‘Our Billy wants to change too.” She also was told: “Billy is not a real trans-sexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.” ‘ Dr. Hannibal Lecter

A medical opinion – to aid my case.

Sepian

Shorter version; sex and gender aren’t the same thing. One is a psycho-social construct, the other is an empirical reality. You find out what sex something is by looking, and what gender someone is by guessing, more or less. Or if you’re polite, you ask them what they think it is.

Trans- $term is a useage I understand. Using the short form, a prefix with no root word, is equally understandable but in one of these threads it makes the debate staggeringly unclear. It is impossible to tell if various contributors above are even aware that trans (gendered) is fundamentally different from trans (sexual) in the context they’re discussing.

If you look at a body and it displays the biological characteristics of a sex, that’s what the body is. If the body displays a penis and so on, and all primary and secondary sexual characteristics are currently male, you have a male body. If it is dressed in a pleated, plaid skirt, then all you know empirically is that you have a male body in a plaid skirt. They might be a post-op FTM transexual, they might be transgendered or a transvestite, or they might be cis-gendered and Scottish; you absolutely can’t tell.

It seems from over here that the confusion being constantly whipped up in this area is deliberate political obfuscation, and there is only one class of people who benefit; those who think neither gender nor sex should be a choice. I think both should be. Does that make me a liberal?

This might be the heart of the disagreement then. People refuse to believe people or things can change category. Heck I bet it would surprise children that milk can become butter which can become cheese, because they all taste so very differently from each other.

The categories of male and female are just as socially constructed as the gender roles that are attached to the sex categories. That we see certain biological structures as inherently female (ie breasts) is a social construction. You can see certain body structures as estrogen-based, which would be more accurate (men have estrogen too, just like women have testosterone) and “male” internal organs as being MIH-dependant, not the province of males.

This construction of sex as inherently one and not the other is what makes guys who grow breasts at puberty be referred to as having a problem (called gynecomastia), a thing you wouldn’t even say about a girl growing breasts. Same structures, same milk ducts, same shape, same sensitivity. What’s the difference? A guy with “gynecomastia” could easily lactate.

Someone defending the category ‘woman’ from people perceived as outsiders is not only doing boundary policing, they are defining the category to include them, but not others. Much like white women have done to black women.

About the commonality of experience: It varies so widely that a claim to a single experience that would be shared across every single instance of a group said to be 51% of the population would be impossible.

Heck I could reduce things. I live in Quebec province, in Canada (7 million people). I bet there isn’t much universalized experience here either (some women are infertile, some give birth some don’t, some are adopted, some are born in rich families, some poor, some white, some black, some latina, some asian, some native-american). Their experience growing up is all very different. But no one would want to say any of them isn’t as woman.

Claiming that trans women aren’t women is drawing an arbitrary line over someone’s body, for many it is to feel better about themselves.

Oppression reproduces itself because kyriarchy wants it to. The rich oppress the middle-class, the middle-class oppress the poor, the white oppress the people of color, the straight oppress the gay/lesbian/bisexual, the cis oppress the trans, the non-intersex oppress the intersex.

You know that many bullies simply reproduce a pattern of abuse used on them on those weaker than them right? It works the same everywhere else. Some more privileged person will bully someone considered “lesser” than them so they can get some kind of relief from being oppressed. The guy with glasses will bully the disabled kid, because he can actually do it without much risk, and because to him it might increase his hierarchy ranking.

In other words, people aren’t pushing above towards excellence, but pushing people below towards mediocrity, hoping that it makes them closer to #1. And women are not safe from doing this. Actually no one is, there is always someone considered lesser, and always someone considered better.

I thought that to be a feminist was to reduce or eliminate the occurrence of hierarchies and its power dynamics. That to be feminist was about the elimination of the pain of being “the guy with glasses” or “the disabled guy” in my examples above.

What Bindel does is simply the same kyriarchy told her to do: Punish people who think they are her equal when she can find any reason to deny that it is so, so she can feel better about herself and perpetuate oppression.

Inventing categories such as born-and-raised-as-a-girl, which only have commonality in how someone’s body is perceived (not how their body actually is, because not everything is visible – nor is it how someone is socially perceived, because that varies widely) is simply another Tool of the Master, which can’t dismantle hir house.

