![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I have thinking a lot lately about transgender (and trans-identity in general) issues. Really trying to listen to and understand what other people have to say. I have had a couple of ah-hah moments, and my thinking has evolved a lot, and yet I am more unsettled and confused about these issues than ever.
First of all, it should go without saying that I do not, and have never, thought that there is a strict binary division between male vs. female. There are no crisp, sharp category boundaries in nature, and a lot of harm comes of trying to impose such boundaries and drive people into one confined box or another. Even if we completely put aside people's feelings about their gender... even on the biological level. I always regarded the conservative world-view that "God created MEN to be MEN and WOMEN to be WOMEN!" as obviously false and over-simplified because, first off, what do you do with people with aneuploidy of the sex chromosomes or XY women with complete androgen insensitivity? Gender is a continuum, a fluid, multi-faceted thing. People are entitled to do whatever they want with their own names, appearance, and bodies. So my knee-jerk reaction to a MTF coming out with fabulous dress and nail polish was to say "go girl, you look fabulous!" but not give the issue any further thought.
But then I found myself annoyed and irritated by Caitlyn Jenner and the hoo-hah around Caitlyn Jenner. Irritated above and beyond what the whole Kardashian family reality TV show thing would explain. See this NYT opinion piece for kind of the flavor of my annoyance. I do think that Ms. Burkett, the author of this piece, is utterly failing to hit the nail on the head. But she is waving the hammer in the direction of... there is something there to be annoyed at.
This came up at lunch, at work, when everyone in the lab went to the cafeteria together, and my boss, just making conversation, tried to grapple with the issue of that crazy woman in Spokane and whether there should be any such concept as "trans-racial". "So, on the one hand, we have absolutely no problem with Caitlyn Jenner..." he started.
"Wait a minute, I do have a problem with Caitlyn Jenner," I interrupted. "I'm not sure I understand what it means to Jenner to 'be a woman'. I didn't watch the TV interview. But I get the impression that to Jenner, 'being a woman' is all about wearing nail polish on her fingernails, and having giggly girls' nights talking about make-up and fashion. I never do those things! Look, I never put nail polish on my fingernails!" I held up my hands to show my fingernails, unpainted, filed as short as possible. "Isn't it weird that Jenner defines herself as a woman by doing things that I, a woman, never do?"
"Well, some women of your mother's generation would say that you are not really a woman," replied my boss.
At first I sputtered and grumped and ranted silently about this. How can other people re-define my category to take it away from me. Here I have done the one thing that is the core canonical biological definition of "female", I produced a large haploid gamete with mitochondria. There is an actual living child as proof of that. Not to mention the slightly secondary female things... like, oh, carry the child in my body for months, and feed her from my breasts for a couple of years.
Then I realized: oops, I'm conflating the concepts of "sex" and "gender". Stop it! Big ah-hah moment: I was talking about sex; Jenner is talking about gender. In many cases people's sex and gender are concordant. That's the typical, canonical, socially expected case. So it's easy to forget about the distinction between sex and gender and get confused. But once I clearly separated the two concepts in my mind, and recognize them as different dimensions, suddenly it seemed to all make sense. In the dimension of sex: yeah, I'm female. And Jenner is still male. No idea of what hir below-the-belt surgical status actually is, but Jenner might still be making the little swimmy gametes. That's totally male. But that's not what Jenner is interested in talking about with the public. Unless you're planning to sleep with Ms. Jenner and need to worry about birth control, it's really not anyone else's business. OTOH, in the gender dimension: I don't claim to be entitled to define who is where along that dimension, because I do not care. I'm perfectly happy to cede the definition of "male" and "female" in the gender dimension to someone else who is more interested. So they very well may define "female" in such a way that includes Ms. Jenner (and that's fine by me, because that would make Ms. Jenner happy) but doesn't include me. Nobody would define me as "male", I think. But if the category tests for inclusion in the "female" category are 1) a strong feeling that one is mentally intrinsically female, 2) the habit of wearing nail polish on fingers, and 3) the irrepressible urge to wear bras and pantyhose, I totally fail those tests and must be classified as "not-female".
Suddenly I see it: look along this axis, and I am a "not-female". And what do I realize when I see that? Big revelation here:omg, it actually doesn't matter.
I floated away from the whole gender dichotomy and looked at it from the outside. I am not in any of those boxes. I am happy to be outside the boxes. I am just eccentric gender-neutral little me, unconcerned about where I am on this particular dimension. Freedom. And if any old biddy wants to tsk-tsk at me about not being a "real woman", and expect me to climb back into a box, they can just shove it. Because do I have to listen to that crap? No. I am free.
