Any masculine women feel a loss when tomboys come out as transgender/nonbinary

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-31T00:47:19+00:00

I don't know the intended difference either. But I do know why genderfree is now associated with gender critical women. A gender critical woman came out on Twitter as "genderfree" some time ago based on her workplace's provided LGBT+ identity definitions. This made her eligible for an LGBT+ award (which I believe she won, but I don't remember her name so can't fact check. Also, this was on Twitter so it's always possible she made everything up. I don't think she did.)

Because she was previously known as a TERF, trans activists were convinced she was trolling and appropriating the "genderfree" identity. They were almost certainly correct in the sense that I, too, am positive she continues to identify as a woman. But they were wrong in the sense that she was absolutely not appropriating the genderfree identity. She 100% fit the provided definition. By their own rules, it was her identity to claim and use. Other gender critical women adopted genderfree as a similar troll/not troll.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-31T00:31:31+00:00

Also, internalized misogyny and being in overly woke circles where cishets are looked down on. I would be very surprised if the latter is not a factor in the OP's case.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-31T00:23:31+00:00

The above is the anti-Galloway set of bullet points. To understand why CanLit was so upset about what happened with Galloway, you need to know things like "[a]fter studying the matter, Boyd threw out nearly every allegation made against him, including the [sexual] assault claim Galloway had learned about in Ohio" and "According to a close friend, many of the complaints filed were petty: one male faculty member allegedly groused that Galloway didn’t respect poetry; another objected to his enthusiasm for a Grumpy Cat meme on a Facebook post."

The process was very opaque, which allowed everyone to speculate about exactly what was witnessed fact, what was allegation, and what the actual charges even were.

I don't know if I personally think Galloway was wronged or not. It's hard to say without knowing what evidence there was about the alleged sexual assault. He has won two court cases, which makes me think that there is something there to the process complaints. I don't take a court victory as evidence about whether the assault happened, however, because I wasn't born yesterday.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-29T20:47:38+00:00

I think the idea that no one can be conscious of privilege is a sign of how watered down and overgeneralized the concept has been. I don't live in a current monarchy, but I'm fairly certain the artistocracy are very aware of their privilege relative to commoners. I am also fairly certain that prior to the feminist revolution, men were very aware of their privilege relative to women. In Jim Crow or apartheid, white people were very aware of their privilege relative to Black people. When there are systems of difference written into law, everyone is aware of those systems of difference.

But in egalitarian systems, we're talking about the gap between the way society is theoretically supposed to function and the way it functions in lived experience. This is a much squishier concept. I think "privilege" becomes used as a way to paper over that squishiness. We should be doing the work to listen to each other and ground our understanding of inequality in site-specific and time-specific systems. What inequality comes from intentional actions? What inequality comes from historical legacies? What inequality comes from demographic numerical differences? What inequality comes from biology? "Privilege" often lets activists skip that analysis.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-29T05:03:51+00:00

WTF??? "“It’s a really important case, because it’s going to set a precedent for other states as well. I think the next generation of these bathroom bills are these sports bills,” said Susan K. Cahn, a history professor at the University of Buffalo who specializes in gender and sexuality in sports. “It’s sort of the latest wave in [the] traditionalist defense of sports as they are in the male imagination, the idea … that men are fundamentally, biologically superior to women, and therefore someone that was assigned male at birth should never compete in women’s competition.”

How can a specialist in gender and sports portray male physical superiority in sports as a figment of men's imagination rather than a physical reality? The stats are unambiguous! I would love to believe that the sexes are physically equal. That would be a glorious world. Unfortunately, it's simply not real. It really feels like a lot of academics are living in a theory-driven la la land.

If it were true that men weren't physically superior, then the real solution would be to get rid of single sex categories. Binary sex-segregated categories don't even work with gender ideology. Does no one think of the poor non-binary folk forced to misgender themselves to access athletics? (NOT sarcasm, by the way. This drives me up a wall every time I read one of these articles. It's such an obvious inconsistency). The only reason to have sex-segregated categories is because we actually do need them.

And once again, it's all about the personal validation: "If I win the case, it legitimizes the ultimate fact that I’m no different than a cisgender girl,” she said. “I should still be able to compete on the team. It would make me feel that society is valuing me as a member.”

Hecox doesn't care about what's true or fair. She IS different from a cisgender girl, and she knows this. But rather than running for fun or participating in a research study to get more data or trying to be an actual trailblazer and advocate for trans competitive categories, she just wants her non-existent femaleness validated.

But yet, people will still tell JK Rowling that she's just a bigot for saying biological sex is being erased.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-29T04:44:35+00:00

"Privilege" is in the list of things like "emotional labor," "intersectionality," and "cultural appropriation" that were perfectly good concepts as used in academia by people who spent the time to be grounded in the theory.

Unfortunately, as these phrases went through the equivalent of a game of telephone migrating from academy through blogs, Tumblr, and Twitter into pop culture, they've become phrases used to short circuit thought.

Too often "privilege", in particular, is used as a rhetorical tool to dehumanize and decrease empathy.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-29T04:38:03+00:00

I think "class privilege" is useful because there will always be a class that holds privilege over other classes.

But I don't think "male privilege" or "white privilege" are useful because they presuppose the conclusion. Power can shift. Because men historically were privileged along the axis of sex doesn't mean they always will be (although I'm fairly glum about this one!). Because white people were historically privileged in the US along the axis of race/ethnicity doesn't mean they always will be, and with "white privilege" there is the additional complication of not having a clear, coherent definition of which groups count as "white."

I think privilege as an analytical tool is overbroad. I see it as a way to dodge performing a specific, situational understanding of power dynamics. But those specific, nuanced, thought-through analyses are exactly what we need on the left right now. There's too much use of phrases to short-circuit really looking at and seeing how phenomenon are operating. That's what gets us things like "cis privilege."

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-28T21:17:21+00:00

One relatively simple place to start is with school boards and school curricula. If your local school board is looking for community volunteers for reviewing sex education, sign up. If yours already has an approved curriculum, check its content around gender identity and puberty, particularly if you're in a blue district.

It is very probable that you will not face push back if you flag content that uses "people with penises" and "people with vagina" languages. Most parents don't expect that in sex ed and don't want that in sex ed. They expect gender identity content to talk about dysphoria, medical transition, and anti-bullying. They will be like many of us were: shocked when we saw what was happening with language.

Other places to start is with sports and supporting girls like Selina Soule. You can see in comment sections on articles about her case that most people understand how unfair it is to make girls compete against non-medically transitioned boys.

Again, this is another area where transgender inclusion happened basically in secret. People assumed sports federations required medical transition and that there was solid research that HRT reduces male sports advantage. When cases expose that this is not the case, even many progressives understand this is unfair. That's part of why the IAAF verdict on intersex XY women was so poorly reported: journalists knew that if they accurately reported Semenya is an adrogen-sensitive XY person and that the other two women's 800 Olympic medalists were as well, very few people would disagree with the IAAF verdict. That would weaken the prospects for transwomen.

I think the more pushback starts in areas of blatant erasure and unfairness, the more people will question in general. At least, that's what happened for me.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-28T20:57:47+00:00

It's such blatant bullshit. There is a lot of mental illness in online TRA spaces, so I'm not going to say that no one literally believes that woman is an abstract concept with no connection to biological reality.

But I am going to say that the organizations backing this generally know better, and most of the activists know better. They know that women's spaces are segregated because of biological sex, not because of gender identity. They know that women face sexism because of biological sex, not because of gender identity. They know woman is a word that refers to adult human females and girl refers to juvenile human females. They know that the reason they can medically transition is because "woman" has a biological reference point. They know that the reason they choose to dress in certain ways is because of the gendered stereotypes imposed upon girls and women.

