Trigger warning for me possibly being a clueless, transphobic douche. I’m trying to work something out and generally throwing out some ideas for people who are cooler than me to react to. But they may be stupid, stupid ideas, and if you just don’t to deal with a cis person being stupid, you should probably skip this.
So, I have this thing in my head where when I’m thinking about “who here is a man,” I include cis men and trans men. If I’m thinking about “who here is a woman” and I’m thinking about something that doesn’t have to do with issues around gender and sex as experienced by sociological minorities, then I include cis women and trans women.
But if I’m thinking about “who here is a woman” and I’m thinking about something that *does* have to do with issues around gender and sex as experienced by sociological minorities–such as “how do we measure the gender bias in this engineering department by looking at the test scores of men and women?”–then I include cis women, trans women, and trans *men.*
I’m talking about auto-inclusion here. The measurements the back of my brain makes before I stop it and go, “Knock that off, trans men are men,” and correct myself.
But there are definitely circumstances in which I think of cis men as one group and cis women, trans women, and trans men as another. For instance, when I meet someone new (and I know their cis/trans and gender status), I have the same basal level of comfort talking to people about issues of sex and gender if they are cis women, trans women, or trans men. And that’s not something I have an inclination to correct the way I correct my brain when it’s wrong about statistics. (Maybe I should, though. That’s part of what I’m trying to work out.)
I suspect my problem is that my brain actually has two schemas which it uses the word “woman” to label. One is the traditional schema: people who are gendered female. The other includes most people who have experience being gendered (or wanting to be gendered if they are pre-transition) as female by society. This would include female-bodied genderqueer or agendered people, or male-bodied genderqueer or agendered people if they are or have been read as female on a regular enough basis for it to affect them as far as sociological measures are concerned.
Probably there should be fine-tuning of what I just said to make it include all the people I mean to include and exclude all the people I don’t, but I think that’s the best marshaling of vocabulary I can handle right now.
So there’s the one schema I have in my brain that’s labeled “woman” which is, I think, the consensus definition of woman. And then there’s another schema in my head labeled “woman” (and the fact that it’s labeled woman may be inherently transphobic) that is a nameless category that includes the bunch of people mentioned above.
If there is a name for this category, I don’t now it. Queer doesn’t cover it; that includes cis men. Genderqueer doesn’t cover it; that excludes cis women.
Now I don’t mean to say that cis women, trans women, and trans men (and the other aforementeioned groups) have all experienced being socially gendered female in the same way. I understand, for instance, that many trans men will have experienced being gendered female differently than cis women since they are not actually gendered female. And obviously all three groups are capable of having horrible, douchey ideas about sex and gender.
Sometimes, though, I think the groups often do go together. Like, as I mentioned above, when I’m calculating the risk of talking to someone I don’t know very well about sex and gender issues. Or when science fiction writers are measuring “how many women writers are there in this table of contents?” I often think that it’s a less revealing measure than “how many people inhabiting marginalized gender spaces are in this table of contents?”
Or, here’s another example where my brain ends up with something other than the consensus position, and I’m not sure if I’m seeing something real or being a douche–when people are discussing safe spaces for women, and they talk about how much it sucks that trans women can’t get in, I’m totally onboard. That is suck pants with suck shoes. I also am totally onboard when they talk about how much that position is revealed as even more scarily transphobic when trans men are allowed but trans women aren’t. But the further argument that allowing trans men into women-only spaces *at all* is inherently delegitimizing their gender identity–well, on the one hand, I do understand it, because trans men are men. But on the other hand, when I’m invoking women-only safe space, I think I want to be invoking the other schema, the nameless schema, the schema that says the reason this space needs to be exclusionary is because of the shared experience of sexism by people who have been sociologically gendered female, and most trans men have as much right to lay claim to that as cis women or trans women.
One reason I want to settle this for myself is that I’m pretty sure my mind swaps fluidly back and forth between the consensus term “woman” and my private, broader term “woman.” Because I use the same word for both, I fail to always make the distinction between when I’ve moved from one category to the other. A lot of times I can catch and correct myself before I speak. But sometimes, I don’t. And in the interest of making sure I say less stupid, cissexist shit without thinking, it would be good for me to clarify what’s going on in my brain, articulate it, understand it, and then fix it, whether that means mentally eradicating my second mental category or relabeling it.
So I guess some of the things I’m chewing on and that I’m interested in other people’s perspective on, include:
*Is the concept behind my second, nameless schema inherently transphobic?
