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Some people have argued that to affirm a trans person is lying. I sympathize with someone who says, "if I call a trans person by his preferred pronoun, it feels like I am lying." If this is all that is meant, then I suppose the rest of this post isn't relevant. To me, the stronger claim is, "if society calls a trans person by his preferred pronoun, society is lying." I never bought that claim, because I never encountered a contradictory set of definitions for sex and gender.
But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.
This is pretty clearly a woman. I can tell because of the hair and clothes. I infer she goes by "she." If I had to publicly address her, I'd do so with she.
People typically speak of passing as a woman. Since I can infer she is a woman, it follows that she passes as a woman. But as far as I can tell, nobody would describe her as passing, because she looks transgender (i.e. male). Based on how "pass" is used, it seems to really mean pass as cisgender. To see passing in this sense, as a good thing, is deceptive. It also seems transphobic. Surely a less transphobic worldview would suggest she passes as a woman because I can correctly infer her pronouns, and that her womanness is just as beautiful as a ciswomans.
Inb4 replies castigating me for just now realizing this: nobody had ever crystalized to me that passing meant to misrepresent a trans person as cisgender because most discourse talks about "passing as a woman"
Am I missing something? Can anyone else steelperson all this?
Leaving aside whether "passing" as a concept is intrinsically problematic (probably? man, hell if I know) I definitely think there's pretty strong (for me) delineations between degrees-of-passing.
I cannot distinguish this person from being a cisgendered man without them telling me verbally.
I can tell this person is attempting to pass as a woman, but my hindbrain is continuing to helpfully inform me that this person is a man.
I can tell this person is a trans woman based off of specific conscious cues, but she passes successfully enough to where my hindbrain perceives her as a cis woman.
As far as I can tell this person's a cis woman.
"Passing", depending on context, either means (3) or (4). I definitely will accidentally misgender people who fall into categories (1) and (2), since talking with or about them involves constantly overriding my typical social scripts for dealing with people I've internally categorized as one gender or the other. I don't think that my unconscious sense of other peoples' gender actually distinguishes between "cis" and "trans".
As an aside, trans people are definitely susceptible to the Gaudy Graveyard Effect where the trans movement tends to be identified by people in categories (1) and (2) because that's where all the controversy is centered. Culture war stuff aside I don't think most people have any visceral problem with trans people in categories (3) or (4).
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By what definition of woman?
I think the whole trans discourse of whether someone "is" a woman is fairly hopeless. The true request is for admission to the social institution of womanhood. And I think a lot of people who are willing to treat the person as a woman -- use her preferred pronouns, not object if she uses the women's bathroom, not give her shit for wearing a dress and makeup no matter how incongruous it seems in proportion to her profile or vocal intonation, etc. -- nevertheless balk at agreeing that she is a woman.
Accommodation is a natural and understandable request. We're used to it in a variety of contexts. It has been a common form of social compromise for longer than civilization has existed. We're used to acting as though there is nothing different about people in wheelchairs, people with congenital deformities, people with dwarfism, people who are extremely old, people who obviously have a terrible disease, etc.
But if someone in a wheelchair wanted me to say they could walk... if someone with dwarfism wanted me to say they were six feet tall, if someone in her late eighties wanted me to refer to her as a 25-year-old... that would be hard for me.
Unfortunately, agreeing that someone is a woman is an unavoidable part of granting them access to the institution of womanhood.
So, it's a pickle.
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Embrace the sex/gender distinction. By which I mean—set aside the terms “man” and “woman” for a minute. Let’s use “male/female” for sex, “masc/femme” for gender, and ignore the edge cases.
Your proposed usage of “passing” would be “male signaling femme enough to get femme pronouns.” Conventionally, it’s more like “male signaling femme enough to be assumed female.” “Representing a trans person as cisgender” was a pretty good way to put it.
