Unwelcoming to men
The Atlantic has an extraordinarily ridiculous piece about trans men who have babies and breast feed them, and (this is the ridiculous part) the resulting need to stop talking about pregnancy and breast feeding as something that women do.
The writer is someone called Britni De La Cretaz, who calls herself Britni De La Cretaz, Writer on Facebook.
[Trevor] MacDonald began blogging about chestfeeding from his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and soon discovered a whole community of transmasculine people around the world in the same boat, looking for guidance. For trans men and transmasculine folks, putting a baby to their chest to suckle can lead to complicated feelings about their gender. Many lactation support services are available for “nursing mothers,” which sounds unwelcoming to men and non-binary individuals.
But lactation support services are for nursing mothers. It strikes me as very “unwelcoming” to women for trans men to object to the word “mothers.” Lactation support services are not for men, because men don’t lactate. Some trans men do, but that’s not a good reason to delete women from the discourse about nursing.
So what can be done? Kribbe feels that one of the most important points of this research is urging care providers to be especially attentive to the terms they use. Part of that, she says, starts with the kind of education that obstetricians, midwives, and lactation counselors receive, but another part involves providers being willing to educate themselves about terminology that is gender neutral, as opposed to the gendered-female language that currently dominates lactation support. Even acknowledging that the need for change exists in the first place is an important step, the researchers contend.
There. That. Don’t do that. Don’t agitate to remove women from discussions of pregnancy and childbirth and nursing – and abortion rights and contraception. That’s the All Lives Matter version of trans activism, and it stinks.
In response to whether or not there were any questions about providing lactation support to transmasculine or non-binary individuals on the exam to become an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, Sara Blair Lake, the executive director of the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners, offered a content outline, which shows that the gendered language “maternal” and “mother” is still common, as opposed to the neutral terminology like “parent.” Meanwhile, Melissa Cole, an Oregon-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, said in an email that, to her knowledge, there aren’t educational requirements for IBCLCs about how to support transmasculine folks who want to nurse their babies, and that she has received no such training. Cole, who has not yet provided lactation support to a trans person in her practice, wishes she could receive more formal education around inclusive language so she can provide better care.
Maybe it’s just not an issue. Ever think of that? Maybe trans men should just be able to grasp that the vast majority of people affected by pregnancy are women, and that women are not the dominant sex around here, and that it’s not cool to try to get them removed even from areas that affect them the most profoundly. Maybe they should be appalled at themselves, wanting to shove women out of the way.
The comments are uniformly scathing.
Basically, all lives matter except women and people of color. There, now things are good. We’re focused solely on the white male person, which is how it should be, since they are the only persons that are really persons.
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world for everyone if women would just become invisible, except of course when they’re serving dinner and offering sex? Wonderful for everyone but women, of course.
I always wonder what it says about gender identity if trans men have babies (and breastfeed). After all, it’s debatable what living as a man or a woman really consists of or, indeed, what a gender identity feels like. However, pregnancy and childbirth are distinctly female so a person who has a baby cannot be said be living as a man during that time.
I’m not suggesting that trans men should not have babies. Everyone is entitled to make their own decisions about that. However, I don’t think it fair to expect everyone else to constantly affirm one’s masculinity during the process to the extent that all references to femininity are erased from reproductive service. Sure, educate health care providers that trans men get pregnant and need access to contraception, abortion and maternity services. However, there is no need to centre everything on these special cases.
Seems like it’d be easier (for trans men) to define ‘mother’ as ‘egg-donor’ and ‘father’ as ‘sperm-donor’. So a trans man who has a child is still a (male) mother, and he has every right to claim that title as his own.
Or the trans man could just be a trans male mother. Whatever. But the erasing women project is just not on.
@^ (Ophelia @4)
Indeed. As a father, I tend to have more ‘maternal’ feelings than ‘paternal’ ones, using words as conventionnaly used in common language (I’m not sure I can define it properly since I don’t really care this specific and arbitrary delineation enmudded by cultural gender roles –that I tend to criticise as a feminist). My ‘fathering path’ * is a mix (in)dependent of social conventions (or more specifically, a stronger tendency to maternal and protective behaviour super(im)posed by paternal and autoritarian role strongly enrooted in social peer-pressure and cultural bias). We have a name for fathers like me in French: “papa poule” (litteral translation: hen father, translation I just discovered: doting father).
I’m harsher in my stereotypic paternal behaviour because of social circumstances, and it’s also what I really hate most in my parenting duty. Any time. I’m doing a much better job as a mother. (Or I hope so, but practical parenting is difficult).
And parenting** gender roles suck.
* Given the French expression, I was really tempted to write down ‘feathering path’.
** Given the French expression, I was really tempted to write down ‘parroting gender roles’.
Careful there, lest parotting gender does rule. Oh, too late?
What I don’t get is why transgender people are so vehemently against the possibility of anyone ever identifying their gender wrongly, at any time or in any way or for any reason. Is it really that big a deal? I’m (obviously) not talking about people who are being cruel or violent, but just the situations like these where “he” or “she” just gets used as a default because it describes virtually 100% of the affected people.
Sure, it’s not super great when people assume the wrong thing about you. I’ve even been “misgendered” a great many times in my life. It’s annoying, it can even be embarrassing. You either correct them or you ignore it, and you move on. Again, I’m well aware of the terrible things that can and do happen to transgender people who are targeted by violent, hateful people, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I don’t understand is how an error that somebody makes in identifying your gender, something I think everybody has experienced at one point or another, is so egregious in and of itself. I don’t understand why anything reminding a trans person that they are transgender is somehow discrimination.
