All: Why do a lot of trans people insist that being non binary or trans has nothing to to with stereotyoes, and then suddenly it really is about stereotypes?

submitted by questioningtw from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]catoborosnonbinary 5 insightful - 6 fun5 insightful - 5 fun6 insightful - 6 fun -  (5 children)

Most of these stereotypes are about gender expression, not gender identity. I am male and pretty much masculine gender conforming. I am nonbinary because my gender self-image does not match my sex, causing gender dysphoria, which I treated with surgical transition. I do not see how I am breaking a stereotype.

My theory is that social gender roles emerge from biological sex differences, and there is something innate that causes most humans to latch on to one binary gender identity in early childhood. Those that do not latch on to the gender identity associated with their sex are trans.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What’s the difference between gender identity and gender expression?

Is the identity how one relates themselves to performing gender (gender expression)?

How is performing gender not sexist? We assign certain sorts performances as male and female, and saying one is a man because they prefer performing masculinity is saying that man is defined by the performance of masculinity.

Why do so many of us never experience a gender identity? What if we don’t perform femininity and still recognise ourselves as women? That cannot work if we’re using the ‘you are the gender you perform the norms of’.

What biological sex differences specifically lead to gender norms such as women caring about prettiness, being overly emotional, being inherently submissive, and being incapable of unemotional thinking? What’s the biological cause behind women being considered less capable of operating machines?

[–]worried19 8 insightful - 3 fun8 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

Those that do not latch on to the gender identity associated with their sex are trans.

But not all of us are trans. Some of us acknowledge our biological sex and reject the gender identity associated with that sex.

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

And a much larger number of people acknowledge our biological sex and have no idea what the hell "gender identity" is.

Over history, a majority of people have struggled with/against the sexist sex stereotypes and expectations placed upon them as children and other times at life. Some people have made a big deal of rejecting sex stereotypes and defying expectations, but most people have grappled with these issues in their own ways without fanfare, making concessions and compromises here & there, drawing lines in the sand in other places, all in an effort to find some middle ground whilst getting on with life - obtaining an education, working, having & raising kids, dealing with health issues, caring for their parents, dealing with life's ups and downs, joys and heartbreaks etc. But the idea that all the people on earth either"latch on to the gender identity associated with their sex" or end up as trans is preposterous.

Take all the young men just entering adulthood in the US who had to spend "the best years of their lives" in the military in World War 2. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, millions of boys & men age in the US suddenly had their lives totally changed. Whilst the age of the men drafted was 18-45, all the young men 18-25 knew they were the ones who'd be put on the front lines to risk their lives - and every boy of 15, 16 or 17 knew he'd soon have to serve in the armed forces too. Those boys & young men were terrified of what they knew would be expected of them all because of their sex. Many cried in fear, then felt worse about themselves because as boys & men they knew they were supposed to feel brave and thrilled at the prospect of battle, not scared shitless and "bawling like little girls."

My own father, who ended up as a Navy recon and bomber pilot in the Pacific, was scared out of his wits, and traumatized by the whole experience - and sex stereotypes and sexist expectations were a part of it. It was his manly duty, he'd always been told, to fight for his country if the need arose. But he'd also been raised to believe that real men should be protective of children and women, and so he had terrible qualms about the many missions he went on when the targets for the bombs he & his crew dropped on Japan and other Japanese occupied territories were factories and industrial plants that they knew were all "manned" by women & children, & relatively young children (coz all the older boys had been conscripted into the military). All those ideas about what being a man meant, and the pressure to live up to manly codes of behavior whilst at the same time breaking fundamental tenets of those manly codes, screwed up men like my father big time - and for the rest of their lives. Talk about dysphoria over sex roles and stereotypes - the men who fought in WW2, and the women whose lives on the home front changed radically virtually overnight too, all had it in spades.

Similarly, during the period of the US military intervention in Vietnam hundreds of thousands of young men suffered what today could be characterized as "gender dysphoria" over the expectations - no, the demands - placed on them coz of their sex. It's just that they interpreted their distress, shame and feelings of conflict, panic, foreboding and sense of having no escape and no choice in different ways, gave it different names, and tried to resolve it in other ways. As books like Tim O'Brien's The Thing They Carried, Michael Herr's Dispatches and movies like The Deer Hunter, Born on The Fourth of July, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Coming Home show.

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My theory is that social gender roles emerge from biological sex differences, and there is something innate that causes most humans to latch on to one binary gender identity in early childhood.

So how do you account for the fact that most people do not have a "gender identity" at all? If "gender identity" is innate and arises from biology, how come the term and concept only were invented and introduced in the 1960s & 1970s - and only began to come into widespread use amongst a significant chunk of the population in the 21st century? How did all the experts who over the course of many decades studied, charted & described the stages & processes of child development from infancy into adulthood - including how humans develop our sense of self (self-concept) & sense of worth - miss it? And how come even today when the idea that everyone has a "gender identity" and "gender" is so central to the human psyche is popular particularly amongst youth and those who consider themselves "progressive," do so many people find such views both untrue and objectionable?

I find it telling that the clinicians who came up with the term and concept of "gender identity" in the 1960s and helped to popularize it later through their influential books - Robert Stoller and John Money - not only were men, but they were sexologists whose clinical practices and research were heavily or mainly focused on a very small, select substrata of humanity: men with the "deviant" sexual interests that Money re-named "paraphilias" (previously, sexologists had called them "perversions," which was jettisoned coz it sounded too pejorative); persons with disorders of physical sex development (whom both erroneously and cruelly called "hermaphrodites, and for whom Money advocated genital surgeries to make them look more "normal"); and psychiatric patients who at the time were considered to have psycho-sexual "pathologies," including what was then called "transsexualism."

Indeed, Stoller and Money based their ideas on "masculinity," "femininity," "gender," "gender role" and "gender identity" not on in-depth study of the general population, but on their work with "transsexuals" and homosexual persons who represented only that small segment of the gay and lesbian population who fit the most stereotyped views of what homosexuals are like (in other words, those who fit either the "girly man"/"swish" or "stone butch"/"bull dyke" mold). [My apologies for using terms some might find offensive, but I'm trying to show the narrow frame of reference sexologists like Stoller & Money had.] In other words, Stoller and Money drew their ideas about "gender" and "gender identity" precisely from those persons in the population preoccupied with issues of "femininity" and "masculinity" and "hung up on" trying to "present" an image to the world based on sex stereotypes, albeit the sex stereotypes associated with the opposite sex rather than their own. Then they extrapolated from that select group ideas they claimed were "universal truths" that pertain to the entire human race. Similar to you saying that because you personally have a "gender identity," then "most humans" must have one too, and it's caused by "something innate" in our species arising from the fact that humans are anisogamous and sexually dimorphic.

[–]penelopekitty 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My theory is that social gender roles emerge from biological sex differences, and there is something innate that causes most humans to latch on to one binary gender identity in early childhood. Those that do not latch on to the gender identity associated with their sex are trans.

The very definition of bio essentialism.