Yes, this is some level of Problematic, in that it asserts sex/gender mismatches ought to be invisible. I don’t think this is a settled issue. For those who believe social interactions are grounded in gender, not sex, changing perception of the latter is unneeded. For others, decoupling sex from gender is hard enough that they won’t feel satisfied unless they can pass. Naturally, the whole issue is complicated when fighting over the terms “man” and “woman,” which don’t historically handle the sex/gender mismatches.
Personally, I have a hard time blaming those who wish to pass. Avoiding cognitive dissonance seems like something worth endorsing, especially when the burden is mostly on one’s own shoulders.
I already do embrace it, though I'm sad to see many replies to my post seem unable to.
Most of the time I've heard people define passing or talk about passing, they talk as if one "passes for femme."
But most of the time I hear people use passing, it's better described to mean "passes as female"
Certainly I don't blame someone trying to pass - it certainly comes with advantages. But I also wouldn't blame a woman who alters her behavior at parties to avoid being raped. Victim blaming is when society asks women to change their behavior to avoid rape (problematic) right?
Trans people trying to pass reminds me of women trying to avoid being raped. Isn't the ideal activist world one where neither minority has to alter their behavior? What's the difference? Why is one more realistic than the other? Is it just about optics, and what activists can get away with asking society to do?
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At the moment, all I can think about is: if only "not a racist" were a category as inclusive as "woman."
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This isn't quite it. I don't "feel" as though I'm lying. I am actually lying. I am saying things I don't believe for the sake of someone else's feelings. That is a lie.
Yes, the concept of passing is contradictory with many other trans related concepts but it's often not seen because the whole of the trans movement is half dozen totally incompatible frameworks glued together while every tries their best to ignore the seams.
Either this is self-evident, in which case why post it? Or it's not, and you ought to unfold.
I've gone into detail in the past. There are many contradictory positions.
Gender as essential doesn't square with most of modern feminism and very few trans activists are willing to disavow feminism preferring to just outcast the feminists who noticed that their movements are incompatible.
Any attempt to actually justify self-id undermines the entire concept of transitioning.
There are deep epistemic issues with even making a claim like "I feel like a woman", people only get one subjective experience and thus have no tool that could possible differentiate between
genuinely feeling the way that women feel
incorrectly believing that they feel the way women feel
This last one of probably the thing that frustrates me most about the whole space and what worries me about teaching children these things. There is no internal or external way to falsify the idea that you might be transgendered. If I put myself in the shoes of a kid that doesn't quite fit in, or hell myself at that age if I had been exposed to this meme, I don't know how they get a better than 50/50 chance of resisting this meme. I am not confident I would not have made a life ruining mistake and stubbornly stuck to it. This possibility haunts me, I think in a few decades we're going to look back on thousands of mangled young men and women.
*bodies of mangled young men and women
The trans suicide rate is probably even higher among those that get memed into it than the ones that would’ve discovered it on their own.
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You are saying "this is clearly a woman" because you're redefining "woman", not because this person is actually passing. The clothes and hair just change the situation to "really weird person that doesn't speak and looks like a woman at first glance, but something feels wrong about them".
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Gun to your head, if you had to guess this person's chromosomes, and you would be shot if you got it wrong, what would you say?
I think you are lying in exactly the same way we all say we would be lying to call that person a woman, but the difference between us is that I think you are lying even to to yourself. I suspect you don't actually outright think "this is a woman", but more something along the lines of "this person is sending signals that they would like to be perceived as a woman".
I've said before on Reddit, but I'm pretty sure there's not much actual difference between the "maps" of pro-trans and anti-trans people.
On a whole host of questions, both groups would be in complete agreement:
Can the person get pregnant?
Does the person have XX chromosomes?
If the person recieved no medical interventions would they have breasts or gynomorphic genitals?
The main issue seems to be whether there is a real category of "adoptive" men and women, who have the morphological characteristics of one sex, while trying to assume the social role of the other.
To that point, I'm not even sure the "gun to your head" bit is necessary. It's a it like asking adoptive parents: "Oh, you call Timmy your son? Gun to your head, would you say that Timmy has 50% of his genes in common with you?"