This is all rhetorical sleight of hand. It's infuriating how many people with power play into it.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-28T20:48:12+00:00

This is so sad. :(

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-28T04:11:36+00:00

No one was having a discussion about testosterone and male suicide rates. You went off on a tangent and expected her to be interested in that tangent with you. She's not. I suspect most of us aren't.

This is also problematic framing: "Compared to men, all women have 'abnormally' low testosterone levels." Women aren't men. We don't have abnormally low testosterone levels. We have the levels that our healthy for a woman's system. Your framing makes me wonder how you came to be on the GC board.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-28T03:49:54+00:00

I know this helps people because I have acquaintances who have made the woman to non-binary identification switch.

But I don't understand how it helps. I'm not familiar with this comedian, so maybe she plans some form of medical transition. In the cases of the people I know, they did not transition in any way. So all they did was replace their biologically accurate label with a made-up label. At some level, they must know that everyone they interact with will still correctly identify them as women. What has actually changed?

It also does feel like externalising the misogyny as Spikeygrasspod says. Instead of broadening possibilities for women (correctly!), it's narrowing them.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-27T01:13:37+00:00

You can be agender. It's asinine, in my opinion, because it has no meaning. But it is a commonly recognized gender identity in rad queer circles. You can also be "genderfree," but there was a thing with a GC feminist using genderfree to qualify for an LGBTQ+ award at her workplace. I think it's now considered a TERF dogwhistle. But as the GC feminist pointed out, she was just using workplace provided gender identity definitions. It arguably was trolling, but it was also sincere. Many of us are agender or genderfree. (presumably, there's a difference between those two terms, but I don't know what they are).

I'm agender by gender identity definitions. I occasionally debated coming out as agender when I was in super woke spaces because I was so uncomfortable by not knowing how saying I was a woman was interpreted. I felt like I was being coerced into this lie of having some essence of woman feeling in my soul. But instead, I peaked and am here.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T20:38:48+00:00

I tried to track down the history of the term to fact check my memory, but there was too much noise because of stuff like this: "Children who are intersex are assigned female or male based on what medical professionals anticipate their gender identity will be. Oftentimes, intersex children are subjected to surgical operations to change their anatomy to fit their assigned sex. "

Did the person who wrote that really think doctors are out there trying to guess at the gender identity of the intersex baby?

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T20:18:37+00:00

Note the equation of femininity and womanhood in that text exchange, too. Both of the participants need to unpack that. I'm not sure when it became so confusing for people to distinguish between sex, a biological class, and masculine/femininity, a set of culturally constructed stereotypes. It seems this is where everything has gone off the rails.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T20:15:30+00:00

But JK Rowling is a transphobic bigot because no one is trying to erase sex.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T20:11:00+00:00

This doesn't make any sense. I know the feminist critiques he's trying to reference. But those critiques are talking about stereotypes of femininity, not biological womanhood. (Lower-class white women were excluded from femininity, too. The class aspects to these critiques always gets dropped.)

There has never been a point in history when anyone literally could not tell women of color from men of color. That's part of the history of violence that he references! This was sex-specific violence and sex-segregated coerced labor.

Can he possibly believe what he's writing? Can he possibly not know how incoherent and offensive what he's saying is? And why do men always feel so comfortable defining womanhood?

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T20:00:40+00:00

I don't think the "assigned at birth" language would ever have been normalized pre-Twitter. It's appropriated language that is obviously incoherent.

It also has the flaw that it neatly created a trans activism-compatible way to talk about women as a sexed identity without using the verbotten word women. I've seen occasional posts from TRAs that are trying to stigmatize discussion of AFAB issues as transphobic to try and close that accidentally created loophole. I assume it was successful as I see far more of the "people with..." language than AFAB.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T19:54:34+00:00

Where is the irony? Are you trying to say that recording sex is synonymous with assigning sex? Or that the existence of rare health conditions means that the normative experience doesn't exist?

In modern medicine, no "assigning" takes places in terms of intersex conditions either. Doctors do observe the physical features of the baby's body to ultimately conclude on the correct sex and medical diagnosis. There are more steps involved, but it's still observation.

Intersex advocacy, in part, exists because doctors have performed medical operations on babies to assign them a sex. That is what the phrase "assigning" means. It is an actual action.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T19:46:03+00:00

My understanding is that the "assigned at birth" phrase was used in intersex advocacy to refer to cases where the intersex condition caused development of ambiguous genitalia, and the doctor operated on the baby to normalize the body. It was literal.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T19:33:27+00:00

"Choice feminism" is a problem because it denies class effects. Talking about one's own personal lived experience and relationship to choices isn't choice feminism. It's sharing life experiences. I think it is an important part of feminism to understand how women navigate that dance between the personal and the general.

I also do think it's important to understand the subjective experience of positive aspects of things that are bad for us. I used to wear high heels because I wanted to be taller. It was straightforward. I generally didn't wear stilettos because they hurt, but when I wore them, I did feel like a bad ass. Of course, the feeling of "bad ass"ness came from media images of the femme fatale. For my generation, the most powerful images of women that we saw were generally also sexy. I think my work as a feminist is to acknowledge that cultural layer and work to critique and change it. But it's also to advocate for shoe companies making better designed heels so that those who want the height boost suffer less to get it. And for what it's worth, platforms never hurt me to wear.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T19:15:27+00:00

I agree with you. In my goth days, I wore makeup as a tool of self-expression. Goth makeup was not the culturally acceptable form of makeup for women and women and men both wore heavy makeup. That was back in the day when goths regularly did full face of elaborate design. No one pressured me into it. If there was any pressure, it was away from it because people considered this form of makeup weird and sometimes scary.

This is a completely different context and way of relating to makeup than my mother waking up early to put on a full face of makeup because her career would be penalized if she didn't. I have never worn a full face of makeup to work, although I do occasionally put on mascara to hide looking worn out or sick.

Context matters.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T07:34:17+00:00

No. Passing trans men will be treated as male. Otherwise, they would be non-passing.

That does not erase their years of female socialization or female biology, however.

I think this is true for passing trans women, too. They will be treated as female. But they will also have been raised and socialized as male and have male biology.

It's why I don't think trans women are men but rather trans women. Likewise, I don't think trans men are women but rather trans men. I think most of the tensions between competing rights can be resolved if we stay grounded in the material reality of what the classed identities are.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T07:28:04+00:00

I think whether gender can ever truly be abolished depends on the question of how much of gender-based preferences are truly innate versus culturally determined. I don't know the answer. But if there are sex-linked differences, I think gender will always be with us in some form because humans observe and generalize. I know of no examples of cultures that have managed to eradicate all subtle pressures to conform to the general expectation for one's greater identity group.

However, I do think those pressures can be reduced or heightened. I believe we were making great strides to reduce those pressures for both women and men prior to the Tumblr microidentity explosion. I think we are seeing a huge step back.

I wouldn't be on this site if I believed contemporary gender ideology was working as it markets itself. I wish NB people had a good strategy because then I could simply change my pronouns and opt out of sex-based oppression. But it's a fantasy based on the transgender and transhumanist wish (in some cases, delusion) that sexed bodies aren't real. Sexed bodies are real, however. I can call myself agender, but anyone who looks at me knows that I am a woman.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T06:48:35+00:00

That is not true. Jews believe that the Torah is the word of G-d as given to Moses. There are also many prophecies in Haftorah that are the word of G-d.

Believing that the Torah is the literal word of G-d does not mean that all words are interpreted literally or that all Jews believe the Torah should be read as a historical narration of events.

