Which gender are you?

[tapitsbo]

AD, but without gender essentialism the whole TG narrative is meaningless. How else could you say that someone who is physically and socially male is somehow really female inside? Every bit as female, we are told, as someone who bleeds and breeds?

I'm not sure what backtoiam meant when he said language was flipped.

I am sure that even talking about "sex" as opposed to simply "gender" is a big no-no in areas where certain kinds of queer/gender politics hold sway.

I like PW's breakdown of the sex essentialism that's built into gender stuff and how that is distinct from simply talking about physical sex at all (even if this is somehow complicated it has become a taboo topic in some ways)

I really appreciate the stuff about identity formation too; it sheds light on how simple things like someone turning you down sexually can be turned into "phobia".

The whole idea that identities can be created with complete autonomy from the rest of the world has a certain "year zero" feeling to it.

[Project Willow]

My feminist friends almost exclusively express disdain for "white feminism" and feel the need to qualify their statements constantly. I imagine that in and of itself is exhausting. Perhaps that's more to do with the fact that we are all broadly from working class backgrounds and / or are still working class. I would say that the trend, especially in the future, will be towards intersectionality.

Sort of like how "unpacking the invisible knapsack," as important as it was at the time for illustrating privilege, was not and still is not universal, showing bias and a lack of class consciousness.

Your feminist friends are parroting a straw-person perception, a chimera, created by various reactionary forces. I recall no such thing in my experiences coming of age at the tail end of the second wave. My women's studies syllabus was highly class and race conscious. The group that suffered the most exclusion in the early days were lesbians, otherwise known as the "lavender menace", and that error was openly discussed and repudiated when I was young adult. We read Audre Lorde, we read Angela Davis. We reviewed endless statistics about the disproportional impact of inequality on poor women, not to mention critiques of economic systems and how only some work is "paid work". We were intersectional long before the concept was fashioned into the lever it is today for young liberals to pry themselves apart from their foremothers, acquiescing, as they are wont, to the errant messages of the ongoing backlash, and neo-liberal capitalism. That feminists are being blamed for lapses in consciousness based on which of their agenda items were adopted, and how perception is shaped and presented in mass media, is something I find terribly sad and ironic. It is erasing the roles of women of countless cultural and economic backrounds in the history of feminism, and blames white (read academic) feminists for the very imbalances they've sought to redress through a variety of critical approaches.

Have your feminist friends ever seen this photo, if not, why not, and whose fault is that?

[American Dream]

AD, but without gender essentialism the whole TG narrative is meaningless. How else could you say that someone who is physically and socially male is somehow really female inside? Every bit as female, we are told, as someone who bleeds and breeds?

I actually don't subscribe to that kind of view of things much at all. Ever since I started digging deeply into these kinds of issues and being around more and more people who don't conform to gender norms, I've become increasingly disenchanted with the binary model. Of course I know that most of the people in the (North American) mainstream do, but it doesn't gain so much traction for me, personally.

So, for example with the kids who are shuttled off to very expensive clinics for early treatments, I see this as unthinkingly fueled by a need to conform to binaries, possibly allowing greedy professionals to profiteer.

In my world, there is more of a sense of fluidity, almost never somebody trying to "be" a mainstream gender they weren't assigned at birth. Just more queerness, generally.

I never ask nor worry about what's in someone's pants. From the little I've heard, hormones and maybe top surgery are the most popular by far. It may possibly be that some folks have had some type of bottom surgery- I just don't know. Mostly though, I just see people living their lives off the binary system.

The biggest reason why people would conform in looks to a binary: so that the many, many haters out there don't hurt or kill them. Beyond the murder and all that physical violence are lots and lots of other forms of violence that will be done to people who don't conform. Please let's not forget that- this is a huge factor.

Also, I think there is a very important generational factor in all this- every young feminist I know is definitively and strongly supportive of trans liberation. That is an integral part of their feminism, in fact. Older feminists, it's more complicated- many are trying to get up to speed, even though it's an effort, a smaller number are hostile.

Mostly though- and this is an important point- the people I know who don't conform to those norms, were/are the militant feminists taking Women's Studies classes, including theorists like Julia Serano. It's really not a big deal in my world.

I subscribe more to the view of gender trying to break free from exaggerated and monolithic norms. We all should be free to find our own way, and find support and acceptance from those around us.

It's really sad that there is so much prejudice, hatred, and violence.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2015/1 ... character/

Epic eyerolls. Think of all the trans-activists could accomplish with the energy being spent on this... like I dunno, homeless shelters for trans youth, crisis center for trans abuse victims... but no, it's very, very important that you don't go see Zoolander 2!

[brainpanhandler]

http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2015/11/23/protesters-threaten-zoolander-2-boycott-over-portrayal-of-androgynous-character/

Epic eyerolls. Think of all the trans-activists could accomplish with the energy being spent on this... like I dunno, homeless shelters for trans youth, crisis center for trans abuse victims... but no, it's very, very important that you don't go see Zoolander 2!

