content warning, I’m going to be glib and talk about misogyny and transphobia in a joking manner - I don’t mean to harm anyone, and I don’t want to upset anyone.
OK hear me out: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, at least the actual radfems who are often middle-aged and still stuck in second-wave feminism, should love gender-affirming care … doesn’t it do exactly what they would love to do to men? Like, a lot of these women are cultural feminists, they essentialise men and women and view women as superior and men as inherently violent, oppressive, and bad. At least that’s been my experience.
So, for example, if a man wants to suppress testosterone and take estrogen, shouldn’t TERFs’ fear about violence from men and the (admittedly simplistic) narrative that testosterone is responsible for that violence and aggression motivate them to embrace enabling as many men as possible to suppress their testosterone and chemically castrate themselves with estrogen?
Even if they don’t believe that makes the man a woman, shouldn’t they believe it’s an improvement?
It just sounds like a revenge fever-dream concocted by second-wave lesbian separatist: a woman goes about secretly injecting abusive men with estrogen to calm them down … it just sounds like a revenge fantasy they would be into.
The plot of The Gate to Women’s Country literally centers around this fantasy of castrating men to make “good” men.
And if that’s not compelling, I know they love the stories about chopping off dicks - come on, if they really believe trans women are a bunch of men, shouldn’t they support access to gender-affirming care like vaginoplasties that do exactly that?
TERFs should support gender-affirming care even if they don’t believe trans women are women. If men are the enemy they should be the biggest fans of chemically castrating and cutting the dicks off men.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Firstly, you’re breaking the first rule of this space and your comment will be removed. I would encourage you to ask questions in an appriopriate space, this one exists for trans feminine people and will be kept safe for them. Secondly, do you know that you have XX chromosomes? Have you ever had that tested? Or is that just the assumption you’re making based on your physiology?
You’re most likely a woman because society has largely told you that you are. They’ve told you that your body is what makes you a woman, and that being a woman comes with all these different things attached to it. You have internalized that identity as you were being raised and it has meaning to you, you have always seen yourself as the gender you were assigned. Cisgender is nothing more than just accepting the gender you were assigned.
Trans people experience dysphoria about our bodies for a lot of reasons. The way that our bodies are shaped and appear is itself gendered. So many trans people feel a gender based dysphoria about their bodies. The way that secondary sex characteristics are typified has an impact on us as well. Many cisgender women experience the same things about their bodies. We have an internalized view of our own gender and if we feel a dissonance between the way we are and the gender we have internalized, it causes distress to us. This necessarily includes our bodies.
As well, feminists don’t abandon all modes of gendered expression. We have our own tastes and preferences with clothing, expression, and presentation. Many of us still undergo gendered rituals about our bodies, like removing body hair and wearing clothing that emphasizes a feminine presentation. Trans people are just doing the same things. I experience all of the same pressures that cis women do to have a conforming presentation. I enjoy wearing gendered feminine clothing because those things correlate with my own identity, with how I see myself. This is a normal thing that everyone, cisgender included, does.
To your last comment, what are you? Presumably, you are a cisgender woman as you have identified yourself that way. What womanhood means to you is up to you. I understand this is something you’ve been told your entire life that you are inherently, and you have to find your own way to exist within the conventions of womanhood, but you don’t. As women, we can be masculine and/or feminine, we can be apathetic about our gender, we can choose to take part in gendered presentations like makeup or wearing clothing associated with femininity, we can work in any field we want and we can be whatever we want to be. Those things are all true even considering Trans women. Masculine Trans women exist. Gender liberation is discarding the concept of assigned gender roles entirely and allowing gender self-determination. It’s letting you decide what gender means to you.
So, as I often do to people questioning, I’ll say this. No one can tell you for sure one way or another whether you’re trans or not, nor whether you should transition or not. That choice is entirely yours. You have to explore your own feelings about gender and come to that conclusion yourself. So what are you? That’s entirely not a question I can answer. You have to answer it for yourself.
Yeah, for all that you can delete me and tell me to fuck off. Why did you respond to me at all? You wrote a wall of text to a banned opinion to pretend you actually allow my existence.
I do none of these things, does it make me not a woman? Can i not be a woman without the feminine trappings?
Where is the appropriate space to speak?
If you’re going to come to our space and ask us to explain ourselves to you, openly questioning who we are and whether or not we are who we say we are, the least you can do is actually read my response.
