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Transgender is it just me that is totally perplexed?

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elbows said:
It's been interesting, I feel like I have learnt some things, even if some of those things are troubling the picture is at least more nuanced.

I've never been entirely convinced that there are less trans acceptance issues from women than men. This stuff seems to work at numerous different levels and whilst most of the most obvious, loud and even violent non-acceptance comes from men, I dont want to get the wrong idea about whether some potentially fairly widespread exclusionary attitudes are held by plenty of women. It might just be less visible, for reasons including all the usual reasons why womens voices may be drowned out.

I can understand why some aspects of the whole 'TERF vs' thing might leave some wanting to reclaim labels from negative use, but I really dont get it when it comes to TERF - its an acronym not a word, and I dont understand how it can be reclaimed in a decent and positive way when two of its letters stand for trans-exclusionary.
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Purely anecdotally, I get the impression that many women just play along so as not to upset people, rather than being fully on-board (whereas men are socialised less for sensitivity).
 
FabricLiveBaby! said:
Not trying to upset them is not a problem. The problem comes from knowing the treatment, despite the pronouns, is still misgendered.

I'm not trying to be cruel or anything but it's impossible to be self aware all the time. This doesn't apply to only you but everyone.
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speaking as a trans woman, it comes across fairly clearly if some-one in my life still considers me a man and if i can, and they are not evolving to accept me as i am now, i will write them out of my life as much as i can.

Example is at work where some people knew me before and some didn't. There is a clear difference in how those two groups interact with me. So i favour being with people who didn't know me before. It's why i moved house when i transitioned - and again, the only people i have problems with here are some guys who found out i was trans when i moved here. Everyone else clearly accepts me as a woman.

I don't care what others think secretly and certainly wouldn't demand that anyone be self aware all the time and moderate behaviour accordingly, but i do expect some effort from those who profess to love or care about me, and to me it's clear that most people now who meet me and don't know my history, clearly see me as a woman, and i don't need to ask anything of any of those people. That's my goal.

I'm talking about myself here, but as far i can tell, i think most trans men and women would be thinking in a similar way - the ones I've talked to anyway.
 
campanula said:
I tend to think that transmen are largely silent having been previously socialised as women, with all the self-effacement, unwillingness to shout out, take up space, be loud and proud...ie. the usual modest, demure compliance...which mitigates against ensuring their demands take precedence. Put such limiting social constraints on people who are already feeling anxious, different, alone...and it is unsurprising that transmen have become a largely invisible presence within the noisy trans rights demands from MtF (who, of course, have not been compromised by a lifetime of deference).
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I’m sure there’s some truth in this. But I’ve also read/heard trans men saying that they’re much more heard, listened to, able to speak up and be engaged, involved etc, since their transition.
 
campanula said:
I tend to think that transmen are largely silent having been previously socialised as women, with all the self-effacement, unwillingness to shout out, take up space, be loud and proud...ie. the usual modest, demure compliance...which mitigates against ensuring their demands take precedence. Put such limiting social constraints on people who are already feeling anxious, different, alone...and it is unsurprising that transmen have become a largely invisible presence within the noisy trans rights demands from MtF (who, of course, have not been compromised by a lifetime of deference).
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Wow! I know many trans men and not one fits this description. They are mainly less visible because society finds female to male transition to be more acceptable, masculinity to be more acceptable; TERFs consider them to be victims of the "trans identified male cult" and most of the trans men i know have successfully gone stealth, something i manage but i think it's much harder for trans women to do this for various reasons. Also - as has been said, men don;t find them to be a threat particularly.

But to say that the trans movement doesn't talk about trans men is ludicrous. For several years now I know for a fact that many of us have been challenging the TERF rhetoric in part by asking why they keep erasing trans men.

And in the trans community i know many who are in key and prominent positions, very active and very frustrated that they keep getting written out of the "debate" & working for all trans people. We are pretty much united in fact so attempts at divide and rule won't work. I spent 3/4 years mentoring a trans man for example and it was a trans man who was extremely supportive to me when i first joined the Green Party.

