I mentioned a few weeks ago my fairly recently exploded passion for a bunch of Youtube video essay makers which used to be called “Breadtubers” (I have been told in the meantime that the term is already a bit passé). As I wrote then, the quality of some of these essays – from an informative and argumentative point of view – is so high and innovative that I assign a handful of them as “readings” for my Gender, Sex and Politics class. Although (again, as a commentator noticed), my favourite content makers within this loose category of content creators are trans women, not all videos by them which I assign are about issues of gender identity. And yet, two videos by two of them, on what is actually a different topic, made me grasp a couple of important points about gender identity in a much more lived, visceral way than I had been thinking about before (as in: they didn’t change my mind, but they made me see and feel much more intensely something which I already sort of believed, but in a way I could not precisely pin down). I am referring to “Beauty” by Contrapoints creator Natalie Wynn; and “Food, Beauty, Mind,” by Philosophy Tube creator Abigail Thorn.
Both videos, I should mention, do talk about trans-ness – in Natalie Wynn’s video, this is interwoven with her discussion of beauty throughout; whereas Abigail Thorn reflects on it at the very end of a video which could be, otherwise, commended for its synthesis of the literature on norms of appearance and feminism over and above any reflection on gender identity. Natalie Wynn’s video is largely a discussion of how impossible it is, for a trans woman, to separate issues of gender dysphoria from “ wanting to be pretty”: “Do I do this because I want to look more like a woman or do I do this to look good? Can I even separate the two?” is the running question throughout. Abigail Thorn’s video is largely a discussion on internalised gendered norms of appearance (going, albeit very well, through well-trodden territory for people familiar with this literature, such as Bartky’s use of the Panopticon metaphor). The argumentative part of the video, however, is interrupted by clips where she bakes a lemon drizzle cake in a black and white, posh-accented impersonation of a 50s style domestic goddess/Nigella Lawson of sorts. At the end of the video, she then brings the two parts together and explains, in a very personal tone, why she found it very difficult to end the recipe clips by actually trying the cake, as recipe videos nearly always do. And that’s where she discusses how transitioning changed her relationship with food and weight in a way that she could not have imagined.
If you want some more detail, just watch these two videos: they are great (although not fully immune from criticism, I for instance found this reaction to Abigail Thorn’s video by a self-described “fat woman” very insightful). I just want to make two brief points here. The first is that, although I already largely agreed with the idea, those two video essays really made me realise, at a much more visceral level, philosopher Katharine Jenkins’s point that your gender identity need not mean that you accept all or even most dominant social norms (of behaviour, appearance, etc.) attached to that gender: it simply means that you experience them as relevant to you. They are the norms to which you need to respond; on which you need to have a view; which you need to negotiate in your daily life. Being a woman does not mean accepting all norms of femininity, but it means that those are the norms you have to deal with – this is no different (I mean it is – more on this below – but it also isn’t) for trans women in particular. Having a female gender identity does not mean buying into the entire cultural apparatus of femininity which you are immersed to, but wanting to live and be recognised as a woman nevertheless. Thus – and I am here speaking of an experience I don’t have, I am only speaking about what I think I have learnt, so apologies in advance for any naïve formulation – the relationship a trans woman may have towards prevailing gendered norms can be just as ambivalent and critical as it is for many cis gender women with deep feminist convictions, with the added element (burden?) that dealing with all that s*** it is a price you have to pay for not being even more uncomfortable in your own skin.
