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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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This is not a good simile, regardless of whether one is on the "trans women are real women, bigots!" side of the fence or the opposite one.

To equate step-parents with trans persons, the more relevant comparison would be someone who lives three doors down from you declaring that they are the step-parent of your kids, and anyone who objects on the grounds of "you're not the biological parent" is a -phobe and an -ist. "Legally you're not the parent" "Well if it's just about a piece of paper I can always apply to adopt them!" "You're not my partner, you have nothing to do with this family!" "This is discrimination and exclusion, I'm a parent if I feel like a parent and I have always longed to be a parent and identified as a parent! I've taken parenting classes! I've read books about parenting!"

Why are you trying to stop me running in this race belonging to this family, you bigot?

Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people? While I admit to having limited first-hand experience, that limited experience is with people who made a sincere effort to transition across both cultural dimensions as well as physically. They don't go around shrieking at people, they actually don't seem to have interactions that involve anyone suggesting anything about their gender because they (mostly) look the part of their transition (notably, these are F->M, which does generally seem more physically convincing). When someone meets Mike, Mike doesn't have to insist up and down that they're totally a guy and explain their pronouns, because Mike has short hair, a beard, and tends towards flannel and ballcaps. Whatever the philosophical position might be on Mike's sex at birth, Mike really doesn't have to yell at people about the matter or make claims that seem completely misaligned with other people's observed reality.

Of course, I'm well aware of the public examples of histrionics, and the evident madness of quite a few non-passing trans people does complicate the conversation, but I think people like Mike are actually pretty analogous to stepmoms.

Unless Mike is nearer 6 foot than 5 foot in height, and the beard isn't some wispy affair, then maybe he passes. But honestly? For some trans men, there's not a whole heap of difference between them and butch lesbians.

Mike is small and unthreatening. No one looks to "clock" a transman because he's not winning Man of the Year Awards, male olympic medals, or scaring anyone with his genitals in a bathroom. It's not that somehow Mike just is a man, its mostly that people don't care because his identity doesn't revolve around forcing other people to acknowledge and validate his fetish.

Until it is, and then people are just as angry at Mike as Dylan. When Mike yells at gay men on twitter or tries to cancel them because they say no to vaginas, or where Mike's family finds the idea of calling their daughter "he" ridiculous, the screeching is just as loud.

Exactly. Transmen pass a lot easier since nobody's taking huge efforts to tell the difference between petite, scrawny (or frankly in a lot of cases, rubenesque-but-short) guys and girls if they're signaling to the world they're a male through outfit or grooming choices.

It's not that somehow Mike just is a man, its mostly that people don't care because his identity doesn't revolve around forcing other people to acknowledge and validate his fetish.

I think another factor that plays into this is that physical instrumentality is an extremely important element/contributing factor towards positioning in male status hierarchies. Trans men, by virtue of the same physiological differences that leave trans women demolishing their cis competitors, almost universally end up on the bottom of these hierarchies as a result. And what happens to men on the bottom of those hierarchies? They largely become invisible. Nobody pays attention to the modal trans man because as a man he is a loser in so many different categories, and people largely don't pay attention to male losers(and get annoyed when they have to), nor do they offer them much sympathy.

The trans people I have interacted with were all bipolar manic-depressives who were prone to public breakdowns of sadness and jealousy rather than the angry ones I see more on TV/social media. Still, there is a narcissistic undertone to every case I've seen IRL.

Fortunately my real-life experience with transgender people has been reasonable too, and I don't think we would see as much pushback against genderism if all trans people were like that, but unfortunately there is a minority that isn't like that, and what's more, those are explicitly endorsed by trans activists, whose mantra is that "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". So I think it's fair to attack that idea by focusing on the people who don't particularly look or act like their desired gender and are basically ruining it for the rest.

The fundamental problem with allowing people to earn their gender stripes by performing gender roles, is that it requires accepting gender roles. Maybe people on The Motte do believe in gender roles (men must be strong and protect women and children, women must be pretty and nurture children), but feminists have historically rejected those. I think both views are defensible, but you can't have it both ways: if a woman who wears jeans and doesn't shave her legs isn't any less of a woman, why would a man who wears a skirt and shaves his legs become less of a man? What has Dylan Mulvaney done to earn the name "woman" besides dressing up and acting like a ridiculous gender stereotype, almost a parody of a woman?

Compare that with parenthood: being a biological parent does come with the expectation that you will nurture and care for your child. A deadbeat dad who impregnates a woman and then bails isn't much of a parent, neither is a mother who neglects her children. So stepparents can emulate the expected behavior and earn the recognition of being a parent, at least partly, but only because there are expectations that a parent is supposed to fulfill beyond the initial act of donating genetic material (for men) and giving birth (for women). If you define a parent as just the genetic donor (just like radical feminists define a woman as someone who just has female biology) then obviously you cannot work your way into parenthood.