Not every culture has a concept of adoptive parents. (Notably Islam instead has "sponsorship.") And not every culture is going to have a concept of "adoptive sexual roles", but I don't think calling a trans person by their preferred pronouns is "lying", any more than calling an adoptive mother a mom is lying.
Adoptive parents invest significant effort to earn the title of mom/dad -- it's certainly not uncommon for a kid to reject a (bad) step/adoptive parent and refuse to call them that.
"Because I say so" is certainly not a good reason to call somebody by the title they prefer.
That's only an argument against identification as a standard. It would still tend to leave transmedicalism on the table. If someone spends years medically transitioning and jumps through legal hoops, doesn't the comparison to adoptive parents get off the ground?
That would just leave "identification only" as a courtesy of sorts. The same way that a kid whose parents just died, might have their aunt and uncle take care of them for a few weeks before all of the legal paperwork is taken care of.
I don't think it does -- raising, feeding and clothing a child has immense benefit to the child. (also a smaller but significant benefit to society, in that somebody needs to raise orphans)
Going through a difficult medical procedure has no benefit whatsoever to me (and is probably a net drain on shared resources, but no need to go there); so it doesn't follow that anyone should be expected to confer the 'title' of women upon somebody else for that reason. If one's adoptive mother were trans, maybe there would be a sense of duty there -- but I don't see any way it exists by default.
How about from another angle then?
Adoptive parents put in a lot of work to be considered parents, but adoptive children are adoptive children irrespective of how much work they put into the relationship.
Perhaps trans people could be considered adoptive members of their preferred sex, not because of the work that they put in, but because of all the work doctors have put in to their transition. For a post-everything trans-woman, shouldn't we recognize all of the hard work the doctors put in and allow them to be considered members of their adoptive sex?
Again, this is an argument that trans-surgeons are/should be proud of their hard work and consider the end product a "real woman" -- this makes sense and is probably even true.
It's not an argument that anybody else should agree; in art, nobody cares how hard you worked -- others will judge you by your end product.
Sure, but that's usually why the state/power is the "tie breaker." It doesn't matter if I think a white woman is kidnapping a little black child, if the records of the state have her as their guardian, then power will back up her claim.
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My understanding is that both historically and today that is how it's treated in the place the term originated: race.
If you looked white, married white then it came out you were not white (by the standards of Jim Crow) you would be seen as having done something fraudulent and having violated anti-miscegenation laws.
If you looked black and acted black, even appearing to be sincere like Dolezal, today but you weren't black you still get excoriated for faking it.
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We have differences in lived experiences, then. I've said this before, but I really think Hanania nailed it by hypothesising that the anti-trans side cannot be understood without acknowleding how some are simply innately disgusted by what they perceive as abnormal physical features. Or, to simplify, too many people have a disgust reflex against non-passing transsexuals for the movement to succeed.
You can talk about how we should all apply Bayesian reasoning to deduce that an odd looking person is likely to prefer she/her, but that's a tall order for someone experiencing literal transphobia (as in: an instinctive, uncontrollable fear/repulsion) as they look at the person.
As for your commentary on how "passing is transphobic", I think it has been independently suggested a thousand times by some of the more radical trans activists.
Do you have any links to these radical activists who say that? That's new to me.
Actually, just assume I'm wrong. I don't have the links
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I really don't like this line of reasoning, it dismisses a lot of very valid criticism of the movement as mindless revulsion.
How so? What criticism is dismissed simply because the underlying motivation is disgust? Disgust does not make or break an argument.
Because there is plenty of intellectual opposition to it aside from revulsion, such as genuine fear for the children that appear to be being abused.
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Mindless revulsion is itself an argument.
Would you eat a cockroach? Why not?
‘Because it’s gross’ is a perfectly valid answer.