So this does not ring true, remotely.
 
I suspect it's a variety of reasons, including socialisation, ease of passing, and that they're not considered a threat.
 
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Sea Star said:
speaking as a trans woman, it comes across fairly clearly if some-one in my life still considers me a man and if i can, and they are not evolving to accept me as i am now, i will write them out of my life as much as i can.

Example is at work where some people knew me before and some didn't. There is a clear difference in how those two groups interact with me. So i favour being with people who didn't know me before. It's why i moved house when i transitioned - and again, the only people i have problems with here are some guys who found out i was trans when i moved here. Everyone else clearly accepts me as a woman.

I don't care what others think secretly and certainly wouldn't demand that anyone be self aware all the time and moderate behaviour accordingly, but i do expect some effort from those who profess to love or care about me, and to me it's clear that most people now who meet me and don't know my history, clearly see me as a woman, and i don't need to ask anything of any of those people. That's my goal.

I'm talking about myself here, but as far i can tell, i think most trans men and women would be thinking in a similar way - the ones I've talked to anyway.
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I know a trans woman through another friend and we are often in the same gathering. The only time I ever feel consciously aware of her pre-trans state is when she refers to it. The problem is that she refers to it a lot, even in passing. Like once I bumped into her in the street and stopped to say Hello, nice to see you and she replied “Well I do stand out don’t I, very visible, me.” I said something ridiculous about her blonde hair, trying to deflect from her apparant reference to her trans-ness. I assume she has some self consciousness around it all, and perhaps some self confidence issues but I don’t know her well enough to broach personal issues with her. But her repeatedly bringing it up in this oblique deflective way means that I am always slightly awkwardly aware of her being trans.

I know it’s not me because I know other LBGTQ... folk with whom it’s really not a Thing.

So it’s not only our (CIS hetero folks) attitudes that dictates how these things work.



ETA Reading this back, I see that I’ve expressed myslef poorly. I start by saying I’m rarely aware of her pre-trans state, and then end by saying she makes me constantly aware of it. I hope the clumsiness of the way I’ve written this can be overlooked and the nuances assumed. Ta.
 
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SheilaNaGig said:
I know a trans woman through another friend and we are often in the same gathering. The only time I ever feel consciously aware of her pre-trans state is when she refers to it. The problem is that she refers to it a lot, even in passing. Like once I bumped into her in the street and stopped to say Hello, nice to see you and she replied “Well I do stand out don’t I, very visible, me.” I said something ridiculous about her blonde hair, trying to deflect from her apparant reference to her trans-ness. I assume she has some self consciousness around it all, and perhaps some self confidence issues but I don’t know her well enough to broach personal issues with her. But her repeatedly bringing it up in this oblique deflective way means that I am always slightly awkwardly aware of her being trans.

I know it’s not me because I know other LBGTQ... folk with whom it’s really not a Thing.

So it’s not only our (CIS hetero folks) attitudes that dictates how these things work.
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I have always admitted that i also struggle with not misgendering some trans people. If you're in the company of a lot of trans people you have to quickly stop relying on your brain to automatically go to the correct or apporpriate pronoun. Can be exhausting. And i have misgendered trans women at times. I just say sorry and we move on. No biggy.

also - I think being socialised as a cis person puts all kinds of attitiudes in you that then is a struggle to unlearn. I'm kind of towards the end of this process now but i remember how hard it was at the start where i was living and breathing trans issues - every day brought some barrier to overcome and driving a social transition by yourself is hard work. I'm sure plenty of trans people who's lives may fall apart through that process probably struggle to move beyond not thinking about anything but being trans.

Does sound like someone is struggling with self acceptance there. I do this with my partner - constantly asking him for affirmation of my gender and putting myself down like that, but then it lets me get it all out of my system. I know when i'm out with my best mate i barely mention being trans - normally she'll bring it up and not all that often tbh. She's quite sensitive on my behalf - goes for the jugular when she thinks I've been misgendered wheras I usually don't even notice!
 
