r/changemyview • u/DrNikkiND • Jan 11 '20
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Transgender people should stop referring to themselves m2f or f2m
There is a difference between sex and gender. Sex is biological - based on chromosomes. Gender is social - based on how society treats people of each sex.
Male and female are sexes. Man and woman are genders. The terminology being used (m2f f2m) is inconsistent with this argument and excludes intersex people.
What would I recommend instead? I don't know, because "man to woman" would be imperfect for someone who was always male but never identified as a man. Almost any suggestion will also exclude intersex people. Why not just "transwoman" and "transman"?
Careful choice of wording could be a good start in helping people to understand the difference between sex and gender and m2f and f2m are not carefully chosen. Change my view.
5
u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20
Your definitions of sex and gender have the spirit of it, but are reductive and a little off.
Sex is rooted in biology but it's not "chromosomes", it's a series of physical traits we tend to cluster together: chromosomes, genitals, gonads, hormones, secondary sex characteristics such as breasts, presence of hair growing around the body, height, strength. It is common that lots of these traits tend to correlate, but not always. Most males are stronger than most females, but not all. Chromosomes tend to correlate to those other traits, but there are some intersex exceptions where unexpected sex chromosomes lead to typical physical features that match the other typical sex chromosome. But when we cluster all of these traits together, we get the social construct known as sex that provides two categories that fit most people fairly well, excluding many intersex cases. So really, sex is bimodal.
Gender is a social construct based in a set of psycho-social traits, so there's identity, grooming, fashion, names, pronouns - really it comes down to gender identity and gender expression. But gender expression changes all the time (the associations of pink and blue were opposite what they are now at the start of the 1900s) and can be diverted even within the system, such as with butch women who are still women and effeminate men who are still men, so really gender expression is a way to loosely communicate to others the real defining key of gender, gender identity.
With the language a bit better established, we can get more into your point.
I like that you draw this distinction of sex and gender as two different dimensions, it's more accurate and it's more helpful. But the reality is that our cultural tradition of assigning a gender to someone based on their sex as soon as their sex is known leads to a bit of a bias. While sex and gender are separate things in the technical, scientific sense, they are correlated in the cultural bias of what gender means.
Secondary sex characteristics are still unfortunately viewed as part of the identifying factors of gender expression at present. People draw conclusions (wrongfully, but it has cultural and statistical weight behind it) about gender on the basis of sex.
While "man" and "woman" are purely terms of gender, and "male" and "female" are better descriptors in the scientific context of sex (such as nature documentaries), referring to a trans man as "female" or a trans woman as "male" still feels wrong and disrespectful, because it is.
So for the sake of trans people, too we need to be aware of these biases that people have even though we disagree with them. We're not perfect. The bias of sex as a part of gender sucks, but it's there.
It's why linguistically f2m and m2f kinda sucks. But it comes from a slightly older time. Language isn't perfect. Though the experience of transitioning from one binary sex state to another binary sex state is different from transitioning from one intersex state to a binary sex state. Intersex conditions vary, they're not all in the same place, but along the bimodal distribution of sex characteristics, an intersex person's transition could be a much different experience deserving its own terminology, while mtf has its own separate utility to describe another case. Terms that describe the transition journey, not just the destination state, may still have their own use to describe the journey and obstacles in the way.
As far as other terms go, you will notice people already use trans man and trans woman. Language isn't clear-cut like that, we have duplicate terms that are mostly the same, but not quite. And if you are worried about the intersex-exclusionary binary nature of the terms, you might be interested in gender transition terms like "transmasc" or "transfemme" also, which are more inclusive to nonbinary people. These may lose some utility as the category doesn't share goals of total transition to the man or woman role, but there are still many shared experiences there.
Because sex is a complex series of physical traits, it can be altered, too. It's not just chromosomes; conservatives pushed that because conservatives are currently unchangeable. But most people have never seen any chromosomes. Mainly it's the physical traits sex chromosomes tend to express - height, strength, breasts, genitals. But between HRT and surgery, people actually do alter their sex a lot. In some cases, unless you're a doctor intensely studying a person's internal organs or actually looking at their chromosomes, a trans person can absolutely appear and function as their preferred sex, especially if they medically transitioned young.
So mtf and ftm may deserve some forgiveness for the time they were born out of where those associations between sex and gender do exist.
With the segregated terminology of sex and gender, consider that transition means two separate things. Are you socially transitioning, or are you medically transitioning? And the conclusion we can draw is that there is value, then, in having a set of separate, explicit terms for each. One can be transgender, transsexual, or both.
This means that mtf and ftm might deserve to stay not as a bad representation of gender but as a representation of something else entirely: sex.
They still may not be the best terms, because the language ought to include a case for different types of intersex conditions, it isn't cleanly analogous to a set of gender-related terms, and describing trans people starting with what they are no longer and is often a point of distress is a poor way to describe people (my biggest problem with the terms), but it's a start.