It's a valid answer but not a very stable position to rely on as disgust is often found to be malleable or something people should get over if the utility gain is large enough. I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who characterizes one of my positions in a way that places it on unsolid ground be they ally or foe. If the main objection to eating cockroaches is that it's gross repackaging the bugs to be more palatable or hidden in other food stuff can be considered to have addressed the concern. You will not address my concern with transgenderism by making them pass more effectively.
I think for most people "I find X disgusting" = "X is disgusting" = "X is bad". The idea that one's personal sense of disgust is not a reliable guide to morality doesn't occur to most people.
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I mean, you don't have to limit it to non-passing transsexuals. Botched plastic surgery, people of walmart, even a lot of extreme body mod stuff makes me gag. Normally this is an issue between myself and where I lay my gaze, and I'm content to live and let live. But there aren't people out there trying to fundamentally reorder society and groom children into splitting their tongues or trying to get make sure their face lift gets infected.
Although it occurs to me, after trying to write that sentence about a dozen different ways, that society does encourage a lot of fucked up shit. It's so fucking easy to become obese in America, and plastic surgery is very much encouraged and glamorized. And our society is increasingly reordered around obesity. The medical profession is under increasing pressure to stop telling people to lose weight, and just attempt to treat the symptoms.
Show this to the guy downthread arguing that trans acceptance will lead to plastic-surgery acceptance. America already has a significant fraction who are into obvious voluntary surgery; it’s just mostly split on class lines.
I can’t agree on the alleged social threat of trans people, though. Targeting children is somewhere between irresponsible and unethical, but that’s not what they are doing. Literally every trans person I know is an adult and firmly focused on affirmation rather than evangelism. That may lead to a false positive rate by encouraging uncertain members, but this isn’t somehow unique to trans issues. To me that means the live-and-let-live category should apply.
By all means, protect the vulnerable, especially children. One can’t get tattooed before 18, and tight controls on other body mods are reasonable. But don’t mistake the cherry-picked worst examples for a general argument.
I think there's a sort of equivocation between "trans people" and "trans activists." When people talk about having problems with trans people targeting children, it's in reference to trans activists, and it's hard to tell how much that overlaps with actual trans people. In my experience, the vast majority of trans activists are not trans people, for instance, but that doesn't stop them from claiming that their activism is on behalf of trans people. This is why I suspect that this sort of equivocation is actively encouraged by trans activists as a useful rhetorical tool by which to defend their positions as being what trans people - the actual minority that people care about - want rather than merely what trans activists - just some set of humans who agitate for sociopolitical change - want.
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School districts around me have been caught secretly socially transitioning kids, with an official policy of maintaining two sets of documents. Birth name documents for the parents, and trans name documents for internal use. When it's government policy, it's a general argument.
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As far as I know, the sex/gender “distinction” was invented wholesale in very recent history for overt political purposes. I reject that there is such a distinction.
To me it’s clearly a man, due to his facial structure. But it’s possible I could be mistaken.
Being a man or being a woman isn’t about what clothes you wear or how long your hair is. They’re biological categories.
This is the fault of the OP for mentioning a sex/gender distinction and then proceeding only with sexes.
It seems obvious to me that “gender” is a useful term, even if not in the way that some trans activists would prefer. Start by treating “male” and “female” as strictly biological terms defined in the obvious way, ignoring all edge cases. Some activities are clearly aligned with one these categories. Males are more likely to do testosterone-fueled activities like lifting heavy things and fighting.
Once we consider culture and perception, we run into some confusion. Not all of the correlations have an obvious biological reason. Maybe there’s a good evo-psych reason for women to be way more into books than TV, or maybe not. And there are plenty of jobs which may have been male- or female-dominated historically, but aren’t anymore.
So it makes sense to have a second set of terms referring to these categories and not the purely biological ones. A male or a female can still act “masculine” or “feminine” based on culture and circumstances. These are clearly not hard boundaries if only because humans are so socially adaptable. From a purely descriptive standpoint, sex and “gender” aren’t the same.
Being male or female may not be based on clothes or hair, but being masculine or feminine is.
