I think there's a difference between how we should recognise someone socially and the reality of an individual's biology. What's worrying here is that stating a biological fact can be viewed as too extreme if it goes against a certain political ideology.
But there are plenty of examples like this. I know people have been kick off of social media for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, or for discussing racial crime stats. And many of the examples I've seen of this don't appear to be in bad faith either, in fact most seem to be in the interest of honest dialogue. They just had the wrong opinions.
It feels you're taking the least charitable interoperation of what I'm trying to say.
I believe trans women are "real women" in just about every way that matters. I only make an exception when I absolutely have to. For example, in sports, or in a medical context.
It might help to remember the word "women" is just a label we assign to people who share a certain common set of social and biological traits. And the majority of these traits trans women share, however in the case of trans women there are some exceptions. But it's not just trans people who don't fit cleanly into these groups, there are similar difficulties to be had with intersex people for example.
There are no easy answers here. Life isn't black and white. It's silly to think we can cleanly divide the whole of society into to clear categories.
I think you mean well, but are maybe a little out of touch with how things have changed in the last few years. Wikipedia does a good job of analyzing this topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
The way I read it is that it's taken over 50 years for "gender" and "sex" to become different things. It's still a word that's transitioning (ok, some pun intended), but essentially we're past the tipping point now and you'll offend people if you use gender words incorrectly.
It does feel a little bit like when "literally" changed meaning to "figuratively", but this distinction is really important to an ever growing group of people.
It's also worth noting that it applies to gender words like "man" or "woman" which are different than sex words like "male" and "female".
I still don't understand how non-binary people fit into this, but if you embrace the "singular they", you'll probably not offend anyone.
If you define "woman" as "able to bear children" you're also cutting out a lot of cis-women as well. Defining gender based on reproductive ability is just a shitty thing in general, anti-human if you will.
And there's only four lights, let's get the accusations of Orwellianism out of the way too.
It's not a matter of "my side has facts and your side has opinions." It's that we disagree on what the facts are. You can find a lot of scientists from a few centuries ago confidently asserting that black people are subhuman. It doesn't magically make them not-racist because they believed it to be a true fact.
Well, yes, there is a creepy element of Orwellianism to this. And the creepy Orwellianism comes in when you make comparisons like the one you just made - that I’m somehow wrong today because, centuries ago, a few scientists had some pet racial theories that turned out to be wrong. It’s a deliberate inversion of language meant to get people to submit.
To some people the word means woman as a biological sex, in which case it would be "has 2 X chromosomes, or otherwise falls in a slightly muddy intersex situation." To some the word means woman as a gender, which itself can also mean either biological sex or gender identity. Watching people make concrete assertions to one another on the basis of definitions they do not share is as predictably pointless as you'd imagine.
Not everyone wants an inclusive definition, some people want discriminatory definitions. And I don't mean discriminatory in a negative sense. If "four" means 4, it would be more inclusive if it also meant 5 and 6, but it loses some utility in its inclusivity.
My problem isn't with your definition, it's with your implied assertion that we should "we want a simple inclusive definition," which is clearly not the case, as the differing priorities in definition are literally central to the debate.
> But there are plenty of examples like this. I know people have been kick off of social media for suggesting the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, or for discussing racial crime stats. And many of the examples I've seen of this don't appear to be in bad faith either, in fact most seem to be in the interest of honest dialogue. They just had the wrong opinions.
I find the trend of "this fact/data is not to be discussed" to be particularly disturbing.
Muhammed being a pedophile/child molester by modern definitions is pretty damn clear in the Quran. Saying we can't discuss it is very odd.
There are significant differences in racial crime and academic stats in the US. The causes can be debated - the existence of a difference less so.
And for a less controversial parallel to the previous... there are major differences in gendered crime stats in the US. Again, the causes can be debated - but a difference most definitely exists.
Under what standard is "racial crime differences are a forbidden discussion" reasonable where "gendered crime differences are a forbidden discussion" is not? What level of fact are we willing to memoryhole if it ends up politically inconvenient?
This is patently untrue in some domains that could be life-impacting, particularly in healthcare/medicine where differences in gender matters for treatment.
If a trans-man is given medicine in doses as a man, and not a woman, they have a much higher risk of overdosing because of differences in how the body metabolizes drugs for each gender [0] [1]. It isn't transphobic to identify them as a woman and give them the proper dosage for their gender. I'd prefer to be given the correct amount of medicine than to pretend there aren't important gender differences and that my actual gender and the gender I would prefer to identify and portray myself as differs [2].
Then you get into the mess of trans-women competing (and usually one-sidingly dominating) in women's sports because lo' and behold there are still gender differences between men and women regardless of how they choose to identify.
I'm becoming accustomed to being told how I should think. Must be my internalized transphobia speaking for me though and not that political correctness is going to cost someone their life one day and that that person could be me.
It's important for doctors to know your medical history, that's obviously true.
Do you know how trans people on HRT respond to Ambien, as your first link brings up? I sure don't. Depends on why the drug works differently.
If you're scared that you'll die because your doctor thinks you're cis, tell them you're trans.
That doesn't mean you have to tell your doctor "I'm really a man, despite being a trans woman, and it's definitely important for you to store an M in your records because you might suddenly forget that I'm trans and also I'm sure my reaction to medicine is the same as a cis man's."
Just be an adult and talk with your doctor honestly.