Yes, you can be a woman and not partake in gendered rituals we associate with femininity. The same is true of trans women. Gender liberation is relinquishing the notion that any assigned gender roles are good. But like we wouldn’t ask cis women to abandon nail polish because it’s associated with a certain kind of femininity, the same is true of trans women.
Literally anywhere else. This is a space for transfeminine people to exist without having to constantly explain who we are and justify why we deserve rights. Many of the people in this community live in places with governments that are actively hostile to our existence. You can ask questions about this literally anywhere else. There are unironically millions of places on the internet with content discussing the exact thing you’re asking about. I responded to you because you seemed to show a disposition of good faith and an awareness that you don’t understand what trans people are all about. I do not categorically ban people from this space unless they prove themselves to be a genuine risk to transfeminine people in this space. You seemed to have an interest in actually learning more about trans people. I provided my own thoughts and my own explanation of what it means to be a woman and how that fits with trans women and cis women. Because again, you seemed actually interested in some kind of answer.
I removed your comment because you openly identified yourself as a terf (aligned yourself with the term at least), and many people here, including myself, have some pretty bad trauma in relation to terf ideology. Terfs are a real political movement, specifically aiming to make my existence impossible. We have to deal with a 24/7 onslaught of terf misinformation informing government policies around the world. We have to deal with mischaracterization and incredible disgusting and horrific language about ourselves and our bodies. You ought to be able to empathize a bit with that as a cis woman. Openly identifying as a misogynist in a space for women would be a form of aggression. I realize this post is kind of inviting commentary from TERFs indirectly, but the rules of this community still stand.
This space is for transfeminine and questioning people first and foremost. As it says in the rules to the community in the sidebar, anyone is welcome to participate here, but disrupting the safety of this space for transfeminine people is unacceptable and will result in moderator action.
I just want to point out that there is nowhere on the fediverse where a person can ask these questions and the op started the conversation by accusing feminists of my age group of being terfs.
[email protected]
I think anything remotely construed as terf would fail their respect rule. Trans support is an all or nothing here.
Respect in that context is more about showing that you’re asking questions in good faith. Disrespectful behavior would be calling trans women men, saying that gender affirming care is harmful, etc.
I never said any such thing. I fully affirm gender affirming care as healthcare and i want my aussie tax dollars to pay for it.
I definitely wasn’t trying to imply that you had. I think a post you make about these subjects would most likely be allowed there.
Yes I definitely recognize that this post was indirectly opening up this kind of conversation, I would not have been as open to engaging if this had been on another post. That’s not a slight against you, just that rather not all trans people are willing/capable of engaging in prolonged dialogs about whether or not they are who they say they are. It can actually hurt being questioned in this way and is something trans people are expected to do a lot.
As the comment below shared, the asktransgender community would be a better place to have this kind of dialog.
I never questioned anyone’s identity. Show where i did? I have never dead named or claimed a woman is a man or vice versa. I acknowledge that trans women are women, i also admit to confusion since it changes my own identity. The op attacked feminists like me and thays why i responded. I usually say nothing.
I didn’t intend to imply that you had, I was just saying as an example of why we are weary of people outside our community asking questions in our community and why we generally do not allow these kinds of discussions. I believe through the conversation we’ve had here you’ve shown an interest in learning more about us and are acting in good faith. If I thought that you were trying to call us men or anything like that this conversation would’ve ended a while ago.
Im questioning who we all are, what it means to be a woman because the idenity i knew is gone. Deal with it.
The identity you “knew” is still there you are just welcome to interpret it however you want to, the same that I am. You can be a woman, I myself am a woman it’s really not that complicated. I’m treated as a woman in every facet of my life, I work as a woman and engage with the world and everyone I know as a woman. I’m assuming you do as well? Again you’ve been raised to perceive gender as something that is assigned to you and that you can never be rid of. I am here telling you that you are the ultimate deciding factor in what your gender is, and what that gender means to you. It’s a liberation entirely from the constrained categories of assigned gender.
If you’re not actually going to read what I’m saying, then why are you here asking questions? Are you uninterested in an answer? If so, what is the point of you commenting here at all?
