[Discussion] How do trans women feel like women?

submitted by deity from self.GenderCritical

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Anna_Nym 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I agree. GNC people are still socialized according to their sex. Socialization occurs through negative reinforcement as well as positive reinforcement. Socialization is the interaction of personal actions with other's reactions, so it is not something that ever happens only according to internal perspectives of self.

It also seems inconsistent with the current activist claims that trans isn't about the gender binary. But if gender expectations or socializations aren't what are defining man/woman, then how can there be significance to whether a person feels more belonging with gendered norms belong to one sex or the other? In my pre-peak days, this bothered me a lot. I could never square the claims of gender transgressiveness with the reality of gender conformity.

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

I think you're right about the negative reinforcement and the fact that socialisation happens with others, not by oneself. I actually often felt like the stupid stereotypes of girls that I saw didn't apply to me because I wasn't 'like that' (I thought I was an individual exception... it took me much longer to realise the whole thing was BS). This didn't stop me from developing a lot of gendered behaviours. I mean, there are so many. And it's easier to reject the explicit messages, but harder to reject the subtle ones, which are manifold. To say my socialisation didn't affect me because I didn't consciously endorse it would be to say I'm the only animal here that doesn't respond to behavioural conditioning.

Yeah, there are trans people who value the gender binary because they want to change categories, not destroy the categories. But obviously non-binary folks want to escape the categories (like many of us... no idea why I would need a special dispensation for that, though). Maybe being non-binary is a way to make an individual escape while still 'respecting' i.e. leaving intact the gender categories for those who want them. I don't know. I know that two key values of that community are inclusiveness and respecting/validating people's identities. That means you might sometimes be in a position where you have to validate, say, two identities that are based on two conflicting views about gender. It's easily done, though. Just say "TWAW, NBPAWTSTA"

[–]Anna_Nym 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I've seen many theorize that non-binary identities are a way of personal gender abolishment in a time when people have lost the belief in actual gender abolishment as a possibility. I don't really know because while I have many acquaintances who identify as non-binary, I'm not socially allowed to question them about it. However, what they do say seems to me like conflating masculine with male/man and feminine with female/man (but yet, they would never say a butch trans woman is invalid, so it's not 100% consistent even at that level).

When I originally started seeing non-binary used as an identity, it was actually very coherent and IMHO, healthy. It was used by trans-identified people who were not in denial of their biological sex. It referred to the fact that through medical transition, their bodies mixed features of both biological sexes. So they recognized that estrogen and breast implants/other forms of surgery did not turn them into biological females but felt that it also removed them from the category of biological male, which is something I can agree with. IIRC, these were the type of advocates who pushed for and won legal recognition of non-binary. But apparently that legal recognition was based on self-ID instead of medical reality, and non-binary identities lost that medical grounding.

I've started to find it all a little insulting. Do people who identify as non-binary actually think the rest of us go around in perfect happiness conforming to our proscribed gender roles and stereotypes? Do they really think "woman" is just a set of gendered expectations with no underlying biological reality? And if so, how do they think women's oppression was enforced on women? (also, why aren't they advocating for the removal of female/male separation in prisons and sports if they truly believe there is no biological need for the separation? Wouldn't that solve the obvious problem of accommodating non-binary identities?)

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

I didn't know non-binary used to be used in that way. That's interesting, thank you.

As for how it's used now... yes, it has the potential to be a little insulting. It sometimes seems to mean "I'm not like other girls"... as though the rest of us are.

Yeah, I don't know what they think will ultimately happen if we ignore biological sex and categorise people by self-identity. If everyone did that, sex based rights and categories would collapse, even though our need for them would still exist. But of course only a smallish number of people are identifying in and out of these categories, so this debate could go on for a long time before the downsides of ID-based definitions become apparent to everyone.