Go back and read about the reasons why lesbians were excluded from women and feminism. Go back and read about the reasons women of color (especially black women) were excluded from women and feminism. Go back and read about the reasons disabled women were excluded from women and feminism.

Tell me “it’s not the same” just so I can point to those arguments above, about WoC, disabled women and lesbian women also saying “it’s not the same”.

It is undeniably true that transgendered women and cisgendered women have different experiences in life. So do white women and women of colour. So do women from economically disadvantaged situations and women from economically advantaged situations. You’ll get no argument from me there.

But I was correct in having interpreted your “speaking as a woman” to mean not “a woman” as in the class to which cisgendered women and transgendered women both belong, but specifically the class to which only cisgendered women belong, because if you meant to include transgendered women, you’d have said so explicitly? I would hope it would be obvious to any feminist why this would be troublesome, just as it would be troublesome if by “speaking as a woman” you had specifically meant “a white woman” or “a heterosexual woman” or “an able-bodied woman”, if those happened to be the statistical norms in your area.

Also, I’m afraid you’ve lost me on the “weighting the influence of the minority view” bit. I honestly have no idea what that entire paragraph was supposed to mean, as it appears to rest upon context or basic assumptions that I am not privy to. Could you state them explicitly for me?

I think to some extent, I would refer you back to your own argument. To ask “why would they not?” betrays exactly the kind of dismissal of others’ experience to which I am objecting.

It’s equally possible that I may have more in common with a heterosexual man than with a woman from Birmingham, but that doesn’t mean that important commonalities between women don’t exist.

As for the attempts to find defining features for gender, I would refer you to the literature on categorisation. The idea that categorisation is based upon defining features for natural categories went out with ark (or should I say Wittgenstein), and even when people were looking for them, they could only explain the data by means of distinguishing between defining and characteristic features. In other words, the idea that a woman is still a woman without breasts, or without a womb, or without performing prototypical femininity is not problematic to the notion of womanhood in the least.

Philosophically speaking, people do tend to be psychological essentialists about gender – ie they behave as if male and female are essentialist categories – as they do for all natural kind categories. In 1989 for eg, Lance Rips did a series of studies which showed that even in a case where a creature’s external features had been radically altered, people were still more likely to insist on identifying it as it originally had been, than as either its new appearance or behaviour suggested.

Not sure where this leaves us, but still. I think you and I will have to agree to differ.

Linguistically (according to Gricean principles) where one is referring to the normative exemplar (in this case, speaking about women, the non-transgendered are the statistical norm), typically one doesn’t need to use a modifier adjective to specify that fact. Hence I make no apology for using the unqualified “woman” to refer to the genetically normative case (to which I belong).

The only case where your suggested interpretations of what I said would be appropriate would be if you weighted the influence of the minority view. Quite considerably. Which would be tantamount to affording a greater privilege to someone who was born male than to someone who wasn’t. As an egalitarian, I’m not really very keen on that kind of thing.

Not all transsexual people buy into biological determinism. At the most base level, all it takes to be transsexual is your brain telling you that your body is wrong and should not be as it is. Issues of social gender role and the like are transgender issues, not necessarily transsexual issues.

It just so happens that most people who are transsexual are also transgendered, and find it easiest to transition their social gender role to match what’s expected as they modify their bodies to be more in-line with what the brain expects. Likewise, it is much more convenient to be transsexual, too, if you are already transgendered. This is actually imposed upon us.

For example, good luck convincing a doctor to perform vaginoplasty or phalloplasty on you without first committing to a social transition. Social gender transition is a requirement for surgical sex reassignment in almost all nations. Likewise, surgical sex reassignment is also a common (though thankfully not universal) requirement in most nations for legal social gender transition. If you’d like your documentation to not out you as a disgusting, inhuman freak, in many places, you’ll need to have surgery performed first. This amounts to mandatory sterilization, if you think about it, which should be a repugnant concept for a feminist of any type.

Social gender strictures oppress us all: male, female, man, woman, cis, trans, straight, gay, queer of any sort.

#4:

When (an assumed) cisgendered person speaks about the transgender experience, prefacing it with “speaking as a woman”, that person has already gotten off to the wrong foot. It’s very difficult for me to not read a variety of things into this:

- Does the speaker mean to imply that trans women are not women, too?
- Does the speaker mean to imply that trans people all self-identify as women?

