> My understanding is that in "queer theory" gender is 100% socially constructed. This essentially means "women" are socially constructed. It is hard to have feminism if you don't have "women". This seems to be at the core of the "terf" conflict.
TERFs don't actually disagree with this. They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion. Likewise they see Female to Male trans people as somewhat more commendable since they are trying to escape the oppression of womanhood, but also bad because they are joining the enemy. Since Janice Raymond in the 70's their idea has been that they can completely eliminate transsexualism by abolishing all gender role distinctions.
Now in practice, TERFs/Gender Crits behave exactly like any other religious conservatives regarding gender. You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you? Instead you see them championing people like Ken Zucker who advocates for feminine boys to be forced to behave in a masculine way, going so far as to deny them access to their mothers in some cases lest she encourage their girlish behavior. Instead they just advocate that gender isn't real therefore sex determines everything forever without making any attempt to open up sex roles to more modes of acceptable behavior.
Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality. They also don't imply that to have feminine preferences is to be lesser than someone having masculine preferences. The notion that transgender people think sex isn't real is a straw man argument. You can find people who say things like this but they don't represent mainstream thought.
What you're more likely to find really is that some trans people and organizations point to disorders of sexual development like androgen insensitivity syndrome, kleinfelter's, etc.... as a way of selling the idea that sex isn't so simple that people should have their entire sense of being and self expression stifled by the size of their gametes. To some people this line of thinking is persuasive, to others it seems like a sellout in that it has an element of nature over nurture to it, and to others still like conservatives and TERFs it's frustrating because it sort of messes with their "biological reality of sex" high ground they've tried to claim thus their most common refrain is to say that such disorders are so rare that they don't matter. (DSDs are about as common as red hair in the US population so make of that what you will). Nevertheless, even this type of argument is a far cry from saying that "sex isn't real" which is what trans people are often accused of.
> They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion.
I think the logic is more: gender is socially constructed and generally harmful. And therefore we ought to deconstruct it rather than further baking it into our society.
> You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you?
I think there's a big mix here. I think you'd find a lot of "TERFs" would support exactly this (take a look at someone like JK Rowling for example).
> Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality.
I haven't seen many people deny that sex is real, but I have seen a lot of people saying that it isn't socially relevant and that for example people ought to define their sexuality in terms of gender identity rather than sex.
> I think there's a big mix here. I think you'd find a lot of "TERFs" would support exactly this (take a look at someone like JK Rowling for example).
JK Rowling isn't really much of a radical feminist or a TERF as far as I can tell. She's just sympathetic to their views. The organizations that TERFs support and staff however do indeed do things like campaign to support Ken Zuckeresque conversion therapies for gender non-conforming youth.
> I haven't seen many people deny that sex is real, but I have seen a lot of people saying that it isn't socially relevant and that for example people ought to define their sexuality in terms of gender identity rather than sex.
Maybe you're alluding to something like the sports argument here? The transgender movement is a big tent that is made up of people who have no medical intervention or even gender dysphoria and also people who take cross-sex hormones and have gender affirming surgeries. The sports debate is muddied by the need to not alienate anyone. If you get down the brass tacks though, the real argument is about how much impact cross-sex hormones have on the performance of a body that has been through a testosterone dominant puberty.
The conservative position seems to be that being AMAB grants you superior performance at all times regardless of any other condition, which complete androgen insensitivity syndrome seems to contradict considering that CAIS girls have no physical advantages over XX girls despite their Y chromosomes. The most radical liberal position would be that all sports should be open via self-id. The real answer is probably that trans kids who never had an androgen dominant puberty should be allowed to play any women's sport and trans women who transitioned later should be allowed in some women's sports but not others depending on how much the development of their skeleton during puberty number one might impact their performance. This nuanced view is rare however as both sides keep taking more and more extreme stances to spite one another. Look at how in Texas a 7 year old trans girl is considered too dangerous to play softball with cis girls. That's obviously dumb but the conservatives proposed HB25 to send a message that trans kids aren't wanted first and to """protect le women's sports""" second (a distant second).
Nevertheless, self-id is one issue that has some real nuance but it's one issue in a whole constellation of other debates which have much less nuance and simply come down to: trans people look weird and I want them to not exist.
> JK Rowling isn't really much of a radical feminist or a TERF as far as I can tell.
I agree, but I can tell you that a lot of my Facebook friends (who are all people I know IRL) who post pro-trans content have posted stuff calling her a TERF and/or transphobic.
> Maybe you're alluding to something like the sports argument here?
FWIW, I agree with your take on sports. but that's not what I was alluding to. I was alluding to my recent experience which is that it seems to be fast becoming socially unacceptable within large parts of the transgender movement to talk about someone's physiological sex at all (and I mean their current physiology as modified by HRT and/or surgery, not what they were born with). I have been called transphobic on numerous occasions for:
- Naming someone's sex
- Wanting to differentiate between those who have medically transitioned and those who have not yet, or don't plan to.
- For suggesting that hormones affect behaviour
- For expressing my sexuality (I am attracted to physically female people (cis or trans))
- For expressing my opinion that someone's gender identity (be they cis or trans) is only rarely relevant to me (as people have such different ideas of what it means to be a certain gender that their identity tells you almost nothing about them).