*If yes, then ignore the rest of the questions, obviously, but assuming no, is there an existing name for it that I haven’t run into? Is there an intuitive name for it that’s not in use?
*Again assuming no, does it seem sociologically useful (as I intuitively think it is) to measure some things by how they affect people with experience inhabiting the marginalized binary gender, rather than just measuring how they affect people who fit the traditional “woman” schema?
I’m going to go ahead and limit the comments on this post to only people who believe in equality between trans and cis folks on both a legal and moral level.
As someone else who is more or less comfortable in my biologically assigned gender, I’m not sure my opinion counts any more than yours, but I can see how there could be a category for “anyone who has ever experienced the effects of misogyny personally” as being sort of a part of the sisterhood, regardless of their biologically or psychologically assigned gender.
What cis men cannot ever truly understand, that all these other categories can, is how it feels to butt heads with the system of male privilege. In the same way that whether a person identifies as black or white, if that person is seen as black by even one other person, they understand stuff about white privilege and systemic racism that I never will.
So while a genetically female person who identifies as male is not, by my definition, a woman, he still has the capability to viscerally understand things about how women are treated, thanks to experience at the hands of those who insist on seeing him as female. So depending on why you are making the mental division (i.e. what you are sorting into each category), it might not be a thing that’s done from ignorance on your part.
Maybe more helpful to apply an intersectional frame than a “grouping” frame?
Because I don’t so much see trans women, cis women, and trans men all belonging to the same group and a different group than cis men, so much as when it comes to gender-screwy social politics, cis men are the one who are least likely to be negatively impacted by that on the basis of A) their currently-assigned gender (which encompasses cis women and hopefully at least most trans women but also some trans men depending on how they are read), B) their historically-assigned gender (applies to trans men mainly, and kind of moot for cis women as it should be the same as their currently-assigned and actual gender) and C) their actual gender (for trans women of course, and again for cis women their assigned and actual genders match, but does not apply to trans men).
So overlap in groups due to kyriarchy and mutual experiences of gender-related oppression, but not the same group? That framing retains an acknowledgement of important differences in experiences and distinctions between groups (e.g., trans men being read correctly as men will be experiencing male but not cis privilege, trans women will be putting up with twofold oppression based on a lack of *both* male and cis privilege, etc.) while also recognizing the parallels and consistencies (e.g., widespread femmephobia, regardless of who is femme/read as femme/policed against being femme)? Rather than collapsing people into a single group that could erase aspects of their experience.
But I guess the ultimate test is in the utility of such a concept. I feel like some trans* people have almost certainly already worked on this, even if only privately for themselves, but I’m not aware of any existing posts. Although I feel like I remember an issue with a cis feminist putting their foot in it by doing some problematic lumping in the past…
Ahhh! I remember now – it went down at FWD/Forward. Kinsey Hope @ Genderbitch outlined her objections here to the conflation of women and trans men in FWD/Forward’s submission policy (which was at the time, “no cis men”) and the way that the following discussion was handled by various admins at FWD. From Kinsey’s “accountability list” page (linked on her blog at the top), it appears that an apology and possible reconciliation (possibly the wrong term?) may have occurred? I obviously can’t and won’t speak to how Kinsey currently feels about what happened, but at least this shows at least one perspective on the issue from a trans person, in this case a trans woman.
…honestly, I do think this categorization is transphobic, because I don’t think it has any real basis besides trying to stick trans men into this artificial sisterhood I don’t think they’d appreciate.
If you mean to say by it, “anyone who’s been marginalized by our gender system (at all)”, that includes everyone including cis men because our gender system is profoundly fucked up and screws everyone over to at least some degree.
If you mean to say by it, “anyone who’s ever been on the wrong end of male privilege” that demands a class that’s ever been on the right end of male privilege. It’s not like not having had it in the past makes it mean less that you do have it now. (Or vice versa) A trans man can totally mansplain and do other things that subvert the purpose of a woman-only safe space, because have ever been female doesn’t mean that you don’t get ALL the privileges of being male, including the privilege of being able to be a douchbag to women in certain situations with impunity. (And, for that matter, women can totally do the same kind of thing, only without the “impunity”, which is why I’m a bit leery of the idea of a “woman’s only safe space”. But there’s no good basis for including trans men in them if you want to have them.)
And then if you mean to say, “anyone who has experienced being a woman”, I don’t think trans men really have the same experience of that as cis women. It’s like, having a spider on your face might be objectively the same whether or not you’re afraid of spiders, but the experience of it is totally different. I don’t think someone whose experience of being female is “DO NOT WANT” has anything like the same experience of being female as someone who likes it but wishes it wasn’t so full of social crap.
