cis male is a slur

[Lucem Ferre]

I am fascinated with the trans phenomenon, know quite a few trans people, have a professional interest in gender theory and so forth. And I find that "identity" is not a particularly useful or interesting category.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[jadis]

I find that what you have to say about the issue is shallow and reductive. This is a story about, among others things, how our relationship to our bodies gets redefined in the digital era of online avatars and universal access to pornography; about how ideas seeping from the humanities get to impact medical knowledge; how the momentous advances of feminism are beset on all sides by men of all stripes driven to distraction by women and so on and so forth. All you've got is the circular mantra of identity.

[Lexi Darling]

Sure, Jan.

Obviously your mind on us trans people is made up, so I won't debate you on this anymore. Today was very enlightening regarding exactly what you think of us, so I do appreciate you being open and honest about it instead of trying to keep up the impression that you're not a transphobe. Thanks!

[Nimbly9]

I find that what you have to say about the issue is shallow and reductive. This is a story about, among others things, how our relationship to our bodies gets redefined in the digital era of online avatars and universal access to pornography; about how ideas seeping from the humanities get to impact medical knowledge; how the momentous advances of feminism are beset on all sides by men of all stripes driven to distraction by women and so on and so forth. All you've got is the circular mantra of identity.

People have always been obsessed with chasing identity unfortunately. Look at all the religious identification and seemingly endless permutations of tribalism.

[Jwb]

Yet somehow these issues end up being women's problems. The one aperçu I love in Marty's book (and which the Tablet article doesn't mention) is that gender is really all about women. Every time we're out to transgress, subvert, redefine etc the paradigm of the relations between the sexes, it's woman's place in the world that's being called into question or redefined. For good or for ill. The last thing this entails is the braindead conservative position that we should stop questioning our gender mores, turn the clock back and settle for (or rather violently enforce) the way things were in the good old times. It means being more rather than less critical.     

What you say is "we'll find a solution, logistics is not the issue." What if, though, the problems that arise in the real world esp with regard to women are a more reliable indicator of what the issue actually is? 

There are no weight classes in swimming. There are hardly any female swimmers the size of Lia Thomas and it's also a matter of muscle density, not just size. Most importantly, no one impinges on Lia Thomas's freedom to compete with other swimmers who have the same anatomy. Surely in sports anatomy is of the essence? What is then this "freedom" someone like Lia Thomas is seeking? Freedom to do what exactly? I'm not suggesting she's a sexual predator btw, there's no evidence for that. But the narcissistic entitlement to invade women's spaces dripping from her every word is, in my view, deeply revealing of what swaths of the M to F crowd are really about, which is to say an aggressive men's rights movement.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm sure they can make up as many definitions as they want, but what would the effects be? When you make up definitions out of thin air and then enforce them in material reality, the consequences tend to be wild. 

I hear the weight class talking point a lot

Tbh women aren't even barred from the men's league. They technically can try out for the NBA etc they just won't make the cut.

But the same is true for most white men.  So we also need our own leagues pls and thx in advance

[jadis]

People have always been obsessed with chasing identity unfortunately. Look at all the religious identification and seemingly endless permutations of tribalism.

The view I represent here sees "identity" as a distinct and modern phase of how we conceptualize our selves  https://newleftreview.org/issues/i217/articles/eric-hobsbawm-identity-politics-and-the-left  I don't have any links in English, but the guy who was most horrified by what he saw as this new phenomenon was actually Foucault, the guy who showed us that sexuality has an ever-shifting history rather than an immutable nature.

I hear the weight class talking point a lot

Tbh women aren't even barred from the men's league. They technically can try out for the NBA etc they just won't make the cut.

But the same is true for most white men.  So we also need our own leagues pls and thx in advance

If you're a white guy seeking a career in professional basketball you should try the Russian and Ukrainian leagues imo. Two fantastic countries where basketball could use a boost

Women demanding inclusion in male sports is a cumtown bit lol

The whole thing about female-only spaces becomes funnier/more poignant after you read about the long and arduous struggles for women-only bathrooms in factories during the industrial revolution. Back then, the idea of a bathroom for women was unheard of, so they had to share it with men and would get raped on the reg. To avoid getting raped, they would fast during the work day to avoid needing the bathroom. Or go in large groups. So it's a bit ironic that once it looks like women get to live their lives with a degree of independence from male-cooked narratives, there is a vocal minority of fellas with some very strong opinions on who gets to enter women's bathrooms and locker rooms. 

