According to Elizabeth Spelman's 1988 book: Inessential Woman 'gender realism' is "the view that women have some social feature in common that makes them women" – so there is an official term for TRAs: gender realists

submitted by SnowAssMan from philpapers.org

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

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Vari4 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

The examples you give are sex statements, not gender statements. The words man and woman designate sex, not gender. Adult human male. Adult human female.

I think this shouldn't be taken for granted. It's perfectly reasonable to say that the terms "male" and "female" refer to sex and "man" and "woman" refer to gender. To be gender critical (or at least trans-critical) one just needs to assert that there is some type of close connection between the two.

I think you make a key mistake when you try to classify all gender critical people as believing in a common conception of gender or sex. I see us as more like athiests - we just don't believe in the possibility of transition.

For context - my own view is that

(1) there are inequalities between men and women - these inequalities are statistically significant and politically significant. They demand explanation. (2) Not all inequalities between men and women can be explained with references to mere biology alone (3) the differences between men and women that cannot be explained with reference to mere biology are explained by the fact that we live in a culture where male and female babies are separated at birth, treated differently, trained to behave differently, and trained to treat each other differently. It is this system that genders us. To be a woman is to be born female under patriarchy. (4) Without this system many the majority of the most obvious and important inequalities between men and women wouldn't exist. It may even be comprehensible to say that in such a world there wouldn't really be 'men' and 'women' anymore in a similar way in which in a world without law schools there wouldn't be any lawyers.

You might see this as if we fundamentally disagree - however i don't think we're that far apart. You reduce the concept 'gender' to a set of culturally constructed behaviours. I reduce it to the system that causes people to behave in these ways.

The key difference between us is that

(i) I tie the concepts of 'man' and 'woman' to gender whereas you tie them to sex. (ii) it appears that you believe it's possible for people to transition gender without changing sex. For example; if a man starts behaving in a feminine way then he may still be a man but you shouldn't have trouble saying that this man has transitioned gender! (question: is this correct? it appears to be what you are saying when you conceptualise gender as being unrelated to "man" and related to "sex stereotypes" - which are presumably stereotypes of behaviour.)

Personally, I don't think it's possible for a man to transition gender no matter what he does - even if he acts feminine or cuts off his balls he will have still been raised in a society that would have trained him to behave in a certain way which disposes him to treat women like shit and that's what makes him a man.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Sex: male & female

Gender: masculine & feminine

Man: adult human male

Sex terms: male, boy, man, female, girl, woman

Gender roles: masculine & feminine roles

"Trans-womxyn" & "trans-men" are inaccurate terms. Basically changing language to serve their ideology, instead of reality. Trans people refer to men with a cross-gender self-identification as "women" & even "female", never male, nor men & not even as feminine. The only legitimate terms are the sex terms, which is why they have appropriated them to refer to the constructs: masculinity & femininity.

[–]Vari4 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I understand you're not the user that i was replying to.

But are you agreeing with them that it is true to say that "a man who puts on a dress and some lippy has transitioned gender whilst still being a man and an adult male"?

TBH I don't think it's accurate to call people like Bradly Manning or Bruce Jenner "transgender" because they haven't transitioned anything. They were men, they are men - they have transitioned nothing. At most they are transvestities.

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

According to Jenner he has had "the surgery", if that's what you were referring to. Changing sex isn't possible, but 'transition' is the trans version of coming out (when they refer to their transition as "coming out" instead, that's just appropriation). They transition by changing their name & pronouns. Nowadays they can "legally transition" too. Often they "medically transition" in addition to that. Once society starts treating them as if they were female, whether they pass or not (celebrities like Jenner will never pass because everyone knows the truth) that's when they have "fully transitioned". Transition is often used as a shorthand for medical transition, but we should probably distinguish between the two terms more often, in order to avoid confusion. Full medical transition would include genital amputation/inversion, which 30% get done.

Transgender people believe that people "are" or "have" a gender. They are confused. Gender doesn't work like that. You can't have masculinity, or femininity. They are using gender as a shorthand for gender identity, likewise they are using gender identity incorrectly too, as what they are actually referring to is a "preferred sex".

Transgender person: someone whose sex & preferred sex are mismatched

Transgender is an umbrella term & used to include cross-dressers, transvestites & transsexuals. Nowadays it includes transvestites & transsexuals, but excludes cross-dressers. The movement is androcentric, binary centric & centres trans medicalism. The assumed/default/normative transgender person is a gender dysphoric transsexual man who identifies as a woman & is on hormones & has had a number of cosmetic surgeries to alter his male anatomy to resemble female anatomy to the point where he passes – this demographic is the privileged social majority within the microcosm.