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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?
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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