Sexism is “prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to stereotypes and gender roles, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another”.
GCs reject sexism. Rejecting sexism doesn’t mean rejecting the reality of men and women being genetically distinct and having different body plans for the purposes of reproduction. Rejecting sexism doesn’t mean refusing to discriminate when discrimination is necessary for the socially just goal of sexual and gender equality.
Sex is recognised at birth, not assigned at birth - it’s determined at fertilisation: XX or XY.
Assuming you’re a transwoman. Your sex is male, and your gender is feminine. Women and transwomen substantially share a gender, given most women choose to be feminine and most transwomen feel compelled to present and be seen as feminine.
This is fine, every GC person I know accepts the right of individuals to choose their expressed gender and be free from unreasonable discrimination. What we don’t accept is the refusal to acknowledge that women also have a sex-based component of identity that transwomen don’t share.
I appreciate that this causes psychological stress to people with a dysphoria that is only calmed by affirmation of successfully changed sex - but - the physical reality of the situation can not be changed or rationally denied.
There is no fundamental law of the universe which says that sex must be defined through gametes or chromosomes.
In any case, all this definition stuff is secondary to how our actual lives are affected by this nonsense. As a transfeminine person I've been using women's bathrooms for many years without incident, but most GCs would want to make that illegal. Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts. All my friends and coworkers use my pronouns, but many GCs would refuse to. The list goes on.
GCs say they want me to live a life free of discrimination but also want to put me in situations where I'm going to face discrimination, like making it harder for me to update my documents. It's all lies fueled by distrust and hatred.
I'm just a normal person who wants to live my life in a self-respecting manner. I don't ever want to interact with a GC but I'm forced to because their policy recommendations keep getting in my way. I really want to do better things with my life than deal with a bunch of boundary cops.
Doesn't CA have a mandate for single-occupancy, non-gendered bathrooms, which are anyway more inclusive of genderfluid folks and those who do not identify with the gender binary?
> Many GCs think I shouldn't have access to healthcare for my breasts.
Well, that's quite bad. Those GC folks should be made aware that male breast cancer is a thing too.
CA has a mandate that all single-stall rooms be all-gender, but there's no mandate to build them.
"Trans people want to reinforce gender stereotypes" is yet another GC lie based on selection pressure from the medical gatekeeping we've endured for decades. Even today, in parts of Europe and in much of the world you'll be expected to wear a dress and makeup to your doctor's appointments, otherwise you won't get access to the hormones your body needs. (The SF Bay Area where I live doesn't have that as much.)
I want to repeat: Cis people are the ones who reinforce gender stereotypes, not us.
There are many trans women for whom femininity is not an important aspect of their individuality as well. There are trans butch dykes. Of course there are. Once you start looking at us as human you'll see that we have as much variation within our group as anyone else.
The stated purpose of feminizing/masculinizing hormone therapy is specifically to alter secondary sexual characteristics in a feminizing or masculinizing direction, respectively - so yours seems to be a comparatively uncommon use of such HT. Given that "medical gatekeeping" is merely a fact of life that applies to all sorts of substances and that there are also many arguments for gatekeeping access to steroids specifically, the proactive step forward for people like you would be to get your specific medical need described in the medical research literature so that, in the longer run, policies around access to steroids can be changed to more naturally encompass cases like yours. Blaming GC positions for such issues is just not very sensible.
I'm aware of what hormones do, I did plenty of research before getting on them. I take hormones so that my body is feminized, which I like. But I don't present as a stereotypically feminine woman in terms of long hair, dress or makeup. I'm not sure why that is so hard to understand.
I'm usually perceived as a gender-nonconforming woman, which is how I'd like to be perceived as. The only reason people like me are uncommon is selection pressure due to medical gatekeeping. There are a lot of trans people who have no interest in conforming to gendered expectations, but are coerced to by the threat of losing access to medically necessary healthcare.
Medical gatekeeping is not "a fact of life" that can't be changed. There's less of it where I live and it works out just fine. Informed consent is the modern protocol and the rest of the world should adopt it, but GCs in places like the UK oppose that and want to reinforce silly stereotypes like "if you don't wear a dress you're not a real trans woman".