Break down for me why you think gender is a useful term. To me it appears almost entirely useless at best, and intentionally misleading in practice. It was more or less invented by activists and saw no real use until the last few decades. And, of course, the guy most credited with inventing it drove a child to suicide with his "treatments".
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The clothes and hair are signals that one is feminine, not the actual measure of someone being a woman.
Yes. The trans ideology proceeds by a double redefinition. The obvious is that males can be women and vice versa. That one is acknowledged as a change.
But, below that, they essentially are brazenly redefining how people even see the categories in order to perform this change. That's where this sex/gender distinction comes in. All of a sudden we hear how "woman" isn't sexed but gendered (so obviously anyone who claims the right gender can be a woman!)
But here they act as if it is obvious and naturally true, not a contingent belief.
It clearly isn't. To this day I am asked on job sites for my "gender" and the options are "male"/"female".
To this day I see signs for the female washroom that are marked with skirts. Until recently nobody thought this meant a man in a kilt was welcome.
To be fair, nobody thinks the kilt makes it okay today, either. That’s still a masculine signal.
Well of course. You wear it with a prosthetic big hairy scrotum. Or big hairy badger, if you prefer to take the principle to extremes.
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Both of them could be said to be lies.
If you have an essentialist definition of woman (something based on, for example, gamete size or the sort of body geared towards producing large gametes if it was healthy) it is not a lie to treat someone passing as a woman if you don't know they aren't. Once you do know, it would be a lie (just as it would be a lie to treat a black-passing Indian as a black American).
The difference is that, in the second case of the non-passing trans person, there is no chance of even an honest mistake. It must all be lies.
I suppose the difference is that I don't see the "standard" definition as pointless in the same way I see the gender philosophy definition as pointless (i.e. incoherent, leading to harmful real world outcomes with limited gain while ousting a simple and useful system).
I deliberately wrote it out in that stilted way to avoid standard gender ideologist criticisms ("well, what if she's infertile??"). A habit forged in the culture war.
Most people who do have an essentialist mentality wouldn't be as circumspect (they would likely default to "a certain body" or, if raised in a more scientific society, "estrogen" or "adult human female") which is why a lot of the tactics of trans activists work on them (e.g. just trying to force a random layman to draw the exact line where someone stops being a male, pointing out intersex counter-examples) in a form of philosophical shock-and-awe. I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference tbh but it can stump a person in the moment.
Hence I avoid it.
But I don't think it changes my belief in an essentialist definition or that I think most people have essentialist instincts and naive beliefs.
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I'd say that's someone who is pretty clearly pretending to be a woman. It comes down to this- what's your definition of woman? If your definition, like the pro-trans people, is that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, then this person would qualify as a woman but it makes the word meaningless. If your definition is that a woman is an adult human female, then this is clearly not a woman. If you definition is that a woman is anyone who is trying to present as an adult human female (as I infer) then this is a woman.( From this point on, I'm going to use the specific definition instead of the word to make the argument clearer.)
But then passing makes no sense the way you use the word. You are saying that she passes because you can tell that she's a woman (trying to look like an adult human female). But her objective, if she is a woman by your definition, is to look like an adult human female (not like someone who's trying to look like an adult human female) which she's failing at- hence pro trans people would not think of her as passing.
Steelman of the pro-trans argument: Woman is defined as someone who would prefer to be an adult human female, regardless of what they actually are. They're passing as a woman if they can pretend to be an adult human female so well that they're indistinguishable from a regular adult human female to the casual observer.
Steelman of the anti-trans argument: Woman is an adult human female. This man is pretending to be an adult human female while not actually being one. The pro-trans people are asking everyone else to pretend that his pretense is successful, to participate in his delusion, and that is unacceptable.