Don't be a dickhead.

[coffin_dodger]

AD:

Any fool can see that this is very much a repeated theme here.

Whoops, there goes the I'm intellectually superior meme, again(!) - these fools just can't understand it, can they?

You're right. That stuck out to me too as something that is unusual around here.

Don't be a dickhead.

This is too good. Thank you, bph.

[brainpanhandler]

AD:

Any fool can see that this is very much a repeated theme here.

Whoops, there goes the I'm intellectually superior meme, again(!) - these fools just can't understand it, can they?

You're right. That stuck out to me too as something that is unusual around here.

Don't be a dickhead.

This is too good. Thank you, bph.

You're welcome. Not sure how those two quotes go together though. Guess I'm just dumb.

[coffin_dodger]

AD:

Any fool can see that this is very much a repeated theme here.

Whoops, there goes the I'm intellectually superior meme, again(!) - these fools just can't understand it, can they?

You're right. That stuck out to me too as something that is unusual around here.

Don't be a dickhead.

This is too good. Thank you, bph.

You're welcome. Not sure how those two quotes go together though. Guess I'm just dumb.

I'm not suggesting in any way that you're dumb, bph - you did that, in a snarky fashion - not I.

But I am seriously wondering about my continued participation here at RI. Now I've tuned into it, it's very difficult to ignore. I certainly don't want to become one of the thought police that I rail against, so maybe a little rest is called for.

[brainpanhandler]

I didn't want to be bothered with explaining why AOC's post was a shitty thing to do. I try not to waste my time here with trolls and/or trollish behavior. In context, asking AOC to not be a DICKhead seemed short and appropriate. I wasn't claiming to be any smarter than AOC. Why do I have to explain that?

[Luther Blissett]

Your feminist friends are parroting a straw-person perception, a chimera, created by various reactionary forces. I recall no such thing in my experiences coming of age at the tail end of the second wave. My women's studies syllabus was highly class and race conscious. The group that suffered the most exclusion in the early days were lesbians, otherwise known as the "lavender menace", and that error was openly discussed and repudiated when I was young adult. We read Audre Lorde, we read Angela Davis. We reviewed endless statistics about the disproportional impact of inequality on poor women, not to mention critiques of economic systems and how only some work is "paid work". We were intersectional long before the concept was fashioned into the lever it is today for young liberals to pry themselves apart from their foremothers, acquiescing, as they are wont, to the errant messages of the ongoing backlash, and neo-liberal capitalism. That feminists are being blamed for lapses in consciousness based on which of their agenda items were adopted, and how perception is shaped and presented in mass media, is something I find terribly sad and ironic. It is erasing the roles of women of countless cultural and economic backrounds in the history of feminism, and blames white (read academic) feminists for the very imbalances they've sought to redress through a variety of critical approaches.

Have your feminist friends ever seen this photo, if not, why not, and whose fault is that?

I'm near 100% certain they all have. I wish I could remember exactly what the subject was of the conversation I was listening to in which someone said "this is going to sound really 'white feminist', but…" but I can't remember right now. The person who said this is pretty high up at a well-known internet media company and it was something about the patriarchal norms of being expected to climb the corporate ladder and her disdain for having to essentially oppress other human beings by "managing" them. The gist of their arguments as best I can repeat is one that, going by this post above, you might appreciate - they are concerned with protecting daughters from murder and physical violence, protecting refugee women, dismantling capitalism, expressing solidarity with disabled women, teaching adult literacy and ESL, etc.

I believe that they feel that at too many meetings dominated by "white feminists" the issues are more focused on advancing careers, and that it is difficult to bring issues of class struggle into some groups. (These are Manhattan and Brooklyn groups, if that makes any difference, and I think it does). Maybe this is a tiny minority, but it was enough that a group of a dozen of my friends could all discuss their experiences with the phenomenon last weekend. I think that they blame other feminists for their lapsed consciousnesses is a product of trying and failing to get them to be more intersectional for years. I don't think it's quite a straw man since I do believe that their experiences were real.

I really don't like having to repeat these words with all the risks of misquoting them or misrepresenting them. Hope this cleared a little bit up.

[Luther Blissett]

We've been circling around the class issue, so I might as well bring it up in full rather than just alluding to the fact that it's important. I'm using a model that I posted in the Schadenfreude thread, but for easy reference I reproduce the link here. What is compelling to me is that the model is based on social network rather than solely income. As such, it is more explanatory of class phenomena. Note that the author attributes no moral judgments to any stratum other than the very very highest ("E1"), which is seen as uniformly evil. I.e., aside from E1, in every rung of the ladders both good and bad people can be found.

