An abridged feminist perspective addressing all the major issues of the trans movement’s ideology

submitted by SnowAssMan from self.GenderCriticalGuys

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[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I have to stress that I do not envy the task you set for yourself. I do not know if the epicycles used to describe the solar system's movements in a geocentric model had a complicated and confusing vocabulary to it but I imagine it did just based on the how the standard model of particle physics has grown in complexity while parsing what is truly minutia. Similarly it still seems to me that you are arguing on their territory.

You may see your way through all this clearly and see a straight line of clear reason as you read through it all. That I struggle to is probably more on me than anyone else. But, if you find yourself ripping your hair out as you organize this and cover all their bases, realize their baselines (I hope you get baseball references) seem like pretzel lines to more and more bases because they rely on confusion. Perhaps start with men and women, perhaps move on to boys and girls who must grow close to their full size before they enter puberty, and how sexual reproduction between two sexes is how it is done on Earth by all species that use sexual reproduction. For all but a very small number of people, around 0.02%, male and female are accurate description of their bodies and which one (and only one) of the two (and only two) roles they can potentially play in reproduction.

Maybe you will find it easier to swat away their arguments by starting with your own reality based argument instead of diving right into their mud.

The history of the word gender, somewhat spelled out by Paul Cockshott in one of his writings on gender on his blog (the name of it is his name) shows that the earliest uses of the word in peer reviewed journals was as a polite substitute for sex.

David Reimer: do tras claim that his ordeal proves trans is real? How? There can be no logic to any defense of what happened to that kid.

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

How about this much shorter version?

Correcting the Self-Identification Cult’s Misinformation

  1. Gender: a) synonym for sex: male/female (nature) b) construct: masculinity/femininity (culture)

  2. Gender Identity: determined by socialisation (nurture)

  3. Gender role: performance of femininity or masculinity (choice)

  4. Cross-gender identification: determined by self-identification, desistance is typical (phase)

• Woman: adult human female, not a role, not defined by femininity, not determined by self-identification, not a man’s mental illness, not a man’s paraphilia, not a phase

• Transsexual – male by nature & nurture who self-identifies as neither female, nor feminine but something indefinable, undetectable & inconsequential, for which misnomers such as “woman”, “gender” & “gender identity” are always used

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I like shorter! Sorry also, I don't check in on social media all that often anymore.

I don't know what gender identity is, I don't think it exists outside of someone's imagination, so I'm very not into 2. It isn't determined by socialization. To give it any credence at all maybe it is analogous to stress vs strain to borrow an engineering/materials sciences concept. But I don't think that is it, because it is first and foremost something that can not be measured or observed. I still can not get beyond how an inner identity is somehow "gendered" or how it is imitative of sex which is an observable physical characteristic. Gender Identity is metaphysical, gender is a social construct, sex is physical, they can only be compared or contrasted as angels and linguine in clams sauce can be compared or contrasted.

OK, so as I type and think I think I see a way in. Definitions have contexts. Dictionaries might give gernal usage definitions, but when you pin down ideas or start using them, they always need fine tuning. You see this, or at least you used to see this, in social science peer reviewed journals. They would clarify how they used a term in the paper to make sure they are not conflating uses of the word. Another way of clarifying a definition is to classify the term, as I did with stress and strain above pointing out that I'm referring to the engineering use of the ideas, not the general usage.

So, Gender Identity is first and foremost a metaphysical concept. I would love to see how anyone denies this. You can not define terms in a way that appeases everyone. If language is fossilized poetry as Walt Whitman said, and thus art, well the sad thing is artists make choices, cast aside what they do not choose, and they define limits. A character has definite characteristics for a writer and an actor and a director, and the character is clearly defined in an audiences' mind. It is not and never all things to everyone, even if it is nuanced and complicated and can be seen from multiple points of view. A melodic phrase does not exist in every time signature in every key with every beat division and every note, it is what it is and it rules out everything else otherwise there's nothing for the composer or arranger to word with.

OK, so "Gender" is: a linguistic term for the tendency in some languages to assign differing forms to certain words based on characteristics that are perceived or assumed to be sex-related or analogous to sex. "Gender" in general usage is often a polite synonym for sex. "Gender" in sociology and anthropology and perhaps economics is a term used to describe the societal roles and expectations placed on individuals and groups of individuals based on their sex, including conformance and non-conformance with those roles and expectations. "Gender in psychology might be the metaphysical concept that a person has a property related to their sense of a relationship to sex-based roles and expectations.

Gender Identity is a metaphysical concept for a type of self-perception that some but not all people claim to have regarding their own status with regard to their own sex that may or may not differ from their physical property of sex.

3 is fine.

  1. is just not a definition. Cross-gender identification sounds to me like a term used to describe when a person's gender identity is at odds with their physical property of sex.

Sex has to be defined, and luckily it is probably the only thing here that can be actually defined. Sex is the biological term for the kind of reproduction used by a great many species across multiple phylum where reproduction requires the pairing of two and only two gamete types, each of which are produced by and only by the male or female of the species depending on the type of gamete produced. (I'm sure there's a better definition, I have no biology experience)

Woman: Adult human female is sufficient I think. We're not the ones tacking extra BS onto it, they are. The key to a theory is it's simplicity and it's usefulness. Gender theory is not simple but more importantly it is useless. How are babies made? We can explain that, they have no idea. If their theory could explain things equally to basic biology then the question is which has less nonsense and less ideas that cancel out in the end (analogous to epicycles of the geocentric model which works but is far more tedious and filled with nonsense than the heliocentric model which just has ellipses (though Venus is kind of circular if I remember correctly)

I think transexual has to be a surgically altered person so that their genitalia is mutilated into resembling the appearance, but not function, of wghat is the genitalia of their opposite sex. Transgender is someone who either wishes to be treated as or simply acts as a person of the opposite sex. These are separate from ideas of dysphoria or dysmorphia, and separate from a catagory that could seem like a 'transsexual' but is not because they could be a victim of a genital mutilation that they did not-- and we know that such victims exist.

I wouldn't go as far as to describe a kid, boy or girl, running around saying "I'm a girl" or the various ways kids might explore finding out who they are in the world as cross-gender identification. That sounds like a chance to put them in a box they will have a tougher time getting out of, by design. This might make it something that is always a paragraph and never a one-liner, but I think the one liner serves their purpose and not ours. The sad thing is if you tell kids they have ridiculous options as if they are legitimate options then kids are going to at least explore the ridiculous before abandoning them (unless they are love-bombed and drugged out of an escape). For proof of that I ask you to consider how few actual astronauts there are compared to how many kids want to be astronauts. Same could be said for dinosaus, plenty of kids want to be dinosaurs but very few are.