That about wraps it up for the subject of gender, as applied to myself. What about sex? Still female here. Nope, haven't changed my karyotype, and still cycling monthly! In the dimension of biological sex, still where I always was, pretty close to the 100% female end of the continuum. So, does this matter?
I do think, sometimes, it does. Here's where Ms. Burkett, that NYT opinion writer, comes close to articulating a problem with the transgender movement's position, yet fails to hit the nail on the head. Nowhere does Ms. Burkett articulate the distinction between "sex" and "gender". In fact, she seems to have these concepts hopelessly confused. (I know, it's confusing.) One thing she waxes indignant about is the fact that the transgender movement has called the word "vagina" "exclusionary and offer[ing] an extremely narrow perspective on womanhood". Another is the claim that "Abortion rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue... [they are] a uterus owner’s issue." I think that Ms. Burkett wants to acknowledge is that there is a set of people who do have a vagina and/or a uterus, and there is a set of political issues that are of special concern to that set of people. A non-trivial set of people: about 3.5 billion of us. Very weighty and significant issues indeed. What do we do with these issues? Are people with a vagina and/or uterus entitled to speak more directly to these issues? I would say, we need to grapple with these issues, and yes, absolutely, they should be owned by the people with the more relevant anatomy.
I don't think anyone in this debate seriously disagrees with that. The contention is: do we use the word "women" to refer to that set of 3.5 billion people when we try to talk about some incredibly important issues such as reproductive freedom, female birth control options, abortion, and lactation rights? Transgender spokespeople seem to want to reserve the word "woman" to refer to a categorization that cuts across only the gender dimension, and therefore see the glitches and ironies in referring to these as "women's issues". But imagine taking an essay on the subject of reproductive freedom and doing a query-replace to replace the word "woman" with a more precise formulation, such as "person with a vagina and a uterus and thus might potentially be a fertile female human." The results would be word-bloated turgid and unreadable. Really not helpful for actually grappling with the issues...
Oh look, I have gone on and on and still not gotten any where near discussing the distinction between gender identity vs. gender roles, which I'm still having a really hard time grappling with. Or talking about what has been going on that has me thinking about this so damn much lately. Or what any of this has to do with the unfortunate incident of having to rent a car in Seattle, let alone the full funny-now-that-it's-over story of renting a car in Seattle... Let me stop rambling now. More later, perhaps.
First of all, it should go without saying that I do not, and have never, thought that there is a strict binary division between male vs. female. There are no crisp, sharp category boundaries in nature, and a lot of harm comes of trying to impose such boundaries and drive people into one confined box or another. Even if we completely put aside people's feelings about their gender... even on the biological level. I always regarded the conservative world-view that "God created MEN to be MEN and WOMEN to be WOMEN!" as obviously false and over-simplified because, first off, what do you do with people with aneuploidy of the sex chromosomes or XY women with complete androgen insensitivity? Gender is a continuum, a fluid, multi-faceted thing. People are entitled to do whatever they want with their own names, appearance, and bodies. So my knee-jerk reaction to a MTF coming out with fabulous dress and nail polish was to say "go girl, you look fabulous!" but not give the issue any further thought.
But then I found myself annoyed and irritated by Caitlyn Jenner and the hoo-hah around Caitlyn Jenner. Irritated above and beyond what the whole Kardashian family reality TV show thing would explain. See this NYT opinion piece for kind of the flavor of my annoyance. I do think that Ms. Burkett, the author of this piece, is utterly failing to hit the nail on the head. But she is waving the hammer in the direction of... there is something there to be annoyed at.
This came up at lunch, at work, when everyone in the lab went to the cafeteria together, and my boss, just making conversation, tried to grapple with the issue of that crazy woman in Spokane and whether there should be any such concept as "trans-racial". "So, on the one hand, we have absolutely no problem with Caitlyn Jenner..." he started.
"Wait a minute, I do have a problem with Caitlyn Jenner," I interrupted. "I'm not sure I understand what it means to Jenner to 'be a woman'. I didn't watch the TV interview. But I get the impression that to Jenner, 'being a woman' is all about wearing nail polish on her fingernails, and having giggly girls' nights talking about make-up and fashion. I never do those things! Look, I never put nail polish on my fingernails!" I held up my hands to show my fingernails, unpainted, filed as short as possible. "Isn't it weird that Jenner defines herself as a woman by doing things that I, a woman, never do?"
"Well, some women of your mother's generation would say that you are not really a woman," replied my boss.