The second point is the flip side of the coin to that: these videos really made me realise how “cis gender” is an apt label for me. I am a cis gender woman, that’s just who I am – and this has nothing to do with being critical of gender norms. Not only do I experience those norms as the ones I need to deal with, but I also do not experience the gender script that society as given me as something completely alien: I want to criticise it, revise it, sometimes bend it and crash it, but it is not something that is fundamentally alien to who I am. I have just never experienced, with relation to gender – I have of course experienced it in other realms, e.g. as a voluntary migrant and academic – what it means to crave to endorse and live a certain identity even if it means having to deal with norms which you find deeply harmful, and which you “could” avoid by not pursuing that identity. It’s just not who I am. And this is not just privilege, it’s more of a messed-up mix. On the one hand, the struggle with the norms of beauty and thinness that Natalie Wynn and Abigail Thorn describe have been my bread and butter since I can remember, so there is a tiny bit of me that wants to say “duh, welcome to the club.” On the other hand, I have always known them, they haven’t hit me like a truck after decades of being oblivious to them – something which, instead, I have experienced as a migrant, for instance.
Does this mean that I have an answer to the question of what gender fundamentally is? No, not really, but it also means that comparing notes with trans women in this lived, concrete way makes me suspicious of the idea that gender is something you can just get rid of, pronto.*
*Of course, I am sure that many people are not trans but also not cis in the way I have described – i.e. they just reject the whole gender script assigned to them without finding a different script more appealing. Some might think that “agender” is an apt description for this – I am just not going to tackle this because it is too huge a topic and I know too little about it. What I know is that I cannot quite see a convincing reason for the claim that there is some fundamental, objective truth in just rejecting gender in a full and uncompromising way, and that this would be emancipatory for everybody – not just for those who think that gender is not for them. Once more, I am left with the feeling that more epistemic modesty from everybody would be extremely beneficial, and that we all have something to learn from one another here.
{ 43 comments }
Mikhail Shubin 08.29.22 at 12:17 pm
General point: I’m very happy that youtube turned out to be such a great platform for long-term, in-depth, thoughtful material. However, its comment system seems to be inherently broken (in the same way comments are broken on other social platforms) so to get a deserving criticism of youtube videos to have to go somewhere else (like here).
Sophie Jane 08.29.22 at 12:18 pm
I think a useful distinction I’ve learned from my agender friends is that the feeling of not having a gender or not wanting anything to do with gender on a personal level isn’t the same as rejecting or wanting to do away with gender as an institution(*). Which is to say that agender is usually understood as another gender identity among many.
Also, while not every non-binary or agender person identifies as trans, many do and there’s no requirement to be on the binary to be considered trans. You probably know this, but I remember some complaints of nb-phobia directed at Contrapoints in the past so I thought it was worth mentioning here.
(*) Or phenomenon, or technology, or practice, if you prefer a different frame.
J, not that one 08.29.22 at 1:36 pm
Of course, there is not only one norm of femininity. Different cultures and subcultures have different norms. In some, women are expected to smile at everyone, in others, women are expected not to look at strangers. (At this point, some people interject that normal women smile and repressed, mentally unhealthy women avert their gaze. Then they go back to abhorring restrictive gender norms.) In some workplaces, women are expected to behave according to “feminine” norms from the social world; in others, they’re expected not to. (At this point, some people interject that it’s unfair to women raised with specific “feminine” norms to favor different types of women, who are supposedly being harmed without knowing it.) We don’t learn about gender by information falling from the sky, we learn about it from the people we know.
This is noticed so infrequently that I suspect there’s a class issue bound up in it. And that maybe critical thought is not the goal of most discussions of the topic, but rather initiating female students into (a suitably abstracted version of) the study of the ways they have failed to be educated for a certain elite behavior.
Aubergine 08.29.22 at 3:41 pm
This always seemed to me to be an argument for decoupling gender roles from sex, so that anyone can be feminine or masculine as much or as little as they want. That would be emancipatory.
And if that was what gender ideology was about, I would still support gender ideology! But the point where it stopped making sense for me was the point where gender roles and gender identity were supposed to entirely replace sex, which was then to become unspeakable. Because it is clear to me that you simply cannot understand how society works if you pretend that sex is meaningless (and that sexed differences in reproductive roles, childcare, sexual behaviour, physical strength, capacity for and tendency towards violence etc. are imaginary) and try to interpret everything in terms of gender identity.