But none of this really matters because trans activists don't even require trans people to behave in any particular way: "a (wo)man is anyone who identifies as a (wo)man". That's like saying "a mother is anyone who says they're a mother" but if you haven't given birth or taken care of any children in your life, you're obviously not a mother in any meaningful sense of the word. You can't discredit that argument by pointing to a group of stepmothers who take care of their stepchildren.

(By the way, I do think there is some gatekeeping for the word "mother" too. For example, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to hating on Hilaria Baldwin, and some of that is based on the accusation that she's lying about giving birth to some of her children.)

but feminists have historically rejected those. I think both views are defensible, but you can't have it both ways: if a woman who wears jeans and doesn't shave her legs isn't any less of a woman, why would a man who wears a skirt and shaves his legs become less of a man

The word "but" confused me here. The feminist perspective is that he isn't a woman no matter how many skirts and shaves. I think Dylan had a crisis last week and decided to be a "they" but I'm on a twitter fast so I can't confirm.

The radical feminist perspective is that Mulvaney isn't a woman because he is male.

The liberal feminist perspective is that Mulvaney is a woman because he identifies as a woman.

Neither group seems to care much about how he behaves, which contrasts with the stepmother discussion, because the consensus seems to be that if you are not a person's biological parent, then to have a valid claim to being the child's parent, you need to have done at least some actual parenting.

Mike has short hair, a beard, and tends towards flannel and ballcaps.

Ironically this, more than anything else, screams trans male to me. It's practically a uniform.

Oh, absolutely. The phrase "performative masculinity" fits no one more clearly than trans men, which I suppose makes sense. I think this is also why I don't really have any trouble with their preferred pronouns though - this dude is doing everything he can to signal to everyone that he's a guy!

Interesting, in the Midwest I'd have a gigantic false positive rate if I assumed every guy (even if I just limited it to short + scrawny guys) who dressed like that was a trans male.

I could definitely see how this would stand out more some place like San Francisco where there are both less cis males dressing that way and way more trans males than in the Midwest.

Edit: Realized I misunderstood and you meant trans male therefore high chance of these appearance choices and not these appearance choices therefore high chance of trans male.

It's just missing the bow-tie.

To be fair, it's hard for transmen to dress casually and distinguish themselves from women. Jeans? Slacks? T-shirts? Button-downs? Hoodies? Women wear all of these, even though the fit is typically a little different. Really the only part of a casual male outfit are the shoes, and good luck getting men to look at your shoes.

By comparison, transwomen can put on a spinny dress and programmer socks, and while they might not pass as a woman, at least it's clear they don't want to be identified as a man.

Basketball shorts? Sagging pants with identifiable male undies?

Fair enough, but those aren't really appropriate dress in a lot of situations, for example if you work in any kind of office environment.

Absolutely have dated (natal) women who wore men's basketball shorts ironically.

Well, go test yourself for AIDS, Marathon

Man, Scalia was right, even getting a full Catholic mass at your marriage to a woman can't save you anymore.

Really the only part of a casual male outfit are the shoes, and good luck getting men to look at your shoes.

And good luck fitting into men's shoes, women have tiny feet.

Couldn't you just get boys versions of the shoes?

Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people?

It matches the experience with defenders of trans people in the media and legal system. If you're saying that trans people don't personally act much like this, and that the complaint should be about trans allies instead of trans people, I suppose that's a fair complaint. But that's different from saying that it just isn't significant at all.

Also, the backlash against FTM is lower than against MTF precisely because FTMs aren't claiming many things that cis men exclusively get, because there aren't many things that cis men exclusively get. What exactly can they shriek at cis people to do?

Parallel here: Stepmoms are encouraged to see themselves, and we encourage others to see them as, real moms because doing so is socially useful. We have no interest in seeing kids who come from broken or tragedy stricken homes raised without female caregivers, we want women to step up and take on that role even if it is not theirs by biology, so we extend the courtesy.

We live in an essentially masculinized society. The essential stereotypes of mid twentieth century man have been expanded to cover both sexes: worker, provider, leader, soldier. While there is some backwash of men moving into more feminine archetypes of homemaker, child-rearer, ornamental kept-man; I would guess that there are fewer true House-Husbands in the United States than there are female Doctors and Lawyers or soldiers. Certainly fewer house husbands than there are women who make $100k/yr at their job. A man who stays home while his wife provides is thinly tolerated and lightly mocked, at worst openly despised and denigrated. A housewife who goes through a divorce has at least a reasonable shot at finding a new husband for whom she will be the same kind of wife; I can't even imagine the same happening to a man.

Purely in traditional social roles society encourages women to become men, while at best tolerating men who become women. Transition is just the physical extreme of this trend.

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