comment, I was thinking of the stuff which all of us would like to see eliminated (like bullying, malicious mockery, unfair treatment at work, assaults, high suicide rate). But you are absolutely right about the diversity of goals.
yeah … which is a very polite strengthening of my own “it’s a fool’s dream”, isn’t it? Ok, point taken. I think I will switch to reading this thread instead of writing :)
Masked Avenger @ 71. Sorry, not making head way with those arguments.
Here for instance you state something as if it is a point of disagreement, both between you and me and between you and Ophelia. It is not. The OP quite explicitly describes both personal paths “Being a woman is not only ‘socially constructed’, as they say, it is also constructed by the path from one’s past to one’s present” and also the societally approved generic path “In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name…”. In my first comment I made the point that “Life is messy and complicated and a whole bunch of messy and non-quantifiable stuff goes into both gender identity and gender perception.” Different words, same concept. You appear to be arguing that a disagreement exists on a point where as far as I can tell agreement largely exists.
You haven’t been ignored at all! It was an interesting and valid data point that simply reinforces the point of agreement. There are multiple paths that women take to reach their place in life. Tell me, in that society, do trans* women follow that path?
And here’s the point. You are the one trying to push me/others into supporting a single path to being a women. Explicity, I am not. That is not how I read the OP. That is not how I interpret Ophelia’s position, or for that matter the position of the vast majority of commentators here. That is your dishonest reductionism of my/others position and that is what is horseshit! Secondly, again you try the ‘ALL’ bullshit, ignoring the fact that there is empirical evidence that in fact many many women to receive push back as to whether they meet the definition of a ‘real’ women. No babies? Too ugly? Dresses/acts/speaks/thinks like a man? Manly sports or job? etc etc etc? But do feel free to ignore the fact your dogmatism has been discredited twice in the same thread.
Pot meet kettle.
I believe that trans* women can speak to aspects of the experience of being a women, but that owing to the paths taken to arrive at that point the majority cannot, any more than I could as a man who was raised as a boy[1]. Tran* activists need to understand that intersectionality cuts both ways. A diverse range of women need to be allowed the freedom to speak as to their experiences and needs as women, just as a diverse range of trans* voices need to be heard (because lets face it there are contrary trans* voices).
[1] Despite having been taunted about being a ‘girl’ and gay as youth (I’m neither), despite having liked art and music and having learnt to sew as a youngster amongst other suitably non-masculine character traits.
Ariel @ 72. I thought your contribution was thoughtful and productive. It also led to Patrick’s thoughtful and productive contribution which reinforces why we do need the quieter readers here to write when they have something to say/ask.
A Masked Avenger always argues this way on this issue. I don’t expect honesty or consistency (I hope for it because I think Ophelia and lots of us are being burdened with an argument we haven’t made) any more. Lots of commenters have explained this clearly, and yet AMA comes right back and speaks as if no one had offered an explanation or a clarification.
I wouldn’t expect this to change, so I’d counsel others to be aware that the only thing you’re going to get out of a conversation with AMA is some verbal jousting, and it won’t be honest.
Josh, yeah I’d noted the pattern. I guess I’d hoped for a more honest and interesting engagement, but I fear you’re right.
Words from the op:
The op isn’t arguing that all women everywhere have exactly the same life experiences.
Women within societies have a number of life experiences in common–and some which are common to most women everywhere, regardless of society or caste.
It bothers me that bodily reality is being so lightly dismissed here. Menstruation itself is an experience. The physical experience itself, plus the (culturally dependent to a large extent) ideas, hopes, fears, taboos, and, for many of us, the shame surrounding it–those are experiences. Experiences shared by the vast majority of young females. Girl experiences.
(Trans girls are not “lesser” because they don’t have, haven’t had those experiences.)
Kevin Kirkpatrick and “A Masked Avenger” both did an incredible amount of bullying reading-in to a post that made a small and not particularly dogmatic point. This kind of imposition is one reason I left the blog network I used to belong to. I want to be able to think aloud, make suggestions, turn things around and try to look at them from different angles. I don’t want angry men stomping in to claim I said things I didn’t say and call me names.
Both of you are unwelcome here unless you stop doing that. I don’t want it from colleagues and I don’t want it from you.
Rob,
So you’re conceding the entire argument, then. If women’s paths are individual and diverse, then trans women’s paths are just particular instances of that, and you can ignore any “fuzzy set” bullshit and conclude that trans women are women, full stop.
Ophelia lest appear to agree with you, though, because she specifies that a “woman’s path” is one that begins with spewing given a girl’s name. So if Harriet started out as Harry, her path was not a woman’s path.