The thing is, none of that sex-denialism stuff flows from the approach to gender norms and identity that you’ve set out in your post. It should be possible to make space for people to negotiate the way they respond to norms of gender while still recognising the underlying material reality of sex. But this is not what gender ideology is about.
Also: the version of trans activism presented by Contrapoints and Philosophy Tube is heavily sanitised. It’s the mildest, most superficial version you’re going to get, and anyone who looks at these videos and then tries to understand feminist responses to trans activism as if they were responding only to this version of it is going to be very confused. You won’t see Wynn or Thorn show up wearing bloodstained “I punch TERFs” T-shirts, or posting violent threats on Twitter, or getting lesbians kicked out of Pride marches because they dare to announce that they are exclusively homosexual, or protesting outside feminist conferences and trying to drown out discussions about sexual violence because some of the attendees are feminists whose feminism does not centre male interests – but all of this is going on.
And I’m curious now – if you are assigning these videos in a Gender, Sex and Politics course, how do you present the other side of the argument?
Sophie Jane 08.29.22 at 8:11 pm
Flagging Aubergine’s post #4 for transphobia:
“Feminist responses to trans activism”, as if all but a specific strand of second wave feminism and the vast majority of feminists weren’t trans inclusive, plus the implication that trans people are somehow opposed to feminism
The usual insinuation that trans people are dangerous, violent, and/or deranged
It’s interesting, too, to see a professed feminist talking about “gender ideology” – a term that originates and is most popular with religious conservatives.
Sophie Jane 08.29.22 at 8:17 pm
I’d once again recommend TransActual’s “What is transphobia?” as a useful guide:
https://www.transactual.org.uk/transphobia
Chris Bertram 08.29.22 at 8:34 pm
Strongly agree with Sophie Jane re @Aubergine’s post. What we see in that post is the reproduction of claims about “trans activism” and “gender ideology” that are circulated and recirculated among the people who sometimes call themselves “gender-critical”. None of the trans people I know are denialists about biology who affirm that “gender identity” entirely replaces sex in all circumstances. Similarly, the claim that what is presented by Wynn and Thorn is “heavily sanitised” is utterly misleading. The truth is that what the various trans-hostile platforms circulate as facts about “trans activists” is largely the product of a combination of malicious invention, provocation and paranoia. A case in point is the claim that “lesbians [were] kicked out of Pride marches because they dare to announce that they are exclusively homosexual”. On the contrary, in Cardiff, for example, a small group of lesbians (who may or may not have been actual lesbians but who were, at any rate, vastly outnumbered by lesbians on the other side) staged a provocation in the path of the march and then used the hostile reaction they wanted to pose as victims in various online fora in the knowledge that this would then be recycled by trans-hostile mainstream journalists. Thus a narrative is deliberately and cynically manufactured.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.29.22 at 8:46 pm
I assign Kathleen Stock and Holly Lawford-Smith.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.29.22 at 8:47 pm
But these two videos in particular I assign for the week on norms of appearance, so not on trans issues specifically.
Sophie Grace Chappell 08.29.22 at 8:48 pm
I increasingly think the entire trans exclusionary movement is little more than noise on twitter. Actual human beings aren’t like that. Nowhere near as mad and nasty.
I mean, come on. Human beings aren’t perfect, obviously. But they’re not THAT bad.
The right question to ask here is not “How can we stage a fair-minded and even-handed debate between trans allies and trans exclusionaries?”
The right question to ask here is cui bono. Who benefits from planting sock-accounts that sow dissension and confusion and hatred and lies and irrational bigotry in the discourse of western democracies?
And if you’ll forgive me the mildly conspiracist tone, the answer is obvious. His name is Putin.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.29.22 at 8:48 pm
Reaction videos are a better alternative to comments. The reaction video to Abigail Thorn, for instance, is great.
