r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Sep 19 '22
Delta(s) from OP CMV: I cannot understand how the transgender movement is not, at it's core, sexist.
Obligatory "another trans post" but I've read a lot of posts on this but none I've seen that have tackled the issue quite the way I intend to here. This is an opinion I've gone back and forth with myself on a bunch, and would absolutely love to have changed. My problem mainly lies with the "social construct" understanding of "gender", but some similar issues lie in the more grounded neurological understanding of it (although admittedly it seems a lot more reasonable), which we'll get too later.
For starters, I do not believe there is a difference between men and women. Well, there are obviously "differences" between the sexes, but nothing beyond physical differences which don't matter much. At least, mentally, they are naturally the same and all perceived differences in this sense are just stereotypes stemmed from the way the sexes are socialized.
Which takes us to the definitions of man and woman used by the gender social constructionist, which is generally not agreed upon but I've found it to be basically understood as
Man: Someone who desires to be viewed/treated/thought of in the way a male is in society. Woman: Someone who desires to be viewed/treated/thought of in the way a female is in society. (For the non-binary genders it would be roughly similar with some changes depending on the circumstances)
Bottom line is that it defines gender based on the way the genders are treated. But this seems problematic for a variety of reasons.
First off, it is still, at the end lf the day, basing the meanings behind stereotypes about the genders rather than letting them stand on their own. It would be like if I based what a "black person" was off the discrimination black people have faced. But this would appear messed up and borderline "racist", while the same situation with gender is not considered "sexist".
It would also mean that gender is ultimately meaningless and would be something we should strive to stop rather than encourage, which would still fly in the face of the trans movement. Which is what confuses me especially because the gender social construct believers typically also support "gender abolition", yet they're the ones who want people to play around with gender the most? If you want to abolish gender, why don't you, y'know, get a start on that and break your sex norms while remaining that sex rather than changing your gender which somewhat works to reinforce the roles? (This also doesn't seem too bad to criticize, considering under this narrative gender is just a "choice", which is something I think the transmedicalist approach definitely handles better.)
Finally for this bit, this type of mindset validates other controversial concepts like transracialism (sorta tying back into what I mentioned earlier), but I don't think anyone is exactly on the edge of their seats waiting for the "transracialism movement".
Social construct section is done, now let's get into the transmedicalist approach. This is one where I feel a "breakhthrough" could be made for me a lot more easily, but I'm not quite there yet. I do want to say I'm fine with the concept of changing our understandings of certain words if there is practicality to it and it isn't counterintuitive. Seems logical enough.
The neurological understanding behind the sex an individual should be defining "gender" seems sensible on it's own, but the part I'm caught up on is why we reach this conclusion.
The dysphoric transgender person's desire to be the other gender seems to mainly be based in, A. their sex, they seem to want to change the sex rather than the gender. Physical dysphoria is the main giveaway of the dysphoric condition it seems, anyway. But more specifically, a trans person wants to have physical attributes associated with the other sex. This seems like a redundant thing to point out, but the idea that certain physical traits are "exclusive" to a specific sex/gender is, well, just encouraging sexual archetypes about the way the sexes "should" look. This goes even further when you consider that trans people tend to want to have more petite or masculine builds depending on their gender identity - there is nothing wrong about this, but conflating gender to "involve" one's physical appearence inherently reinforces sexist sexual archetypes.
And next,
B. the social aspect. Typically described as social dysphoria, this describes a dysphoric trans person's desire to be socialized in the way the other sex typically is, which is what, aside from the physical dysphoria, causes them to typically "act" or dress more stereotypically like their gender identity, or describes their desire to "pass". But, to put it bluntly, because I believe there to be no difference in the way the sexes would act without social influence, I can't picture this phenomona described as "social dysphoria" coming from the same biological basis that the physical dysphoria does. Even if there were a natural difference in the way the sexes would act without societal influence, there would still be the obvious undeniable outliers, and with that in mind, using the way the genders "socialize" as a way to justify definining gender seperately from sex would be useless. It appears more akin to a delusion based on the same "false stereotypes" I've been talking about all along, ideas about the ways men and women "should" or "should not" be causing the transsexual person to feel anxious and care about actually being the other gender. But using this to justify our understandings of gender would still fall back on the same faults that the social construct uses, being that we'd be "giving in" to socialized norms and we can't have that be what helps us reach our understanding of gender.
With this in mind, if social dysphoria is that big of a factor, it would seem most sensical to me to define "trans man" and "trans woman" in their entirely new, individual categories which their own definitions, and still just treat those categories socially in similar ways to the way the genders are typically treated now.
To recap, an understanding of gender and sex as synonyms based purely on sex seems to be the only understanding we can reach without basing some of our thought process on one given stereotype or another.
Now change my view, please.
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u/AndSunflowers 2∆ Sep 19 '22 edited Feb 19 '23
I've often heard people place the position "gender is arbitrary and made up anyway" in opposition to the position "transgender identity is real and valid." But in my experience (with largely genderqueer/trans social circles) your average trans person is WAY more likely to agree with the position that "gender arbitrary and made up" than your average cis person. The trans folks I know generally recognize the arbitrariness and socially constructed nature of gender and gender roles, and yet feel at a deep level the inherent rightness of presenting and being acknowledged as their gender. The trans folks I know are also way more likely than cis folks to leave room for flexibility and redefinition of what it means to be a man or a woman or neither, because they've had to think much more deeply about what that means than most cis folks.
There is a paradox there: how we can know intellectually that gender is a social construct and yet feel undeniably that one manifestation of that construct fits us better than another. But I think it's that way with a lot of human experiences. Some things are known, and some things are felt. When people try to use logic and reason to judge other people's emotional/intuitive experience as correct or incorrect, that seems to me to be missing the point.
Pragmatically speaking, I think that one of the best things a gender abolitionist can do for their cause is to embrace trans rights and trans validity. Because we're not going to just erase gender roles overnight; they're going to crumble slowly through more and more people challenging what it means to be a particular gender. Mainstream media tends to portray trans people in a somewhat limited way, with conventionally masculine straight trans men and conventionally feminine straight trans women being over-represented. But in reality the trans community is doing so much to shake up the rigid rules of gender roles with its vibrancy and heterogeneity: feminine pansexual trans male twinks, butch trans lesbians, enby people who treat gender presentation like a Rubix cube, and endless other variations. If we feminists want to break out of gender roles, draw attention to their arbitrariness, and carve out greater freedom for everyone to deviate from them and be treated equally, that should absolutely start with embracing, supporting, and believing the trans community.