8ball said:
It's fortunate that "team bloke" is optional for men, though.
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I'm not sure it's always optional. It may depend on the company you keep, and how much choice you get over that, day-to-day. And then the optional you mean may be no more than the options Team Bloke or Team Persona Non Grata, though that may be preferable to Team Target for Abuse, so you go Team Bloke because it's less distressing than what happens if you don't. Also there's no real control over how people see you who don't know you from Adam. Like eg you're a potential rapist.

I imagine trans men, especially trans men who pass well, might get some or all of that but it obviously all depends on the company they keep and places they go.
 
mojo pixy said:
I imagine trans men, especially trans men who pass well, might get some or all of that but it obviously all depends on the company they keep and places they go.
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A good friend mine is a transgender man and i remember him getting punched by some bloke in a pub over what was essentially him giving inappropriate eye contact in a slightly fraught situation. Afterwards, he took it as a learning experience. I remember him saying "so now i can't look at women but i can't look at men either". I had to profess that I never learned the rules either but giving eye contact to strange men is just something i always avoided and still do.

I think it's not just something that post transition trans men deal with, but many pre-transition trans women too. I speak from experience. Many of us get misgendered as women even as we attempt to be men. Or we get "girl", or "woman" thrown at us as slurs for not being able to conform to masculinity.

I could write reams about this but not going to because i just don;t have time today.
 
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comrade spurski said:
That is simply a lie.
Continuously calling people "he" who have said they wish to be called "she" does not equate to your "replies have always been courteous." It shows a staggering ignorance regarding the feelings of others and a huge amount of arrogance.
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It is not discourteous nor is it arrogant to refuse to submit to someone's subjective internalised thoughts.
 
Miranda Yardley said:
It is not discourteous nor is it arrogant to refuse to submit to someone's subjective internalised thoughts.
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Because you believe you're colluding with magical thinking? We all collude with something like that all of the time, there's nothing special about trans issues in that respect.

What is your motivation in needing to tell people how you see reality?
 
Miranda Yardley said:
It is not discourteous nor is it arrogant to refuse to submit to someone's subjective internalised thoughts.
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Hypothetical situation, but one grounded in reality:

You run a club of some kind - sports, martial arts, that kind of thing - and one of your members comes to you after a period away from the club to tell you that they are transitioning and would like to come back training but identifying as the other gender. They have changed their name and are in the process of obtaining a legal gender change (something that still involves, rightly or wrongly, the idea of 'living as that gender'). You discuss various issues, including their concerns wrt changing areas. You agree to find them somewhere discreet to change on their own at first at least as everyone works out the best thing to do (ime, in the real world, this kind of thing is more likely to happen than some kind of demand and imposition).

You explain the situation to the rest of your members. All but one say they'll do their best to make the person as comfortable as possible. That one says 'no, for me biological sex is a fact that cannot be changed; gender is an oppressive social construct, and I refuse to indulge somebody else's fantasy that they can act out a gender role in a way that makes them like the people of a different biological sex from the one they were born with'. Or something similar - insert your own argument here if you think you have a better one.

You try to make things work between them, but this one member refuses to use the language appropriate for the trans member's adopted gender. There are complaints. The others support the trans person.

What do you do?

I know what I would do. Treating others with respect would be the foundation of any club run by me, and that would include, in this instance, respecting the trans person's wishes wrt how they are addressed. Ironically, I see your position, as given here and demonstrated in what you said about Sea Star and others, as the anti-social one, demanding that an individual's views should trump any wider consensus: an extreme individualism in many respects.
 
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FabricLiveBaby! said:
As far as the men are concerned I've come to the conclusion they don't really want to talk about it.

I've asked the dudes pontificating what it means to be a woman several times what it means to be a man but there have been no takers so far.