Likewise, the Qor'an is very poetic. It is the revealed word of G-d, but just as in Judaism, there is a lot of room for interpreting the meaning of the words.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T06:36:46+00:00

One thing that I would like to see Western feminists do more is platform Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists. There are movements like the White Wednesday movement that deserve far more press. There is eloquent writing and moving art about the experience of hijab. But I feel like instead there's a weird silencing, as though letting Muslim or ex-Muslim feminists speak about their personal negative experiences with cultural practices linked to Islam is promoting Islamophobia. I see that with Ayaan Hirsi Ali as well.

I agree that banning is not a good path. Women need freedom to navigate the constraints of cultural demands as best they can.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T05:48:48+00:00

I went to sleepovers. Neither pillow fights nor oral sex ever happened at them. Our most stereotypical activities were playing Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board and Ouija.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-26T00:03:21+00:00

My divide is between trans people who are willing to discuss sex-based needs and those who are not. I don't care who is attracted to who.

I think back in the day, there was probably a more significant difference. The old school HSTS wanted to be closeted and just live their lives.

I think it's a good thing that trans people generally are safe to be out. I think a closeted life can't be healthy. Heck, I feel stress just being closeted about GC beliefs! I can't imagine how stressful it would be to have to lie about significant chunks of my entire past as well as the material reality of my body! But the result of the lack of closeting is that we're seeing that a lot of HSTS trans folk are just as cruel in their entitlement as AGP folk and that some AGP folk (like Debbie Hayton) are pretty reality based.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-25T23:50:08+00:00

I don't see this technology as viable because gestation is so complicated. I think it would likely cause a class-based stratification of womahood if it happened. Potential positive effects are that career-oriented women would have an easier time developing their careers, and it would make it easier to preserve gender equality in relationships. I think the physical realities of pregnancy and childbearing are under discussed as a cause of why relationships slide into stereotypical gender roles.

But if this technology happens in the real world, there is no way it will be cheap. So women who either can't afford it or have a religious/other type of motivation for physically gestating a child will still deal with the physical effects of pregnancy. I think they will be at a greater disadvantage because more elite women will have no need to advocate for policies to help them. I think they will likely feel some guilt that will sublimate into resentment or disgust.

But even though I think it would be dystopian, I also would have loved the option of artificial pregnancy. I would have liked to have more children, but pregnancy/breastfeeding had too great a negative impact on my life.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-25T23:38:00+00:00

I don't see your post labeled as NSFW, for whatever that's worth.

What do you want to talk about with hijab?

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-25T23:33:47+00:00

To me, this is more about the destabilizing force of the Internet and LGBTQ+ organizations abandoning safeguarding. If you actively promote the idea that men and women are feelings, and being a man or woman means you deeply identify with the feeling of manness and feeling of womanness, of course teens and many adults are going to think they're non-binary!

Because how many people really, truly feel like a man or a woman as opposed to simply recognizes their biological reality as man/woman? What does it even mean to feel like a man or a woman? So expose a teen to Gender Spectrum sex ed content, reinforce this with Tumbr/Tumblr-esque social media bubbles, and of course, there will be a ton of enbies. Generally, if you ask, they will be basing their ideas of woman and man on sexist stereotypes. But since it's now literal violence to ask questions and you may be literally killing them to point out those stereotypes, no one can push back.

There also is no cost to the enby identity. No one needs to make a physical committment. Trans activism also expects women to broaden our definitions to include enbies in our spaces and language--even though this is wildly inconsistent with the tenets of trans activism. So enbies don't even have to sacrifice that. Instead, the burden is placed on women.

It is amazing how effective this rebranding of patriarchy is.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-25T23:23:06+00:00

I think there are some who do. I can't remember the names, but I remember reading a few articles by older transwomen using their experiences with transition to advocate for equity in the workplace. They talked about things like their work output being negatively compared to their "brother's" work or the difference in respect/assumed expertise they observed.

But it's definitely not the focus of the contemporary TRA movement.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-25T23:19:51+00:00

And the accepted "inclusive" language in reproductive justice is "people with uteruses" too.

Why should a transwoman expect to be included? They don't deal with either pregnancy or abortions.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-25T00:09:56+00:00

This is the type of thing that I find so problematic about contemporary gender ideology. As an adult, I can roll my eyes at it. But when sex education materials incorporates these concepts, prepubescent and pubescent children are being told by authority figures that there is some kind of woman/girl feeling or man/boy feeling that they're supposed to have in order to be a certain sex.

That's horrible! They're at the exact age when it is normal to feel disconnected from their bodies, scared of their expected adult sexual identity, and have a lot of identity issues. Instead of being given the tools to navigate a bog standard phase of life, this type of ideology is confusing and destabilizing them.

And there's no research or science behind any of this. It's just shit that developed in Tumblr echo chambers. But somehow norms shifted over the past decade such that it's become dangerous in many social circles to say that the emperor has no clothes. Even though none of this makes any sense or has any grounding in material reality. It also is appropriative of the gay rights struggle.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-24T23:50:20+00:00

So is saying "fujoshi don't interact" basically saying that only self-identified gay men are supposed to read/respond to the fiction/art?

This is all so strange to me because back in my days of fandom, slashfic was known to be predominantly by and for straight women. (Femslash was much less popular in all fandoms, and generally seemed to have predominantly lesbian fans. Which makes sense.)

But it was also common to think of straight women's slashfic as a healing tool for exactly the reasons described elsewhere in this thread. No one was stigmatized for it and really, no one could be stigmatized for it because the amount of actual gay men involved in slashfic was negligible.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-24T04:44:23+00:00

I used to be in fandom a long time ago, and this is making me feel old. I am scared to Google. What is a "fujoshi"?

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-24T04:38:49+00:00

I couldn't see it either. She may have settings on her account to limit who can see her stuff so she doesn't get brigaded.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T21:14:59+00:00

That's fair, but the only evidence for butch lesbianism is that the 2003 obituary used female pronouns. I think the weight of evidence is stronger for trans man than butch lesbian in this particular case. (but as I said before, I don't think that makes the casting critique legitimate. However Gill may have thought of him or herself, Gill's physical reality was that of a biological woman)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T07:20:22+00:00

I've been on an early US feminist history kick lately, and based on what I've read, it's more nuanced than saying Black women were systematically excluded. For example, in the famous incident of Ida B. Wells and black suffragettes being told to march at the back of the Woman Suffrage Procession, Virginia Brooks and Belle Squire both offered to march with Wells at the back. When Wells joined the IL delegation out of the crowd, Brooks and Squire linked arms with her to demonstrate racial solidarity and universalism. Alice Paul, the main organizer, was supportive of Black women marching, but was also willing to segregate the march to placate some of the Southern suffragettes.

And in a lot of ways, that experience captures the development/schisms of the US suffragette movement over time as a whole. Many of the initial white suffragettes were abolitionists who worked in partnership with Black women and men and saw the two causes as linked. Black women organized and were part of the US suffragette movement as a whole. But as Southern overt white supremacy became a clear political obstacle, there were schisms around how to negotiate that political reality. Women weren't always organizing together across racial lines.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T06:26:40+00:00

Crenshaw's original writing about intersectionalism was based on a specific discrimination case that involved black women being left unprotected because black men were promoted (thus no racial discrimination) and white women were promoted (thus no sex discrimination). But the concept was more general than black women/black men/white women. As I read Crenshaw's early writing, it was not intended to silence white women or to diminish the impact of sexism on white women. It was to argue for awareness of how specific forms of institutional power can have differential impacts on vulnerable people depending on the intersections of various identities.

The general idea that race, class, and sex combine to produce specific and different ways of experiencing discrimination/privilege predates Crenshaw.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T06:14:20+00:00

I'm trying to follow your point, and I can't follow it at all.

