Discussion: Transwomen are not women (Part 7)

[Ziggurat]

"Lived cultural identity" could be taken to mean that the individual is perceived and treated as female by society, e.g. pronouns, expectations of femininity, etc.

Well, THAT won't fly. The trans activists aren't going to accept a definition that requires other people to recognize their desired status.

 

[Olmstead]

"Lived cultural identity" could be taken to mean that the individual is perceived and treated as female by society, e.g. pronouns, expectations of femininity, etc.

That is just another weird level of circular obfuscation.

"Why is she a woman?"

"Because society perceives and treats her as female?"

"Why does society perceive and treat her as female?"

"Because she's a woman."

 

[theprestige]

Which in practical terms means pronouns. Every other signifier has been deprecated as sexist. Or is a signifier of sex, not gender.

 

[d4m10n]

"Why does society perceive and treat her as female?"

Because she appears to be female, or else because she has signaled her preference to be treated as such.

 

[Ziggurat]

Because she appears to be female, or else because she has signaled her preference to be treated as such.

A workable definition of "woman" which includes trans people could be someone who wants to be treated as if they were female. It's non-circular, it's quite inclusive, and it's simple and easy to apply.

But it also implies that biology is important, and that's a bit of a problem nowdays.

 

[theprestige]

Because she appears to be female,

Which is sexist.

or else because she has signaled her preference to be treated as such.

Which is either sexist or meaningless.

Show me a transwoman who wants all the expenses of a romantic outing to be paid for by her male partner, because she's a woman, and I'll show you a sexist scumbag.

Show me a transwoman who bristles at the thought, and makes a point of paying for herself on a date, and I'll show you someone who probably doesn't need to be making the man/woman distinction at all.

 

[Ziggurat]

Which is sexist.


Which is either sexist or meaningless.

Show me a transwoman who wants all the expenses of a romantic outing to be paid for by her male partner, because she's a woman, and I'll show you a sexist scumbag.

Show me a transwoman who bristles at the thought, and makes a point of paying for herself on a date, and I'll show you someone who probably doesn't need to be making the man/woman distinction at all.

I have to disagree here. Taking your date example, who pays may be beside the point. The transwoman may want to be treated as a female because she wants a heterosexual male to go on a date with her at all. I wouldn't call that sexist (unless biology itself is sexist), and it certainly isn't meaningless.

 

[d4m10n]

Which is sexist.

How so? Sexism implies the idea that one sex is superior to the other in non-trivial ways, e.g. "Men are leaders," or "Men are scum."

 

[Paul2]

never mind, ninja'ed way too long ago

 

[theprestige]

How so? Sexism implies the idea that one sex is superior to the other in non-trivial ways, e.g. "Men are leaders," or "Men are scum."

Let's start with the premise that it's okay to treat someone differently because of how you perceive their sex. A dude seems effeminate to you, so you treat him like a lady. Assuming there actually is a difference in how you treat men and women, that's sexist. I don't think the difference in treatment has to be non-trivial in order to qualify for this. Just different.

But the important point to me is not so much the sexism, but the difference in treatment. If you want to argue that it's not sexist to treat men and women differently because of their sex (or gender), fine. But you're still treating them differently. How? And why?

 

[theprestige]

I have to disagree here. Taking your date example, who pays may be beside the point. The transwoman may want to be treated as a female because she wants a heterosexual male to go on a date with her at all. I wouldn't call that sexist (unless biology itself is sexist), and it certainly isn't meaningless.

Maybe sexist isn't the right term for what I'm trying to get at, then. Because I'd say that biology is sexist. Not in a pejorative sense, but certainly in a "there are real differences and they have serious implications" sense.

But I do think that treating women differently, according to some social stereotype of gender, is sexist in the pejorative sense. It's either a hangover from conventions about the "weaker sex", or it's a misandrist overcorrection.

---

And what's really notable here is the complete absence of trans-activists from this part of the discussion. We're trying to figure out what it really means to be treated as a woman (separately from being treated as a female), or what it could even possibly mean in our society today. But the people with ostensibly the biggest vested interest in getting these questions answered assiduously avoid answering them.

 

[d4m10n]

Let's start with the premise that it's okay to treat someone differently because of how you perceive their sex.

Of course it's okay, at least some of the time. That's why human females have separate sports leagues and separate spaces such as sleeper cars, changing rooms, communal showers, an entire floor at Wi Spa, and (formerly) the all female festival known as MichFest^WP.

A dude seems effeminate to you, so you treat him like a lady.

I might be somewhat less likely to suggest football and brewskis if he seems into HGTV and wine coolers, but now we're talking about gender instead of sex.

 

[Olmstead]

Because she appears to be female, or else because she has signaled her preference to be treated as such.

"Appears to be female" is just a polite way of saying looks/behaves like a stereotypical female.

As for "signalling a preference to be treated as a female", you will have no problem finding many cis-males and cis-females who don't want to be treated as their sex in many circumstances (whatever that means, sounds like a personal thing), unless you're talking about very superficial stuff like pronouns.

But let's ignore that, and see what the last part would really boil down to:

"A woman is someone who wants to be treated like society usually treats females."