If one thinks a woman is a person with female reproductive capacity going about their daily business without any other judgement, then there's not much else to say about transmen from that perspective.

However it's much easier for all the dudes here to give transmen AND transwomen and non-binary issues to the women to deal with.

Lest we might discover what it is that *really* makes a man.

So I'll ask the men on here again :

Men: what makes a man?
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Male is the unmarked identity. Male is default. You can be male however you like... so long as it doesn't conflict with the marked identity of being a woman. These questions of "what is a man?" miss the point by missing this basic truth. It is woman that is marked with a specific set of characteristics, not man. Transgendered men are performing the role of not-woman as determinedly as they can, which helps avoid this conflict. Beyond that, it threatens nobody else's identity, role or assumptions for them to take on a male (non-)identity.

Being a transgendered woman is a very different proposition. To be a woman is to take on the characteristics of the marked identity, and society has a distinct concept of what this involves. Conflicts against this archetype/stereotype can easily be created and in their turn create cognitive disonance. It is threatening.

The fact that the difficulties encountered by those trying to assume the marked identity run headlong into the difficulties encountered by those who already suffer under the yoke of the marked identity is, of course, deeply unfortunate for all involved and lead to the problems we are currently observing.

(I have stated all the above as if it is Truth. It is not, of course -- it's just my interpretetation of my observerations of current cultural norms and the transgressions against those norms. I would hope the fact that it is just hypothesis would be obvious, but just in case it is not so: I know it is conjecture, and I will be interested to see reactions, objections and extensions of it.)
 
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kabbes said:
Yes, this is the kind of response I was interested in having.
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You plumped for the term 'transgendered'. Was that a considered choice? Are you aware of the issues surrounding that choice?

I'm sorry if I didn't find your post so sparkling with ideas that I could ask something more worthy of it.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Hypothetical situation, but one grounded in reality:

You run a club of some kind - sports, martial arts, that kind of thing - and one of your members comes to you after a period away from the club to tell you that they are transitioning and would like to come back training but identifying as the other gender. They have changed their name and are in the process of obtaining a legal gender change (something that still involves, rightly or wrongly, the idea of 'living as that gender'). You discuss various issues, including their concerns wrt changing areas. You agree to find them somewhere discreet to change on their own at first at least as everyone works out the best thing to do (ime, in the real world, this kind of thing is more likely to happen than some kind of demand and imposition).

You explain the situation to the rest of your members. All but one say they'll do their best to make the person as comfortable as possible. That one says 'no, for me biological sex is a fact that cannot be changed; gender is an oppressive social construct, and I refuse to indulge somebody else's fantasy that they can act out a gender role in a way that makes them like the people of a different biological sex from the one they were born with'. Or something similar - insert your own argument here if you think you have a better one.

You try to make things work between them, but this one member refuses to use the language appropriate for the trans member's adopted gender. There are complaints. The others support the trans person.

What do you do?

I know what I would do. Treating others with respect would be the foundation of any club run by me, and that would include, in this instance, respecting the trans person's wishes wrt how they are addressed. Ironically, I see your position, as given here and demonstrated in what you said about Sea Star and others, as the anti-social one, demanding that an individual's views should trump any wider consensus: an extreme individualism in many respects.
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Although it's a hypothetical it illustrates the point you mention very well, which I would like to stress: what is being presented here is a dichotomy, the action can either be pro- the trans person's right to be identified as a member of the opposite sex (when they are not, sex is defined by reference to reproductive class and is immutable), or pro- the other person's right to use language to describe what they see. The take away points are (i) there's a freedom of thought/speech issue here, and (ii) consider that the person's objection can be for a number of reasons:
  • That person is just mean;
  • That person views indulging pronouns (including non-binary like xie and hir) as enforced imposition of language, thus to use these is an act of submission;
  • That person sees males who transition as reinforcing sex-based stereotypes which are damaging to women, and after what women have been through why should they;
  • That person may consider it cruel to reinforce the idea someone is what they are not;
  • In this instance we are talking about a contact sport, natal males have longer and denser bones than females on average and this confers a (literal!) mechanical advantage in contact sports: what sort of man anyway wants to fight women?
There is a real problem with the false dichotomy of pro-woman being translated into anti-trans, it doesn't have to be like this. We can recognise 'trans women' as just that, and avoid problems like the recent Labour Party 'self-defined women' fiasco: if the underrepresentation of T, or even LGBT people in parliament needs to be addressed, allowing trans males to occupy women's shortlists doesn't achieve this. Instead it attacks women's representation and entrenches a zero-sum position in the left with regard to women's rights and trans rights. It's incredibly regressive. (For example, where does this policy put any 'trans men' who wish to stand for parliament?).
 