So coming back from that, the reason I think it’s transphobic and not just a bad category is that trans men can spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to become fully male and this categorization kind of puts them in a bind where there’s a bit of female-ness that you won’t ever let them leave behind.
And especially for your original example, “how do we measure gender bias in the Engineering department?”, counting trans men as women assumes they haven’t really pulled off becoming male; that they are STILL subject to bias against women despite (presumably) fully presenting as male. I don’t think I have to say that this is VERY transphobic. (Unless maybe you’re measuring previous bias due to having been a woman? But then you’d have to exclude the trans women; “cis men” versus “cis women, trans women and trans men” will never be a valid comparison because it conflates two different kinds of bias. It should either be “cis men versus cis women” only to avoid any questions about “but she used to present as male”, or else you split everyone out and have four seperate groups.)
Hey everyone,
I’m not interested in hearing comments in this thread about how the fact that masculinity and cisness is privileged oppresses men.
I’m going to ask Amp to move that thread to an open thread. I’m quite happy to hear about intersections of trans identity and feminism, but I’m really not up for debating whether or not maleness and cisness are privileged.
(And yes, for these purposes, I am including “don’t point out things are privileged or otherwise you are perpetuating privilege” as “debating whether maleness and cisness are privileged” for much the same reason that “YOU’RE the real sexist” when said in response to the observation of sexism is not a particularly feminist reaction.)
I think this is actually a pretty pernicious thing to say, actually. Maleness is privileged over femaleness; a cis male is still experiencing male privilege even when they’re being fucked over by gender roles. I’m not talking about “to some degree,” I’m talking about the experience of having been oppressed for being on or being perceived to be on the wrong side of the binary.
Maybe that’s still not a good thing to break out, but I don’t think the reason for that is because PHMT.
Yes, I did mean to include childhood biases against trans men.
Why? We don’t separate out cis women’s experiences in terms of having been oppressed-as-women from childhood and then in departments. We can’t usually break those things out. I’m perfectly comfortable with including people who have privilege at some points and not others.
I think this is a good point to keep in mind and a very good reason for why any automatic grouping of trans men with women is deeply problematic (as the issue at FWD/Forward I linked to illustrates).
That being said, I think completely excluding trans men from being considered in terms of experiencing sexism and misogyny is also problematic, as I tried to suggest in my admittedly fuzzily-worded comment above. The truth is that not all trans men pass equally, and even among those who do, they can be outed, as many have been. So there just is no guarantee that trans men will always be protected against being treated like cis women by people who perceive them as such.
This, however, still does not equate their experiences with those of trans or cis women, which is why I think an intersectional rather than categorical approach is probably more helpful.
I can strongly relate to a good deal of this post. And while I do think that it is transphobic to label the entire category of “gender-marginals” as women (for reasons which I think you explored well in the post), I also think it’s a useful framework in some ways. And more to the point, your brain apparently finds it to be a useful concept, and it’s not actively harmful *if* you can get it untangled from the category of “women.”
I think there might be two things going on here. One is a shared lack of male privilege. I am not a trans man, so I cannot speak to that experience, but I am a genderqueer person who was assigned female at birth and am feminine presenting, so I have a lot in common with women. In that sense, I find it useful to have a term that I can identify with that recognizes that shared experience.
The other thing I am often using my mental gender minority category as a proxy for is “has this person done much critical thinking about gender.” This is a bit more difficult, because there are obviously women (cis and trans) who have not really questioned patriarchal gender constructions and men who have. But it’s a rough estimate that conditions when I feel safe opening up about certain things.
Finally, Julia Serano (Whipping Girl) breaks sexism down into three different types, which may be useful to this conversation. Oppositional Sexism, she says, is the belief that Men and Women are separate and opposite beings, and oppresses anyone who falls more in the middle. Traditional Sexism (her term — though both are traditional), is the privileging of masculinity over femininity. The concept of marginalized gender identities that we’re discussing here seems to be some sort of overlap of people who are on the receiving end of either of these forms of sexism. (In which case it seems to me that extremely feminine-presenting men may also share some of the same experiences.)
Not disputing any of that; this is a response to the one specific line:
The patriarchy screws EVERYONE over and so if you want to group all the people that the patriarchy screws over together you need to include all the people period. That’s all I wanted to say; that some people get screwed over more than others is not something I want to dispute.
We don’t for cis women, yes, because cis women have been oppressed at all points in their life. And it’s also true that, for cis women, you can’t separate certain oppressions out from others.