Be careful with both of these. There are so many perils with either implication, and just as you ask people not to be dismissive of your experience, I’d ask you not be dismissive of theirs, should either of these implications actually be intentional.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by libcon: :: Julie Bindel does transphobia again http://bit.ly/1XG1qF...

Ruddy cheek. She’s the one shagging birds. Whose privilege is that supposed to be, eh? Men’s, that’s whose.

When I was on Cambridge City Council, I had the pleasure of working with Cllr Jenny Bailey, who became the UK’s first transgendered mayor. Here are some of the things she said in interviews on being appointed to that office:

“For transgender people, all we want is to disappear and become normal, so I don’t want to let it define me.”

“When you go through transgender experience and come through the other side, you are just happy to get on with normal life, normal problems.”

“I’m proud that I managed to get through something which was quite difficult and managed to come out of it a better person… So many more things define me than being transgender — a medical condition I had 15 years ago and which I have now recovered from.”

Of course, not all transgendered people will give exactly the same account of their feelings as Jenny – she was only speaking for herself. But that relief upon achieving a gender that seems to fit ones inner feelings, and that desire simply to be accepted as a normal person and go on with ones individual life – these feelings are very common, entirely reasonable, and harm no one.

What, really, is the big problem with just letting Jenny and women like her get on with their lives? Why keep poking and prodding at them? Don’t people have anything better to do?

I’ll gloss over your erasing of my experience as a Jewish woman, because I think we don’t fundamentally disagree on the bigger point.

I accept and in fact welcome the point of view that there is no such thing as authentic men and women. I just don’t understand where one locates the focus of becoming a “woman” from a starting point of not being a “woman” if there is no such thing as “woman” to begin with (which I think there isn’t, or at least philosophically there isn’t – in practical terms cis women are socialised so strongly as to make the the fiction very much a working reality). If there is no authentic end point, I don’t understand the journey. I don’t object to people making the journey, I just don’t get where they’re going.

And in that sense I do apply the same yardstick to trans- and cis-gendered people. I don’t “tut”, thanks for that mental image, but I do question. I question the behaviours of men I see and try to separate authentic actions from aggressively socialised masculinity, and I question my own and other cis-women’s behaviour constantly. Obviously the only canvas to which I can make alterations is my own, and I would not seek to change that, but for what it’s worth I doubt and double doubt almost every action and reaction I have in my everyday life, from what I wear to whether or not I cook to whether I start sentences with “sorry” to trying to mine the exact motivations behind every instance of feminist rage. I do not take my gender for granted at all, and I don’t take masculinity for granted either, in the sense that I don’t simply rebel against the oppressions of femininity by being as masculine as I can be. I try and look for an authentic representation of self in amongst and outside accepted gender norms, and I struggle daily to incorporate that into a so called “normal” life, i.e. one that involves socialising with people who don’t share or identify with my journey and working with them in a pretty conventional corporate environment.

Sorry for rabbiting on about myself; I don’t mean to derail to conversation into “hark at the poor little privileged girl”. I just wanted to show as much as I can that I’m not applying a double standard here, but extending a question beyond just myself: if I am not an authentic woman, what makes you an authentic woman? If there is no such thing as an authentic woman, what is the womanhood you identify with based on? I don’t seek to exclude you from a club that I don’t think I belong to. I just want to understand why, if we agree that it doesn’t exist, you say that you do belong to it.

They do, otherwise they wouldn’t attempt to change their biology. If they believed that gender is a social construct they’d just declare themselves female and campaign to have themselves accepted as such without all those inconveniant medical procedures.

Transexualism is declaring you are what your body makes you, even if that body has been surgically altered.

I recognise this is a very tricky subject, but I’m not sure opting out of an explanation will fly.

One reason some feminists are antagonistic towards M2F transsexuals is because the M2F transsexual is making a claim of some sort about what it is to be a woman. Women are often being told what it is to be a woman (motherly/helpless/bitchy/caring etc.). Part of the feminist’s job has been to redefine what it is to be a woman from a woman’s point of view. And they have and continue to struggle to get their experiences recognised and seen as legitimate in the public sphere (look at the fuss over the miscarriage tweet).