[Lexi Darling]

It's funny to me to watch Jadis seethe about """fellas""" like me gaining access to women-only spaces like he knows so much better than all my cis women friends who respect my womanhood. Way to speak over women, you sexist.

And just out of curiosity, Jadis, what is your opinion on trans men? Surely they must have some secretly sinister reason for transitioning just like you think trans women do.

[jadis]

There's nothing secret about the following scenario: young girls feeling general misery, unease, discomfort with their bodies, not being who they're "meant" to be and so forth, and medics "medicalizing" it and labeling it as different conditions to be treated. In the 19th century it used to be called hysteria and in the 1990s it used to be called "multiple personalities disorder"* and now it's called gender dysphoria. There is a particularly dark history of medics deciding that the problem lies in the female reproductive system, which has to be removed, as in the theory of menstruation as a "nerve reflex" in the late 19th and early 20th century. On this view, the current explosion in the number of young girls reporting gender dysphoria is broadly akin to the enormous increase in cases of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa in the 1980s.

On a personal note I can add that my response to this phenomenon is one of overwhelmingly greater empathy than toward lesbians of the bepenised persuasion. 



*https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Hysteria-Multiple-Personality-Disorder/dp/0787947946
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/04/06/the-politics-of-hysteria

[Lexi Darling]

Ok, so what about trans women like me who are exclusively into men? Where do we rank on your empathy tier list?

[jadis]

As with everything else, depends on who you are as a person. I'm the opposite of a rigid ideologue. At any rate, I'm really polite to everyone IRL

I used to be close friends for years with someone who was a beautiful gay guy and who first came out as nonbinary during the pandemic and then started transitioning. I supported this friend very closely and in particular repeatedly told them it was fine to drop out of a PhD program if your heart was no longer in it and you were going through stuff, because the main thing is avoiding self-loathing and self-flagellation and the rest will take care of itself. When we travelled to Montreal last year we even came to Quebec City (where they were living with their mother, not particularly happily) esp to hang out with them, only they were not happy I brought my gf along cause she wasn't smart enough to participate in our conversation. That kinda derailed things between us, which - I suspect - in turn made their (or whatever pronouns they use now) rants against heteros (read: against biological women such as his mother) on instagram stories even more vicious and unhinged.

[Lexi Darling]

Thank you for answering my questions. I appreciate your politeness and your general respect for people's pronouns. I think part of respecting people is taking them at their word about who they are instead of assuming the worst of them and questioning their intentions on everything.

At the end of the day all I can offer is my own trans experience and that of my close community. We're a very diverse bunch with different feelings on transition. I stand by what I said about your take being reductive, but really, at this point as long as you support my people's legal right to live our lives as we are, I don't honestly care that much about your little analyses of us.

I'm gonna keep living my best life with my wonderful fiance and my supportive community, and I'm not going to let transphobia grind me down.

[Lucem Ferre]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/

^^^^^^^^^^^

The brain anatomy of trans people is shifted towards the sex their gender identity aligns with.

It's not just an iDeNtItY phenomenon that's amplified by social media.

https://cadehildreth.com/gender-spectrum/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This explains how both gender & sex are a bimodal spectrum rather than a binary.

Speaking of gender identity as if there is no biological basis to it just because it makes YOU uncomfortable is shallow and reductive.

Proves that you're just a bigot acting in bad faith with no true intentions to understand. I'm an uneducated dumbass with the same access to this information as anybody else so there is no excuse to keep being ignorant.

[Nimbly9]

^ He's not acting in bad faith.  It's just that even if you are right, it doesn't really explain what is going on.

In Sweden, officials have seen a massive uptick in dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds assigned female at birth, with an increase of 1500% between 2008 and 2018, and there is no explanation from a biological standpoint that can account for that considering they've been progressive and opening and welcome on these matters for decades.  The explanation we have in the U.S. of why more people would suddenly come out and identify as transgender makes sense if they were afraid to do so before, but that explanation doesn't fly in Nordic countries.

That article's explanation of the intersex phenomenon isn't correct though. "Intersex" is an outcome of having abnormalities of the sex chromosomes, which means that the person who was born intersex would have been either male or female if those abnormalities hadn't occurred. It's not a third category any more than saying people with methemoglobinemia are a "new" race of blue people.

