konogasa
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen in western countries were generally of this later kind.
Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does, by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work awaited them.
In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than 13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.
I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim darkness that was before.
A link to that book:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo362138...
"When are you going to find a good girl to marry?"
"Mom, I'm gay".
For example.
This one reminds me of the old joke about Jews controlling the media. One jewish man asks another why he's reading all those tabloids that are full of antisemitic lies. The othere one replies that no matter how bad things are in real life, the newspapers always make him feel great because according to them the Jews control the banks, the media, the world governments and everything else.
I'm full of jokes today.
Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho!
OK, here's my own joke. I'm trans and this is a trans joke taken from, like, life, dude.
There's this guy sitting with four ladies and another guy and he starts saying how he knows a tranny when he sees one.
"I mean, they all have like, what, size-7 feet? I mean come on, it's so obvious!"
"I got size 7 feet" says one of the ladies.
The guy blinks once, then goes on:
"And their hands! Have you seen their hands? They're like two times the size of my hands!"
The second lady holds up her hands. "My hands are bigger than your hands".
The guy pauses for a mere second and goes on.
"But the dead give-away is their voices. They have loud, booming, bass voices..."
"I can sing in the entire baritone vocal range" says the third lady.
The guy stops, clears his throat, looks around, then leans in conspiratorially.
"You know what's the real way to tell a trannie apart? They can explain the offside rule in soccer".
"That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent".
The guy is now sweeating bricks. He turns to look at each of them carefully.
"OK" he says. "Was even a single one of you born female"?
"Sure" says the other guy. "I was".
Badum-tish.
You say this very lightly but it's obvious to me that you haven't really considered the consequences.
For example, you say "people who didn't undergo any gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy". But you don't seem to consider that those are medical interventions. I think if you thought of them in that light, you would be a little more thoughtful about demanding that people undergo medical interventions for any reason, no less as the price of being recognised as their claimed, or lived gender.
Such requirements are common. In some countries in Europe until very recently transwomen were not allowed to change their papers to identify them as women and to declare the female names they used everyday unless they could demonstrate that they had been rendered surgically sterile, by castration. Germany was one such case.
I wonder also if you have a slightly romantic idea of surgery and hormone therapy. The truth is that surgery doesn't magically transform a man into a woman, no matter what some surgeons want us to believe. Some transwomen will always look like men, no matter how much they cut off and throw away. Others, will look like women without having taken any hormones in their entire lives. I know that's hard to believe, but it's how it is. The human species is only very lightly sexually dimorphic and some males can pass for women, and some females for men, with very little intervention. In the case of transwomen, for many it is enough to remove their beard (by electrolysis or photolysis) and take care of their hair, to be immediately identified as women by everyone that sees them. On the other side, history is full of females who cut their hair short, wore pants and lived the rest of their lives as men.
But, I know the above is hard to believe so OK. Just please try to keep an open mind and remember that you don't automatically know everything there is to know about transwomen (and transmen).
I'm a trans woman too. Can you please explain to me how "trans women are women" is transphobic?
I have said "I am a trans woman" many times in my life. Can you please explain whether I was being transphobic at those times?
Many thanks.
I'm not speaking for the majority of trans women. I'm speaking of them. So when I say that "my description covers a strong majority of trans women" I mean that the traits I list describe a majority of trans women, in my experience and in my opinion. I don't mean that the trans women I describe in this way would agree with my description of those traits, or that a majority of them would share my views.
If you ask me, because I also have a bit of background in various trans communities, I think the majority of trans women would not accept the traits I ascribe to them. I did warn that my comment would probably be controversial. In trans cirlces, it would most definitely be.
>> Often I find these lines of thought to be thinly veiled attempts at othering trans folk, erasing their identity, and forcing them out of gender spaces entirely. If transgender women are to stay out of women's spaces while not being accepted in men's spaces, where do they belong?
While there is still need for gendered spaces? We belong in our own spaces. Personally, I'd feel a lot safer and not just a lot less awkward in a space meant for trans women than in one meant for cis women, or even all women.
I don't have to speak in the hypothetical. I have actuall been in trans spaces. Once as a representative of my country at a TGEU meeting, which was how I imagine heaven to be, a couple of days where I was between the only people in the world who can really get me, other trans women and men (the few cis people were friendly enough to not spoil it although I wasn't sure why we had to have a cis facilitator, but no matter).
Another time I went to a meeting of an LGBT group at the university were I studied. This was a meeting to discuss trans matters and it was open to everyone, but it was preceded by a closed meeting, only for people who identified as trans. And that was nice also.
Finally, I've been a member of a local support group for trans people, for a couple of years, before I started working and didn't have any time to attend the meetings anymore.
All those were places were I've felt I can really belong and where I don't have to explain anything, although sometimes this had more to do with passing privilege and women with less heteronormative presentation were less welcome, I'm very sad to say.
We need more spaces like that. For trans women in tech (whose numbers are legion, btw) we need a special place just to discuss our very specific needs and experiences. A community for cis women in tech is just not going to be that, I'm afraid.
And that's besides the fact that I fear we'll just end up making things awkward for the cis women also.
I concede I haven't considered women with atypical behaviours so I'll be honest and say I don't know how to answer your question. My guess is that cis women being a bit confrontational (if I intepret that right) is going to be much less disruptive, or divisive, than trans women doing the same.
>> Personally I love the idea of allowing trans-women into a woman focused community. Your perspective is going to be unique (and likely uniquely insightful.) You also experience the same discrimination as cis-gendered women if you aren't explicitly identifying as transgendered and may have the same needs for support and understanding related to that discrimination.