What I understand the OP to be arguing is that "white feminism" is not a useful term because it doesn't describe a concept with material reality. It describes an emotional sense of exclusion. It is used in practice to group a set of women together on the basis of an externally perceived identity rather than an understood shared set of unifying experiences. Furthermore, it is used to rank those women in an hierarchical mode in a lot of spaces, which contributes to silencing. Off the top of my head, immigrant women from Eastern Europe, Jewish women, light-skinned Latinas, light-skinned Arabs, rural white women, white women without college degrees, and white lesbian women are all women who can get grouped into white womenness but who won't necessarily share the life experiences, advantages, or cultural norms that get described as "white women."

As far as I've been able to track it, the term "white feminism" arose as part of a power struggle among the early generation of Internet blogging feminists (specifically out of a conflict on Feministe between Amanda Marcotte, Mikki Kendall, Flavia Dzodan, and some others that I can't remember off the top of my head.)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T05:55:52+00:00

I think you're illustrating the OP's point, though. Sexism disadvantages us all, which is what feminism is supposed to focus on. It's also frustrating to see these conversations get reduced down to black and white, as though those are the only two options in the world (if we're going to play Oppression Olympics, why don't we talk much more about Native American/First Nations women for example? Why don't we acknowledge Asian women's economic success in the US?). I also don't think it makes sense to speak of black and white like these are homogeneous categories when there are many differences within them.

Our goal should be to understand the ways in which our various identities make our experiences of sexism specific. But to do that, we need to actually listen to each other rather than project beliefs onto each other. My personal experiences with feminist spaces is that "intersectional" spaces instead do encourage Oppression Olympics. (The actual concept of "intersectionality" does not do this, but the term has come to be used very differently than what Crenshaw originally wrote about.)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T05:43:14+00:00

Crying is an emotional reaction. It's rarely something people do on purpose and I don't know of a single "Karen" story or video that actually includes tears. The idea of tears as manipulative is something that I've always seen on MRA sites, and I think it's weird and troubling that it was imported into contemporary feminism with so little data or pushback.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T03:05:50+00:00

There's an interview with a cousin that confirms Gill's transness: https://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/article/Dante-Tex-Gill-s-Cousin-Tells-Us-What-Tex-13071088.php

It seems clear that everyone knew Gill was a biological woman, though. (Except perhaps when he married his wife in Hawaii since that wouldn't have been legal at the time)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T02:59:39+00:00

Shouldn't this be given to a trans man if it's not going to be given to a lesbian? What does Our Lady J know about lesbian culture or trans man's experience?

As far as I can tell, there's no documentation that Gill was on T or had any kind of surgery, so the whole thing is silly. He does seem to have identified as a trans man (per an interview with a cousin), but that doesn't actually alter his physical form. It's why these conversations are so incoherent. Sure, this isn't transing the dead and why not respect Gill's pronouns? But in terms of casting, a woman makes more sense than a medically transitioned trans man.

I am glad Johansson didn't end up playing Gill. He was a big person, and there aren't a ton of good roles for bigger actresses. I'd rather Lea Delaria or someone like her play the part.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-22T00:37:47+00:00

Yes, it's a whole house of cards that falls down with any thought. Hence, the aggression around reasonable questions and concerns that may lead to thought.

I think this is also part of why there's such a bitter divide within the trans community between transmedicalists/truscum and tucutes/transtrenders. They're essentially two different populations with different needs.

I think there's been a very successful infiltration of sex ed programs that's led to a generation of Zoomers truly believing in the essentially religious concept of true gendered souls. I don't know how to counter this because it's become so unsayable in leftist spaces to point out the most obvious, common-sense things (such as that biological sex is real, significant, and the root cause of sexism). But it's tragic to see how much people are hurt by it... girls, the most but not just girls.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-21T07:02:27+00:00

Yes, I agree current society is failing our teen girls in horrible ways. I don't think the teen girls are idiots for being failed, though.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-21T06:35:13+00:00

Bari Weiss is in her mid-30s. Her college years don't seem particularly relevant to me. I don't think they would be relevant to anyone else if not for her other writings.

(That story is also contested. The counter-POV it is that Weiss protested a professor for his treatment of Jewish students, not his views on Palestine/Israel. I haven't seen either framing put forward by an impartial person in an impartial way, so I don't know whether one is closer to the truth than the other. Since I don't care about Weiss's college activism, I don't plan to put any energy into trying to find out.)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-21T06:28:17+00:00

I'm familiar with him on Twitter. He's part of a biology-acknowledging circle of trans folk, so he's already outside of the TRA crowd.

I wish more people would read voices like him and that we could suck the oxygen away from TRAs. I thought this was beautifully written and a clear articulation of how the TRA language hurts trans people as well. Heck, although he sounds truly dysphoric, maybe in a different fork in the world where Tumblr didn't help drive queer activism off the rails, he would have come to accept himself as both a woman and a lesbian without needing medical transition.

Back in the 2000-2010 years, no one questioned trans men's belonging in the lesbian community. The first time I can remember anyone questioning it was a trans woman on Feministing (Jos Truitt), and it mostly seemed motivated by cotton ceiling crap. I recall the commentariat being pretty resistant and pointing out that the realities of physical bodies are part of sexual orientation. I also recall people saying it was gross to essentially police other people's desires.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-21T06:12:05+00:00

You read through the end, right? That's just describing his thought process at the time. His whole point is that he understands now that what he thought at 12 years old was oversimplified and wrong. (not shocking given how young he was!)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-15T04:56:13+00:00

No, as far as I know, the hostility to her started when she wrote an article about the IDW back when that was a thing. It may have been with the Mirai Nagasu tweet, but I think the Nagasu tweet only became a thing because she was already disliked due to the IDW article.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-15T02:29:23+00:00

Evan Urquhart and his wife mostly fit the lesbian couple description. He and his wife have both written about how his transition raised identity issues for them because of that change from lesbian couple to straight couple.

One of the lesbian detrans women I follow on Twitter also wrote an article about the tensions that transition caused for her marriage. I can't remember exactly what she wrote, but I think it's on 4thWaveNow. Of course, she detransitioned.

I don't know if you're familiar with the writer Danny Lavery/Mallory Ortberg of the Toast. Pre-transition, Mallory identified as a lesbian woman. Post-transition, Danny married Grace Lavery... a not-particularly-passing transwoman. Grace is also fairly far in the "I have always been a woman and have never had male privilege" camp of trans writer (despite getting tenure while holding herself out to the world as a man and IIRC, graduating from an elite all-boys school). They also both identify as queer and as a queer couple. I've always wondered how they reconcile this with their simultaneous claim that they are a man and a woman, which should make them just a boring straight couple.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-15T02:16:41+00:00

I am rusty on my feminist history, but from what I remember, the French feminist writers in particular tried to write with a lot of word play and rhetorical flourish. I think it's as simple as that "sex roles" is a clumsy phrase. I suspect that it never occurred to her that people may think she was arguing biological sex literally didn't exist because it was such a ridiculous concept (and still is).

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-15T02:09:27+00:00

I'm still voting Democrat and don't see that changing in the near term. But I don't think the Left is actually helping with any of the things you list except protecting abortion. Increasingly, I'm worried the Left is going to hurt with both racism and economic suffering because cancel culture is squelching discussion. Just as women are getting shut down for trying to talk about our issues outside of the Twitter approved way, PoC also get shut down. Class issues have pretty much disappeared.

If we can't have rigorous debates about policy, we can't create quality policy. Poor policy tends to hurt those who it tries to help. For a movement that has one of the tenets being impact matters, not intent, the social justice movement is hostile to examining its own impact.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-15T02:02:23+00:00

Weiss is not a Trump supporter. I doubt she's ever voted Republican, although I can't be sure of that. She's a free speech liberal. People don't like her because she calls out anti-Semitism and supports Israel (but has also called out Netanyahu's administration and criticized anti-BDS rulings that infringe on free speech).