But we’re not TALKING about cis women, and for trans men and women you CAN separate out the experience of sexism now from the experience of sexism over the rest of their life. And you have to if you want to study this kind of thing properly because otherwise you mess up your data: by including people who have never experienced some kinds of discrimination in the set of “marginalized people” you weaken your conclusion.
Which is one of the reasons why you can’t just group “everyone who has ever experienced being female” together; a trans woman will never have experienced the ways young boys are privileged over young girls, and a trans man might ONLY have experienced the ways young boys are privileged over young girls. So what happens if you invite a trans man to a “women only” space and he starts saying things like “I never was paid less when I was a woman”? That’s really his experience, and it’s unrepresentative exactly because he stopped being a woman before he gathered any serious experience of this particular bit of privilege.
(Oh and one last reason that trans men shouldn’t be invited to women only spaces is that the point of those is at least partly to protect women against sexist culture, and trans men don’t need that protection. They need protection against transphobic culture, certainly, but the trans community has their own spaces for that.)
I think this is a bad heuristic, not because some men have thought critically about gender but because many women haven’t. Having experienced sexism does not automatically make you able to even tell that you are experiencing sexism, much less exactly what it is. A woman who is acquainted with feminist theory is going to have a better knowledge of the sexist pressures facing her than a man who is acquainted with feminist theory, but if you aren’t trained to see it, you can’t see it whether it’s there or not.
I mean, it’s still better than picking at random but I think you’d need more information than just gender if you want to be able to usefully pick out people you can talk about gender issues with.
Does the term “gender minority” work? I too have this problem where I say “X issue affects women”. And then I think “oh yeah, and it can probably affect me too” since I’m genderqueer. But the thing about genderqueer as an identity is that it is rather slippery and easy to want to run away from, when one is attempting to sort people into 2 easy-baked sociological categories. I mean, I clearly don’t get male privilege (except when I do) because my body appears to be more female (except when it doesn’t). But then I have a genderqueer friend who was assigned male at birth and still is mistaken for a man most of the time. That ze and I would be mixed and mashed and split and rearranged in these categories based on what hour of the day it is or the phases of the moon… I think this [back to the original topic] analysis will always be fundamentally broken because our gender system is fundamentally broken.
In case you’re wondering, I heartily believe in complete equality for transfolk. If I use terms wrong or make invalid and/or offensive assumptions, it is inadvertent and I welcome correction.
I wonder if part of what you’re cogitating about might be the interplay between an individual’s comfort level with, their identification level with, and their level of playing to the social “norms” of, the sex they were born with, and/or the gender they choose in later life.
For example, contrast Amp and myself. (I’m the handsome one.) I know Amp fairly well so I feel comfortable in assigning him nominal places along those axes. He is quite uncomfortable with, but identifies reasonably strongly as, and performs a very modest level of, masculinity. I am very comfortable with, identify completely as, and perform a moderate level of, masculinity. I am one of the relatively fortunate/privileged people who are largely well-served by their gender role as assigned by society; Amp is relatively less fortunate (and if I recall had a hard time in boyhood). Yet we are both cisgendered, both carry a lot of gender privilege, etc. Are we basically in the same place, or are we very different? Both, it seems.
I recognize that adding additional layers of nuance doesn’t make analysis any easier but people are just so darn complicated and frankly weird (especially Amp). It may be that analysis isn’t possible other than in broad brushstrokes.
Why are you asking whether your position is transphobic? Why aren’t you just asking whether your position is wrong, or ideal, or whatever?
It just seems to be adding to the often-inflammatory language that springs up in a lot of these threads, in which the “____-phobe” labels gets tossed around willy-nilly. Here you are thinking about it, asking about it, and trying to learn about it.
You may or may not have some ideas about transfolk that you might or might not want to change based on data (and depending on whose opinion you trust.) It’s a fascinating question. But you should change your nomenclature IMO.
Nerd:
“I think this [back to the original topic] analysis will always be fundamentally broken because our gender system is fundamentally broken.”
I think you’re probably right.
I mean, I still want to find ways to talk about it, though.
Robert:
Yeah, it’s certainly all fuzzy-definitioned, which I guess one should expect for general language-is-not-reifiable reasons (which doesn’t mean I’m trying to talk about the right things).
Mandolin:
You’re certainly not that. You may be clueless, as are we all, sometimes. You’re certainly transphobic, as are we all, because you can’t grow up in our society without internalizing some amount of transphobia, just as we all internalize racism, and sexism, and on and on. People who try to work on this stuff in themselves inevitably take a hit and question themselves when they un-earth another root of the various systems which pervade our culture and ourselves. When you take a hit, it’s important to stagger forward into being a better person, and not to let it knock you backward into self-loathing.