Except even this doesn't work for current mainstream trans activism since "passing" is seen as an undue burden to demand - this is the entire basis for self-ID (if the standard is passing or surgery most transpeople would fail) and the shift to the dualism of the gender identity view where everyone has an inbuilt non-contestable understanding of their
soulgender.As a steelman it would be politically intolerable to actual trans activists. Which is Why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot be Solved
There's simply no definition that includes both women (in the traditional sense) and every transperson who wants to identify as a woman.
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Disclaimer, while I am accepting of trans people as human beings with rights, I am highly skeptical and in some cases openly hostile to the efforts trans activists to dismantle the concept of gender or biological reality. I'll do my best to explain my perspective on the issue without strawmanning anyone, but given that I don't know your actual beliefs on this, I can only speak for trans arguments I typically see.
It really depends on your definition of "man" and "woman". For hundreds of years in English, and via translation in the majority of historical languages, and still for the majority of the population, there is no meaningful distinction between "woman" and "cis-woman". They don't even use the term "cis", because you can just say "woman" when you mean an adult human female. For anyone who still holds this definition, then to "pass" as a woman means that people to mistake the trans person for a biological female. This is inherently deceptive, because the trans woman is not a biological female, and yet is deliberately causing themselves to be mistaken as one.
I'm pretty sure this counts as transphobic, despite not really being a normative claim, because it ignores/denies attempts to change language that trans activists have been making recently. I personally think all of the "-phobe" words are overused and nearly meaningless, but I usually interpret it as meaning something along the lines of "hinders the trans agenda", which this definitely does.
If you take the opposite extreme, and define "woman" to be purely "anyone who identifies as a woman", and if everyone embraces this definition you end up in circular logic where the word becomes meaningless. Why would anyone care what word they or another person identifies as if the word means literally nothing other than identifying as it. You might as well identify as a "snurxoth". This is consistent, it's just no different from having a name. Someone might identify as "Alex", and it doesn't allow you to infer anything about them at all, it's just a word you can use to pick them out of a group of people with different names.
Under this definition alone, then, it's impossible to pass as a woman or man without wearing your pronouns written visibly somewhere on your person. If gender is purely a construct of the mind and a person's self-identification with no external foundation, then you can't infer that the person you linked is a woman. Maybe they identify as a man and just like that style of hair or clothes. Maybe they're nonbinary. More importantly, why would you think that hair and clothes are associated with women at all? If everyone's gender identity were purely internal, then there would be no reason for all of the biological females, who tend to have long hair and wear that type of clothes, to decide that the word "woman" was their gender identity. If the word doesn't refer to anything physical, then there's no reason for people to divide themselves up into the same two categories that most people are in now. Rather, I would expect most people would identify as random stuff they like like "Dragons" or "Princess", or just their names.
I'm pretty sure this definition is also transphobic from a different perspective, because if you entirely deny the existence of a biological basis for gender, then trans people basically don't exist. Or rather, they're not meaningfully different from cis people. Everyone is just born as a person, has a gender identity, and their physical body doesn't matter at all, so there's no such thing as bodies that men have or women have, because anyone who identifies as a man or woman is equally a man or woman. There's literally no reason for anyone to try to transition or pass, because even if they do, there's no way anyone could know their gender identity afterwards without reading their mind, or asking, same as before. On the other hand, there's no way for this to be deceptive, because claiming a thing is literally all it takes to be that thing. Except in circumstances where someone outright lies (you ask to be referred to as a man but secretly identify as a woman in your mind).
But what I mostly see as the accepted trans activist position is a Motte and Bailey at play. The Motte is the above position, that gender identity is just self identification, the Bailey is that gender identity means a bunch of things that historically it has meant tied to biological sex. Most trans women don't want to be perceived as "someone who identifies with the word woman" or the pronouns "she/her", they want to be perceived the same as biological women, with all of the cultural baggage that that perception has picked up over the centuries. It's only because the majority of the population believe that "women" have meaningful physical and behavioral differences than "men" (a statement which is factually true if gender = sex), that trans women want to be categorized alongside the cis women and trans men want to be categorized alongside the cis men. Imagine if tomorrow all of the cis women decided that they no longer identify as "women", they have a new word, I don't know "snurxoth", and suppose all the cis men decided to go along with it and the word was quickly adapted to regular use and the old one abandoned.