Lynne 08.29.22 at 9:13 pm
Miriam, glad to see you assign Kathleen Stock! I found her book so clear it helped me sort out how different terms were sometimes being used to mean different things. Aubergine, I always enjoy your comments. I find it particularly important to remember that there is such a thing as sex, and female-only spaces were developed for a reason. Also, per Stock; transwomen are male. Trans men are female. Shouldn’t be an insult (and isn’t intended as such.) The mantra “transwomen are women” tends to blur that fact.
Probably shouldn’t comment in haste, especially on this topic, but came here to give a “like” to Aubergine and found there were new comments. Ducking and running…
J, not that one 08.29.22 at 9:42 pm
I’m puzzled by aubergine @ 4, in particular the stated willingness to allow other people any gender expression they feel is correct, combined with absolute certainty that there’s only one way people experience sex, violence, and so on and that anyone who says they feel otherwise is lying or somehow mentally or morally deformed.
I know for a fact that the way I experience desire (primarily for men) is not universal, though it is pretty widespread among women of my age and general background.
Sophie Jane 08.29.22 at 10:05 pm
@Sophie Grace Chapelle
It’s rather more complicated than that, of course, but if you’re interested in the origins of “gender ideology” and its links with the populist right then I recommend Agnieszka Graff and El?bieta Korolczuk‘a keynote from the FGEN conference earlier this year:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AwzbOWQ16W8
@Miriam Ronzoni
Kathleen Stock has eliminationist views on trans people and I’m sorry to hear you’re helping propagate and legitimise them
Aubergine 08.29.22 at 10:08 pm
Thanks, Miriam! I can see how these videos would be a great way to kick off a discussion.
J-D 08.29.22 at 11:26 pm
I’ve never seen anybody do that. Indeed, I’ve never seen anybody show up anywhere in any kind of bloodstained clothes, so I don’t know how I’d react. What I hope my response would be is ‘Are you okay?’
Again, I’ve never seen anybody do that, either, but then I’ve never seen most of what’s on Twitter, which is unsurprising as I’m not on Twitter. I expect there are lots of violent threats on Twitter even though I’ve never seen them. However, I have no difficulty recognising the following as faulty reasoning: ‘Supporters of X have posted violent threats on Twitter, therefore X is bad.’
Debate is exceptionally seldom or never a useful mechanism for finding out about something, and if somebody asked me for advice about devising a lecture, tutorial, or course of study on any subject, I would never recommend considering the question ‘How do you present the other side of the argument?’ as if the natural form that investigation of any subject takes is an argument with two sides (neither more nor less).
Bob 08.30.22 at 12:09 am
It is unfair to blame all trans activists for the actions of a few. But the tropes and stereotypes didn’t just appear out of nowhere. And it is equally unfair to dismiss anyone on the other side who puts their hand up with a concern as “sock-accounts that sow dissension and confusion and hatred and lies and irrational bigotry in the discourse of western democracies.” Is Kathleen Stock such a “sock-account”? Should Miriam not be assigning Stock to her class? Is she being transphobic for doing so?
Aubergine @4 provided a thoughtful commentary; I’m fully prepared to be shown that she is wrong on facts or perhaps even has been misled. But to call her comments “transphobic”–that kind of immediate pouncing, to shut down all discussion–smacks of exactly the kind of bullying and over-reach for which (some) trans activists have (rightly) been criticised.
FluidUntil 08.30.22 at 12:22 am
Thanks for these threads.
I am a heteo male accepting style +50 progressive. And a father to a 15yo girl (female, non gender, trans???!!!) who recently announced “I am gender fluid”. After telling me what I basically already knew after her first ‘date’ was with another female. She – they – you- very confusing – was extremely relieved when I said no problem, but I thought you were a lesbian.