Intent matters, even though it’s not a panacea (as Kinsey Hope so hilariously pointed out). Here, you have held a thing deep in yourself up for public comment, a thing which you fear will reflect poorly on you. I can’t help but respect that.
So you have internalized transphobic patterns, filters, and habits of thought. We all do. But you do not yourself become a transphobic person, until you spit on your hands and get to work in service of those internalized transphobic habits of thought, and start asserting them onto other people, or defending them. Jay Smooth has a really useful way of looking at this kind of thing (though he was speaking of racism). He describes working on such things in ourselves as equivalent to dental hygiene, something requiring regular attention and occasional outside help.
I suspect that you already know all this, but if so, sometimes it’s good to be reminded.
See, that may be part of your problem. You’ve greatly limited feedback, because there just aren’t that many people out there who are cooler than you. I’m certainly not, and I didn’t reply at first, but then people like Robert and gin&whiskey started replying, and I decided I must have misunderstood, because there’s no way they’re cooler than you.
Yeah, that’s transphobia (but see above, earlier in my comment). Time to work on rooting that sucker out.
That’s not to say that your construction is not a valid category, useful when used right and worthy of a name. But that name is not “woman”, nor “woman when considered in this light”.
So, you need to find a phrase which describes that category but does not assign gender to the occupants.
Since you have invited opinions about your psyche, I will take leave to speculate a bit. It’s possible that this category which includes trans men maps very closely onto this category: “People I feel more comfortable with, or more kinship with, because we share some life experiences being gendered as female by society generally.” It’s perfectly fair to suppose that, statistically, those categories (cis women and all people of trans experience) are more likely to “get it” when it comes to understanding the marginalization and sexism you have experienced as a woman. For example, generalizing from a very biased sample, the trans men I personally have interacted with all worked hard not to talk over other people in conversation, because they had all had it happen to them back when they were being mistaken for women.
I think that’s part of what’s at play at a certain annual music event, or other venues explicitly for women but which welcome trans men. It’s what proponents of such venues are referring to when they reference “male energy”, and its presence or absence.
Yeah, it’s transphobia. But you aten’t dead yet.
So why not use that? Speaking practically, if you use “women”, you’re obliged to explain what you mean by it in the way you’re trying to use it, and no matter how elaborately you phrase it there will be insult and collateral damage to your argument, measured in the number of people who decline to proceed past that definition, or who don’t appreciate the nuance you’re trying for. If you use “people inhabiting marginalized gender spaces”, then you are free to define it as you will, and people will have to engage with it on that basis. It may seem clumsier, but it’s probably the most efficient construction, in the end.
I quote this to label it as a very fine illustration of productive soul-searching.
I don’t think so. It only becomes transphobic when you name it “woman”.
Not that I’m aware of.
Any generalization is problematical, and yet, generalization is necessary to get anything done. If you’re going to use this category, it might serve you well to dice your data to a finer level, and then aggregate the groups explicitly based on a life experience which includes being socially gendered as female (or whatever; sometimes you’ll want to see what falls out when you aggregate all people who have life experience being gendered male). Note that I did not posit a four-part nomenclature of trans women, trans men, cis women and cis men. That would be leaving out the genderqueer and any other self-identifications which don’t fall neatly into that troubled doubled binary.
So, I think it’s a small power tool: useful for certain things, but to be used with care and proper preparation, because it will cut quickly when you slip.
I hope this helped.
Grace
“because there’s no way they’re cooler than you.”
I am far cooler than Mandolin, but I allow there to be a perception that I’m not, so that she’ll feel good about herself.
That’s how cool I am.
Hi Grace,
Thank you; that’s very helpful.
I guess what I meant to say in the post that didn’t come across very well is that I’m using the word “woman,” but I shouldn’t be.
Hm, now thinking other things which are tricky to say, too, and I’m not sure I can formulate them.
I’d apologize for saying “cooler than me” but where would an insecure person be without language like that? :-P
Mandolin:
I confess to being tempted to point it out, but then considered that it might be one straw too many. ;)
Grace
Robert:
NO! Really? I’m flabbergasted. That’s just astonishing; I had no idea.
Cuz’, like everyone else here, I was completely persuaded that you’re an abject nimrod. I’d have taken an oath without a second thought. I’m sure we all would. “Robert? Total nimrod. Don’t waste any cool on him; he’s a lost cause. Why does Amp put up with this loser year after year? Feeling a little nauseated even pondering him for this many sentences in a row….”