Red Cat said:
Because you believe you're colluding with magical thinking? We all collude with something like that all of the time, there's nothing special about trans issues in that respect.

What is your motivation in needing to tell people how you see reality?
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Again, it's an act of submission. So, no.
 
Miranda Yardley said:
It is not discourteous nor is it arrogant to refuse to submit to someone's subjective internalised thoughts.
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You say 'submit to' when you could just say 'respect'. It's not submission if you lose nothing by doing it. And no, losing the opportunity to have a thinly-veiled dig at someone does not count.

If anything you are, by misgendering people, making them submit to your judgement of who they are at the expense of their own. Even if they choose to ignore it, that's still a choice that they wouldn't have to make if you could only bring yourself to be civil.
 
SpookyFrank said:
You say 'submit to' when you could just say 'respect'. It's not submission if you lose nothing by doing it. And no, losing the opportunity to have a thinly-veiled dig at someone does not count.
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No, it's not respectful to lie to someone about what they are. And it's not a dig calling a man a man, unless you think there's something wrong with being a man.

SpookyFrank said:
If anything you are, by misgendering people, making them submit to your judgement of who they are at the expense of their own. Even if they choose to ignore it, that's still a choice that they wouldn't have to make if you could only bring yourself to be civil.
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The point is, like it or not, 'trans women' are males who have benefitted from living as men. We *are* men. And it's okay. It's only 'allies' like you and hypersensitive activists who view being a man a judgement. It's not. It's a morally neutral statement of fact. It's not my fault transgender ideology involves people suspending any sense of reality and indulging a lie, in order to be treated as a friend.
 
Miranda Yardley said:
No, it's not respectful to lie to someone about what they are. And it's not a dig calling a man a man, unless you think there's something wrong with being a man.
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Do you insist on referring to married cis women by their maiden names, because whatever their wishes, you reject the patriarchal system of marriage? Do you call black people coloureds because no-one truly has black skin and anyway race is a social contruct? Do you call disabled people cripples or people with learning disabilities retarded because they are perfectly good descriptive terms and why should you submit to their insistence that you use namby pamby politcally correct terms? Do you refuse to call people gay because gay means happy not homosexual? How far do you insist your beliefs take precedence over people being treated with decency and politeness?
 
smokedout said:
Do you insist on referring to married cis women by their maiden names, because whatever their wishes, you reject the patriarchal system of marriage? Do you call black people coloureds because no-one truly has black skin and anyway race is a social contruct? Do you call disabled people cripples or people with learning disabilities retarded because they are perfectly good descriptive terms and why should you submit to their insistence that you use namby pamby politcally correct terms? Do you refuse to call people gay because gay means happy not homosexual? How far do you insist your beliefs take precedence over people being treated with decency and politeness?
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Well quite. If basic courtesy feels like an act of submission then getting through a typical day must be a real struggle.

Submission is a surrender of agency; courtesy is using your agency to make life slightly more pleasant for someone else, or just to avoid making life needlessly unpleasant for them. If that takes a massive chunk out of your plans for today then maybe you should plan to be less of an arsehole tomorrow.
 
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