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.
TERF stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, and originally it designated anti-trans feminists, like Janice Raymond (The Transsexual Empire), Sheila Jeffreys, Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, and others. A lot of these feminists are part of second-wave of feminism. Contemporary TERFs however are arguably poor feminists, and many of them even refuse to identify as feminists as they make alliances with right-wing movements. Basically, TERFs today seem to be more anti-trans than they are feminist. (More here about TERFs if you are interested.)
Since by definition TERFs are anti-trans, they would not agree with “trans women are women” or anything like that, they believe trans women are delusional men and invaders of women’s spaces. You could not be a TERF and believe trans women are women.
Did you have a karyotype test, how do you know you have XX chromosomes in particular? Even so, why do you think having XX chromosomes guarantees being a woman - there are certainly men who have XX chromosomes (for example trans men - I assume if you think trans women are women, you agree that trans men are men).
It seems to me that not only do chromosomes not guarantee a gender, but most people don’t actually know their chromosomes.
If we were being pragmatic, we might say you’re a woman because society perceives and treats you as a woman, but this can be a problematic definition for trans-inclusiveness. Simone de Beauvoir, the famous existentialist philosopher and foundational feminist thinker, in Second Sex, writes that what makes a woman cannot be reduced to just physiology, i.e. she rejects biological essentialism and the idea that something like a uterus or XX chromosomes makes a woman a woman, instead she points to the larger context of the way women are fashioned as subordinate to men and as an “other” in society, some important quotes from Second Sex:
In the end I understand Beauvoir to be arguing that there is no inherent thing as being a woman, and that we should instead see view people as primarily human, the very same way that men are often perceived as human first (as the default / universal) and not particularly gendered or othered in their gender.
But this creates a problem for trans identity, and it does not accord well with certain facts about biology - for example, the common belief that gender is just a social construct, which came from feminist thinking and finds its roots in Beauvoir, resulted in the sexologist John Money deciding to have a baby boy whose penis was damaged by circumcision be raised as a little girl - after all, gender is just “socially constructed nonsense” and what does it matter. Money thought it would be better to raise the kid as a girl because it was easier to construct a vagina and give the child a normal life as a girl rather than raise them as a boy without a penis. The baby would never know they were born a boy, and they performed corrective surgery to give the baby boy a vagina and raised him as a little girl without his knowledge. This boy’s name is David Reimer, and he contrary to Money’s theory, he struggled to live as a girl and by the age of 15 rejected being a girl and lived to be a boy.
Now, this is an example of a cis boy who was raised as a girl and who experienced gender dysphoria trying to live as a girl and who eventually realized something was wrong and was able to transition back to being a boy.
What was going on with David Reimer, if gender is just a social construct, why did he struggle so much to live as a girl? He was pressured and expected to be a girl, and he conformed in many ways, but he was particularly rowdy for a girl, and he was, well, boyish.
Well, it turns out there is a growing body of evidence that indicates gender identity is actually a part of our biology, and there have actually been dissections of trans women’s brains that show particular structures in their brains that are more like cis women’s brains in terms of volume and density than cis male’s brains (even when the trans women did not take hormones or transition medically). We now know it’s a lot more complicated than brains just being “male” or “female” and there is a new model called the brain mosaic, so it’s complicated.
But the main take-away is that gender identity is biological not something we can mold with social influence - this is why conversion therapy is not successful, and why the only evidence-based and effective treatment for gender dysphoria that has ever been found is gender affirming care. We also now know that gender dysphoria is genetic, though likely caused by a complex set of traits rather than a single gene.
So why do people change their bodies? They got unlucky and inherited a genetic condition that causes their brain to feel like a different gender from the sex they are assigned upon birth, and that results in discomfort similar to if you took a cis person and tried to raise them as the opposite sex. This is all oversimplification and leaves out a lot of the complexity and diversity of trans experience, but hopefully this helps give you an initial idea.
I’ve thrown a lot at you, but in terms of “what you are” - I can’t answer that, nor can anyone else. Unfortunately nobody can inspect your gender identity, even if they can try to infer your gender from your body and gender expression. And even the inferred gender that society places upon you is not necessarily who you are in inherent sense. There might just not be any essence of what you are, or that gender essence might be too complex to fit with our current gender concepts. The “brain sex” that plausibly explains gender dysphoria in trans people is so complex that it is not clear we could ever construct something like simple categories or a taxonomy of sexes or genders from it, which is why the researchers describe it as a mosaic. It’s not even a spectrum, it’s too complicated.
If you are wondering if you could be a trans man, you could see if your experiences are like other trans men, here are some videos that may help explore that.
You might also find the Gender Dysphoria Bible worth reading, even just to learn more about trans people out of curiosity.