After the gender fluid announcement she he they – we had a long confusing and funny discussion about pronouns and still were unable to entirely resolve. Fluid. And for me, I said it will take my brain about 3 years to regrow pronouns functions. Accepted. Talk about fluid at this stage of both our journeys. And for her, a name change as well. Tricky to navigate. I know many professed “progressive ” parents for whom such would be very confronting.
She he they (educate me please) have friends who are trans, straight, leabian etc etc. And normies. So as they are all well ahead of peer group, especially the trans people are way ahead of- everyone – especialky the ‘boys” and general population on gender sex & society, I will be showing them these theeads. Already watched Contrapoints.
Any “I am fluid about all this” just coming to terms with it all, resource you may point to?
And whoa! Pronouns!
J-D 08.30.22 at 12:25 am
What is the intention behind making those statements? No innocuous possibility occurs to me. Just because the way that uttering them might cause harm does not happen to occur to you doesn’t change the fact that uttering them can cause harm. Just because no justification for uttering them despite the harm they can cause occurs to me doesn’t prove that none can exist, but if it does exist somebody should be able to tell me what it is.
<
blockquote>The statement that trans women are women may not be clear to everybody: people have to learn the meaning of ‘trans’ in order to understand it. If you understand the meaning of the word, though, it blurs no facts.
Aubergine 08.30.22 at 3:20 am
J, not that one @ 13:
No, that is not what I said (particularly the “mentally or morally deformed” part!). I certainly don’t believe that there is only one way people experience those things! Rather, I am saying that it’s entirely possible to believe in a fluidity of gender expression and be open to a reshaping of gendered norms of behaviour while acknowledging sex as a useful category in some contexts, such as some philosophical or legal arguments. That was my response to the videos Miriam linked to, anyway.
(In my experience, trans activists may be willing to accept a statement like “sex is real” as an abstraction, but if you start exploring the concrete implications – and especially if you suggest that there may be cases where the interests of female people and trans women might conflict, or might be best understood along lines of sex rather than gender identity – well, that’s transphobia, and transphobes must be shunned. The “sex is real” segment near the start of Contrapoints’ video on JK Rowling is an example of this kind of thinking.)
Lynne @ 12: thank you! I appreciate that.
nastywoman 08.30.22 at 8:01 am
‘Once more, I am left with the feeling that more epistemic modesty from everybody would be extremely beneficial, and that we all have something to learn from one another here’.
Very much agreed – as especially ‘beauty’ was pretty instructive BUT we still wouldn’t go for such an expensive permanent transformation as we still LOVE to do it with all kind
of reversible attachments -(wigs – eye colour changing lenses – prostheses – makeup – etc)
as you never know if you want to change back from a beautiful brown eyed – dark haired Italian into a blue eyed – blond Norwegian Beauty – and there was a time where we all wanted to be ‘AmericanIndianWarrior – and for that y’all need lots and lots of make-up –
(even if y’all souls are completely gender-fluid)
And about the hate against such joyful gender-fluidness -(mostly from narrow minded Right-Wing Idiots) do you you guys know – that in Germany the utmost popular gender-fluid figure is ‘Die Hexe’ -(the witch) where in the Body of the craziest scaring Witches – there are always men – since nearly the Middle Ages –
AND
take that ‘America’!
Miriam Ronzoni 08.30.22 at 9:13 am
This is a reply comment but it is meant as a general update on moderation. I am not going to accept any more comments on trans activism and gender critical activism, I accepted those made so far, and my fellow bloggers accepted some more, and I think we have a fair representation now (apologies to those who disagree, I had to make a judgment call there), but this was not the specific topic of my post so I am going to close that conversation thread now.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.30.22 at 11:00 am
This does not mean that this comment thread is closed, btw. I am just closing the specific conversation thread on the two forms of activism and their ugly sides, twitter, etc. Apologies for the confusion!