AMA @ 79. No. If you believe that you have serious reading comprehension and logic issues.
Autocorrect: “lest” should be “doesn’t.”
Rob, you can’t have it both ways. Either trans women’s paths are not women’s paths, as claimed in the OP, or they are women’s paths.
When I point it that “women’s path” can’t possibly be defined in such a way as to include all AFAB women while exclding trans women, you reply that every woman’s path is unique and that it’s unreasonable to expect such a characterization.
When I point out that if every woman’s path is unique, then a trans woman’s path is just an instance of this, you reply with the vague assertion that something is missing in my reading comprehension.
But that merely brings us full circle. Either there’s such a thing as a “woman’s path,” which is a[n equivalence class of] path[s] common to women, or there isn’t such a thing and women are in fact different and unique. Folks have refused to define this “path,” probably sensing that the definition will be circular: a woman’s path is the path followed by a woman, and damnitall, trans women didn’t follow a woman’s path.
You can rigorously accomplish the desired goal by stating that a woman’s path is any path that begins: step 1–be assigned female at birth. That works, but would be too transparent. Note that “be given a girl’s name” is nearly equivalent, since girls names are given to those assigned female, and boys names are give to those assigned male. It’s not quite, though: I know a woman named Charlie, and a woman named Bill, and believe it or not a woman named John (not American, so actually the equivalent in her language). Ophelia wouldn’t say they aren’t women, despite never having been named a girl’s name.
Yes, a trans woman probably had different experiences from the girl next door to him. And a girl from across town had very different experiences from both. The devil is in pinning down what actual difference that makes.
@A Masked Avenger
Every woman’s path is unique in some ways, but “women” have some things in common. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a classification of people called “women.”
The commonalities that place us in the class “woman” to begin with, are biological.
Historically and presently, all over the world–with very few exceptions–women as a class are held to be inferior to men as a class. This is also something women have in common. It’s why feminism exists.
Training in this inferiority begins at birth. The training itself varies from society to society and between economic classes within societies. And there are individual differences as well. And yet, women are still treated as second class citizens throughout most of the world.
Do you think that the existence of exceptions makes these facts negligible?
What in your opinion makes trans women women-from-birth?
AMA @82
Josh is quite right about you. On this topic at least you only engage in verbal sparing. I am growing to dislike the way you attempt to rephrase people’s positions in a bad light but act as if it were a quote. At best it is a sign of poor thinking (maybe you assume that is what they really mean, which is massive projection), at worst it is intentional and plain dishonest argumentation.
So, I’m not required to agree 100% with the OP for starters. I’m only required to stand by the positions that I have actually taken and those of others that I have said I support. So, what have I said?
“Life is messy and complicated and a whole bunch of messy and non-quantifiable stuff goes into both gender identity and gender perception.”
“There are multiple paths that women take to reach their place in life.”
“I believe that trans* women can speak to aspects of the experience of being a women, but that owing to the paths taken to arrive at that point the majority cannot, any more than I could as a man who was raised as a boy.”
At a micro level every individuals path is unique, if broadly similar to many others. At a macro level the vast majority of our paths begin to coalesce into broader streams that show large scale patterns, but loose individuality. That is why some trans* women can speak to the same experiences as women in the broader sense. It is also why most trans* women cannot, or at least not with the same degree of veracity. Too much of their path is simply too different to the broader stream of most women. I haven’t tried to have this each way and this is the point that I interpret the OP as making. Broadly, I agree with it. There is nothing circular in either the description or the definition. It is a collection of empirical observations of what happens to women at what times in what order and what frequency throughout their lives. It includes biology, family, and society at micro and macro levels.
Your last paragraph you actually, ironically enough, at least half agree with me. It seems to me that you are of the view that there is no substantive space between any trans* women and any other women, whereas I tend to the view that where differences exist they are important. Not to disempower or make either group invisible, but to emphasise the issues and struggles that both groups face and to highlight the strengths and experiences that can be brought to bear to improve the lot of all.
They’re called women because cave people noticed that about half of people ejaculate sperm, and roughly the other half gives birth and lactates. This was a significant breakthrough linguistically, because we’d been impregnating and being impregnated since we were some sort of flatworm, and following various sexual divisions of labor since we were reptiles at least, but suddenly we had a verbalization with which to designate the impregnator and the impregnatee. That meant, among other things, that we could grunt out an invitation to fuck, instead of rubbing our asses against a blueberry bush and then dancing around blue-assed until some female accepted a piece of fruit from us, thus signifying that she was in estrus and found our blue ass the most pleasing one on offer.