It does seem to me that you are saying there is some gender essentialism going on, produced by a complex set of genes/hormones/environment (like everything else) and I don’t conform to the woman stereotype therefore I am not a woman, not really, because i dont have the feminine self expression part of the identity. What if i reject gender as an overarching identity, can i be a women despite enjoying maths and machines? Why is makeup a prerequisite for female? Tomboy does not in any way mean male, i am entirely comfortable with my body. I am not anti trans btw, i fully support all trans rights, especially healthcare, i just have confusion. I think most people see gender as very important to identity and i dont understand that.
I’m just going to repost this here since I already said it elsewhere and you didn’t seem to respond to it.
Gender essentialism doesn’t make sense, in the end the idea behind essentialism is that “male” and “female” are two categories that are clearly differentiated by a set of essential, inherent characteristics. Basically a woman is someone who meets a set of criteria, and those criteria are never particularly work to actually include all women and exclude all non-women.
Most TERFs are biological essentialists and many will say a woman is someone who produces the large gamete (i.e. eggs, as opposed to sperm). It’s not clear to me that essentialists like this have any sufficient response to the fact that there are very real (even cisgendered) women who are sterile and don’t produce eggs - are they not women because they lack that defining characteristic?
Other essentialist definitions focus on other biological components, like having XX chromosomes, or having a uterus, or the capacity to bear children (again problems for how to make sure sterile women are correctly categorized as women) … None of these definitions work, there are exceptions to all of them because human biology is very complicated and there is a lot of natural variation. (If you’re curious about the science, this Nature article is fairly accessible.)
Another problem with this kind of essentialist thinking is that we clearly operate in a social context where we do identify people as “women” and “men” without knowing their chromosomes, genitals, and so on. (I notice you didn’t answer my question about how you know you have XX chromosomes … I know my chromosomes because I have taken a karyotype test, but it still didn’t tell me anything about my gender.)
Gender dysphoria might have biological causes and might not be curable through therapy or brainwashing, but that doesn’t exactly give us an essentialist account of gender. The biology is also not the only factor, just like gender itself is complex and multi-faceted, the social context plays a role in shaping dysphoria and the distress experienced by trans people. A trans man might feel uncomfortable wearing a dress - whatever biological causes there were for the gender dysphoria did not include specific discomfort with dresses, the dresses are an arbitrary aspect of the way gender manifests in our society. In a society where people would not be put in strict gender roles the shape of dysphoria might look different for trans people than it would in a society where gender is put upon people and enforced.
I don’t think that is accurate, as you point out a tomboy is still a woman - not conforming to stereotypes doesn’t invalidate your gender. You seem to understand this already, so I’m not sure why you make this statement.
Some people are “agender” and don’t have any notable or strong gender feelings. It’s OK not to understand from a first person perspective what it’s like for people different than yourself. If you’re really hoping to empathize and understand better, one way to help with perspective taking is to read fiction works that take those perspectives - Stone Butch Blues for example might help you understand a trans perspective better.
I might also point out that you likely don’t understand what it’s like for cis men who are very masculine and who enjoy having hairy bodies, broad shoulders, and a penis and so on - but you don’t seem confused by the existence of cis men or their preferences … Maybe your confusion around trans people is similar to confusion you would have with cis men, from your account I could assume it’s general like that.
On a more personal note, it’s interesting the way you talk about gender, it reminds me of what I was like pre-transition. I somewhat hated gender and wished people would just shut up about it, and I wished they would stop gendering me (either way). I didn’t particularly care about my body and I would not have said I experienced anything like “gender dysphoria”. That’s not to say you’re trans or that these perspectives indicate a trans experience, but it is a bit surreal for me to be on the other side of transition and to see how radically different my interpretation of my experiences pre-transition are now. Where before I might have taken gender abolitionist positions and felt some affinity for agender experiences, now I am much more clear about how unconscious gendered preferences impact my life, and while before I coped with those through repression, I just relate to them differently now.
Anyway - feel free to DM me anytime with questions, this is admittedly not the right place to explore these kinds of questions.
Thank you, that was a great, educational comment and i found much to relate to. Im not going to respond right now because a knee jerk reaction would not be productive but i want you to know that i have read and i am ruminating on what you have said. It was not in vain! You have my ear and i will come back to this. I genuinely thank you for your effort and time and i sound like a complete fucking wanker but i actually mean well just shoot me! Sorry
All that matters is that you are engaging in good faith and have a good heart - thank you for listening and reading my comments, it means a lot to me ❤️
I’ll be here whenever you want to chat, I know it’s a lot to think about and to process (I spent months working through a lot of this myself, I know what it was like to be on the other side).