These distinctions are why there is a ton of investment going into prenatal gene-editing applications in Europe focused around manipulating and removing/adding chromosomes, because most of these scientists view someone being born as intersex as a detrimental outcome for that person. It would result in them having to do long-term hormonal therapy or surgeries later on in life depending on their orientation.  It has nothing to do with identity (which is a nonfactor at the prenatal stage) and everything to do with creating better medical outcomes for the most amount of people long-term in society in a more significant way.

[degrassi.knoll]

Lots of high emotions in this thread despite there being only civil discourse.

I understand wanting to be taken at your word, but Mrs. Waffles, I'm seeing a lot of projection and taking any discussion of the topic personally. For example, jadis referred to "fellas" and "lesbians with penises," both categories which you are not indicated to be in, yet I'm seeing a lot of "you think x about me" kinds of reductive and reactionary statements in response.

Lucem has a lot of links at the ready because he battles transphobia (among other things) in his community literally on the daily, but you both are seeming to react to everything being said emotionally, defensively, battle-ready, and as such missing the points that jadis is making that are not even that wild...

It's easy to call everything a "bad faith argument" but not everything is - jwb wasn't making bad faith arguments about trans issues on mb and jadis isn't doing it here.

At the end of the day there are a lot of questions, and a lot of people have varying degrees of familiarity with the topics at hand. And there are a lot of new and gray areas now that trans rights are very much at the forefront of the sociocultural stage - we have to be able to talk about them and through them without taking questions as attempts to discredit who you are internally.

The trans community at large doesn't need you "have their back" or defend their right to exist. Objective discourse can and SHOULD happen, even without a clear outcome.

[Lexi Darling]

Lots of high emotions in this thread despite there being only civil discourse.

I understand wanting to be taken at your word, but Mrs. Waffles, I'm seeing a lot of projection and taking any discussion of the topic personally. For example, jadis referred to "fellas" and "lesbians with penises," both categories which you are not indicated to be in, yet I'm seeing a lot of "you think x about me" kinds of reductive and reactionary statements in response.

Lucem has a lot of links at the ready because he battles transphobia (among other things) in his community literally on the daily, but you both are seeming to react to everything being said emotionally, defensively, battle-ready, and as such missing the points that jadis is making that are not even that wild...

It's easy to call everything a "bad faith argument" but not everything is - jwb wasn't making bad faith arguments about trans issues on mb and jadis isn't doing it here.

At the end of the day there are a lot of questions, and a lot of people have varying degrees of familiarity with the topics at hand. And there are a lot of new and gray areas now that trans rights are very much at the forefront of the sociocultural stage - we have to be able to talk about them and through them without taking questions as attempts to discredit who you are internally.

The trans community at large doesn't need you "have their back" or defend their right to exist. Objective discourse can and SHOULD happen, even without a clear outcome.

I responded to the "fellas" thing because I read it as Jadis accusing trans women in general of being men. I acknowledged his emphasis on lesbians, which is why I asked him if he thought the same about straight trans women like myself.

For the record I don't think Jadis's arguments are in bad faith at this point, he has been open about his opinions and I respect that. I also have no real problem with anything JWB has said.

I react defensively not to defend myself, but my community. I feel like Jadis has been attacking the integrity of trans people as a group; not everything he's posting is that, but I do think some of it is. I am exposed to transphobic rhetoric online on the daily, and it does bother me if it just goes unchallenged, so yeah, I do want to defend my people. I agree that Jadis has been polite, which I commended him on, and I agree that his takes on trans people are saner than your average conservative. I still think they are transphobic, and if me reacting the way I did to him trying to delegitimize trans experiences, not just mine, is "taking it personally" then I guess I am.

I have strong emotions because this kind of rhetoric, when espoused by those with power, does in fact contribute to actively harming my livelihood at the moment. But you're right in a lot of ways. I just don't know how to debate Jadis when most of what he has posted is just opinions and conjecture.

I'm not going to try to defend trans people anymore. We've come to a point where this feels like an endless cycle, and you probably know by now that I am not very good at debating. So I'm not going to challenge him anymore. As I said in my last post, he can think whatever he wants about trans people. I have nothing left to say.