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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?
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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