But yes, in addition to that, she's basically called out for not toeing the party line. Also, a bad tweet about Mirai Nagasu that her co-workers compared to Japanese internment.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-14T21:28:41+00:00

This is hard because I don't want to doxx myself and I know you don't either. But I'd love to know if there are commonalities between spaces that attract more reality-connected trans people and spaces that attract more reality-disconnected trans people. I don't see any trends when I look at the online activists, not even in age.

Although I've had my suspicions about some others, I've only known one trans woman who was unambiguously delusional (she thought she had multiple personalities and talked to angels and demons). But even she was very reality based in terms or biology. She also wasn't threatening or creepy like the people you knew. Knowing her made me question what it means to be mentally ill because she was literally delusional, but she was also smart, successful in her job, and generally fun to talk to and spend time with.

That was a long time ago, though, when it was still progressive to use the wrong body narrative and distinguish between transsexuals with dysphoria and transvestites with a fetish. I don't know what she would say now, or how her general mental health may have deteriorated over time.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-14T21:01:23+00:00

Both. I've been in very woke circles. I'm not close friends with any trans people, but I've known a fair amount of transmen, transwomen, and enbies at the close acquaintance/casual friend/oversharing together on social networking level of relationship.

In my personal circles, the least willing to publicly acknowledge biology are the non-binary-identified women.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-14T08:10:34+00:00

What I mean when I distinguish between trans activism and the majority of trans people I know in real life is a simple, but important, thing. The majority of trans people I know in real life freely admit their biological sex, freely distinguish between themselves and natal males/females, and don't feel harmed by discussion of biology or sexed bodies. They generally also acknowledge there are non-transphobic reasons to be concerned about trans women competing in women's sports or being in women's prisons. They support gender neutral bathrooms, but aren't offended by talking about how current bathrooms need to be altered to make gender neutral bathrooms safe.

I have seen some drifting towards biological denialism over the past two years, so I don't know how much the above will change. But unfortunately, I've also seen that drifting in many of my non-trans friends because I've been in super woke circles. With a few exceptions, people are following the trend rather than leading it.

I do wonder about the percentage of autogynephilia. Now that I know more about it, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that something like 3/4 of the trans people I know have some degree of autogynephilia. But if so, it isn't influencing creepy or predatory behavior in any perceptible way.

For me, it's important to acknowledge this because at heart, I'm simply not anti-trans. I believe transition helps a lot of people. I don't think our rights have to be in conflict. I can acknowledge gender identity if trans people will acknowledge biological sex, and we can work through when the one matters more than the other (for example, gender identity mattering for dress codes in the workspace but sex mattering for sports and vulnerable spaces like changing rooms or prisons.) But the fetish-driven trans activism is forcing our rights in conflict, and women need to be able to call it out.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-14T07:49:28+00:00

Ooof, he's an adult so I didn't expect to feel sad when I read that. But I did. He wrote this! "It seems I can’t consider my own masculinity or lack of femininity without relying on some of the worst and most pernicious sex-based stereotypes. This suggests to me that the enterprise itself is suspect."

In his later article on why he decided to transition, he says he intentionally omitted his body dysmorphic feelings about his breasts, hips, and lack of penis from this article. But what he didn't explain in that article, is that he developed those feelings at puberty, was raised in a household with a fair amount of pressure to enact femininity, and had an eating disorder. That comes up in his Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/07/transition-parents/564008/) So he actually has even more similarities to the detransitioner narratives than I realized, and I'm pretty sure he's doing a lot of projection when he writes and tweets negatively about them.

I tried to find where he mentioned deciding to transition after going to a gender therapist, but I can't find it. So maybe I made an assumption. It is weird to me how he could write the butch lesbian article and the Atlantic article and never consider that maybe he could have been happy as a GNC lesbian with more social support earlier on. I also am curious how effective T really has been on masculinizing his body. His facial features look very masculine to me, but the majority of trans men I've seen in form fitting clothes clearly still have feminized bodies. T is powerful, but it doesn't seem to be as powerful as trans men believe. I think the more familiar the general public becomes with what trans men look like, the less they'll pass as cis men.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-14T04:47:10+00:00

I think they're separate issues. Semenya is not the first athlete with a DSD to have been sex tested and treated poorly. The history of sex testing is pretty horrible, and it sounds like it was fairly degrading for female athletes. That's why sex testing was stopped in... I think it was the 90s. However, as we see with Semenya and the other XY, androgen-sensitive women, that doesn't work either. Sex testing needs to be done in some way.

Semenya did start her career in good faith, but I don't think it's true to say she has a female body. She is both androgen-sensitive and XY. She is biologically male and knew that when she raised her challenge. Some people with 5-ARD (her DSD) can produce viable sperm in their testes and father children with medical intervention.

I know the IAAF and IOC have tried to put in reforms to create a more dignified and humane process for identifying athletes with DSDs. I don't know what those reforms are. Unfortunately, I think athletes with DSDs need to be identified at the junior level in order to have a humane process. It seems like the local federations should be able to do this.

I don't think Semenya's treatment can be compared to transwomen, though. As you acknowledged, there is no need to sex test transwomen because they're open about being biologically male. But they do need to be monitored for compliance with T-reduction. Unfortunately, I think it's looking like the initial claims that T-reduction would be sufficient to remove their biological advantage were false. It is infuriating that quality studies weren't done BEFORE changing eligibility standards.

(I personally wonder whether Semenya would still identify as a woman if she grew up in the US or if she didn't have such a financial incentive to preserve her eligibility to compete in the women's category. But we'll never know.)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T20:53:50+00:00

TRA communities are, and online spaces seem to be. There seems to be some variability in detrans' experiences with real life LGBT+ spaces.

I think there's a lot of fear about how detrans narratives challenge trans activist claims. I also suspect some prominent trans writers are less secure in their transition than they hold themselves out as being. For example, Evan Urquhart had a nasty exchange with some detransitioners after J.K. Rowling's essay. However, there are a lot of obvious similarities between detransitioners' experiences and what Evan's written about his own transition. He had very manageable dysphoria, no strong internal sense of a male gender, and a lot of internalized sexism. He did not consider transitioning until he went to a gender therapist. If I can see the obvious similarities, I'm sure he can, too. His nastiness read to me like fear that the distinction between them and him may not be as strong as he wants.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T20:25:24+00:00

What everyone else said. Bring it back to Crenshaw's original formulation, and it's fine. But it shouldn't be used for Oppression Olympics or to set up a hierarchy of whose words are more valuable.

I suspect most people who use the term have never read any of Crenshaw's original writings.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T20:20:27+00:00

Yes, the more trans women are given space to talk, the clearer it is that AGP types have no idea what it's like to move through the world as a woman in an embodied way. And how can they? They lack the physical vulnerability; they lack the socialization; and very few of them pass at all. They have their own experiences, which are valid. I wish they were willing to claim and identify them. I think a lot of the tensions would be solved by that simple action of accepting their identities as what they are (trans women or trans men) and not trying to make them into something they simply aren't (natal women or natal men).

Unfortunately, the prominent activists are not willing to do this. The majority of trans people I've known in real life have been so much more grounded and honest about the differences between them and natal females or males. I think activism in the Internet area, unfortunately, rewards the most authoritarian and extreme ideologues of all types.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T07:28:18+00:00

Some detransers have collected anecdotal data that there is a high rate of EDs among teen FTMs (inspired by their own experience with both ED and transition). It's such an understudied population that I doubt there's hard data.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T07:22:10+00:00

It makes no sense because "gender" as a word has been used both as a way to talk about biological sex without saying the word "sex" and as a way to discuss sex-linked social roles. "Gender theory" was always a poorly defined set of post-modern word games that was then filtered through teens on Tumblr and turned into something even less coherent.