I have to think this ties in with the bizarre concept of cis-woman privilege (which still baffles me). Do they think that we enjoy being reminded of our gender and the related roles and expectations all the time? Do they think it’s any more comfortable for us when we engage in activities that have been coded “male” and see all those assumptions woven throughout them? It doesn’t get easier. Gender roles just plain suck, whether you’re dealing with the ones you were automatically assigned or not.
Why the fuck would this even need training? You use words like mother, breastfeeding (‘chestfeeding’ oh my god), maternal and such because that works more than 99% of the time, and makes the mother feel like she is being addressed somewhat more directly than if neutral terms were being used. Then, on the rare occasion a man surprises you by saying “actually, I’m a man that was born with female anatomy and I am looking for lactation support,” say “oh I’m sorry I didn’t realise that” and proceed to treat that man as the patient, with the same level of attention and such as if he were a woman.
And to echo #3 and #4, what’s wrong with simply saying men can be mothers (and vice versa)? Terminology problem solved.
#5
The idea that women (and therefore NOT men) are considered to be the nurturer is one of those areas where the male population would actually benefit from this whole feminism ‘gender roles are bad’ thing.
To ZugTheMegasaurus (@7): I don’t fully understand all that is behind this. However I can offer the following:
– Some cisgender people also take misgendering strongly (though not as strongly as I have seen some transgender people taking it).
– Part of the problem is that (at least some) transgender people do not like to be reminded of their pre-transition days. At all. They describe the experience as traumatizing.
– Some transgender people perceive being accidentally misgendered as evidence they have failed at presenting as their gender.
– Some transgender people don’t trust anyone to be truly making an honest mistake about their gender. They may have a reason to be at least somewhat suspicious about at least some people.
Adding to my previous response: I wonder how the reaction changes as time from transition passes.
“…complicated feelings about their gender”
Males can breastfeed, but they sure as hell can’t build a baby in their wombs and push it out into the world. So if someone is going to freak out over being perceived as female, maybe that should have been the stumbling block.
My husband and I have both been misgendered frequently, even though he often has 5 o’clock shadow when it happens, and I have a cup size between E and F. I’ve come to the conclusion that people re very poor observers of other people.
Couple of thoughts:
Trans women who haven’t had bottom surgery still talk about their penes. I’ve read, “It’s my penis and I’m a girl, so it’s a girl penis.” And, charmingly, “Suck my girldick.”
But apparently trans men, even those who bind (which is to say, they haven’t had top surgery,) don’t have breasts. They have chests. They “chestfeed.”
This, despite the fact that men, male people, actually do have breasts.
If I were an Evil TERF, I would suspect there’s some misogyny going on here. Penises are cool, but breasts are icky girl stuff.
Second thing:
Just like that? Where were the “Breast is Best” police? I hear women get pressured to keep on breastfeeding, however they feel about it, however it complicates their working lives; through extreme pain and even mastitis.
And even if they do not produce enough milk to keep the baby alive! I know. I went through that. My son was losing weight very rapidly because I could not produce enough, but saying that only led to the snickering about not being enough woman. This wasn’t reference to the size of my chest, which was more than adequate, but to my “ability” to be a complete woman.
This is why ‘girly’ is an insult to men, and ‘manly’ an insult to women. In both cases, for not matching gender expectations: a man is a girl if he doesn’t like violent sports even on tv, a woman is a man if she keeps her hair short and wears flannel. Although, a woman is also ‘one of the boys’ if she is willing to get her hands dirty in an engine or something, and scoffs appropriately at other women.
Funny how being misgendered is usually an insult*, yet being called male can sometimes be a compliment to a woman, while I don’t think I have ever seen femaleness used as a compliment for a man.
*To say nothing of the bullshit trans people go through, what with douchebags insisting on using their old name / pronouns.
Ya know? women have been a bit over half of the human population since before there were humans. We have so damn’ much cultural baggage accumulated, in so many different social packages, that its only in the last couple of centuries that we’ve even begun to deal with what gender ACTUALLY means for real people.
The option of gender reassignment has only been around for a bit over 50 years. Why has this option endowed the very small number of people who need to transition an absolute right to censor and punish the other 99% of the population?
The actual conditions and experiences of transfolks are still novel, unprecedented. Real respect for trans people does not mean obsequious grovelling at the feet of a tiny sub-set who demand an essentialist notion of gender that everyone else on earth has been harmed by.
A man once said to me in a conversation, “You’re a better man than me.” It was intended as a compliment but it’s a very backhanded one.
John:
Well, of course it hasn’t.
And the vast majority of trans people I know wouldn’t dream of appropriating and erasing – but then, who is going to go to the trouble to produce a piece of journalism that consists of trans people saying “I’ve no problem with whatever pronouns you wish to use; and I’m perfectly happy both to be considered a member of my target sex for social reasons, but a member of my birth sex for biological and medical reasons.”
Boooooring
How would they get the page hits?
So we get a fraction of a fraction being used to misrepresent the whole, and thus the narrative around trans people is swerving off into Nonsense Land.
Since the vast majority of people don’t give the issue a second thought, the vocal extremists and the people willing to give them publicity are carrying the day.