Basically, I do think women in the Labor ladder classes have it worse off than men. Male dominance is a key virtue in that class, so it stands to reason that women will always be seen as contributing less to society (other than their value as walking wombs). In the Gentry ladder classes, I think men and women experience different advantages and disadvantages, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that women in these classes have a slight advantage over men, because the legal and policy frameworks that govern these classes have been heavily influenced by feminism and they also favor talents and skills that are typically more common among women than men. For the Elite classes, it's really hard to say which gender has it better, but I would submit that whatever advantages one gender may have over the other, they pale in comparison to the advantages that Elites as a whole have over other classes.

Where does the TG phenomenon fit in? Access to medical intervention is really mostly available to Gentry and Elite classes, so we'll start there. I don't find it hard to imagine that Gentry men see advantages that accrue to women in that class, and begin to develop a resentment that becomes a very deep desire to access those advantages, and this desire combines with a deeply felt shame for ones masculinity (I'm vastly oversimplifying here, but I am almost certain that something like this is going on with at least the lesbian MtFs). Something similar may be going on with MtFs, and it's possible that the same process is operating in reverse, since the benefits experienced by women are not absolute. Note that I am not denying that there may be deeply felt identities in all cases, but as a quasi-Buddhist I don't really believe in the reality of core identity, and I'll just remark anecdotally that as a child I went through a phase where I wanted to be Marsha Brady (now look where I am). I can't fathom what's going on in the Elite classes, except that the most prominent Elite TGs are actually very low on the Elite ladder and probably heavily influenced by Gentry norms. As for the Labor classes (and Underclass), most TGs here do not have access to medical intervention and they end up working in the sex industry. I suspect that many of these TGs would probably turn out to be garden variety gay men or lesbians if they weren't so heavily influenced by the strict gender norms of their class ladder. In addition, I think there is a glamour factor influencing some of these TGs (look what kind of life I could have if I were a woman!) which eventually bumps against the cold hard reality of how difficult it is to climb the class ladder.

These musings are all in the hypothesis realm, and if they are backed up by data, I haven't seen anything systematically presented. I'm open to other hypotheses and interpretations.

This is a all interesting stuff and it's good to hear an honest interpretation from someone who came up in an upper middle class environment, especially someone with a background in biology.

I was with you up until the "glamour" bit — most trans and queer people I know are FtM (at least I think) and I can't think of one who is or would want to be called glamourous. And the MtF trans people I know, a smaller sample, are just androgyne, punk, nonbinary people. I really feel like the "glamour" thing is just something from television and not a reality on the ground.

[divideandconquer]

Exiles in their own flesh: A psychotherapist speaks
A guest post submitted (anonymously) by a practicing psychotherapist to the site 4th Wave Now (2015)

Read the full post here.

This link is very cogent, and worth quoting in case it got overlooked in the frenzy of rapid-fire posting.

When I am suddenly and without warning discouraged from exploring the underlying causes and conditions of certain of my patients’ distress (as I was trained to do), and instead forced to put my professional stamp of approval upon a prefab, one-size-fits-all narrative intended to explain the complexity of my patient’s troubles, I feel confused. It’s as if I am being held hostage. No longer encouraged or permitted to question, consider or discuss the full spectrum of my patient’s mental health concerns, it has occurred to me that I am being used, my meager professional authority commandeered to legitimize a new narrative I may or may not wish to corroborate.

It’s been perilous to simply admit to not fully understanding it all–let alone disagree with the trans narrative. There was no training or teaching. I was just suddenly told that some of my patients thought they were trapped in the wrong body and that was that.
....
There are so many complex forces, from many different realms, coming into play with this trans wave. Most people are completely unaware of these intersecting interests.

Unfortunately the culture war has done a number on the concept of critical thinking. I have considered myself liberal my entire adult life, and I still am. But for a long time I couldn’t find anyone questioning this trans explosion who wasn’t on the far right. It made me feel like only conservatives were allowed to think, to consider this issue, but ultimately their thoughts were rendered meaningless due to their branding by the culture war. It’s essential that left-leaning people model critical thinking for the masses in this regard.

It’s important to link people like us together, who have been silenced, so we can resume contact with our critical thinking skills and reduce our growing sense of self doubt. Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled transphobic. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types.

What frightens me most about the trans movement is that the establishment has gotten involved and is leading it. I think that’s really weird. Clearly they are benefiting from it financially. So sad. It disturbs me to see how giddy my former medical director is to be part of this growing craze. We used to treat kids with mental health problems, but now it’s all about validating their emergent and shifting identities. As professionals, if we don’t loudly prioritize their identities as being the most important thing about them (and identities do shift constantly in kids and teens), we risk coming across as unsupportive and even immoral. Identity development has always been a teen task, but in the past it wasn’t necessarily supposed to become a lifestyle, or colonize the entirety of your existence.
...
What saddens me the most is the way children are being trained to think their parents do not love them if mom and dad don’t jump aboard the trans train. To me, this is a brutal aspect of a near-dictatorship being foisted on everyone.
....
One common trait I’ve noticed in nearly all the trans kids I’ve met has been their profound sense of being different, and too alone. They often have had little success with making friends, or what I would call contact with “the other.” Because of their psychic isolation, they are prime targets for group think narratives. But in addition to looking for a way to belong, they are also craving protection and the stamp of legitimacy, perhaps because they feel a profound lack of it.

