DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I have a lie in and you wankers nick all the best puns.
White civil rights leader has pretended to be black for years
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Not to say that there isn't such a mechanism. I can see how one might have evolved so that we are predisposed towards acquiring one or another gender identity. But it seems somewhat tactically unwise to invest too heavily in identifying one. Even if it can't be identified, that doesn't make the trans experience any less real. And there are other, imo very powerful, ways to distinguish it from spurious notions like transrace.
(fwiw, Dolezal's notion of transrace strikes me as pretty blatantly another one of her absurd lies.)
I don't really want to get into a row about it Stella - but you were dismissing mainstream feminist theory as something only a nutjob radical would spout. Which it isn't. And I don't think failed attempts at socialising cis children as trans implies anything other than the 'experiment' being really fucked.
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
This is a very pertinent:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org...nsistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html
http://www.psychologicalscience.org...nsistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html
Transgender Kids Show Consistent Gender Identity Across Measures
[URL='http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/transgender-kids-show-consistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html#']
[/URL]
A study with 32 transgender children, ages 5 to 12, indicates that the gender identity of these children is deeply held and is not the result of confusion about gender identity or pretense. The study, led by psychological scientist Kristina Olson of the University of Washington, is one of the first to explore gender identity in transgender children using implicit measures that operate outside conscious awareness and are, therefore, less susceptible to modification than self-report measures.
The findings will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Olson started the research project, partly out of her interest in how children think about social groups, but also because she’d witnessed the challenges of a close friend with a transgender child.
“Seeing how little scientific information there was, basically nothing for parents, was hard to watch,” Olson said. “Doctors were saying, ‘We just don’t know,’ so the parents have to make these really big decisions: Should I let my kid go to school as a girl, or should I make my kid go to school as a boy? Should my child be in therapy to try to change what she says she is, or should she be supported?”
The idea that young children, who haven’t gone through puberty, can truly be transgender has met with public skepticism and some experts believe the best approach is to encourage “gender-variant” children to be comfortable with their biological gender. In recent years, however, more doctors, parents, and mental health professionals have begun to advocate for allowing children to live as their identified gender.
Olson wanted to better understand gender identity in transgender children, taking a scientific approach to investigating whether their gender identity is deeply held, confused, or simply pretense, as some have argued.
Olson and co-authors Nicholas Eaton at Stony Brook University and Aidan Key of Gender Diversity, a Seattle organization that provides training and runs support groups for families of gender-nonconforming children, specifically focused their study on transgender children who were living as their identified gender in all aspects of their lives, who came from supportive home environments, and who had not yet reached puberty. The participants and their cisgender (non-transgender) siblings were recruited through support groups, conferences, and word of mouth.
Finally, the researchers recruited cisgender children from a database of families interested in participating in developmental psychology research studies. These cisgender children were age-matched to the transgender participants for analytical comparisons.
To get a comprehensive sense of the children’s gender identity, Olson and colleagues used self-report measures that asked children to reflect on aspects of their gender in combination with implicit measures designed to gauge the strength of the children’s more automatic gender associations.
For example, one of the implicit measures, based on the commonly used Implicit Association Test (IAT), assessed the speed with which they associated gender — male and female — with descriptors related to the concepts of “me” and “not me.” The test is based on the theory that people are faster to respond to pairings that are more strongly associated in memory. The IAT has been used in many studies to investigate implicit attitudes related to various attributes, including gender and race, and brief versions of the IAT that use pictures instead of words have been validated for use with children.
Overall, data from the various measures indicated that transgender children’s responses were indistinguishable from those of two groups of cisgender children
On the IAT measuring children’s gender identity, transgender children showed a strong implicit identification with their expressed gender. When the researchers looked at the data according to the children’s expressed gender, they saw that the data from transgender girls showed the same pattern as the data from cisgender girls and the data from transgender boys showed the same pattern as data from cisgender boys.
And Olson and colleague saw the exact same pattern of findings when they looked at data from an IAT test that tapped into the children’s gender preferences.
Transgender children also showed the same pattern of results as cisgender children on the explicit measures included in the study. For example, transgender girls, just like cisgender girls, preferred to be friends with other girls and they tended to prefer toys and foods that other girls liked.
“While future studies are always needed, our results support the notion that transgender children are not confused, delayed, showing gender-atypical responding, pretending, or oppositional — they instead show responses entirely typical and expected for children with their gender identity,” the researchers write.
“The data reported in this paper should serve as further evidence that transgender children do indeed exist and that this identity is a deeply held one,” they conclude.
