The word "male" has a myriad of meanings and connotations. For most purposes it maps well onto "born male". Manifestly applying the word to someone born with a vagina puts the definition under strain for many people. If it didn't we wouldn't be talking and there wouldn't be this whole thing about wanting trans people to be included.
True enough.
However, there's a third category and a serious problem. Maybe more as well, but I'll talk about this third category, partially because I'm in it. Maybe someone else will snot on me and tell me I'm missing the point, thus saying more about their mindset than mine.
There is something about the transgender talk that is quite in common with the cisgender talk. That is, that male is male, and female is female, and never the twain shall meet.
It's implicit in the blithe slide from "gender dysphoric" to "transgender" to "transitioning is the cure." It's implicit in the insistence that "man" means this and not that, which may be along a different axis from usual but still is insistence that it means something definite and real. (Of course, then the hammering of people for using it the "wrong" way and claiming that it's about facts rather than convention.)
Just because someone is unhappy with their birth gender doesn't mean they're going to be happy with the other, "reassigned" gender either.
OK, some people will, and we can call them transgendered. I hope they find happiness, but
not at the expense of other people's will for happiness.
Look at the thread title. "Leelah Alcorn, transgender teen, committed suicide." Well, I don't know that she was transgender. I can figure out that she probably wasn't cisgender (ugly word, that, but it will have to do). But still, I don't know. I won't get a chance to meet her or see what she's like at 30, or whether she wants to be called "he" or "she." Not that I'd care very much, which is kind of the point.
Without going too far into the definition of "gender" (or needing to), I can say that there are an awful lot of people who aren't really happy either with being male or "masculine" or being female or "feminine." Such people are getting tossed under the bus by the very context of the discussion.
The thing is that there used to be at least a little cultural leeway, from Jung's idea of the anima inside every man and the animus inside every woman, through the Kinseys, through concepts like "tomboy," through the androgyny of the 1970s and 1980s. Patti Smith said something that sticks with me, "Being any gender at all is a total drag." OK, so not everybody is going to be David Bowie, but still, there was some cultural lassitude for a lot of people.
It seems pretty much gone in this gender essential, pick-a-side, brave new world. Of course, a pure cisgender world would also suck, but that doesn't mean the the one alternative that seems to be in vogue doesn't also suck.
I don't know if gender dysphoria is genetic. I am strongly convinced that differential treatment of boys and girls starts at the birth of the targeted, and that it is remarkably universal and independent of stated attitudes, as the old Conyers and Conyers study showed pretty clearly. So maybe that's genetic.
But surely gender dysphoria starts pretty early. (Hell, even the term "gender dysphoria" is just assumed to be "cisgender dysphoria," when if it were taken seriously it might be better.) It's also pretty bad.
I'd really like to have continued the changes in culture to cut people some more slack, to let them experiment with things such as might be called "gender." And if they find out, after some experimentation, that they'd be happier as the non-birth gender, then go ahead.
But that's the enemy, isn't it? That's just
horrible. We can't have that!
We absolutely have to inject them with puberty-delaying hormones, because puberty would hurt. Of course, we can't try to make puberty easier, as that would be bad. Or, we have to start them transitioning before puberty because it works better. And, of course, what we mean by "works better" amounts mostly to "makes them look more like our One True Ideal™ of what Barbie or Ken looks like. Which is really important because, well, I am not quite sure, but it always seems to be there under the surface of all this discourse.
I mean, we
say that such matters should be flexible, and so a man who doesn't want to have a mate who was born a man should be hammered with social pressure, For Great Justice™. But it would be bad to wonder if those self-same gender expectations that we are spending so much time shouting down to advertise our goodness might be doing a little bit of dirty work inside our brains that affects our thoughts. So we have to get rid of most of the basic findings of psychology, don't we?
Definitely we have to give up the idea that personality, gender identity, and even sexuality are things that develop through adolescence and are not rigidly hard-wired in during the third trimester, if not before. And the lack of any remotely objective evidence need not concern us, because we're so damned sure of everything.
Now, maybe people can come up with other reasons that aren't as obviously silly as my cartoon, but I don't trust what they say, unless there is a lot of evidence that they themselves have seriously questioned their preconceptions and how their culture may have shaped the very basis of their thought. This never seems to happen, especially amongst the people who are so insistent that they know who is a man and who is a woman and who is using the words right (them) and wrong (those bad people on the other side.
I think it's almost tautological. People who
have done the serious introspection aren't the type to go around trying to nail people's heads to a coffee table for using
the wrong word. They tend to be able to have serious discussions about matters with a
ton that I am simply not seeing very much here. Sure, some people, such as TubbaBlubba, have made a lot of sense, but it gets drowned out.
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