I highly doubt the trans women would continue happily identifying with the word "woman". No, they would want to follow suit. Because at the heart of trans ideology isn't self-identification, it's factual and normatative claims that trans women and cis women aren't meaningfully distinct, and similarly for trans men and cis men. There's no point for trans women to want to pass as trans women but fail to pass as cis women, because it doesn't truly mean anything. Or, maybe there is some point. Other trans activists will use certain pronouns and treat them a certain way because that's what you're supposed to do to be a good ally. But it seems to me the real Bailey is that they want to be treated the same as cis women, and the only way to do that in a society that treats biological males and females differently is to deceive people into thinking you are a biological female: a cis woman.
I guess a society that treats biological males and females differently would be considered inherently transphobic . Your specific question of whether it's transphobic for you to think of passing in terms of passing as cis, conditional on already living in this society, are going to depend a lot on what that word even means for you. Is it more important to advance the trans agenda as a whole by dismantling the gender norms and deny biological differences matter? Or is it more important to help individual trans people try to slip into the existing categories by imitating the other sex? Either could be considered transphobic depending on the priorities of the accuser (which is why I don't think the word has much bite).
All of which just seems like it makes the word 'transphobia' itself, when used this way, utterly meaningless.
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Passing is mostly used by trans people to refer to "appears similar enough to a biological woman nobody can tell". A (clever) trans interlocutor says - 'woman' does refer to, usually biologically determined and innate - physical and psychological traits, as well as social roles, appearances, ways of dressing and acting, and acknowledging that isn't "transphobic" - it's just that I want to possess those traits! - be cute, feminine, wear skirts, etc. But the entire thing doesn't mean much
If womannees (the social meaning) was actually useful to discuss then passing would be about passing as a woman. Since I can correctly infer most people's pronouns thats what it would mean to pass.
Since passing is actually about passing as cis -- that is, passing as female (the physical meaning) then it is deceptive because its goal to cause observers to make false inferences.
You intrigue me with your clever hypothetical where the terms are defined as conflating the physical and the social into one category. Of course, any category buckets things so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Could you elaborate on that?
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Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling. I've had progressive acquaintances react with what seemed like genuine surprise and apprehension when I referred to third parties who in my eyes obviously did not pass as trans (in a non-hostile context; we were having a completely non-adversarial discussion about diversity metrics at our university). When pressed on this, they insisted that they really didn't know and reacted to my reasoning (masculine voice, height many SD above the biological female mean, large hands, impractically feminine presentation (like frilly skirt in a hardware shop setting), uncommon and conspicuously feminine name) in an "wtf, you caused me disutility by planting this pattern in my head" way. It seems to be more akin "passing" as in "passing a college course" - meeting a standard that is itself up to debate, and generally at least in an American setting understood to be ideally determined according to a principle like "as low as we can get away with without causing too many problems".
The blue tribe wasn’t exactly a bastion of gender conformity before all this, either- it’s possible they’re just genuinely bad at reading clues.
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Not just being bad at telling, the entire gender ideology's concept of gender identity as a purely inbuilt phenomenon that no one can gainsay is making being able to tell irrelevant by stating that what you can tell doesn't actually represent someone's "real" gender.
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I always wonder what it must be like for cis-women that look sort of like transwomen. I've known a few women over the years that have sort of a 'trans' look about them, particularly as they got older. I wonder if it is tougher to be in that position these days.
About twenty years ago, when I was in high school, there was a new student. I didn't know jack shit about transgenderism, and neither did anybody in my school (that I know of; it was a rural school). The student looked like a girl, talked like one, walked like one. But there was always something off about her. Then the school year ended and I never saw her again.