What the kids these days seem to think is that "gender" is an actual essence that people feel and that this essence determines whether people are "women," "men," or "non-binary." It's not the same as sex stereotypes, although people often draw on sex-stereotypes to express their identity. For the true believer, they really believe that people have an innate gender identity of "man," "woman," and "non-binary" that has nothing to do with the body. Thus, when they say women can have a penis or a man can have a vagina, they really mean it. Genitals are arbitrary; the inner gender identity is real. True believers also seem to think "women" and "men" have always been used this way and everyone understands what "women" and "men" mean in this context.

Any reading of history or conversation with a non-too-online person would reveal that no, most of us genuinely have no idea what they mean and no, the words have not been used in isolation from biological sex. Unfortunately, social media has made it really easy for people to form echo chambers. Also, groups like Gender Spectrum have provided horrible puberty/sex ed materials that basically miseducate kids about biology and gender. Their content only makes sense if gender = sex stereotypes, but they do a lot of word games to obfuscate that. (They also misrepresent intersex conditions and appropriate intersex language, but intersex activists get regularly harassed for trying to point that out.)

Modern teens are spending so much of their lives interacting in a disembodied way through the Internet that I think the inconsistencies of gender theory are probably much less obvious to them. Many of them will not have experience with embodied desire, or will have negative/traumatic experiences. Puberty will be making their bodies uncomfortable and unfamiliar. I would guess that the idea of remaking their body to express an idealized inner essence would be appealing.

I think the mechanism for adults is probably a little different, but that the attraction of gender theory is similar. Even though I have to believe every adult over 30 knows in their heart of hearts that gender theory makes no sense, it must be a seductive promise. Uncomfortable with sexism? Feel like you're not quite like other girls? Now you get to opt out of being a woman. (Even though, of course, you don't.)

While I do think there are many true believers or people who are willfully putting on blinders, I also think there are many people who are manipulative. If trans activists really believed in gender identity as they express it, there would be no need for medical transition because woman/man/non-binary are completely separate from bodily appearance. We would also see more arguments for adding non-binary categories and spaces (since otherwise, non-binary people will be excluded or misgendered).

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T02:08:08+00:00

I figured out why I thought she was Australian. I first heard of her in the context of a debate between Roxanne Gay and Christina Hoff Summers that took place in Australia (when she called out Roxanne Gay for saying Saudi feminists were doing fine on their own and didn't need Western feminists to support them despite several high-profile Saudi feminists having recently been jailed for their activism around driving. Wow, that was a long sentence but I don't see a good way to break it up).

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-13T01:57:04+00:00

I wasn't on the old board, but I've seen detrans and trans people on Twitter talk about it. The impression I got was that there was a lot of mockery and negative discussion of trans appearances. So that may be where Contra got the strawman about innate disgust.

I do not generally feel disgust at trans appearance, whether they are passing or not. But I do feel disgust at trans women who bimbofy themselves and then claim the bimbofication makes them a woman. It's not disgust at the appearance, but disgust at what the overall action signifies about their perception of women. This is different from a trans person dressing in a sexy way, although it's difficult to put that difference into words. I suspect everyone here knows exactly what I mean, though. It's also different to me from a man who knows he has a cross-dressing or other form of fetish and enacts it in an appropriate, consensual space without claiming it turns him into a literal woman.

Contra also claims not to have a fetishistic motivation for transitioning, but there is a lot of video evidence to the contrary. Ever since learning about that, I've become more skeptical about how honest Contra is.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-12T20:18:52+00:00

Do you follow any detrans women on Twitter or YouTube? There are a fair amount, and they have a lot of variety in their views of and closeness to their communities from when they were trans identified. A fair amount of them have described feeling like they left a cult when they stopped being trans identified.

I've seen some of them really connect with GC spaces and some have pretty strong critiques of GC spaces.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-12T19:42:07+00:00

She's Canadian? I wonder why I thought she was Australian.

I follow Thomas Chatterton Williams, and he said that signatories were asked based on recommendations. I presume Sarah Haider is familiar with Yasmine Mohammed, but I wouldn't be surprised if few other signatories are.

I'm going to try not to doxx myself here, but MENA women's experiences with hijab was tangentially related to academic work that I've done. Libfem oversimplifcations of hijab are so frustrating. I think I have a lot of remedial feminist reading to do to catch up on the various influential theorists, but it seems to me that there is also a distinction between actual academic feminists and Internet-based feminists. A lot of the influential voices now are bloggers who went big, and I don't think they understand what they write about in any depth. It seems like to them it's as simple as Muslims are a marginalized population in the post-9-11 US + right-wing people don't like seeing hijabis = hijab is always and unambiguously good.

Whereas I would say that hijab is a piece of cloth that has no inherent morality, and you have to examine it in context. A woman freely choosing to wear hijab as a personal expression of her faith is different from a woman freely choosing to wear hijab to broadcast her cultural identity which is also different from a woman being forced by her family to wear hijab which is also different from a woman being forced by state violence to wear hijab. An individual woman's choice also doesn't exist in isolation from the broader cultural messaging of the action. These things are nuanced and don't reduce down to Bad or Good.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-12T05:20:20+00:00

They don't actually call it cervical cancer. They say that the tissues used to create the neo-vagina or neo-cervix can develop cancer. They recommend that transwomen tell their doctor the full details of the surgery so that the doctor can monitor appropriately. It's a very carefully worded page.

I'm curious whether the neo-cervix is actually a thing. Neo-vaginas seem complicated enough for surgeons to do well. What would be the point of creating a neo-cervix?

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-12T05:14:23+00:00

I have seen people online who decided they don't like GC spaces or GC feminism. But they didn't return to trans communities or trans activism or a re-embrace of gender ideology.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-12T03:16:20+00:00

Thomas Chatterton Williams and Kmele Foster have both talked about the problematic way the illiberal left restricts the views POC are allowed to express. Sarah Haider has also talked about that because her activism is on behalf of ex-Muslims. I don't know if Yasmine Mohammed was a signatory--probably not since she's Australian based--but she also complains about that. (Relevant to this board, Mohammed often discusses how Western feminism's attempts to be intersectional in regards to Muslim women ends up erasing actual Muslim feminism. I've never seen anything on a mainstream US feminist site that talks about Muslim feminist movements like the White Wednesday movement in Iran)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-12T00:16:01+00:00

It's not only white, rich people. That's an intentional mischaracterization by the critics of the letter because it's simpler for them if they strawman the signatories that way. There were a fair amount of non-white signatories, and I doubt that most of them are independently wealthy. People like Sarah Haider, Kmele Foster, and Zaid Jilani are inconvenient for the social justice left because they complicate simplified identity politics. It's easier to pretend they're not there.

One of the signatories to the response letter (Akela Lacey) very recently tried to cancel her co-worker Lee Feng for the crime of uploading an interview with a Black man about the George Floyd protests (because the interviewee talked about the need for Black advocacy to also focus on intraracial violence). So that gives an idea of some of the motivations for the counter-letter signatories.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-11T04:43:27+00:00

Not in the US yet, right? Or are there state laws in some places that do that?

But I agree that looking at the trajectory in other countries, it is very easy to see how the Democratic Party could end up promoting and enforcing laws like that in the US.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-10T21:55:07+00:00

They did not in the curriculum that I reviewed.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-10T20:50:30+00:00

I had to read and review sex curriculum several years ago in a woke location. At that time, they were generally fine. For the high school content, one of the curricula used the vague "people who have..." type language but most of them didn't. The actual sex ed and puberty information was really good in all of the curricula I read. It was much better than what I received when I went through school.