Thank you for your empowering words, I appreciate them. I hope you're right and that the trans women who join Leap will contribute positively to it.
Personally, I'm not out to my coworkers so yes, I'd benefit from a community like Leap, absolutely. But that can't be just about me (or others like me). If you look at complaints cis women have against trans women, it's all about us thinking only of ourselves and our need to be perceived as women, taking the place of cis women in employment, enjoying resources and structures meant to help cis women etc. The majority of the people who say those things typically turn out to be vicious trolls who don't really care so much about cis women as about hurting trans women. But I have to consider the possibility that in their hatred they have managed to latch on to a nugget of truth: that just by being perceived as any other woman, I end up taking the place of one. And that just shocks me to my core. I transitioned to find myself, not to usurp someone else's place in the world.
So I've decided to be very careful to avoid doing that, if at all possible. And one part of that is staying well away from spaces meant "for women", even if they're explicitly trans-friendly.
And I do think that other trans women should also be just as careful. Expressing your identity can't be done at the cost of others' lives. Well, unless you're Vlad the Impaler.
Unfortunately I'm totally rubbish at community building (wouldn't know where to start) so I won't be the one to do it. But it's strange that nobody has thought of it just yet. This is just anecdata but there are a lot of trans women in tech. We should just band together.
It took me a long time to start thinking of the effect of my being trans on others around me. For example, when I get hired in a job, is the fact that I'm perceived as a woman giving me a tiny advantage? Is the interviewer thinking it's cool to have a female SE on the team? And does that mean I'm taking some other woman's place? Or is the fact that I'm trans (which is never discussed in interviews) a convenient compromise between a development team that's 100% men and actually going out and hiring more women?
In trans circles, it was my experience that such questions were brushed aside and never given any consideration. Of course I'm a woman, of course I deserve everything a woman deserves and as a woman I'm subject to discrimination in tech anyway (maybe all the companies that didn't even reply to my applications didn't think it's "cool to have a female SE on the team"). That was the general reaction. Or I was just overthinking things (but I do that for a living).
Currently the only people who even broach the subject of how trans womens' rights could affect cis womens' rights are extremely unpleasant transphobic trolls and that's very unfortunate. We've left the conversation about what claiming our rights does to othes entirely up to the very people who want to take our rights away from us. My comment here is in the context of a half-hearted attempt on my part to reclaim this conversation.
I accept that there are differences between trans women, but I believe my description covers a strong majority. I don't speak "for" anyone, of course.
>> It ends up with us being excluded _everywhere_ because of some dubious concept of "socialisation", as if every trans woman has the same experiences such that you can discriminate based on it.
I agree that the concept of "socialisation" is vague and hard to define. The problem is that there are differences in the way men and women behave in a social context and because these differences end up harming women (usually) they need to be addressed. It's easy to see that boys and girls are brought up differently (different toys, different advise, being told off for different things etc) so that's a likely explanation. The alternative is usually a biological explanation about male and female brains generating male and female behaviours. We don't really understand how brains generate any behaviours so I find the biological explanation to be very suspicious. The "socialisation" explanation sounds a lot more straightforward.
Of course there are differences between trans women, in behaviour as well as upbringing. There are differences between men, and between women. Yet, here we are with a tech indudstry that is, in aggregate, unfair or hostile to women, but not to men. You can't predict the behaviour of individuals, but you can make fairly accurate predictions for the kind of behaviours that arise in groups. That's why a community like Leap is needed in the first place.
My concern is that in the case of women-only spaces where trans women are welcome, many trans women will join, responding to their need to belong, which you express and which I feel myself. And that given enough trans women joining, a few of them will eventually display those behavioural traits you can expect from people who grew up like men and that are the traits the community seems to want to keep out.
I agree that feeling excluded from everywhere is harsh and feels extremely unfair. But we can't fix unfair by making more unfair. We can't make the world fair for ourselves by making it more unfair for others. At the end of the day, the way forward is true equality. If trans women are accepted as women, and women are accepted as equal to men (in technology, or anywhere), trans women will not need to feel excluded from anywhere.
But this is not yet the case and I really think that trans women need to give some space to cis women until it is and in order to help make it so.
>> Often!
And thanks for letting me have one, too. My experience is that it happens, but rarely.
If you identify as a woman and are interested in joining Leap,
please sign up for our beta here.
Obviously the invitation is meant to show that trans women are welcome. That's... moving, but I think it will only cause trouble. First you create a place especially for women, which is needed because like the announcement says, many women don't feel welcome, comfortable or even safe in online discussions that tend to escalate to shouting matches, typically among men (since it's the women leaving). Then you invite in to the community people who have been socialised as men, have grown up as men, have spent most of their professional lives as men and who have often contributed to exactly the kind of working environment that makes womens' lives difficult as tech workers. That's defeating the whole point of a "community where the core culture [will be] set by women".
I'm not trying to say that trans women are not women (I mean, duh; I'm one. Of both). But it should be kept in mind that most of us carry a great deal of baggage from the time we lived as men. Baggage that's very hard to get rid of and that many of us are not even aware of. In light of this, I think this big-hearted invitation to everyone who identifies as a woman, should be revised to something more cautious. I'd think, if someone "identifies as a woman" and works in technology, they'd respond to an invitation to just "women" anyway.
To be perfectly clear, I'm totally not joining and I invite any other trans women who read this to think very carefully before doing so. Just think of all the times you had a civilised and polite debate with other trans women about trans stuff, or about anything.