Hope I’m not making you blush. I wouldn’t say this about just anyone, but you really deserve it.
And hey — you’re welcome!
Hey, a friend directed me to this blog, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts as a trans(feminine) person.
I can see the value of what you’re talking about. The word ‘woman’ is not helpful, and I think I’ve heard something like “gender and sexual minority” (or GSM) used. Anthropologists have also used the term ‘unmen’ for studying other cultures, but the entire thing seems to create its own binary that privileges maleness as ‘normal’.
Also, there are some issues that I see with grouping people together in such a way. I would say that gay men could also hypothetically be included in this grouping, especially “effeminate’ gay men, since hetero/cis/patriarchy also regulates men’s behavior in that way. And many of these more effeminate gay men experience levels of harm at cis men that is reasonably similar to a person belonging to the groups that you talked about.
The other issue that I might raise is that gender is many times tied up with race. To take an example, in most of American culture, asian men are portrayed as less of a man than white men. So, since asian cis men in America deal with a racialized patriarchy, do they fit within this group? It all comes down to the fact that once groups are constructed based on more than mutual identity, the policing of the borders of those groups gets pretty complicated.
Silly Robert. Cool is like being a lady or a gentleman. If you have to assert that you are, you ain’t.
Grace
Exactly. I go around saying things like that so that the secret coolness will not be exposed.
And with that I think my throwaway joke has reached or exceeded its maximum utility for lightening the mood, and perhaps should be dropped in favor of the ongoing OP discussion.
Grace, thank you so much for your comments! That was very helpful to me as well.
I’ve made a real effort to read and understand this discussion, and my eyes keep glazing over, the way they do when my sons try to describe the arcana of “Magic the Gathering.”
I think the problem is that you’re taking socially constructed concepts — “man” and “woman”, “male” and “female”, and trying to use them in contexts that violate the premises on which they are based. It’s no wonder you are getting nonsense out. It’s like those grade-school “proofs” that 1 = 0.
In the case of 1=0, the premise that is usually being violated is that you can’t divide by zero.
In the man/woman case, the premise is that all humans can be unambiguously put into exactly one of the categories “male/boy/man” and “female/girl/woman,” based on their anatomy, and that you can then assign a whole bunch of roles, assumptions, rules, etc., to each category which will apply to everyone in the category.
Trans men & women directly violate this premise. For example, trans men say “I belong in category ‘male’,” despite having the anatomy (and training) “female.”
So you get the whole question “what is a man?” “what is a woman?”, and it’s no surprise that you get different answers for the same person depending on which aspect of the male/female dichotomy you look at.
Ultimately, using “male” and “female” to describe anything but anatomy (or maybe genetics) is an absurd oversimplification of humanity, and only works if you’re willing to spend a lot of time hammering square, semi-circular, star-shaped, etc., pegs into round holes.
For that matter, there are a number of people whose anatomy doesn’t neatly fit into “male” or “female”; the fact that these people are simply erased says a lot about society’s attitude towards sex and gender.
The only part of the discussion that has made sense to me has been the idea that, if you’re going to categorize people, it makes sense to do so based on their present and past experiences of privilege and oppression.
At least, this would make sense if you’re trying to select who should be in, say, your women’s consciousness raising group. Women’s vs. men’s sports might use a different basis.
Genderqueer also excludes trans men and trans women. Genderqueer is an identity of its own, often outside the binary. Trans men and women are usually binary-identified.
Yesterday there was a piece in Le Journal de Montréal (a French daily newspaper in physical form) about an organization that stands to help male victims of rape in childhood. The only one in the island, if not the province. And it doesn’t receive public funding. It always gets refused. Even though they can prove demand is heavy, they got huge waiting lists. Over 250 people that know the service exists, but still can’t see any therapist about it.
Similar services for women exist, in much larger number.
So while being trans didn’t give me any privilege over being seen as cis, being a trans woman gave me a heck of a lot of visibility privilege. Where people actually care if I’m a victim. They don’t call me an oppressor. Or say I (and all trans women, regardless of actual behavior) have male energy (oh yes, some do, but they’re fringe…they just happen to be the activists running DV and rape shelters, like Vancouver Rape Relief).
The best thing that’s happened in transition, besides not getting beaten up because I was seen as target practice, and an acceptable casuality (and that’s because I’m seen as female, not as a guy in drag, or I’d get double doses) is that people don’t think the worst of me or my group. If they see me as a woman, they won’t be afraid of me being with kids, or sleeping platonically in the same bed as a woman. Suddenly I’m innocent of all those thought crimes. No more male gaze. No more pedophile scare.
