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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?
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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