Anyways, years later (actually just a few years ago), I was flipping through my yearbook and saw her. And I immediately recognized that she was trans. Googled her, and it turns out she's still trans, openly so, and streams (to an extremely small audience) on Twitch. Heard her voice, and it sounded just like it did when we were younger, but I could recognize that it was a trans voice. It was pretty interesting to me how, not knowing the concept of transgenderism, I viewed her as female. And it was also interesting how something in my subconscious picked up that something was awry. She was 'passing' simply because I knew of nothing else. Today, with transgenderism being taught at such a young age, I imagine the younger generations will be able to decipher between trans and cis people at younger ages, and much more accurately, despite the fact that many young trans people seem to be much more passable to me than 20 years ago. It'll be more and more difficult for 'passing' transwomen to actually be mentally categorized as women.
Obviously evopsych gets a bad rap for being a set of just-so stories (and my conduct now doesn't help) but I am not surprised by the idea that men may have an interest (and thus a capacity) in figuring out who is legitimately a member of the opposite sex.
The funny thing is: I used to see this raised as a good thing in psychology. Paul Bloom cited research in Just Babies that showed that you could confuse the mind out of racial categorizations but not sexual or age based ones. His reasoning? Race wasn't a fundamental distinguisher (we distinguish outgroups and race is one way to do it, but we didn't really rub shoulders with members of different races regularly until recently) but sex and age were, if a being wanted to reproduce.
Now it makes me worried because of what it implies about how unrealistic this push to ignore sex is.
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You are just asking "What's it like to be an unattractive woman ?".
I remember a lot of girls getting clowned for 'looking like dudes' (mostly by guys, it was the one thing that guys could really emotionally cut girls with, comparing their appearance to a guys) back in high school. Definitely doesn't happen in adulthood, they just go from 'looking like dudes' to just being a "plain jane" or whatever.
Not quite. There's a difference between a woman who looks very plain, and a woman who looks masculine. I've known both: women who are plain looking but unmistakably female, and women (biological women, not transwomen) who are like "is this person a man who got surgery". And like @bsbbtnh, I too wonder if it's even harder for them in this day and age. At one point at least nobody would be able to question if they are a woman, but now someone might well do so.
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There's a difference between being teased for "looking like a dude" and having people quietly suspect or assume you're attempting to "pass" as the opposite sex has rather different implications.
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I'd put forth that the separation of sex and gender is a lie in and of itself. Furthermore, the people who you presumably want to convince would simply reject your framing of "transphobia". In the same way that it's not "schizophobic" to say that what schizophrenic people see is not real, it's not transphobic to say that trans women are not women.
Of course, I may have misunderstood your point entirely and you were trying to reach an entirely different audience with your post in the first place.
It does make some sense, which is why normies/naive gender philosophers are so often convinced by it.
Just as today it makes sense to divide "noble" as a social class from "noble" as a moral state. Doesn't mean that, in the Bronze Age or prehistory, they didn't actually "buy their own supply"
The problem is that gender ideologies act like the absolute divide they've invented in academia (since the 50s) actually represents the historical and common view of terms. It simply hasn't. In reality we blur the lines all of the time (which is why the conceptual simplicity of the sex/gender divide is so attractive).
To this day the line is blurred. You can see artifacts of it all over the place where "ladies'", "women" and "female"' are used interchangeably.
In order to sell their naked change of the definition of "woman" to include transpeople they first insist on the sex/gender distinction. But activists act like this is just obvious, not a redefinition in and of itself.
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That's not the point. It's not that there is no difference between sex and sex stereotypes. It's that Gender, the dualist concept where you decide in your mind what the reality of your social condition is or should be, has no connection to reality.
One can perfectly reject thoroughly gender theory and still retain a perfectly acceptable explanation for the cultural variance you mention, which I don't even believe to be that large.
"Gender role" suffices for that purpose and isn't contentious.
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In the absolute I would agree, but not when that word smuggles in with it an entire metaphysical outlook that's tailor made to promote social constructionism and then self-destruct.
This argument is a soldier.
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