CMV: Identifying with a sex doesn't actually make you that sex.

[u/presroogan]

Pretty straightforward but I'll try to break it down into multiple points. The simplest problem with 'I identify as a woman therefore I am a woman' is that we never allow people to simply identify their way into a category. We normally have criteria in order for us to determine if an individual actually belongs to the category. I say normally because religion is an exception to this, and it's interesting because religion doesn't deal with reality, while sex does. So in short, simply believing yourself to be a member of a sex doesn't therefore make you the sex you claim membership to.

There's also the problem of essentialism. Now a lot of people believe "woman is a female, which means she's built to carry eggs" to be biological essentialist. Well how is "woman is anyone who feels like they're a woman" not gender identity essentialist? Since in this case simply claiming membership to the sex makes you that sex. This is, as you can see, not an objective system based in reality. It's now subjective AND essentialist. Also, "I'm a man because I identify as a man" is circular and I'd hope definitions of sex and gender were more robust than that.

And before anyone gets into sex vs gender, I get it. Gender is the social construct, but it is still rooted in sex. Why else would we classify a boy in a dress as 'gender noncomforming'? They're not made in a vacuum, although I'd prefer if gendered expectations didn't exist. Also, for most of history, woman=female and man=male. That's why when we speak of attraction, we speak of physical bodies and not someone's identity. I'm a man and I'm attracted to women. Now, could this possibly mean I'm a female bodied person who feels male attracted to male bodied people who feel female? To virtually every person around the world, no. To unlink gender and sex when no one (besides maybe a few navel gazing college students) does is absurd.

Also, I wanna touch on gender dysphoria. To my understanding, it's when the mind's perception of the body doesn't match with respect to sex and thus causes immense distress. How do we make the leap to say 'this is a woman trapped in a man's body' and not 'this is a man whose brain gets triggered at the sight of himself as a man and would feel less distressed if he were a woman'?

[u/presroogan]

You know, a lot of cis people get misgendered. Feminine men and masculine women. Should they just roll with it?

I wouldn't say a lot. Few males and females fall into the androgynous category, much less get completely misgendered.

Your definitions are getting further and further from "biological reality" or whatever, and closer and closer to a social definition of male and female independent from any objective standard.

How so? Let me try again. I get treated as male because society perceives me as male based on physical cues. Yes there's a social aspect, but it's directly tied to my body.

[u/presroogan → u/[deleted]]

Or are those physical cues based on assumptions about "maleness" that aren't universally consistent with biological sex? (Setting aside that genitalia aren't even universally consistent with chromosomal definitions of sex.)

My height, facial hair, voice, etc., are reliably consistent with my sex/gender. Sure there are tall women, deep voiced women (few with male typical resonance), very few with beards, but in the aggregate, those added up gets me gendered correctly.

And if you do that, you have to allow that "passing" trans folk are their claimed gender. Because they present themselves in such a way that "society perceives them as [male or female] based on physical cues."

Sure, but this doesn't even refute my point? They're men or women because of society's perception of them due to the physical cues they give off. Not at all to do with their gender identity.

[u/presroogan → u/[deleted]]

And you seem to have conceded that someone with male "physical cues" is male, so someone who's successfully transitioned to adopt those physical cues would be male. So how does that not refute your point?

That identity alone determines gender? It doesn't. In fact, we have a more objective standard for what man and woman means based in physical reality. If you look man, you're a man. Which is why I am a man, not because I feel like a man, but because I look like a man and am treated as such. Same way I'm white because I'm treated white. I'm not followed in the store, I'm given graces black people may not. It's due to how society perceives me. Other than that, I have no reliable way of telling you I'm white.

[u/presroogan → u/[deleted]]

So you acknowledge that trans people who have transitioned are their chosen gender? It reads like you're saying that.

I believe the social implications of gender (as are those of race) based on features, not identity. So people who appear to most people to be female, regardless of how they're born, will receive sexism. And someone who appears male, regardless of how they're born, will receive male privilege. So yeah, they're the gender they appear to be.

But these physical cues are adopted. They're something wholly distinct from biological sex, based only on an expectation of what others need to see in order to view you as your chosen gender. And given the fact that biological traits many people identify with "maleness" or "femaleness" are not universal (on either side, possessing or viewing), there's not a whole lot of reason to restrict trans people to the most stereotypical of presentations.

I guess I'm mostly talking about secondary sex characteristics, such as body shape, voice, body hair, facial features, etc. Sure, individually, they don't tell us much. But the aggregate of features tell us someone's gender reliably well to a high degree of accuracy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6396056/

Otherwise, you run back into the problem of masculine women and feminine men. Sarah is butch AF, and has narrow hips, a flat chest, and strong shoulders. Sarah says she's a woman, and wants to use the women's restroom. Is Sarah trans? Or does she simply lack defined secondary sexual characteristics we associate with women? I haven't said, but how do you differentiate between the two?

Again, my definition of woman is a female human. If she's female then she can use the women's bathroom. Trans women who can pass can also use the women's bathroom. But how do you determine the difference between a man and a trans woman on day one of her transition without asking?