This is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot in relationship to my own gender (which is genderqueer), because I have no problem identifying as a woman in the sociological sense (i.e. I was conditioned to be a woman and am generally treated as such) while I feel like vomiting from dysphoria if someone wishes to treat me as a woman in any other sense.
I think that, at the very least, one can separate gender role education (i.e. the gender conditioning one received), gender identification (i.e. what gender you are), and gender assignment (i.e. what gender people think you are). And each of those are going to be relevant in different situations… obviously, most of the time, gender identification is the most important aspect. But if you’re talking about the lived experience of being a woman, then some trans men will also have things to say about it (although, of course, the transness and social dysphoria will make their lived experience of womanhood different than a woman’s).
I think that a lot of times gender is a shitty heuristic to begin with. In the case of the hypothetical SF table of contents, there is no reason you couldn’t count the trans people in addition to counting the women (…and the people of color, and the people of lower classes, and the disabled, and the queer…). And in the case of the FWD/Forward link drop, wouldn’t it be easier to limit it to feminists/womanists/people with an awareness of gender privilege/whatever, with a note that certain people with a history of being problematic (Hugo Schwyzer, for instance) shouldn’t be linked? I mean, Thomas from Yes Means Yes is a cis man, but I trust his opinions on gender far more than I trust a random cis woman Cosmo writer’s, or Chaz Bono’s.
“In the case of the hypothetical SF table of contents, there is no reason you couldn’t count the trans people in addition to counting the women (…and the people of color, and the people of lower classes, and the disabled, and the queer…)”
Of course that’s done.
Actually, I don’t know if anyone has done much comprehensive work on figuring out how authors identify WRT disability. I mean, there’s at least one study I can think of, but it was about MFA students and involved actual psychological research; I don’t know how one would begin to do back-of-the-envelope calculations on massive amounts of impersonal data like tables of contents.
ozymandias:
Yes, but alas, people will insist on beginning with it, because we’re all socialized to do so.
It’s as though we’re all given a task, and a clawhammer. For 98% of people, the task is “drive a nail”, and the answer is obvious. For around 1.5% of people, the task is “measure the length of this building”, and the answer can be reasoned out, even if people look at you funny while you see how many times you have to set the clawhammer down to get from one end of the building to the other. And for the remainder, including the genderqueer and people persistently and obsessively curious about gender, there is a list of tasks, including “find the resistance across this circuit” and “measure the specific gravity of this liquid”.
…for which the clawhammer is manifestly unsuited.
(Yes, I’m tired. And bonus points to anyone who can describe how to accomplish those last two tasks using only a clawhammer. At STP.)
Grace
Threaten to hit other people on the head (with the hammer) until one of them tells you the answer?
Or is that cheating because it uses other people as secondary tools? ;-)
Why not include, e.g., feminine gay cis men, many of whom experience gender oppression everyday and have a completely different life experience from most straight, masculine cis men? To me, this omission signals that this category is not grappling with the way misogyny impacts men’s (cis and trans) lives. I think a general “people who have experienced gender oppression” term would be really useful, but this particular line-drawing seems all wrong to me. In practice, this sounds like it would often mean that cis women’s concerns would take priority over trans women’s, with trans men invisible.
As a trans man (the only one in the thread? correct me if I’m wrong), I’ve found that cis women’s attempts at gender solidarity with me are almost always wrongheaded and hurtful. Would this category illuminate different experiences, or erase them?
…Shalom got me thinking: this system does kind of imply discrimination-due-to-being-female is the only “real” gender discrimination, doesn’t it? (I’m sure you didn’t intend that, of course, but it seems to be there anyway.)
Overall I think I’m with Ozy and AMM. Go ahead and count trans people, but count them separately from women unless you’re making an index of all discrimination.(Oh, and Ozy, may I ask what’s wrong with Chaz Bono? Or were you just using him as an example of a random trans person?)
“This is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot in relationship to my own gender (which is genderqueer), because I have no problem identifying as a woman in the sociological sense (i.e. I was conditioned to be a woman and am generally treated as such) while I feel like vomiting from dysphoria if someone wishes to treat me as a woman in any other sense.”
My experience is similar, though less extreme – I find the one place where I frequently slide back to putting myself in the female category is when it comes to things like sexism and general experience-of-life-being-gendered-female. But when it comes to actually thinking of myself as a woman I go “what what what that’s not right” and in general I feel alienated enough from womanhood and femaleness that, yeah, nonbinary here.