Now it’s hardly as though transsexuals get their voice heard everywhere either, perhaps it is even more difficult for the trans community than women. But it’s not really about who has it worse. The thing is, it’s trans people that want feminists (among others) to accept them, so they’ve got to do some work (just as feminists had and have to do work to get their voices heard and taken seriously). It’s not particularly fair, but you can see why feminists are not just going to roll over on this one.

I think that asking for an explanation of this is difficult – it betrays some kind of cissexual privilege (and I hate replying to people by saying ‘oh that’s a position based on privilege because it can seem like a cop out but I think it’s true)

In terms of why trans women are the same as biological women, why would they not be? I think that there probably isn’t a common experience of “biological” womanhood and my “biological” womanhood the same as yours. I don’t think asking the question of what the differences or similarities are is necessarily transphobic, but denying someone the right to be a woman based on the fact they don’t conform to what I feel is an abstract conception of “biological womanhood” (where does it start… is a biological woman someone with a uterus, what about people who have Klinefelter’s syndrome etc) as Bindel does is transphobic and I find it very offensive.

Sam and others- I understand what you’re saying about gender as a social construct and it’s an excellent point but the problem is that I don’t think theres a commonality of female experience – I think the concept of a woman is basically an “imagined community.” I agree with SomebodyElse’s comment above on this. I might have more in common in terms of my outlook and attitude to my femininity with a M2F person with a similar upbringing to myself than with a woman from Birmingham. But you and several of the other commentators have given me something to think about.

And transexuals impact your life how exactly? I’d guess barely at all.

To insist on identifying M2F transexuals as being equivalent to biological females

Which I don’t. I’m not particularly interested in who counts as a real woman – I thought my post made that pretty clear. But I will certainly stand up for people’s rights to behave as they like,in the face of brigades of terribly offended ideologues bossing everyone about.

“you’re failing to make the important last step: there are no authentic men and women, none.”

Except that those who oppose biological essentialism about gender don’t suggest that there’s no such thing as gender. They argue with essentialists about the cause of gender. If society makes you a woman by treating you in a given way, then you are not a woman if you have not been treated in that way, according to the constructivist. Now obviously if someone has lived as a woman for a considerable period of their life such that most of their experiences are of society treating them as a woman, then the constructivist probably has to concede that this person is indeed a woman. But immediattely post-op, say, the constructivist will deny that the person can legitimately call themselves a woman.

“Nobody has ever explained why my history makes me inauthentic when compared to that of a non-trans woman”

If you accept that cis people cannot really know what it is like to not identify with the body you live in, then you must acknowledge that you do not know what it is like to live your life as cis people do. It cuts both ways that. And although trans people will vary in the details of their experiences, there’s got to be some sense in which you share something that cis people don’t, right? If you grant this, you have to extend the same to cis women/men.

It’s always confused me why transsexuals don’t adopt biological essentialism. Perhaps unintuitively, it seems like a better strategy. So you say something like: For whatever reason, a bit of my brain is more female than male, despite the fact the rest of my body is male. If I get all the medical proceedures done, I will have the complete (or close enough) biology of a female. Thus I will be a woman.

You do know that’s a ridiculous parody and a terrible example? Despite how transphobic people stereotype transsexual men and women, many of them simply don’t adhere to gender norms of behavior. And even if they do, so what? Plenty of men and women do exactly the same. There’s no way of judging trans people with one measure and judging non-trans people with another without it being prejudice. If you’re going to tut at me for wearing a skirt and makeup, please make sure you do the same to all my friends.

Of course, you’re only talking about those who “appropriate” the symbols of maleness and femaleness, without being “authentically” men or women. For you, and seemingly for many transphobes like Bindel, authenticity is about being raised and socialized as a man or woman. That’s a great step away from the biology-based essentialist arguments trans people have had to put up with for years, but you’re failing to make the important last step: there are no authentic men and women, none.

We all learn how to be gendered at one point or another, and even though you learnt as a child, you still carry out that act anew every day – just as I do. What makes yours more “authentic” than mine? Maybe more practiced, sure, you make it look “natural”; but more authentic? Nobody has ever explained why my history makes me inauthentic when compared to that of a non-trans woman, yet no woman’s history can make her inauthentic when compared to that of any other woman. I don’t understand the basis I’m being judged on, and why I’m not a member of your club. There’s a magic line, I guess, and as long as you’re on one side of it, you’re authentic, no matter what your experiences are, and likewise inauthentic if you’re on the other side. No arguments.

What would you call that?