Not sure what any of this has to do with feminism, though, which is an innovation people invented, using their powers of visualization and abstraction, for the express purpose of doing away with this sort of biological determinism and ad hoc role assignment based on ones external genitalia. We’ve inherited this concept of gender that predates our species, and we’ve inherited a legacy of differentiating roles[*] by sex from ancestors who weren’t even simian yet, and we decided that we can improve on this.
[*] Note that the roles varied tremendously. We did NOT develop patriarchy as prosimians. But we did develop a distinction of roles. The roles changed over time. We don’t even know how the primate common ancestor lived, because their are six different social structures found among primates. But each species has such a structure, which determines whether a female has many mates, or is one of many mates, or is allowed to switch clans, etc.
Absolutely agreed.
Absolutely agreed.
Damn blockquote monster.
Cressida : sometimes, how other people treat you is what makes you what you are. If all the members of a group treat you as the leader, then that’s what you are. If “woman” is a social category, then how others see you is part of what it means to be a woman. If you are seen as a woman, people will behave towards you the way they behave towards women, because you will belong to that social category no matter how much you personally feel that some other factor is the only one that counts. Feeling deep in your heart that you’re not really a woman is poor protection against misogyny.
Brilliant. I tell A Masked Avenger to stop saying I said things I did not say, and AMA promptly comments to do just that, yet again.
I’ll be screening AMA’s comments now.
I said:
The bold was referring to this in the OP: “In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name…” I’ve double-checked and that was actually said by Les Green and quoted by you. So NOT what you said. Apologies for that.
You commented, “And those things, and many others, are important…” which seems to indicate general agreement with Les Green. So although I apologize for the misattribution, I think my overall point remains. If “having been given a girl’s name” is a vital component of a woman’s path, according to Les Green, then being assigned female at birth is necessary (if not sufficient) to be considered a woman.
And damnitall, “spewing” above should be “being.” I hate autocorect soooo much.
I hear the inventor of autocorrect died yesterday. His funfest is next monkey.
@A Masked Avenger
This is in my opinion deeply confused, and it’s where our quarrel lies. Noticing that “about half of people ejaculate sperm, and roughly the other half gives birth and lactates” is not “ad hoc role assignment.” Those cave people didn’t invent that distinction.
Feminism isn’t needed because women menstruate, lactate, and give birth. Feminism is needed because women, their lives, labor, and sexuality, including their ability to give birth, have tended over the last 5,000 years or so to be controlled by men.
No “concept” can possibly predate our species. What predates our species is sex, not gender.
You didn’t answer my question: What in your opinion makes trans women women-from-birth?
Rob: –
“I believe that trans* women can speak to aspects of the experience of being a women, but that owing to the paths taken to arrive at that point the majority cannot, any more than I could as a man who was raised as a boy.”
AMA-
That is explicitly my current opinion. I haven’t stated it as fact. I believe it to be largely true, which is a different thing altogether. It is also not a piece of deductive logic that follows from the previous statements. Rather the three statements represent what I have said in summary, as opposed to what you claimed I said.
I’m not much interested in an academic theorisation of the path(s) to be honest. There are people better equipped to do that than me. In any case I think such exercises are often doomed to failure because they become disconnected from reality. Theories have two useful purposes. Explaining the observed, or demonstrating a coherent area for further empirical observation of what actually exists.
Yes! Exactly what I think would in fact be useful. Yet you say this as if it’s a bad thing to actually understand more about peoples lives and what actually influences their behaviour, thinking, responses and outcomes.
Yes! Surely you’re not afraid of a bit of work to cast light on a topic clearly near and dear to your heart? While you provide extremely facile examples of the sorts of outcomes such observation could provide, funnily enough in a lifetime of observing people I certainly see men/boys interrupt women/girls more often than the other way around and in fact I believe there have been studies that demonstrate exactly that. Who knows where trans* individuals fit in.
Well actually empirical knowledge can lend itself to both sweeping and precise statements. It depends on the information gathered, the means of gathering that information and how wrong you are prepared for any given statement to be. For example, here are some sweeping statements all based on empirical data: ‘What goes up must come down’, ‘The sky is blue’, ‘Speed kills’, ‘women/brown/trans people are discriminated against’. These are all based on observation of the environment and events. They are all largely true, but are all also wrong under certain conditions or at certain times and for certain individuals.
I think I’m done with arguing with you. It’s jousting. It’s boring. It’s not challenging. At least try to come up with a stated position of your own that forces me to think about whether that is more right than what I currently believe to be so, rather than trying to make me change my mind playing games of gotcha (especially dishonestly).