On the other hand, I think cis people often make assumptions about trans* people’s experience of being gendered in a particular way that just aren’t true. For instance: I’m nonbinary but am assigned female, haven’t transitioned, never will and do still identify as sort of… near female? female-ish? if not actually female – I consider my gender to be in between female and neutrois. However, there are still elements of female socialization in childhood that just… didn’t take. Because even though I thought I was a girl, some part of me in the back of my mind went “this does not apply to you. they are getting it wrong.” And this might be tied in with other stuff (disability or sexuality), but I think it’s also to do with gender – that on occasion the messages were “you should do X because you’re a girl” and my brain sort of went “okay, no need to do X”. It wasn’t that I rejected the messages, it’s that somehow, I understood them as never applying to me in the first place.
And people who are further away from their assigned genders may have a more extreme experience of this. I am pretty sure I’ve read about a trans woman talking about how she was socialized female, because unconsciously she’d take on the messages she gathered from how people treated her cis sisters or female friends or other women around her, and would just dismiss all the “guys do X” stuff as not relevant. This will still be different from a cis girl’s experience – but not in all the ways cis people often think, and it’s going to be different from a cis boy’s in ways cis people often still don’t realise.
And even the sociological have-you-experienced-sexism stuff, there are still probably going to be trans* guys who had such a totally different experience of this than any woman that yes, putting them in the same category is kind of cissexist.
Here’s an analogy that might work: suppose that you’re straight, you know you’re straight, and you end up in a situation where people are reading you as gay. And they’re treating you in homophobic ways and may even be discriminating against you because they think you’re gay. Now, this is still going to be an unpleasant situation for you – but it is not going to be remotely the same as for an actual gay person because you’re not gay. These people are committing a category error. Some straight people who go through this may gain more empathy for gay people, but some won’t – will see the problem as “why the hell do you think I’m gay?”. And suggesting all people who go through this have similar enough experiences to actual gay people that one can put them into the same category seems bogus to me.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t something to a “people marginalised by sexism”-like category – I often feel kind of quietly alienated when feminists define something that happens to me as something that happens to women. I just think it’s probably best to let trans* people work out for themselves if they belong in that category or not.
I rejected the messages on another basis: Them being illogical, irrational, unneeded. And often solely based on faulty traditional notions of “how things should be”, which I had no reason to subscribe to.
Asperger syndrome has perks, though not everyone has such a “skepticism shield”…it did take being rejected by pretty much everyone to consciously think of myself as “different from everyone”, and that “thinking outside the box” would be mandatory to even live.
This is sort of what I meant by rejecting vs. not applying – I rejected plenty of messages too, but it was different. Like, if people told me “girls are bad at maths!” I’d go “that makes no sense, my mother is a mathematician and maths is one of my best subjects.” But with some other stuff – a lot of things to do with beauty ideals, for instance, and others I can’t properly phrase right now – it never even got to that point. It just – wasn’t meant for me. I didn’t need to reject it for myself anymore than I’d have needed to if someone had said “boys are bad at maths” or “English people are bad at maths” or whatever.
Also, yay another person with AS! :) It sounds like it affected me differently – I think I was actually more gullible because of it because I had such problems with the concept of lying, and also did (and do, sigh) a lot of emotion and opinion mirroring. This did not always work out very well. I do wonder if I missed some of the messages because of that, though, because I was very aware of being the weird one growing up and it’s possible I could have gone “nah, this stuff is for normal girls only.” But then again, for me personally gender and AS are kind of tangled together.
(me: I’m a genderqueer trans boi)
I actually make this kind of distinction a lot, except I think of it as “always gender-privileged” (cis men) and “not always/not currently gender-privileged” (everyone else). It’s not based on anyone’s actual gender or trans history, but on what their gender privilege experiences have been, which is usually related to their awareness of patriarchy/sexism/misogyny. For example, as some people have mentioned, queer and/or feminine cis men often fall into the “not privileged” category. Additionally, trans boys who come out to supportive families at, say, three years old and are pretty gender-normative tend to fall into the gender-privileged category. (These are just two examples — there are plenty of other people who blur the categories.)
Calling the “not always/not currently gender-privileged” group “women,” I think, is very gender-binarist; it brings everything back to a binary system that obviously doesn’t encompass everyone. If we’re going to really understand gender oppression, we should get our outline straight. Women is a subcategory of “people who have dealt with/are dealing with gender oppression;” that group does not always fall under “women.”