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edit to respond: sigh, no, transness does not hinge on gender expression. It hinges on gender identity and subconscious sex, neither of which are the same thing as gender expression. Gender identity is only somewhat related to social conceptions of gender expression.
What a lot of GCs do is deny the existence of gender identity. But that's just empirically false based on the evidence from millions of trans people worldwide, which includes literally me as a human being, writing this comment right now.
It is important to note that this is a contingent fact about Homo sapiens—it is possible that a different species with our level of intelligence doesn't have anything called a gender identity. But humans do.
Please read Whipping Girl. It goes into all this in quite some detail.
Well, historically, the broad shift from a focus on "transsexual" status and "sex change/reassignment" (focusing on primary and secondary sex characteristics) to one on "transgender" and "gender reassignment" (focusing on some canonical gender expression) was driven by consensus within the trans community.
If anything, the more traditional or "gender critical" POV is that the earlier 'transsexual' focus was in fact appropriate, in which a transfemale person can be transfemale no matter what they express as, whilst "cis", "trans" or "fluid" gender expression is a bit of a red herring.
What do you think is the psychological cause of not wishing to be recognised as a gender-nonconforming transwoman?
What is the identity difference between woman and transwoman?
I find this debate interesting so I try to read a lot of different perspectives. I think the /r/gendercritical position was more nuanced than you make it out. They think that while humans can’t change their sex, rigid ideas of what it is to be a man or woman are one of the things that causes some people to feel like they need to. They would say that society should accept a and encourage a broader range of expressions of femaleness and maleness than it does now.
The GC position, as I understand it, decries the idea that a butch dyke should feel the need to live under a male identity just because she is far outside of the “firm category” of feminine or has many traditional masculine traits. It’s why they use terms like “butch erasure” [1]. It’s something interesting that I learned reading a now-banned subreddit which helped me to have more compassion and understanding for people who haven’t always had the easiest time in life.
I can’t speak for all GC people, but for me it’s more a rejection of seeing certain behaviours as gendered at all - rather than things individuals may do.
Current trans ideology makes what sex people identify as vitally important, and something that requires gate keeping by femininity. “Womanhood is for feminine people, being feminine is the most important aspect of who I am”.
The GC position, ironically, sees sex as primarily important for the purposes of reproduction - though, in the context of ongoing sexual inequality also important for social justice. “Womanhood is for female people, being female is a relatively minor aspect of who I am as a unique individual”.
To repeat: I do not believe what you claim I believe. I do not believe that womanhood is only for feminine people or any such nonsense. I know and love masc cis women and masc trans women.
People won't let you hold that kind of opinion, though. You'll just get flamed from both sides.
Guess who was responsible for that injury. Not Fallon Fox, but a cis woman.
MMA is an incredibly dangerous sport. If you want to talk about banning UFC I'm all ears.
My problem with GCs (in their strongest firm) is the policy prescriptions. Making medical transition harder. Making it harder to get updated documents. Opposing anti-harassment laws in our workplaces and schools. Not letting us use the bathroom in peace. GCs do a really slimy shift from policy to philosophy and back that indicates a deep disrespect for our experiences.
I know trans women who present quite masculine while being on estrogen and having changed their name and pronouns. They're butch dykes living as women, not men. They're literally exactly what GCs claim to want. But would GCs think so? No, because their brain is warped by oppositional sexism.
The GC position is absurd, untenable, and simply does not fit with the available evidence about humanity.
https://www.autostraddle.com/6-amazing-women-speedrunners-to...
"Six amazing women speedrunners" and only one of them actually had to build their rep as a woman.
Meh. That's completely unobjectionable to me -- fact is that a lot of trans people used video games to escape from society's bullshit when they were younger, which is why we're overrepresented in video game communities. To the extent that a cis woman has trouble being inspired by a trans woman speedrunner, she should probably work on her own internalized transphobia.
Thankfully, this view is vanishing among younger people: they generally take it for granted that the category of womanhood includes cis and trans women.
However, GCs tend to believe in an oppositionally sexist view of the world, where your assigned sex at birth puts you in one of two firm categories, and any sort of crossing over or breach between categories is impossible. That's how GCs construct their categories.