That sounds horrible.

 

[d4m10n]

"A woman is someone who wants to be treated like society usually treats females."

We've drifted too far from LJ's formulation for me to weigh in on whether that's what he was getting at with the idea of "lived cultural identity." That said, I think it's safe to say that trans women do indeed want to be seen and treated as females. What they have in common with cis women isn't the desire to be seen and treated as females but rather the treatment itself.

That sounds horrible.

In a patriarchal society, no doubt it is.

 

[Emily's Cat]

How do intersex people fit into your reckoning?

Intersex people have deleterious medical conditions that interrupt their sexual development. But each person with a DSD is still exclusively only male or female.

There is no third gamete, nor is there something in between eggs and sperm.

"Intersex" is a horribly misleading (and abused) term. Disorders of Sexual Development are not actually "in between" with respect to sex. In fact, the vast majority of DSD conditions don't even cause ambiguity of genitals, they are only apparent because the individual tries to reproduce and is found to be sterile as a result of their condition, or because they don't develop as expected during puberty. Of the remaining minority of people with DSDs, the genital variance are minor and do not represent any confusion about their inherent sex - cases of very small penises, very large clitorises, or urethral openings on the underside of the penis.

Only an incredibly minute few individuals have truly ambiguous genitals at birth. As I understand it, those generally fall into cases of either a) a female fetus being improperly exposed to high levels of testosterone at key development stages or b) a male fetus failing to be exposed to high levels of testosterone at key development stages.

Either way, it is irrelevant in the context of this discussion. DSDs have nothing at all to do with transgender identities. Gender dysphoria is not a DSD. DSDs get used by gender ideologists as a red herring argument in support of self-id.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I was responding to Emily's Cat's post that said boy-girl was as simple as chromosome determination. Do you think it is that simple?

Male/female is as simple as noting what gamete type the body is organized around producing, regardless of whether that gamete is successfully produced. Some cases aren't as clearly unambiguous... but in zero cases is the body organized around the production of either a third type of gamete, and in zero cases is it organized around the production of an in-between, middling-sized, sluggishly-motile gamete.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The only way an X chromosome could go faster than a Y chromosome is if the X was really a Y identifying as an X.

I suspect this is intended as humor and I'm simply missing it.

Both of the cases in my post were related to sperm. Each sperm carries a single chromosome type, either X or Y. So far as I know, sperm don't travel faster if they're unburdened by that extra leg.

 

[Emily's Cat]

People are talking tough on the internet, stop the presses.

Trolls and criminals abound online. Trans people have no special patent on unhinged lunatics threatening violence to celebrities they don't like.

What is interesting is that transphobes seem insistent that the existence of bad trans people is some kind of compelling reason to deny entire classes of people their rights. The post about Chapelle's claims about bad trans people goes into this directly. Rather than discuss the substance of the issue of trans rights, the reactionary right and TERFs (but I repeat myself) would rather focus on anecdotes of bad actors. It's not meaningfully different than stormfront users spamming black crime horror stories, though the TERFs seem very upset when people rightly point out that they are increasingly outing themselves as unhinged bigots.

Which rights should we be discussing? Please be specific.

 

[Ziggurat]

I suspect this is intended as humor and I'm simply missing it.

Both of the cases in my post were related to sperm. Each sperm carries a single chromosome type, either X or Y. So far as I know, sperm don't travel faster if they're unburdened by that extra leg.

It's not a particularly good joke, and jokes are always ruined by explaining them (which is why I like to explain dad jokes to my sister). But the joke comes from thinking of the X as a "female" sperm and the Y as a "male" sperm, based on the sex of the child it can produce. And since males can run faster than females...

Yeah, they can't all be winners.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I've only had time to take a quick look at this, but I'm not sure the highlighted conclusion accurately conveys the main finding.

Most brain research in this area has confounded GD/trans identity with sexual orientation, which is correlated in the case of early-onset GD.

This was discussed by Cantor in his analysis of a Scientific American article. "Biological males and females differ from each other on certain subtle, non-learned features of the brain and body, and some samples of transsexuals are in-between on these features. That is, they were shifted away from what is typical for their sex-at-birth and towards the other sex." However, these shifts, such as 'click-evoked otoacoustic emissions' are also seen in association with sexual orientation which was confounded in the research.

The current study you linked states 'After controlling for sexual orientation, the transgender groups showed sex-typical FA-values.'. In other words, the study did control for sexual orientation and found that after doing so there was only one brain circuit that distinguished the transgender groups. This circuit is one that relates to self-perception and body perception (and is also implicated in conditions such as body integrity dysphoria/body dysmorphia). At least one other recent study that addressed the confound with sexual orientation also found this.

That was the part I found interesting - that there is brain circuitry related to self-perception that is identifiably different for people with gender dysphoria.

It supports the generally acknowledged reality of gender dysphoria being real. But it's not at all extensible to self-id, nor to people who claim to be transgender without gender dysphoria, and it doesn't cover cases with comorbid mental health issues or neuro-atypicality.

Mostly, it was the first study I've seen that was actually well designed. That made me happy.