you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

AnotherOP/post that reminds me of the meme where the two women of post-menopause age are shaking their heads and telling a guy, That's really not how any of this works.

the parents went ahead and refused to put a gender on the child's birth certificate

BCs show sex, not gender. In most jurisdictions, there is no option not to have the sex of a newborn recorded by government authorities, so withholding a child's sex isn't an option for parents.

Moreover, depending on the jurisdiction, it's often not the parents who alert birth registries that a child has been born and what the sex is. In the UK, parents register the birth themselves, but in the US it's customarily done by HCPs. In the US state where I gave birth, the form to be submitted to the registry of births was filled in by the hospital/doctor/midwife and presented to me for my approval and signature attesting that the information filled in on the form was true.

given equal access to dolls and trucks

Lots of kids were raised this way, especially in the 1970s. I was raised this way, and I was born in the mid-1950s. Most kids had fewer toys back then, and tended to play with a lot of hand-me-downs, so if you had an older brother or sister - or both - you played with what they played with. My own children born in the early 90s had equal access to dolls and trucks - and to puzzles, stuffed animals, Lego, Brio, books, Matchbox cars, all sorts of board and other games, crayons, finger painting, Play Doh, plasticine, etc and to dress-up costumes, makeup, jewelry, tutus, tiaras, cooking, cleaning and so on. But none of this changed anyone's sex, or made them or us less aware of sex.

dressed in gender-neutral clothing until it was allowed to pick its own

Lots of kids grew up wearing "gender neutral" clothing, particularly when babies and toddlers - and only wore clearly boys or girls clothes for special occasions - church, temple, school, holidays, celebrations. When my parents were little in the 1920s, all the boys and girls wore dresses, and the boys all had long hair until they started school. Still every child knew what his or her sex was.

It's impossible to raise children with no awareness of sex. Coz of practical matters like breastfeeding, weaning, bathing, toilet training, personal hygiene, learning the names of body parts, menstruation, spontaneous erections, nocturnal emissions, puberty, and the myriad differences in the bodies of adult male and female humans that kids all notice and are quite attuned to, including pregnant women's unusually large bellies and the size, shape and feel of mothers' and grandmothers' breasts and dads' muscly arms, big shoulders, hairy chests and bearded or scratchy faces.

Children are all naturally curious about where babies come from, and ask a lot of questions about it. Moreover, most little kids, being narcissists by nature, are full of questions, and want to be told stories, about when they personally were inside "mommy's tummy" and what they themselves were like as babies.

Plus, most kids are very touchy-feely and accustomed to a lot of cuddling and co-sleeping with, being cradled by, and being spoken and sung to by, their parents and other carers. They become very attuned very quickly to the fact that women's bodies feel and smell different than men do, and their voices sound very different. From early infancy, breastfed kids learn that only moms have that special milky smell and are able to provide milk from their nipples.

One day, this child grows up, gives birth by vaginal delivery, and nurses the child directly from the breast.

You seem to be suggesting that the person in this situation didn't realize she was female until the moment she gave birth to a baby. How can this be when most girls begin menstruating around age 11? From 10-11, most girls begin developing in other ways that are very obvious to us as well.

Giving birth, whether vaginally or by CS, is not something that suddenly happens "one day" the way you portray it. Pregnancy is a long-haul process.

I am also confused by what you mean when you say that once the woman in your imaginary scenario has given birth "by vaginal delivery" she

nurses the child directly from the breast

A woman's ability or desire to breastfeed is NOT dependent on whether she gave birth vaginally or by CS. Moreover, it's not clear what you mean by "nurse" and "directly" there. Or by "the breast." Most women have two breasts, and we call them ours. We don't speak of nursing children from "the breast."

[–]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?