Olson hopes to recruit up to 100 additional transgender children and follow them into adulthood to observe how the support they have received influences their development and whether it translates into more positive outcomes than in today’s transgender adults, launching the first large-scale, nationwide, longitudinal study of transgender children in the United States.
“We have absolutely no idea what their lives will look like, because there are very few transgender adults today who lived as young kids expressing their gender identity,” Olson said. “That’s all the more reason why this particular generation is important to study. They’re the pioneers.”
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
Feminism is moving on. I know very few feminists now who would stand by the dogma of the 1950s
and I didn't say nutjob radical, I said TERF. Those who cling most rigidly to the 1950s dogma - now shown to be damaging and incorrect - are the TERFs.
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
in the absence of any evidence from you, lets say it is.
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
I don't consider it pure "dogma" as you imply we all do Stella. I may not agree with all of the arguments but I know where they come from and I think it's very good that women on that side of the argument say they are and put their arguments across.
Not to mention that the "dogma" argument itself is dismissive.
Not to mention that the "dogma" argument itself is dismissive.
what?
ddraig
kicking against the pricks...
has this short overview from the bbc been posted?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33159940
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33159940
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
I agree that 99% of gender is socially constructed - and women's place in society is entirely socially cosntructed. And when these ideas appeared they were important and not dogma.
However, the world has changed a lot. Transgender people and intersex people now have a voice and our experience contradicts the idea that gender is nothing but a construct. I am happy to see that most feminists are moving on, including us and that feminism is continuing to modernise. what I'm less happy about is that the old guard of feminism seem to want to exclude us because we explode their theories.
Trans women do exist, we are women, and we aren't going away.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
are there tefs?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Hmmm. A lot of big statements in that list, many of them very questionable. I'm really not sure where they're going with the rape argument.
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
in other words.... while most people argue in black and white - gender is or gender isn't a social construct... the trans experience leads most of us to take a middle ground - a bit of nature and a lot of nurture. Gender has a core of reality based in biology and then society supplies the rest, exploiting biological differences to exploit and oppress.
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
I didn't understand the rape argument but i thought some of the other items were valid.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
surely sex is biological and gender is the societal meanings overlaid on that.
muscovyduck
Good IT skills and food hygiene competent
Listening to her speak in these interviews is like listening to the poshest student in my class speak when someone calls him out on his bullshit. She's actually quite shit at lying and there's not a coherent narrative
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
jeffrey archer will be relieved
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
Don't patronise me.
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
How am I patronising you?
Treacle Toes
Time
Going back to the discussion of RD, her overinvolvement as a member of adoptive transracial family, her lies about her heritage/experiences and questionable claims to have 'become' Black, this pretty much sums up how I feel as a person of mixed ethnicity, who doesn't have an issue with being mixed. 
http://www.skirtcollective.com/the-mixed-race-communitys-response-to-rachel-dolezal/
She is hijacking my identity and fucking it up...she is using the imagined binaries of Black and White to justify herself and her deceptions in ways that are colonialist in thought/practice and very damaging.
http://www.skirtcollective.com/the-mixed-race-communitys-response-to-rachel-dolezal/
She is hijacking my identity and fucking it up...she is using the imagined binaries of Black and White to justify herself and her deceptions in ways that are colonialist in thought/practice and very damaging.
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I'm hoping you googled and stuck up a link without reading it here btw. There's some pretty shit stuff on that page.
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
I'd already told you that I don't agree with all of the arguments put forward by those you call TERFs (a term, btw, I consider more a means to "exclude from debate" than anything to do with the very debate), hadn't I?
I'll leave you with this to ponder through though because you speak as if you had all of the answers. I don't.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-terf
Sea Star
have you ever explored your dark side?
I'm inextricably involved in this debate already having been named by a New Statesman article as an "extremist" trans woman, just because I insist that I am a woman. The article implied that I was a rape apologist and gave me no right to reply. After that I was the target of a massive campaign to discredit me and to get me deselected as a candidate. This article is dishonest as in fact the TERFs are intent on silencing us!
I have a lot of answers because I am trans and because I have lived and breathed this argument for nearly a year. It has become my life.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
There were some cracking ones
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
An argument for another thread perhaps?
We all agree, I think, that comparing Dolezal with transgender is dead wrong.
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
Glad to see the debate going back to what it's actually about. One my first thoughts about what RD's done was what will be the impact on mixed race people. It's not rare to see them excluded by two extremes
MochaSoul
It's being enslaved of your own free will
There were some cracking ones
Yours "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being" was especially good. There I was thinking of how much lighter my life would have been without my having to stand up for my own person regardless (hence my suggestion) and you throw the subject into its actual light.
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