However, I saw an update to one of the ones I reviewed, and it replaced all of the girl/boy puberty language with "people who have..." language for all ages. I think this was done because of CA requirements for gender identity inclusivity in sex ed.

I expect many teachers will ignore it and use boy/girl but that there will be some fierce battles. I also expect that it will peak a lot of parents, who will learn for the first time that the dominant ideology in contemporary trans activism is actually trying to erase biology.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-10T20:41:39+00:00

The criticism of 50 Shades of Grey seemed similar to me, too. It seemed to be more about being Not Like Other Girls and crapping all over what other women liked than about genuine content concerns. People who recommend Secretary or Story of O as alternatives are not people seriously concerned about the conflation of abuse and consensual BDSM.

Current progressive critiques of art and policy seem to be very rigid and mostly interested in dividing art into Good and Bad. I've seen a lot of liberal critics compare it to fundamentalist approaches. Once something is slotted as Good, it can't be realistically critiqued... at most it may get the occasional "your fave is problematic" type comment. Once something is Bad, it needs to be cancelled.

Because sex workers and sex work are classified as Good (SWERF is also a slur, although not one with the widespread use or power of TERF), porn must also be Good, regardless of what it actually consists of.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-10T20:18:07+00:00

I'm not sure what you're arguing with because you seem to have two separate points, and I feel both have been addressed to you clearly in replies.

Point #1 seems to be that cancel culture is not a big deal because it's not government censorship. It is true that it generally isn't government censorship in the US right now. I consider losing employment, social circles, hobbies, dealing with targeted harassment etc. to be a big deal, even if it's not done by the government. I also consider the chilling effect on people's ability to discuss policies and events that affect them to be a big deal.

Point #2 seems to be that cancel culture has nothing to do with the Democratic Party. To this one, I would agree that yes, the Democratic Party is not the primary advocate or perpetrator of cancel culture. However, what we see in progressive areas like CA, Seattle, Portland, and certain House districts is that supporters/advocates of cancel culture are gaining political power through the Democratic Party. This is troubling to me for the reasons already stated.

In terms of examples of media censorship as a result of cancel culture, I am confused how someone could be on this board and have to ask that.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-10T05:00:15+00:00

Doxxing is part of cancel culture. It's one of the tools. If you think that cancel culture sounds like something you associate with the conservative right or MRAs, you're not wrong. Both sides use what is now called cancel culture. But the left-affiliated side currently appears to have more institutional capture and so is more dangerous with it. To put it in very broad trends, the right currently seems to only be able to cancel their own. The left can cancel their own as well as those in neutral territory.

The current Democratic Party has tension between its moderate members--including both those who could be called centrists and those who are liberal leftists--and its more firebrand progressive wing. When I look at CA as a bellwhether of what types of problematic policies the firebrand progressive wing may put into place, I do find it troubling. I think that wing is gaining influence over the Party and that the wing is anti-free speech, anti-policies-of-equality, and anti-biological sex. Because this is already the dominant ideology for books, TV, movies, and media, there will be no checks.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-10T04:44:58+00:00

I've seen multiple trans people make that exact point.

If I thought I could do it without getting cancelled in my real life social circles, I would genuinely like to talk to some of the trans people I know about this. Because to me, it seems like if we take trans activism at its word and state that sex is spectrum with no connection to men/women, then this should also lead to:

a) no insurance for medical transition. How could medical transition be a medical need in this framework? Estrogen doesn't make a woman/man. Breasts don't make a woman/man. The appearance of specific gentials doesn't make a woman/man. Medical transition must be a cosmetic desire, similar to breast enhancement or a nose job, and thus should be paid for personally.

b) no sex or gender segregated spaces. What's the need for them in this framework? Since there's no physical component to men/women in this framework, what's the purpose of segregating spaces? All they do is place a burden on non-binary people, who have to either misgender themselves or have their own special places. (this legit upsets me in sports conversations... I think sports categories need to be based on biological sex not gender identity, so accommodating non-binary people isn't a problem in my desired system. But I do not understand how people can advocate for for woman/man competitive categories on the basis of gender identity and not view it as a serious problem that non-binary people have to misgender themselves to compete.)

c) no gender markers at all, actually. What purpose do they serve?

Like it all seems so transparently fake. No one can truly believe in gender ideology as advocated by the dominant forms of trans activism because it is so inconsistent.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T21:34:04+00:00

There is no question for me that I'll be supporting Biden because Trump is just incompetent. But I'm with you on not knowing what will happen with the Democratic Party in the future. I am in a socially liberal area where cancel culture runs rampant, and I non-hyperbolically think we will enter an authoritarian reality if this approach gains widespread political power. People don't care about due process, injustice, or free speech.

I think the Republican Party is a lost cause because they were already captured by their ideological wing. But I am hoping that there will be a counter force with disenchanted centrist Republicans and disenchanted Democrats to create a revitalized liberal movement.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T21:30:05+00:00

One is cancelled from one's job, social groups, and any other realm that mass pressure can reach. You are so lucky that you've never seen it in action. It's horrible and cruel and leads to a Stasi-like/Cultural Revolution-like state. Free speech and cancel culture cannot co-exist.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T21:14:45+00:00

The catastrophizing in responses to any critique of trans issues is part of how I peaked in the first place. No one is trying to deny trans people's existence! Most of us weren't even trying to deny people their desired pronouns or surface their birth names or anything like that.

All we've been trying to do is preserve the language to discuss our material reality and advocate for our own needs and legal rights, like progressive politics is supposed to support! We've generally looked for ways for everyone to have their needs met. Heck, I wouldn't even personally mind using "cis" as part of a framework in which I was able to advocate for the distinctiveness of my identity, needs, and rights as a cis woman. But none of that is ever enough for the activism.

It comes across as so narcissistic.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T20:58:48+00:00

That's how I understand it, too. Like I now consider myself GC because I sign onto most of what's written on the sidebar of this site. But I don't consider myself to be a rad fem.

Although since radical feminism had already fallen out of favor when I was in university, I also don't know that much about it. My impression of it was that radical feminism views heterosexual interaction as intrinsically falling along the oppressed/oppressor model, which I do not agree with. But maybe that's an oversimplification of the patriarchy model?

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T02:30:31+00:00

That title does not lie. That is the intersex masterpost that everyone needs to read! Thank you.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T00:50:08+00:00

I do not believe being closeted has a minimal impact on one's life. I don't want to mind read, but based on your arguments, I doubt that you believe that either. Compulsory heterosexuality is actually part of why I said that bisexuality and lesbianism can't be directly compared, so I am also not dismissing compulsory heterosexuality.

There is clearly a fundamental misunderstanding of each other's points going on, and I don't think it's worth the time to try to get past that.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-09T00:44:07+00:00

If you look at what a spectrum is, "sex is a spectrum" makes no sense because even by the anti-binary argument, it's still not a spectrum. Spectra are things like light where there are two discrete points and a continuum between. That doesn't apply to sex by anyone's definition.

But setting aside the semantics, yes, there are both biologists and intersex activists who are pushing back against the claims.