At first I sputtered and grumped and ranted silently about this. How can other people re-define my category to take it away from me. Here I have done the one thing that is the core canonical biological definition of "female", I produced a large haploid gamete with mitochondria. There is an actual living child as proof of that. Not to mention the slightly secondary female things... like, oh, carry the child in my body for months, and feed her from my breasts for a couple of years.
Then I realized: oops, I'm conflating the concepts of "sex" and "gender". Stop it! Big ah-hah moment: I was talking about sex; Jenner is talking about gender. In many cases people's sex and gender are concordant. That's the typical, canonical, socially expected case. So it's easy to forget about the distinction between sex and gender and get confused. But once I clearly separated the two concepts in my mind, and recognize them as different dimensions, suddenly it seemed to all make sense. In the dimension of sex: yeah, I'm female. And Jenner is still male. No idea of what hir below-the-belt surgical status actually is, but Jenner might still be making the little swimmy gametes. That's totally male. But that's not what Jenner is interested in talking about with the public. Unless you're planning to sleep with Ms. Jenner and need to worry about birth control, it's really not anyone else's business. OTOH, in the gender dimension: I don't claim to be entitled to define who is where along that dimension, because I do not care. I'm perfectly happy to cede the definition of "male" and "female" in the gender dimension to someone else who is more interested. So they very well may define "female" in such a way that includes Ms. Jenner (and that's fine by me, because that would make Ms. Jenner happy) but doesn't include me. Nobody would define me as "male", I think. But if the category tests for inclusion in the "female" category are 1) a strong feeling that one is mentally intrinsically female, 2) the habit of wearing nail polish on fingers, and 3) the irrepressible urge to wear bras and pantyhose, I totally fail those tests and must be classified as "not-female".
Suddenly I see it: look along this axis, and I am a "not-female". And what do I realize when I see that? Big revelation here:
omg, it actually doesn't matter.
I'm fine and happy with that.
Because... now I am free.
I floated away from the whole gender dichotomy and looked at it from the outside. I am not in any of those boxes. I am happy to be outside the boxes. I am just eccentric gender-neutral little me, unconcerned about where I am on this particular dimension. Freedom. And if any old biddy wants to tsk-tsk at me about not being a "real woman", and expect me to climb back into a box, they can just shove it. Because do I have to listen to that crap? No. I am free.
That about wraps it up for the subject of gender, as applied to myself. What about sex? Still female here. Nope, haven't changed my karyotype, and still cycling monthly! In the dimension of biological sex, still where I always was, pretty close to the 100% female end of the continuum. So, does this matter?
I do think, sometimes, it does. Here's where Ms. Burkett, that NYT opinion writer, comes close to articulating a problem with the transgender movement's position, yet fails to hit the nail on the head. Nowhere does Ms. Burkett articulate the distinction between "sex" and "gender". In fact, she seems to have these concepts hopelessly confused. (I know, it's confusing.) One thing she waxes indignant about is the fact that the transgender movement has called the word "vagina" "exclusionary and offer[ing] an extremely narrow perspective on womanhood". Another is the claim that "Abortion rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue... [they are] a uterus owner’s issue." I think that Ms. Burkett wants to acknowledge is that there is a set of people who do have a vagina and/or a uterus, and there is a set of political issues that are of special concern to that set of people. A non-trivial set of people: about 3.5 billion of us. Very weighty and significant issues indeed. What do we do with these issues? Are people with a vagina and/or uterus entitled to speak more directly to these issues? I would say, we need to grapple with these issues, and yes, absolutely, they should be owned by the people with the more relevant anatomy.
I don't think anyone in this debate seriously disagrees with that. The contention is: do we use the word "women" to refer to that set of 3.5 billion people when we try to talk about some incredibly important issues such as reproductive freedom, female birth control options, abortion, and lactation rights? Transgender spokespeople seem to want to reserve the word "woman" to refer to a categorization that cuts across only the gender dimension, and therefore see the glitches and ironies in referring to these as "women's issues". But imagine taking an essay on the subject of reproductive freedom and doing a query-replace to replace the word "woman" with a more precise formulation, such as "person with a vagina and a uterus and thus might potentially be a fertile female human." The results would be word-bloated turgid and unreadable. Really not helpful for actually grappling with the issues...
Oh look, I have gone on and on and still not gotten any where near discussing the distinction between gender identity vs. gender roles, which I'm still having a really hard time grappling with. Or talking about what has been going on that has me thinking about this so damn much lately. Or what any of this has to do with the unfortunate incident of having to rent a car in Seattle, let alone the full funny-now-that-it's-over story of renting a car in Seattle... Let me stop rambling now. More later, perhaps.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}