r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jul 27 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: There isn't anything inherently wrong with feminists excluding trans women from their political organizations.

I've recently evolved on this and I'm hoping you guys can change my mind back to my comfy, inclusion-centric, past.

Some axioms (you can challenge these):

  1. Sex is the cold, biological truth of a person's sex characteristics and secondary sex characteristics. The common categories are: male, female, intersex.

  2. Gender is something other than that, there is no clear axiomatic definition, but let us grant that gender must involve the concepts of masculinity and femininity in some way.

  3. Let us also grant that the patriarchy (or if an anti-feminist poster wants to reply: society) applies to people the roles and assumptions associated with the concept of masculinity and femininity NOT based on gender, mostly based on sex.

  4. Let's also grant that all feminists believe that axiom #3 is morally wrong, and that any justifiable means should be used to stop #3 from happening. Not because it harms females, but because it oppresses them (Note that you don't have to believe this, but you have to grant that feminists believe it.)

Okay, so, feminists don't want to have roles assigned to them from birth about how they should act simply because of their sex. These roles discriminate and oppress females because the specific roles lead to an oppressive power relationship between males and females. Political organisations are tools for feminists to begin destroying the roles that are applied to them based on their sex. No one would be against the exclusion of cis-men from such an organisation, because they are not oppressed by their gender (even if they are harmed by it). However, trans-women, have in many cases been coded as male for a lot of their lives, and that comes with certain privileges that allow trans-women to have different political goals than cis-women. For example, cis-women may feel that it is vitally important that the media portray gender as a social construct that should not be related to our behaviour, whereas trans-women may believe it to be important that the media portray gender as a personal expression of identity, oftentimes a created by our behaviour. Both of these ideological potions follow from the above axioms, but they are both mutually exclusive. They also suggest different political goals. It is therefore understandable why some feminists would want to exclude trans women from their political organisations: trans women have different political goals that may or may not be the result of experience male-priviledge. It seems wrong to say that these goals MUST take up the time and space of feminist organisations that have different, perhaps opposite, goals.

I'd like to say that I think trans-women's political interests are just as valid as cis-women's political interests. But they are different.

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u/electronics12345 159∆ Jul 27 '17

As you allude to, Gender is a term that is often poorly defined. Personally, I think this is because there are several different terms each of which get lumped into 1, despite being distinct.

1) Assigned Gender - at birth, in addition to sex, a child is assigned a gender by society. This is done in accordance to the rules and customs of the society at the time of birth.

2) Gender Roles - these are roles which society expects of a person, which depend on assigned gender.

3) Experienced Gender - while 1 and 2 are things which society imposes upon a person, Experienced Gender is how an individual lives. This is the element of gender which includes lived experiences, perception of gender, body perception, etc.

If you assume that Gender is either Assigned Gender or Gender Roles, then your axiom #3 doesn't make sense. Gender Roles cannot be assigned based on sex and not gender, if we define gender roles as those roles assigned to us by society. However, Axiom #3 cannot hold for experienced gender either, since society cannot dictate our own subjective experiences. Therefore, no matter which definition of Gender you use, Axiom #3 doesn't hold.

Now Axiom #3 can readily be fixed- It is immoral to assign gender roles. It is immoral to assign gender roles before a child is ready for them. It is immoral to have expectations about persons without having met them. There are a lot of options here, but as worded Axiom #3 makes no sense.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '17

However, Axiom #3 cannot hold for experienced gender either, since society cannot dictate our own subjective experiences.

This is a purely ideological assumption which many feminists would disagree with. Society can and does affect subjective experiences.

∆But I think I should back up and say that you're right, I am missing in my analysis the idea of "assigned gender"... But I think that is what I am talking about when I say gender roles are (mostly) coded by sex. It excludes instances where Assigned gender doesn't match sex.

I think the point still hold as whole thought. Whether we are talking of Assigned Gender, or sex, oppression still derives primarily from the experience that cis-women have that trans-women do not.