Colin Wright's Quillette article is probably the most accessible overview for debunking:

https://quillette.com/2020/06/07/jk-rowling-is-right-sex-is-real-and-it-is-not-a-spectrum/

This is another overview that explains it really well. I found it slightly more difficult get through because it does really get into the weeds of what sex is. But because it really gets into the weeds of what sex is, it helps make clear how disingenuous a lot of the "biological sex is not binary" arguments are.

https://sci-hub.tw/downloads-ii/2020-05-10/0d/10.1007@s12129-020-09877-8.pdf

I don't have a good overview Intersex article handy, unfortunately, because people with DSDs really get the short end of the stick in all of this. Their medical conditions have been weaponized without their say, and no one listens to them when they try to speak up about it. But I do have a short list of some intersex Twitter accounts that you can read through to get some idea of how actual people with DSDs understand their identities and their lives. To be fair, I will disclaim that I know there are intersex activists who very much support being under the LGBT+ umbrella and conceptualizing intersex as a third category of sex. But I don't follow any and so can't link. That viewpoint is well represented in trans activism, though, so this is really about seeing the alternatives.

https://mobile.twitter.com/intersexfacts (probably the most controversial... I'm not sure why, but there are some other intersex activists who really don't like her)
https://mobile.twitter.com/RaeUK
https://twitter.com/ClareCAIS

And as a bonus, a super quick overview thread on third genders, such as muxe or hijra. It's not that informative, but third genders are also widely appropriated in trans activism, and this does call out the basics of that. I can speak to this in more depth if you're interested.

https://mobile.twitter.com/kirakiradoll/status/1278054439576838145

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T23:41:40+00:00

It depends on the details. That's why I gave specific examples of the context where I find foregrounding an identity that one hasn't lived to be dodgy.

I also don't think bisexuality and lesbianism are identities that can be directly compared the way that you're trying to. I'm bi, and I fall into the category of women for whom my bisexuality has very minimal impact on my life. I'm not closeted about it, but it's an identity that I would have to actively perform for people to know because my relationship history is almost exclusively straight. I've never met a lesbian who could say the same about her life (although it's a wide world, so I'm sure some exist).

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T21:32:00+00:00

Sylvia Rivera is a different person. I don't think anyone argues that Sylvia didn't consider herself to be a trans woman.

The question is whether Marsha Johnson identified that way or whether he identified as a gay man who liked to cross-dress and present as female.

(and neither of them started the Stonewall Riot!)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T21:18:05+00:00

Making judgments on other people is part of how we move through life in a society. Just having a bisexual orientation doesn't give a person any experience or insight into same-sex relationships or into homosexuality as a marginalized identity. You need to actually LIVE as the identity to understand anything through it.

I've seen a lot of bisexual women and men perform at/speak at/otherwise take up reputation and financial building spaces at gay pride and other gay rights oriented events, for example. I don't want to go around asking everyone for their relationship histories, but when you know people fairly well and their relationship history is nothing but straight for decades, it seems pretty dodgy. Likewise to me, foregrounding your identity as bisexual when bisexuality has had a minimal impact on your life seems dodgy.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T20:51:38+00:00

This is interesting, but I think the significance of it is unclear from the article. I can't tell if carers have experienced trans patient's being distressed by the gender identity assigned to them or if it is more about trans patient's not remembering the specific changes and disclosures. A trans patient may be confused about no longer having his penis, but also delighted by it. Or alternatively, a trans patient may be confused and agitated by having a body that no longer fits what he remembers.

But if there are patients who are actually reverting back to identifying with their biological sex, to me, that would be be significant.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T20:40:12+00:00

I think it matters, though, how open a transwoman is about their biological maleness. I am totally fine with men speaking about women's issues and feminism, especially now that I've seen how quickly and easily identity politics devours communities. We are all living in this world together; we are all affected by social norms and policies; we all have a right to comment and have opinions on issues.

That said, of course, I'm going to judge how a person talks about issues slightly differently based on how much skin in the game they have. So Blaire talking about feminism from a transwoman's perspective on her personal social media channels... totally fine to me. If Blaire claimed to be a woman and to have grown up as a girl, that would be appropriation.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T02:34:23+00:00

This is something some detransitioners have talked about. They experienced that trans men were widely ignored or even flat out told they need to take less space because of male privilege. In LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, the occasional trans man pops up, but it seems to be overwhelmingly trans women. Anecdotally, I think more trans women are in tech than trans men (hmm... how peculiar that this would map out to natal sex...). I don't know if there are any stats on it, but it's what I've observed of the Twitterati who identify as both trans and in tech (with one exception, although she is now detrans).

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T02:25:16+00:00

Why does "inclusivity" never factor in women's needs to speak about our bodies in plain, clear language? Inclusive language is language that feels good to everyone. The fact that it's impossible to have inclusive language around anything to do with women these days is a sign of how different trans women's needs actually are.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-08T02:09:52+00:00

But radfem and GC aren't actually synonyms, right? I'm here because I don't believe in gender ideology, but I don't subscribe to radical feminism either. I'm not committed to any specific ideological lens.

That said, I am a feminist and I am interested in discussing women's issues. But I would expect that to be a more contentious debate as I would expect there to be a greater variety of beliefs.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-06T02:31:13+00:00

I thought Fionne's text for her GoFundMe was quite respectful. I've read her* Twitter for a while, and Fionne's never made secret that she's dysphoric. She posted on her personal Twitter, and IMHO, if people want to give to her friend to friend, that's fine. She's not harassing or guilting anyone into giving, and I believe her that she respects the reasons why many people she considers friends will not donate.

However, I thought some women in the comments raised an important point that women's women-related fundraisers should be shared and prioritized more.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-04T08:40:07+00:00

I don't think it's fair to say Baroness Nicholson was right about same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage is not the problem. It's the capture of LGB institutions by trans activism and the Tumblr-influenced cancel culture.

I am glad we have same-sex marriage, and I don't believe that there is a conflict between legal same-sex marriage and advocating for women's rights. Indeed, lesbians were the canary in the coal mine about where TRA activism was heading.

I don't even think there's an inherent conflict between actual trans rights and women's rights. I think with proper gatekeeping and reality-based definitions, trans people can have equal rights. They just can't have superior rights.

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-03T06:15:18+00:00

Yes, your last sentence is really the issue to me, too.

Also, I am genuinely happy to treat someone as they want to be treated--pronouns, names, and all--in one to one interactions. I am not happy to have my needs, lived experience, and identity erased or have history rewritten. Woman is a biologically sexed term. Gender roles have been attached to it, but no culture anywhere that I am aware of have seen the gender roles as the primary definition of "woman/man" rather than the sex. Even in cultures that have third or fourth genders, those are still based on recognizing the reality of biological sex. And it is not a coincidence that there are way more examples of cultures that have a third gender that allows a biological male to assume a female social role than there is of the reverse. So I will use she/her, but I am not going to pretend that "woman" means anything other than adult human female to validate someone's desired identity. (well, I'm not going to pretend in the privacy of my own mind... I am a big coward, so even commenting on this message board is a toe step towards the courage to start saying this outside of my own mind.)

Anna_Nym · 2020-07-02T18:47:22+00:00

I think there's more to it than that. For the old-school transsexual, there is a very powerful dysphoria associated with their bodies. I think some people have that dysphoria because of unresolved trauma, and some may have it because of hormonal influences that we currently don't understand. That was where the now-out-of-favor "born in the wrong body" explanation came from.

To me, this seems like a subcategory of body dysmorphia, although I think trans people hate that categorization. But I've never read a coherent explanation for how it differs, other than that people want the treatment to be changing their body rather than reconciling with their body (whereas that is not the recommended path for eating disorders or people who want to be blind/deaf/etc.)

And then there are the later-in-life transitioning Caitlyn Jenner types, who are completely gender conforming. Some of these are clearly fetishists. I don't know if it's really that simple that all are, though. I have to go by anecdote here since Blanchard's work is old, and I don't know of any contemporary researcher trying to update it. But for some of the people I've known, it's more of a sadness... a sense that they won't ever be valued as a man or a woman but they may be valued if they transition. It's not dolls and dresses, but beauty and compassion.

Anna_Nym