Alex Sharpe 08.30.22 at 11:26 am
“Your gender identity need not mean that you accept all or even most dominant social norms (of behaviour, appearance, etc.) attached to that gender: it simply means that you experience them as relevant to you”
This is self-evident to most trans women. The idea that trans women replicate ‘problematic’ stereotypes of women is both true and hugely exaggerated. Based on my own observations, most trans women who have transitioned are more likely to challenge gender stereotypes than their cis counterparts. Having said that, I don’t believe in policing gender. Nor do I consider its abolition to be desirable, let alone possible.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.30.22 at 11:43 am
Alex I agree, and always have. But I am sure you’ll also agree with me that it helps (in some cases, it is essential) to have a lived experience of something, and that in those cases something that brings you a tiny bit closer to such lived experience, even if you don’t have it yourself, can also help immensely. This is how those two video essays have really done something for me (and I hope that can be true for others, too): they have helped me understand a bit better, and especially at a more gut level, not just intellectually, how a trans woman can experience problematic gender norms. In a way, what I was trying to convey in the post is that I think I now have a better feeling both of how that’s an experience that is an experience that is so similar to mine as a cis gender woman, and yet also very different. So yup, I have no problem imagining that this is obvious to you and most trans women – I was trying to share what I learnt from those videos as a cis gender woman.
J, not that one 08.30.22 at 12:06 pm
Miriam, thanks for @25. I realize I mistook your point in writing the OP. I thought you were bringing in your personal experience in order to point out what cisgender women can learn from videos like Wynn’s about gender expectations in general including for ourselves, but you were actually pointing out how your personal experience helped you relate to Wynn’s videos and thus to learn about how trans women experience gender?
aubergine, I think you might not get how phrases like “you simply cannot understand how society works if you pretend that sex is meaningless (and that sexed differences in reproductive roles, childcare, sexual behaviour, physical strength, capacity for and tendency towards violence etc. are imaginary)” comes across. “Sexed (or gendered) differences in childcare are not imaginary,” means “gendered differences in childcare are real,” which would mean it would be wrong/counterproductive/etc. not to assume they’re always so. This is rhetoric that has been used by anti-feminists for over a century.
Sophie Jane 08.30.22 at 12:28 pm
@Miriam Ronzoni
In all the excitement over transphobia I forgot to say how glad I am you’ve been finding useful stuff by trans people. Understanding each other’s lived experience is tremendously important.
engels 08.30.22 at 12:28 pm
Your gender identity need not mean that you accept all or even most dominant social norms (of behaviour, appearance, etc.) attached to that gender: it simply means that you experience them as relevant to you
But that seems likely to put you at odds with people who believe gender is just an arbitrary and oppressive system of norms which patriarchal societies typically condition subjects into identifying with according to their sex (on most common interpretations of this experience). Which is what I have always understood this dispute to be about.
engels 08.30.22 at 1:29 pm
Imagine two Brits: Fairfax and Carstairs. Both are anti-nationalist in the sense that they despise flag-waving, the British government, think tea, cricket and most traditional British culture is silly, and are trying to emancipate themselves from it by travelling and reading foreign literature.
Carstairs is anti-nationalist in the stronger sense of thinking the whole concept of “Britishness” (and any other nationality) is an absurd, reactionary fiction: people are just people, although some are born in particular places, which gives them special legal rights, and brought up in certain ways, which teaches them special forms of behaviour.
Now suppose Jack (not his given name) was born and raised by French parents in Provence, has no officially recognised connection to Britain but for as long as he can remember has always strongly felt British rather than French. So at substantial personal cost he moves to Britain, gets a British passport and is now recognised as British. Even so, he too hates the British government, tea, cricket, etc. I imagine Fairfax might be perfectly understanding (“it’s because you’re British like I am that you hate the British government as much as I do!”). I’m not sure about Carstairs though?
(NB this is a comparison, not an analogy, and not meant to directly imply anything about anyone’s experiences of gender.)