Ok, honestly that is how i lived my life. Im a woman because of chromosomes and it means nothing day to day. I feel like your ‘treated as a woman’ is not the same as my treated ‘like a person’. Woman means something to you but to me it’s incidental. I’ve always been here being a woman with no real meaning attached to that. Now there are people attaching meaning and that makes me uncomfortable because i can’t relate to their meaning. Whether it’s makeup and fashion or babies and boob jobs or whatever. I’m a person first and a mani pedi is a luteral nightmare. Now we have womens stuff on lemmy and it includes makeup and fashion? Am i not a woman??,???, i’m not a man so what the fuck am i??? I feel like the stereotype is enforced more than ever and i hate it.
By women’s stuff I assume you mean the community, and I would agree that it does fall at times into what I would consider pointlessly gendered.
I am a radical feminist and a gender liberationist. I very much believe that the assignment of gender at birth is one of the ways that patriarchy is maintained over women. The insistence that gender is a biological trait rather than a social class allows them to attach other things to womanhood and resist attempts to remove them. It’s easier to insist that all women must be subservient to men and stay at home to raise children if womanhood itself is something inherent and biologically ordained. Biological gender essentialism actually works against women’s liberation in this way.
I’ll admit that it’s not intuitive, but gender just really isn’t something that can be empirically determined. Like in broader social contexts, how you are gendered by other people is entirely up to their perception of you. That’s why the concepts of passing (being perceived and treated as a cisgender woman) and of clocking (being perceived and treated as a transgender woman) exist. Now I personally hate that and wish that gender itself was not ever assumed about other people. It would functionally make patriarchy impossible if no one was ever presumed to be a man or a woman, but instead we allowed other people to identify themselves.
I understand also that for you makeup and fashion and things we traditionally assign to femininity are constraining. For me, they are liberating as I always desired these things growing up and was denied them. The same with my body, with the shape and physiology of my body. But that doesn’t make my gender the one by which everyone else is judged. That’s why I’ve said that what womanhood means is up to you. It’s your choice. And if the identity itself of woman feels so repulsive on you that it causes you distress or discomfort you are not obligated to identify with it. Womanhood is what women are, and women are masculine and feminine and everything in between and beyond those terms. What is feminine and what is masculine is subjective too. To some women being strong and large is itself an expression of their femininity, to others it isn’t. Gender liberation isn’t about dictating who is right in this situation, it is rather about allowing everyone to decide who and what they are and refute constant comparison to others of the same gender.
I do also have to acknowledge that as much as these ideals are ones I firmly believe in, the world doesn’t operate cleanly along these principles. While I’m here discussing real gender liberation gender is still being assigned all over the place. And what gender means is still being dictated by others. In that way trans women and cis women face social pressure to conform to standards of womanhood dictated by others. I don’t think we should blame any women who do conform to those standards, but rather we should call out the people putting the standards in place to begin with. The people doing that are not transgender people, but those interwoven with systems of patriarchy and male dominance in society.
How do you reconcile all that with research showing trans women have female brains? And where does that come from? Clearly not the chromosomes. I think you get me in the ‘it’s all bollocks’ way. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all relative, and i absolutely define my own womaness (as meaningless), as always, i am not anti trans.
I don’t tend to put a lot of value in neurological studies like that. We don’t understand at all how neurology impacts who we are as people, in terms of identities and personality traits and things like that. I have always been resistant to attempts to categorize “male and female brains” and then extrapolate meaningful information about gendered behavior from that. Like I do definitely believe neurosexism is a thing.
I’ve actually always felt a resistance to attempts to find a biological origin for queer people. I don’t believe that sexuality and gender identity are derived from biology and believe that the only thing to be gained from that kind of research is new methods for gatekeeping who is and isn’t actually gay or trans. I understand the appeal in trying to fit trans people into biological gender essentialism, but I do not see it as anything other than an attempt to reconcile the problems with biological gender essentialism instead of recognizing that gender is not a biological trait.
The differences in brain structure for trans women I mostly attribute to hormone usage. Hormones do change the structures of our bodies, but there’s no evidence that those changes to the brain influence who we are and what we identify as. I am inherently skeptical of such results, and associated theories like “trans women identify as women due to increased estrogen exposure/decreased testosterone exposure in the womb”. I purely believe that gender is a product of our personalities and our experiences in early childhood. There’s also evidence going back to the beginning of recorded history of trans and gender variant people. In all that time gender has existed in the form of differing social classes, and gender variance in those eras has been related to the way gender was at that time perceived.