Loaded question is loaded. The answer depends entirely how one defines “women from birth.” The term is only used by trans-exclusionary types, precisely because they think it excludes trans types. It’s brilliant, because vaginas are usually objectively verifiable (except various intersex conditions), and usually indicate an XX karyotype (again excepting some intersex conditions, like androgen insensitivity syndrome).
But let’s not so quickly make an exception of those intersex conditions: AIS sometimes goes undiagnosed for a woman’s entire life, and she dies never knowing that she has undescended testicles and no uterus. In the developed world they’re usually discovered around puberty when their doctor investigates their amenorrhea–but not always. Their path is precisely that of a girl, at least until puberty, because generally nobody realizes that they have an XY karyotype and no uterus. Is there a meaningful sense in which someone with AIS is not a “woman born woman”?
My position is precisely that your claim, that there’s some non-specific thing common to the life stories of women (which women? All women? Middle class white American women? You conspicuously fail to say) that is not shared by trans women (again which trans women is unspecified. Thai “lady boys” included?) is an overly broad, non-specific claim that does not hold up to scrutiny, which you refuse to scrutinize for that reason.
Of course it sounds plausible. But so do statements like “men are stronger than women,” or, “men are more logical than women, which is why there are more of them in stem fields.” Lots of statements are plausible until scrutinized. Refusing to scrutinize one’s opinions is not the hallmark of rationalism or free thought, though.
Lady Mondegreen, at least some trans people say that even before they were consciously aware they were trans (or what being trans was), they internalized messages about the gender they ended up identifying as. As in, a person who is being raised as a boy hears messages about girls being some way (whether it is ’emotional’ or ‘bad at math’ or whatever) they felt as though the stereotype referred to themselves. Or if they were told that as boys they should dominate over girls there was some internal perception that ‘no, it’s the other way around’. I don’t think all trans people report such an experience, but I have seen this kind of thing in a few places, by different people. Would such a person be a girl/woman from before transition at least in some sense?
@Anat
Yes, I think so.
To be as clear as I can be on a subject about which so little is known and about which I have zero certainties, I’m not arguing that trans women are in no sense women but are “really” men. What I think (now) is that they’re trans women, and that trans is a perfectly fine and legitimate thing to be. I think there are differences worth acknowledging and discussing between trans, intersex, DSD (which classification may include trans people) and sex-typical women, because, and here I apparently diverge from AMA and some trans activists and allies, I don’t think bodies and our experiences as bodies, and the meaning our culture attaches to our bodies and their experiences, is negligible. I don’t think we’re transcendent beings, and I don’t think sex is a meaningless abstraction.*
I wish it went without saying that I also think trans people exist, are fully human, should never be shamed or scorned, and should have the same human rights as the rest of us. I don’t think it’s necessary to avoid gender critques or play semantic games with the meanings of words like “sex,” “female,” and “male,” to support full trans equality.
* It may become one, though. Perhaps in the near future. I just read about a uterine transplant; men (and trans women) may be able to give birth in 10 yrars .
97 posts arguing over something that still seems very straightforward to me. Is it still a contentious post if we reword it very slightly? Women (and men…) that are trans have a different set of common experiences growing up, as compared to non-trans. There is nothing wrong with being one or the other, neither is superior, but the common experiences have diffferences.
That strikes me as being the entire point of the OP and the quoted article; not that there is some experiential criterion one must meet in order to be considered Genuinely Female or other silly shit, but that there are two broadly defined patterns of experience.
Rob, many thanks for your #74.
Holmes #98: after ploughing through this thread, I’m afraid that very few things are straightforward to me. I would still like to know (1) what these common experiences are (2) how they are different in both cases and (3) in what types of contexts these differences make a difference.
At the moment it is (3) that is most nagging to me. What are we after, really? In the OP, Ophelia reminded “the distinction between the ontological and the political meaning of the words”. Now, what is the meaning that we are trying to pinpoint in this discussion?
Are we looking for a universal, ontological content of gender words, which makes their application valid across times and cultures? Are we after a common basis for applying the word “woman” to a contemporary American student, a Mosuo matriarch and a 5th century BC courtesan? Do we want to base a principal, ontological distinction between all of them and the trans women (across cultures and ages) on the basis of some peculiar properties of the relevant ‘paths’? If so, then it won’t do to say – like Rob in #93 – that we are “not much interested in an academic theorisation of the path”. This won’t do simply because of *the choice of our topic*! If we treat seriously our ontological endeavor, a proper formulation of the ‘path’ proposal (theorizing it, if you prefer) looks like a necessary initial step. I really can’t think of any other way to proceed.
