content warning, I’m going to be glib and talk about misogyny and transphobia in a joking manner - I don’t mean to harm anyone, and I don’t want to upset anyone.
OK hear me out: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, at least the actual radfems who are often middle-aged and still stuck in second-wave feminism, should love gender-affirming care … doesn’t it do exactly what they would love to do to men? Like, a lot of these women are cultural feminists, they essentialise men and women and view women as superior and men as inherently violent, oppressive, and bad. At least that’s been my experience.
So, for example, if a man wants to suppress testosterone and take estrogen, shouldn’t TERFs’ fear about violence from men and the (admittedly simplistic) narrative that testosterone is responsible for that violence and aggression motivate them to embrace enabling as many men as possible to suppress their testosterone and chemically castrate themselves with estrogen?
Even if they don’t believe that makes the man a woman, shouldn’t they believe it’s an improvement?
It just sounds like a revenge fever-dream concocted by second-wave lesbian separatist: a woman goes about secretly injecting abusive men with estrogen to calm them down … it just sounds like a revenge fantasy they would be into.
The plot of The Gate to Women’s Country literally centers around this fantasy of castrating men to make “good” men.
And if that’s not compelling, I know they love the stories about chopping off dicks - come on, if they really believe trans women are a bunch of men, shouldn’t they support access to gender-affirming care like vaginoplasties that do exactly that?
TERFs should support gender-affirming care even if they don’t believe trans women are women. If men are the enemy they should be the biggest fans of chemically castrating and cutting the dicks off men.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
The identity you “knew” is still there you are just welcome to interpret it however you want to, the same that I am. You can be a woman, I myself am a woman it’s really not that complicated. I’m treated as a woman in every facet of my life, I work as a woman and engage with the world and everyone I know as a woman. I’m assuming you do as well? Again you’ve been raised to perceive gender as something that is assigned to you and that you can never be rid of. I am here telling you that you are the ultimate deciding factor in what your gender is, and what that gender means to you. It’s a liberation entirely from the constrained categories of assigned gender.
If you’re not actually going to read what I’m saying, then why are you here asking questions? Are you uninterested in an answer? If so, what is the point of you commenting here at all?
Ok, honestly that is how i lived my life. Im a woman because of chromosomes and it means nothing day to day. I feel like your ‘treated as a woman’ is not the same as my treated ‘like a person’. Woman means something to you but to me it’s incidental. I’ve always been here being a woman with no real meaning attached to that. Now there are people attaching meaning and that makes me uncomfortable because i can’t relate to their meaning. Whether it’s makeup and fashion or babies and boob jobs or whatever. I’m a person first and a mani pedi is a luteral nightmare. Now we have womens stuff on lemmy and it includes makeup and fashion? Am i not a woman??,???, i’m not a man so what the fuck am i??? I feel like the stereotype is enforced more than ever and i hate it.
By women’s stuff I assume you mean the community, and I would agree that it does fall at times into what I would consider pointlessly gendered.
I am a radical feminist and a gender liberationist. I very much believe that the assignment of gender at birth is one of the ways that patriarchy is maintained over women. The insistence that gender is a biological trait rather than a social class allows them to attach other things to womanhood and resist attempts to remove them. It’s easier to insist that all women must be subservient to men and stay at home to raise children if womanhood itself is something inherent and biologically ordained. Biological gender essentialism actually works against women’s liberation in this way.
I’ll admit that it’s not intuitive, but gender just really isn’t something that can be empirically determined. Like in broader social contexts, how you are gendered by other people is entirely up to their perception of you. That’s why the concepts of passing (being perceived and treated as a cisgender woman) and of clocking (being perceived and treated as a transgender woman) exist. Now I personally hate that and wish that gender itself was not ever assumed about other people. It would functionally make patriarchy impossible if no one was ever presumed to be a man or a woman, but instead we allowed other people to identify themselves.
I understand also that for you makeup and fashion and things we traditionally assign to femininity are constraining. For me, they are liberating as I always desired these things growing up and was denied them. The same with my body, with the shape and physiology of my body. But that doesn’t make my gender the one by which everyone else is judged. That’s why I’ve said that what womanhood means is up to you. It’s your choice. And if the identity itself of woman feels so repulsive on you that it causes you distress or discomfort you are not obligated to identify with it. Womanhood is what women are, and women are masculine and feminine and everything in between and beyond those terms. What is feminine and what is masculine is subjective too. To some women being strong and large is itself an expression of their femininity, to others it isn’t. Gender liberation isn’t about dictating who is right in this situation, it is rather about allowing everyone to decide who and what they are and refute constant comparison to others of the same gender.