>If you're scared that you'll die because your doctor thinks you're cis, tell them you're trans.
I'm more scared that my doctor will know I'm trans but not give me proper treatment as a result of being scared of losing their career to backlash from the politically correct. It's a far more realistic fear than my doctor not knowing my gender and it isn't something that would be brought up because it is a taboo to ask someone their "real gender".
I'm happy to expand on this if necessary, but this fear of social backlash has already caused problems in other fields of work such as policing certain minority groups in the U.K. It isn't too large a stretch to see it impacting healthcare.
This is all a bit besides the point though. The point is there are many physiological differences between trans-women and women and that trying to conflate the two as being equal actively harms both groups. It's a social feel-good statement said by people who's identity is more important to them than reality and any of the negative externalities caused when adhering to their view of the world.
As far as I am concerned, letting trans-women compete in any physical sport against cis-women is harmful to women and the concept of women's sports. There are biological reasons many sports are segregated by gender. I don't care if this hurts any feelings because it's reality and it is harmful to people to ignore reality just to avoid hurting some feelings.
Hang on: your doctor knows you're trans, but they don't know your birth gender, and you think they're too scared to ask, and that you'll get a slightly wrong dose and then you'll die.
>This is patently untrue in some domains that could be life-impacting, particularly in healthcare/medicine where differences in gender matters for treatment.
Why not? Do you have to share the views of every single person within a group to be considered a supporter? What if they vote for every pro-LGBT politician that runs for office? What if they vote for every pro-LGBT legislation that they come across? What if they give support and words of affirmation to LGBT family members that are close to them? Why is he suddenly not a supporter because he disagrees with a small part of the discussion? This seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
My understanding is that most trans women don't want to be identified as such, and that "passing" is a really big deal.
"Tall" is an acceptable descriptor for a person, obvious to all and not usually very sensitive. "Trans" isn't like this and remarking on "how trans" someone is carries a very different meaning than remarking on "how tall" someone is.
Maybe it's still acceptable or useful to accept "trans women" as their own group, but eventually that will probably go away and "trans woman" will become a dated and bigoted term.
You may find yourself shocked that you ever used the term "trans" in the same way that it's now shocking that black people were once referred to as "colored".
Or alternatively, being trans might become an identity badge of honor, in the same way "gay" has in many places.
My point is that these things evolve over time, so either people are going to be allowed to make mistakes and have debates and figure things out in public, or we have to only use useless tautologies to describe people.
When you tell the GP (who claims to be pro-LGBT) that they're not pro-LGBT because they're struggling to speak correctly on the topic and they used the "wrong" language, you might not be having the effect you intended.
In this case, the GP mistakenly believes the dated idea that "gender" is a biological term, but enlightened folks are aware that gender is now a social construct. I think they simply meant "biologically male people are not female" instead of "trans women aren't women". The language is confusing because it's evolving, but getting everyone on the same page is going to require a lot of public errors that would be better met with debate than shaming.
I'm a trans woman, so I'm gonna go ahead and be gentle when I say that my understanding does not match yours.
Some trans women are as you describe, preoccupied with passing and going stealth, especially for safety reasons. Many aren't.
You can speculate on if the term is gonna go away, but right now it's the best adjective to describe trans people. It's not offensive or a slur, it's literally the community's chosen language.
And you're right, sometimes it's better to be nice and gentle to people who are wrong. I won't be mad if you pop back upthread and correct them gently. We can do one of those good cop bad cop things.
The elephant in the room is that "passing" is often little more than wishful thinking, and people are starting to understand this. Ultimately, a shared focus on full transparency about being 'trans' or 'cis' is quite helpful at de-escalating hostile attitudes and discrimination about the matter - one could admit of rare exceptions, but by and large, anyone who feels like they must hide themselves for "safety reasons" is likely better off leaving the unsafe environment entirely!
Unfortunately, even a lot of places that are generally trans-supportive won't admit refugees fleeing anti-trans violence - or when they do, they're not treated much better than the place they left.
I'm not sure what your first comment is meant to imply, but I suspect you might be suffering from confirmation bias if you think that passing isn't realistic.
I made my attempt to explain it upthread for cis folks who haven't got it sorted yet.
I'm surprised that my understanding is already out of date or was wrong in the first place. Maybe 5 years ago or so, the rule I learned was that cis people should make no distinction between trans or cis, so as not to separate people into groups. I figured that extended to everything, which is why we don't make a distinction between cis and trans in things like sports or bathrooms, because there should be no distinction to make.
It's all a bit confusing. I'd like to get it right, but there's a lot of change happening and it's hard to keep up.
Because they are different. No transwoman can give birth or have a period. None of them has a womb. None of them are genetically female. Most of them have all the advantages of a man like higher bone density, more upper body strength.
Why are you so afraid of different groups of people being physically different? As long as you treat all groups as humans, it shouldn't be a problem. Denying basic biological facts is not a path to truth.
The distinction is supposed to be that "biological facts" no longer include gender. Gender is now fluid psychological term, not a biological one. In other words, you said "advantages of a man" instead of "advantages of a genetic male", which is now wrong.
But apparently I'm incorrect in thinking that you're not supposed to discuss "trans women" as a group, which is still confusing to me.
Sure, gender is different from sex. The point stands. There are major biological differences between females and trans women. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a part of life. Pretending everyone is equal is just lying to yourself.
But of course, people should be treated equally (in most cases).