Now that the government and medical communities are involved in the creation of who trans folks are, this class of individuals have finally found their safe havens. Now, rather than being merely invisible and awkward, they have been transformed into veritable leaders of a revolution. Now, rather than cower in the shadows, they have commandeered the narratives of others into a similar dark and brooding place where they once were. The tables, as they lived and viewed them, have now turned.
....
A large part of the problem comes with the revolution in health care. More and more, we are giving people the power to define their own treatments. This is good in many ways, but the trans movement is using this moment, and is actively recruiting young, psychologically undefined and frightened people to push their agenda through the medical community. It’s clearly not that difficult to do. These kids are just pawns. That’s how it looks to me anyway. The trans community needs more converts so that the narrative becomes more cohesive. I’m guessing the push for this comes from a need to further cohere so they will have more members to fully cement a fragile, constructed reality.

Thanks guerilla!

It's very interesting--and scary--to see how the establishment, seemingly out-of-the-blue, can universally impose whatever "prefab, one-size-fits-all narrative" they want upon intelligent professionals, supposedly experts in their field, without any kind of significant backlash. If a cult is generally considered to be a group that indoctrinates its members, aren't most professionals merely cult members? Aren't professionals the most indoctrinated group amongst us, the most susceptible to coercion, primarily because they can't afford not to be?

Cults and closed narratives neutralize and tame what we see as the unknown.

As this psychotherapist said, "my meager professional authority commandeered to legitimize a new narrative" Unfortunately, this woman is rare because most people, as she said, allow themselves to be systematically separated from their own intuition, from their critical thinking skills..just go along to get along.

Not that this surprises me in the least, but to see such a blatant example, especially one that depicts the the government and medical communities involvement in the creation of who we are, is always jarring.

[Luther Blissett]

I still say that transhumanism represents a classist, hypercapitalist, libertarian thrust to give oneself an ultracompetitive edge over fellow humans in order to depart the species in search of some demigod "ideal," while transgenderism is none of the above.

[backtoiam]

I still say that transhumanism represents a classist, hypercapitalist, libertarian thrust to give oneself an ultracompetitive edge over fellow humans in order to depart the species in search of some demigod "ideal," while transgenderism is none of the above.

I respect your opinion and I always enjoy reading your posts. Just want to say that up front, and I mean it.

I want to ask you a serious question though. This is not a rhetorical question I am being very sincere.

Why do you think the mainstream media has decided to focus on .07 percent of the population and make it a global narrative?

Is this tiny fraction of society so important to the whole of humanity that it deserves urgent global attention?

If so, why so? What is it about this tiny section of humanity that gives it enough importance to occupy incredibly valuable real estate in the public media machine?

What is it about this tiny section of human beings that the mainstream media wants the other 99.93 percent to know?

If a person can accept the fact that the mainstream narrative is designed a social control tool, it can also accept the fact that the subjects in the info stream are social control tools right?

So, what is it about this subject that is being used as a social control tool? In my opinion there is a Trojan Horse buried in this issue disguised as empathy and concern for transgender human beings. I believe the Trojan Horse is transhumanism.

This would go to the next level of course and open the debate on transhumanism and the ethics of this issue, which seems unrelated to transgender, but just in my little opinion I believe that behind the smoke and mirror public show these issues are totally related.

The Fabian Turtle crawls very slow, but indeed, it does crawl. The old fable about the tortoise and the hare having a race is not a joke. "Slow and steady wins the race" and the reason it wins is because it goes unnoticed by the majority of humanity. It does not catch the eye due to sudden movement and this is the key to its success.

Many a well meaning human being is riding on the back of a Fabian Turtle, and has no idea that it is being taken for a ride.

[guruilla]

I still say that transhumanism represents a classist, hypercapitalist, libertarian thrust to give oneself an ultracompetitive edge over fellow humans in order to depart the species in search of some demigod "ideal," while transgenderism is none of the above.

Every wedge has a thin end as well as a thick.

Did anyone else notice this link at the 4th wave Now blog: 7-year-old “trans activist” used in campaign by Transgender Europe, a German NGO partially funded by US State Department (Haven't read it yet, just saw the title)

Bio-tech is apparently a huge new industry. Access to children for experimentation + massive funding under cover of compassionate research into gender dysphoria? Hello?? Earth to RI?