> Nevertheless, self-id is one issue that has some real nuance but it's one issue in a whole constellation of other debates which have much less nuance and simply come down to: trans people look weird and I want them to not exist.
I would agree that there a bunch of issues that simply come down to "trans people look weird and I want them to not exist" (as a somewhat effiminate man, I have unfortunately experienced some of this myself). However, I would suggest that there are also a bunch of issues from the other direction that simply come down to "I'm not comfortable with my body, therefore I don't want anyone to talk about bodies".
> I agree, but I can tell you that a lot of my Facebook friends (who are all people I know IRL) who post pro-trans content have posted stuff calling her a TERF and/or transphobic.
I do think she is pretty blatantly transphobic. I mean she wrote a whole novel which just rehashed the old trope from Dressed to Kill to drive home the point about how dangerous she thought it was for males to be in women's spaces. That's some commitment.
> FWIW, I agree with your take on sports. but that's not what I was alluding to. I was alluding to my recent experience which is that it seems to be fast becoming socially unacceptable within large parts of the transgender movement to talk about someone's physiological sex
Maybe that's true? Thinking on my own experiences, I transitioned mtf when I was a teenager like 15 years ago and since then I've blended in and lived a pretty normal life with a husband and an adopted child, I had some uncles and stuff who would bring up physiological stuff but only as a sort of gotcha or subtle dig at me or later my husband (to make it clear to him that despite being a masculine cis man they think of him as a homo). I think it's pretty common for trans people to be gaslit with like "yeah but your chromosomes are male so you're a male" in bad faith to the point where it always looks like a dog whistle when someone brings it up.
I'm sorry you had negative experiences as a feminine man. I can obviously relate. I think it's harder for feminine men who are attracted to women since as a gay guy before I at least had a community to be kind to me.
> I do think she is pretty blatantly transphobic. I mean she wrote a whole novel which just rehashed the old trope from Dressed to Kill to drive home the point about how dangerous she thought it was for males to be in women's spaces. That's some commitment.
I haven't read this novel, but if it's about males then why do you see it as transphobic rather than male-phobic? After all, Rowling almost certainly doesn't cis males in women's spaces either. To me it's not obvious why it would be considered acceptable to discriminate on the basis of identity differences, but not on the basis of physiological differences. Especially as to me it would seem that of the two, physiological differences (specifically testosterone levels) would be more likely than identity to affect aggression (incl. sexual aggression) and therefore the danger someone represents. (AFAIK (I read her "open letter") Rowling is quite happy for medically transitioned trans women to be in "women's spaces" - it is self-id without some kind of check that she opposes).
There is nuance to this debate in that a trans woman who is perceived as a woman is probably more likely to be targeted in an attack than someone who as perceived as a man (although we should note that this really is about the perception of others and not self-identity - and people may not be perceived as they self-identify). So I'm not necessarily saying I agree with Rowling's position, but I don't really see it as transphobic.
> I had some uncles and stuff who would bring up physiological stuff but only as a sort of gotcha or subtle dig at me or later my husband (to make it clear to him that despite being a masculine cis man they think of him as a homo). I think it's pretty common for trans people to be gaslit with like "yeah but your chromosomes are male so you're a male" in bad faith to the point where it always looks like a dog whistle when someone brings it up.
I'm sorry about your experiences with your uncles, that's really unnecessary. In particular, while ones chromosomes may have influence on phenotype I suspect it's rather a small one in the case of trans people.
Having said that, I think it's worth noting that for many people the physical aspects of gender are really much more important/interesting than the social aspects. For example for me personally, my gender has only ever really meant:
1. That I have a penis, and a certain hormone balance that subconsciously affect my perception and decision making in subtle ways.
2. That society treats me in a certain way and has certain expectations of me.
With regard to "how I see myself", to be honest I see myself as more similar to the average woman that the average man in most ways. But I still use the label "man", because my personal understanding of gender is that if I have the physiology that I do then I'm a man. That's just what "man" means to me.
I don't think gender needs to mean that for everyone, but I do think my understanding of gender and identity as a man is just as legitimate as a trans man's. And I also think (without assigning blame to any one party) that the fact that we're both using the same terms - "gender", "man", "woman", etc - to describe utterly different phenomena is problematic in aggregate.
More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of the conflict in the gender debate is that there are really two or three things going on:
- Physiological features
- Societal treatment
- Internal mindset and how one views oneself
In western societies we have traditionally labelled all 3 of these things as "gender" and assumed that they coincide. And now that we've realised that they don't always, we're fighting over which one(s) are "gender", and which one(s) are of legitimate social interest. Whereas in reality all 3 are of legitimate social interest, and all 3 have a justifying claim on the term gender.
I feel like there's a lot of unnecessary hurt and conflict caused by people trying to say for example "You have male physiological features" and other people hearing "You have male internal mindset". And I feel like if we came up with some way to disambiguate about which of the above we mean when we are talking about gender in a given context then it would help a lot. It wouldn't solve all our societal disagreements and prejudices, but I think it would help lead us away from slanging matches and towards productive debate.
