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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.*<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So I guess some of the things I’m chewing on and that I’m interested in other people’s perspective on, include:<\/p>\n
*Is the concept behind my second, nameless schema inherently transphobic?<\/p>\n
*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?<\/p>\n
*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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading