QT: Would a pure "theybie" who took a binary gender as an adult always be trans?

submitted by levoyageur718293 from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]levoyageur718293[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

I think I heard the phrase "from the breast" in a Robert Graves novel, that seems like the sort of thing that he would write. I wanted to go about my theme obliquely, perhaps too obliquely, by saying "this person is unambiguously female" without actually using the words "female," "girl," or "woman."

In any case, I'm not suggesting that - or not trying to suggest that - this person had no awareness of sex before the moment this person gave birth. My attempt was to go along with my understanding of QT that bodily sex is unimportant and only the transcendental "gender identity" matters; therefore, a person who was brought up in a gender-free environment, or who was effectively brought up nonbinary, and later chose to identify with a binary gender would therefore be "transgender" regardless of which way they went. Since this is obviously not a conclusion that QT would want to draw, my Socratic goal was to screw an admission out of someone that bodily sex represents a meaningful class.

[–]MarkTwainiac 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Maybe it's my powers of reading comprehension, or maybe it's how you phrased and presented your OP, but none of the aims you now state were behind your OP were clear to me. At all.

I think I heard the phrase "from the breast" in a Robert Graves novel

Why on earth would anyone take a phrase used by a male writer of fiction, classicist and dissector of (male written) mythology as emblematic and the best description of an inherently female experience? A female experience that billions of female people who are on the face of the earth at this very moment have gone through?

Also, didn't Graves do to his lover Laura Riding what Scott Fitzgerald did to his wife Zelda?

[–]levoyageur718293[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Yeah, I did not do my best work in writing my original post, I can own that.

[–]MarkTwainiac 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

OK, then. Good for you, and props to you. But can you tell us what your OP was about/meant to convey?

[–]levoyageur718293[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It's a hyperbolic assertion; I figured that if I started from a QT position and followed it as logically as I could to a conclusion that QT would disagree with, then that would demonstrate the weakness of that initial position. This is my response to trans narratives that follow the basic line Philosophy Tube put down, saying something like, "when I was born the doctors said "It's a boy," but then I grew up and realized I was supposed to be a girl, so I'm trans" - which papers over the reality of the body, aka why the doctors said "it's a boy" and the reality of the sexed body. I've also heard from QT types that the commonality of transwoman is "raised as a boy," or vice-versa, which this hyperbole challenges - because I think QT would, if pressed, say that being raised as non-binary and "transitioning" to the gender that matches your sex doesn't rightfully put you in the ranks of the people who transitioned to a gender that doesn't.

If, as QT asserts, genitals are completely unimportant to gender, and "transgender" means "a gender other than you were assigned at birth," then it follows from those presuppositions that a child who was raised as a theybie - a child who was raised in a completely gender-neutral way, effectively being brought up nonbinary - would by definition have to "transition" to either binary gender, and there would be no consistent way to exclude such a person from the ranks of "transwomanhood" unless the people trying to exclude her were courageous enough to say bluntly, "transwoman means you were born with a dick," and that there are two meaningfully discrete classes - people who were born with dicks and people who were born with vaginas, aka what we GC types would call "men and women."

[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

None of your original intent as you've now explained it came through to me from your OP. Perhaps this is my fault, perhaps it's yours.

Your framing of distinctly female experiences such as giving birth and breastfeeding struck me as odd - and not in a good way. Why did you try to make your point by depicting the imaginary experience of someone decidedly female? Why not a male person? Or one of each sex?