> I have been called transphobic on numerous occasions for:
> - Naming someone's sex
Feels like a dog whistle when you hear it because in 99.9% of cases it isn't very germane to the discussion considering that we are talking about phenotypes and not genotypes unless it's talking about fertility or something.
> - Wanting to differentiate between those who have medically transitioned and those who have not yet, or don't plan to.
This is a fair thing to do. Julia Serano talks about the difference between classical "transsexuals" now usually called binary trans people and other people who may not have any sort of physical changes. So just bringing up that there are differences there isn't a big deal but it does put people on edge for a few reasons: 1.) the trans community is afraid of gatekeeping coming back in vogue and if you slice up trans people in any way it starts to feel like the old days when certain people weren't deemed fit for HRT or surgeries and 2.) needing to get expensive genital surgeries to get an "F" on your documents really hindered trans people's lives for a long time. I know it might be hard to imagine, but I had a friend who also transitioned as a teenager but who hadn't had her documents changed back in like 2010 and I went with her to try to help her open a bank account because she had never had one because she was so shook about the bad experiences she'd had with showing people her ID. She was shivering in the bank lobby with me there coaching her to try to give her courage. It's HARD to pass 100% as female and feel the vulnerability of that and then be outed as trans and have the vulnerability of that put on you too. Like suddenly not only are you in a feminine body but you also run the risk of being treated like a man which could lead to you getting hurt. I know that might sound hyperbolic but it's real. At least it was for us back in the day. When the Obama administration changed the rules on passports so we could get 'F' on them without bottom surgery it changed my life personally. I changed jobs after that finally after putting it off for instance because suddenly I could do paperwork without it setting off a huge firestorm.
> - For suggesting that hormones affect behaviour
This is obviously true but I do realize there are people who don't like that this is true for ideological reasons. I know zero trans people who haven't attested to having emotional changes on HRT though. And emotional changes obviously affect behavior.
> - For expressing my sexuality (I am attracted to physically female people (cis or trans))
What? Did they call you a chaser or something? Are you friends convinced that everyone has to be pansexual??? That sounds homophobic almost.
> - For expressing my opinion that someone's gender identity (be they cis or trans) is only rarely relevant to me (as people have such different ideas of what it means to be a certain gender that their identity tells you almost nothing about them).
I mean as someone who lived ~ 18 years being gendered male and almost the same time gendered female I can tell you that your perceived gender identity impacts pretty much every aspect of your life. And when I came out a lot of people who knew me from high school were like "oh that makes some things make so much more sense." So I think there is something to the idea that a person's internal feeling of themselves has some baring on how you might want to treat them or which lens you should view their actions through? I dunno.
It sounds like you're either an abrasive person who draws in conflict but doesn't realize this about yourself or your friends are particularly radical. I live in the Southeast where queer people seem to be a bit more pragmatic about things. Maybe I'm out of touch with how things are in more progressive environments.
TERFs don't actually disagree with this. They call themselves "gender critical" because they believe all gender roles are socially constructed and that the gender role we call "woman" was constructed so that females would be weaker than males and subservient to them. So when they see someone choosing to join that gender role they become very irked by it and can only explain it in terms of mental sickness or perversion. Likewise they see Female to Male trans people as somewhat more commendable since they are trying to escape the oppression of womanhood, but also bad because they are joining the enemy. Since Janice Raymond in the 70's their idea has been that they can completely eliminate transsexualism by abolishing all gender role distinctions.
Now in practice, TERFs/Gender Crits behave exactly like any other religious conservatives regarding gender. You don't exactly see them encouraging boys to dress like princesses but still identify as boys do you? Instead you see them championing people like Ken Zucker who advocates for feminine boys to be forced to behave in a masculine way, going so far as to deny them access to their mothers in some cases lest she encourage their girlish behavior. Instead they just advocate that gender isn't real therefore sex determines everything forever without making any attempt to open up sex roles to more modes of acceptable behavior.
Mainstream transgender organizations view gender as socially constructed but also related to one's own preferences and personality. Because of that gender may not always align with sex. They do not conflate sex and gender and do acknowledge that sex is a biological reality. They also don't imply that to have feminine preferences is to be lesser than someone having masculine preferences. The notion that transgender people think sex isn't real is a straw man argument. You can find people who say things like this but they don't represent mainstream thought.
What you're more likely to find really is that some trans people and organizations point to disorders of sexual development like androgen insensitivity syndrome, kleinfelter's, etc.... as a way of selling the idea that sex isn't so simple that people should have their entire sense of being and self expression stifled by the size of their gametes. To some people this line of thinking is persuasive, to others it seems like a sellout in that it has an element of nature over nurture to it, and to others still like conservatives and TERFs it's frustrating because it sort of messes with their "biological reality of sex" high ground they've tried to claim thus their most common refrain is to say that such disorders are so rare that they don't matter. (DSDs are about as common as red hair in the US population so make of that what you will). Nevertheless, even this type of argument is a far cry from saying that "sex isn't real" which is what trans people are often accused of.