For GC: what makes someone trans?

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[–]Spikygrasspod 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Brains are physical, I just don't think what we can currently measure about them should overrule the whole package of physical sex. I would also not use height, elbow thickness, or hair length to determine a person's sex, though I might expect these to differ by sex.

Oh, I do think men and women are psychologically different (though I don't know to what extent this is socialised vs innate, if such a distinction even makes sense), I just think behaviour is a much, much better and more useful measure than neurological scans. Some of the salient features of male behaviour are a greatly increased statistical tendency to sexual predation and physical and social aggression. That's why I like women only spaces. Neurology is not meaningful in this context because it has virtually no predictive or explanatory power with our present measurements, as far as I know.

Can you point me to where neurological sex has been reliably measured and described? I got the impression that the best we can do is say that men and women have a 'mosaic' of brain features that a programme can tell apart with low accuracy? I have also seen a study that shows at least some trans women have brains similar to women and gay men (in one small, specific and potentially unimportant way, kind of like elbows... the fact that gay men and women have similarities here should tell us that this is not a good or comprehensive measure of anything like neurological sex) but I have never seen anyone suggest either that they can reliably tell female from male brains, let alone that trans people's brains can be reliably classified as the sex they identify as without previous knowledge.

So yeah, I'm still concerned that you're preferring a virtually unmeasurable definition of woman/man (neurological sex) over a concrete, highly reliable measure (actual sex), and that the effect if not the purpose is simply to allow men access to everything formerly reserved for women, including the word itself.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

It’s so strange for tra to try and make sex about brains. Sex is sexually reproductive differences. It’s like there’s this weird underlying idea that human biology is distinctly defined in a different way to any other animal. Like, sure duh, animals are all sexed but not humans.

[–]Spikygrasspod 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yes, it is strange. You know what I think? I think men invent femininity, their own picture of how women should be, and force it on women with violence, threats, humiliation, "medicine", grooming, economic coercion, advertising and so on. And they fall in love with their own invention of femininity, which is so much better than actual women, who, after all, have minds of their own and bodies that answer nature's purposes, not men's. And then they say femininity is the real thing and women don't exist (I've gotta credit de Beauvoir and Daly for these ideas).

I think trans and non trans men alike do this. I think if the trans movement were to succeed, it would fail. That is to say, if men could successfully strip femaleness from every social meaning associated with it (in short, from femininity), they would be able to enter the category at will but it would no longer be appealing to them. It gets its appeal from the sexual aspect which relies on female bodies. I don't think they'd want to wear makeup and women's clothing if these were no longer associated with women. So they actually need to weaken the definitional criteria of "women" to let a few people in, without changing the content much. They can do this because most of us haven't actually changed our understanding of what women are, we just added "trans women" as an addendum whose logical incoherence we paper over in our minds.

Anyway, that was a much longer aside than I intended. Long speech short sense: neurological sex is only useful to the movement because it conflates femaleness and femininity without destroying the category "woman" (since females are still presumed to be similar enough to each other to produce a standard to which trans women can be matched) while being unfalsifiable. The second it becomes practicably measurable it will be dropped.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Damn that was well put. I agree with you entirely

[–]Spikygrasspod 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Cheers!

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

A TRA on Twitter the other day actually did claim that humans aren't sexed, only (other) animals are.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Oh goddamnit why was I still surprised by this