On the other hand, perhaps we are having not so much an ontological as a political discussion? (Yeah, I know, the borderline can be fuzzy, but still there is a difference.) Perhaps what we are really after is the meaning of “woman” which would help us to decide whether (e.g.) a trans woman is a suitable candidate for the position of a NUS Women’s Officer? This would vindicate Rob’s impatience. Political decisions are to be made now and here; we cannot wait with them until the ontologists and the scientists are done with their theorizing and checking. This would also mean that some of the MA’s objections lose their bite: after all, the officer in question won’t deal with Mosuo matriarchs, therefore invoking them in such a context is hardly relevant. So, perhaps the OP (and some other people here) argues only that in our society, differences of paths between trans and cis women are significant enough to justify these-and-these political choices and decisions?
I have some problems with (1) and (2) as well, but at the moment it is (3) that’s really blocking me.
Indeed, Holms. Thousands of words to discuss almost nothing but some commenters’ personal hobby horses. Which include deliberately befuddling language in order to gin up something allegedly genuine to be right about.
For Christ’s sake, this isn’t that complicated. It’s offensive at this point to see so much effort being put in to destabilizing the term “woman”. It’s a long game of bullshit gaslighting, and I fell for it for far too long.
Folks of good will here—you don’t have to let yourselves get tied up in created, artificial ontological confusions. There’s a time and place for the kind of deep analysis that interrogates what we mean by the terms we use. That is not what’s going on in this comments section. It’s almost a parody.
You don’t have to be confused about what ‘woman’ means in this context. Full stop. This is not in genuine controversy. This is clear, and plain. You are not obligated to chase your tails, and you’re not ethically suspect for opting out of this bullshit.
Holmes, Josh – wise words. I’ll bow out.
Ariel @99, you’re welcome. Please note that I’m not much interested in the theorising because that is not where my skills and strengths lie (for this topic), but then I’ve seen precious little coherent theorising from AMA either.
AMA, hopefully we find something we can universally agree about at some point. I know nothing about Thai lady Boys beyond the Wiki article, which notes they can be an expression of trans* but also effeminate gay men (so not an example). I have had slightly more to do with Fa’afafine (Samoan), which could loosely be described as part of the trans* spectrum, but hold a very special place in Samoan society where they are regarded as a third gender and happily accepted as such. Food for thought.
No, that would be ridiculous. Say rather that the OP and the quoted article are in direct opposition to a certain type of overzealous trans activist / defender; the sort that would claim “trans women are female-socialized” along with the rest of that bilge.
It does not harm trans people to say that the experience of growing up trans has some similarities, but also some differences, to growing up cis. That there are broad patterns of experience that many trans people will recognise from their respective childhoods, and other experiences that they might not recognise. Discussions of hormone therapy and surgery to remove X anatomy and shape it like Y are examples of experiences most people do not go through, but are quite common to those that are trans. Discussions of behaving correctly to attract a nice husband in the future, and the joys of making him comfortable after he comes home from work, and the ‘so you’ve just had your first period’ discussion are things that I believe most cis women will recognise from childhood.
But then, I’m trying to reason with the person that came up with post #39.
Oops, I realise I mixed Ariel and A Masked Avenger up in my head. I guess they are similar to me in that both strike me as quite disingenuous on this topic.
We have that. They’re all adult human females.
Their “paths” are different, but the OP very clearly speaks of culture- and time- dependent paths. Les Green, quoted in the OP:
Emphasis mine. Bringing women living in tiny matrilineal societies into this discussion is a red herring.
Holms:
You must have misunderstood me. I suggested that two parallel discussions are having place here (yes, one of them carried out mainly by AMA); I also considered it worth stating that these two discussions are *different*. The reason why I considered it worth stating is that in my own case, a mixture of the two conversations produced a bafflement – at a certain point I wasn’t sure any more whether everybody here talks about one and the same subject matter.
I wouldn’t say that anyone in this conversation was disingenous. I prefer to steer clear of such conclusions as long as I can, especially in political discussions. All of this is confusing enough for people to make blunders even without any malicious intent. Obviously, you will have your own picture of the situation.
Lady Mondegreen:
Agreed. It is a red herring in a political discussion (indeed, in my previous comment I called it “hardly relevant”).
I still *do not* believe (even for a tiny moment!) that everything here is “clear and plain”. Nevertheless, following the example of some wise people, I bow out as well. Have a good day, all of you.