J, not that one 08.30.22 at 2:11 pm
“ dealing with all that s*** it is a price you have to pay for not being even more uncomfortable in your own skin.”
I’m realizing this phrase bothers me a little. I wear some makeup sometimes to shop etc. in part because it makes me look less old and less like my dad when he was ten years older than I am now, because I am treated better when I’m in public when I look “nicer.” But I can’t honestly say I feel more comfortable in my skin when I cater to other people’s expectations than when I don’t.
The OP in that sentence seems to me to express an over-socialized view of human nature, one I find it difficult to recognize as feminist – one I am inclined to feel is what some people mean when they speak dismissively of “white feminists” – and to (as I suggested above) over-generalize from one person’s experience to what it is essentially to be a woman.
I don’t like this any better when it’s about makeup than when it’s about a Boomer feminist telling me I’m doing feminism wrong.
Mikhail Shubin 08.30.22 at 2:24 pm
Well, not everyone who have a valuable comment also have resources/skill/equipment to record a video reply. And writing comments on youtube is an exercise in futility. Thanks god blogs (like this) still exists, damn they are not so popular anymore.
engels 08.30.22 at 3:40 pm
Some of the gender debate also reminds me a bit of the marriage debate a decade ago. At the time some radicals were arguing that marriage was oppressive/reactionary/bourgeois and reforming it in an inclusive direction would just strengthen it. Evidently they lost and we never hear about that anymoree (in fact you’re unlikely to open “left Twitter” nowadays without seeing elaborate wedding photos of some millennial leftists).
One thing that puzzled me is why both sides of the discussion seem so focussed on trans women and trans men barely seem to get a look in.
Alex Sharpe 08.30.22 at 9:30 pm
Miriam, I wasn’t disagreeing with you as such, just making some observations.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.30.22 at 9:48 pm
Alex sorry, my bad. I think we are on the same page on this one.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.30.22 at 9:54 pm
J, not that one: Just to be clear, that bit which made you uncomfortable is about trans people, not cis people, and it is about dealing with problematic norms rather than necessarily complying with them in order to “feel better” – so I suspect you might have misunderstood the context?
Miriam Ronzoni 08.31.22 at 9:14 am
engels: This is a great comparison engels, very helpful – and actually, I think it’s a great analogy, too. I guess I’d say that both Carstairs and trans exclusionary gender critical feminists need to be epistemically a bit more modest: in both cases I think the jury is definitely out on whether the concepts of nationality and gender can be eliminated at all, and whether doing so really would be emancipatory for all.
Miriam Ronzoni 08.31.22 at 9:43 am
engels: yes, it puts me at odds with people who think that gender is (as you rightly qualified) “just” that and are convinced that there is no doubt about it
MisterMr 08.31.22 at 12:44 pm
@engels 32
“One thing that puzzled me is why both sides of the discussion seem so focussed on trans women and trans men barely seem to get a look in.”
Some years ago I tought that all our concepts about gender and sex were completely social constructions, but now I’m more dubious about this.
I now think that we have some very basic “archetypes” about sex, and these archetypes then influence gender concepts. Gender is a cultural construction, but it has to deal with how we manage our sexuality, so it will have to deal with those sexual archetypes, either reinforcing them or suppressing them: the sexual archetypes don’t determine directly genders, but set the topics genders are about, IMHO.
Specifically, I think that males are, are perceived as, and expected to be more aggressive than females in sexuality, and many of the gender construction deal with this either reinforcing or suppressing this male aggressivity.
So when a male (person born with a penis) transitions to female, he/she is more likely to be perceived as a wolf in a sheep’s cloth, both because males are naturally expected to be more aggressive and because of the transgression of gender norms about suppression.
When a female (person born without a penis) transitions to male, she/he is not perceived as potentially aggressive (even when displaying a macho aggressive attitude), so there is less problem.