I do also have to acknowledge that as much as these ideals are ones I firmly believe in, the world doesn’t operate cleanly along these principles. While I’m here discussing real gender liberation gender is still being assigned all over the place. And what gender means is still being dictated by others. In that way trans women and cis women face social pressure to conform to standards of womanhood dictated by others. I don’t think we should blame any women who do conform to those standards, but rather we should call out the people putting the standards in place to begin with. The people doing that are not transgender people, but those interwoven with systems of patriarchy and male dominance in society.
How do you reconcile all that with research showing trans women have female brains? And where does that come from? Clearly not the chromosomes. I think you get me in the ‘it’s all bollocks’ way. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all relative, and i absolutely define my own womaness (as meaningless), as always, i am not anti trans.
I don’t tend to put a lot of value in neurological studies like that. We don’t understand at all how neurology impacts who we are as people, in terms of identities and personality traits and things like that. I have always been resistant to attempts to categorize “male and female brains” and then extrapolate meaningful information about gendered behavior from that. Like I do definitely believe neurosexism is a thing.
I’ve actually always felt a resistance to attempts to find a biological origin for queer people. I don’t believe that sexuality and gender identity are derived from biology and believe that the only thing to be gained from that kind of research is new methods for gatekeeping who is and isn’t actually gay or trans. I understand the appeal in trying to fit trans people into biological gender essentialism, but I do not see it as anything other than an attempt to reconcile the problems with biological gender essentialism instead of recognizing that gender is not a biological trait.
The differences in brain structure for trans women I mostly attribute to hormone usage. Hormones do change the structures of our bodies, but there’s no evidence that those changes to the brain influence who we are and what we identify as. I am inherently skeptical of such results, and associated theories like “trans women identify as women due to increased estrogen exposure/decreased testosterone exposure in the womb”. I purely believe that gender is a product of our personalities and our experiences in early childhood. There’s also evidence going back to the beginning of recorded history of trans and gender variant people. In all that time gender has existed in the form of differing social classes, and gender variance in those eras has been related to the way gender was at that time perceived.
I do recall being taught that left handed and right handed people had bigger brain differences than men and women. But if gender is so unimportant, as it is to me, then why trans? This is not an anti trans question! It is an ‘i don’t get it’ question. As always, i fully support trans peoples rights, especially to healthcare.
I think I get what you’re asking a bit. “If gender is entirely up to interpretation, why does it have to exist at all?” You can let me know if I’m misunderstanding you. My response to that is more or less that we don’t live in a world without gender. Gender identity is something that is formed in early childhood, and most people would be very resistant to attempts by others to get them to abandon gender entirely. It’s just not that simple unfortunately. I think gender liberation, as in like allowing everyone to self-determine their gender, is functionally doing the same thing without asking people to discard it entirely. Being a woman has deep meaning to me, powerful feelings about who I am and who I was growing up. Being a woman is for me an act of self affirmation and resistance of assigned gender.
My partner for example does identify as agender. They just dislike most gendered labels being applied to them and feel most comfortable letting it go entirely. That is absolutely valid too. Theres no right or wrong way to perform gender, nor is it wrong to feel like gender itself is incompatible with our own self perception. Gender liberation is just denying attempts to assign gender and allowing everyone identify their own gender.
You understand me well, the problem is that i identify as a woman and i stubbornly refuse the non binary/agender whatever. Im a woman, i just dont think it means much so i very much resent being told that it means something and trans certainly seems like it’s meaningful. Anyway, you get me :)
And yeah I think it’s fine for your own identity to be entirely separated from what is socially constructed as conventionally feminine. Butch women and femme women and androgynous women are all still women. For all those people their own definition of womanhood is different.
As for non-binary people, this community is for them too and I’ll ask that you respect their identities too. Here is an article that does a good job explaining the basics of non-binary identity. I’d ask you to keep an open mind and consider that your perspective on this might not be entirely informed. Non-binary/third gender people aren’t a new phenomenon by any means. The wikipedia page for third-gender has a history section that talks a lot about non-binary gendered people throughout history (it goes back to the beginning of recorded history). We’ve often been sold a lie that people and cultures have always had the binary male/female dichotomy. This is just simply not true and is a form of western erasure of other cultures.