This is also the reason, in my opinion, that while early feminism was largely about gender blindness more recently many feminist seem to be more about protecting weak women from evil, dominant males: in part it is about real problems but in part is a reversion to older gender roles, because in part these gender roles are rooted in sexuality.
To be clear this doesn’t mean I agree with traditional gender roles, in fact I see this as a problem.
This is also the reason a statue of a naked woman is perceived as antifeminist but a statue of a naked man is not perceived as antimaschilist, IMHO.
J, not that one 08.31.22 at 2:19 pm
Miriam, yes, I must have misread! So sorry.
TM 08.31.22 at 3:07 pm
engels: “At the time some radicals were arguing that marriage was oppressive/reactionary/bourgeois and reforming it in an inclusive direction would just strengthen it.”
The first can be true (at least there are valid arguments in favor) and the second still be wrong.
“gender is just an arbitrary and oppressive system of norms”
If I take your analogy in 29: state borders as they currently exist are in one sense totally arbitrary, in that they could have been drawn completely differently and we also could imagine a world without any borders at all. A the same time however they are the result of historical processes that cannot simply be undone at will and the existence of these borders, especially when they have existed over many generations (as is the case for Britain and France, but not for most other contemporary countries!) has materially affected people living within these borders in profound ways. So the borders are arbitrary in the sense that there is nothing naturally given about them (why not call them “socially constructed”), but that doesn’t mean they are easy to change or do away. In fact we know empirically that many people feel strongly about national borders and react intensely, often violently, to attempts at changing them. Or conversely they feel strongly that the borders are wrong and need to be changed in specific ways (e. g. ask Scottish separatists). Both these groups would deny that their preferred borders are arbitrary, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are in fact arbitrary.
TM 08.31.22 at 3:29 pm
As a further clarification, I’m not sure whether “gender is just an arbitrary and oppressive system of norms”, or whether anybody truly believes this to be the case. What I do think however, and that is a fact that is easily demonstrable, is that in our society most gender norms are indeed arbitrary and oppressive.
Tm 08.31.22 at 9:21 pm
“why both sides of the discussion seem so focussed on trans women”
I disagree with the premise that the “gender debate” is defined by “two sides”, there are many voices in this debate. But to simplify, the main antagonism is between diversity, fluidity, openness and autonomy on the one hand, and rigid traditional categories on the other.
The alleged focus on trans women is clearly an artifact of the right wing culture war. The prime example here is the US panic about trans women in sports, an issue that nobody except for sports afficionados would have the slightest interest in if the right wingers hadn’t discovered that stoking resentment against trans women in particular is politically potent.
And this is very much a US (and probably UK) thing. In Switzerland, hardly known as a progressive hotspot, the law since January 1 allows anybody aged 16 and older to adjust their gender and legal name status on official documents by self-declaration. This must be the end of Western of civilization, right, but triggers hardly any passions. I’m not sure why the right-wingers here (of whom there is no shortage) don’t work harder to whip up transphobia. (They didn’t even force a referendum on the law). Whatever the reason, the point is that without the culture war background, hardly anybody would be “focussed” on trans whatever. People are interested, yes, curious to learn about queer issues. Different thing.
The exhibition «Queer – Diversity is our Nature» receives the Prix Expo 2021 of the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT).
https://www.nmbe.ch/en/exhibition-and-events/queer-diversity-our-nature
nastywoman 09.01.22 at 5:20 am
agreed
‘I disagree with the premise that the “gender debate” is defined by “two sides”, there are many voices in this debate. But to simplify, the main antagonism is between diversity, fluidity, openness and autonomy on the one hand, and rigid traditional categories on the other.
The alleged focus on trans women is clearly an artifact of the right wing culture war. The prime example here is the US panic about trans women in sports, an issue that nobody except for sports afficionados would have the slightest interest in if the right wingers hadn’t discovered that stoking resentment against trans women in particular is politically potent.
And this is very much a US (and probably UK)’
thingy’.
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