I’ve met many self-identified women (trans and otherwise) that did not prefer female-gendered terms, prompting plenty of inadvertent social gaffes on my end.
I think that if someone self identifies as a woman to you, and you use a gendered term to describe them (she, policewoman, actress) that is not a social gaffe on your part. I think that it is fine for someone to identify as a woman, but advocate for the use of gender neutral language in all cases even applied to them, but they should not put pressure on those who do so differently.
and the most reliable heuristic I could think of was “in conversation, don’t bring up video games or guns when talking to women.”
I would not make this assumption about cis women, and so I also wouldn’t make it about trans women. If you’re living in two subcultures, one with few trans women but many cis women who this assumption applies to and one with few cis women but many trans women who this assumption applies to, I could see how you would arrive at this and find it doesn’t work very well.
I remain rudderless and find gender categories way too broad and opaque to discern any meaningful guidance
It is possible you don’t interact with people’s gender that frequently, which is fine, but this isn’t true of most people I interact with. Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:
Which bathroom they use, and whether you can go to the same changing room in a pool/gym.
Which clothing they will wear, which clothing they will shop for, and how you should react to them wearing said clothing. (Is your friend being silly by wearing a skirt? probably if he’s a man, but unlikely if she’s a woman.)
With whom they are okay with casual friendly touches (for example, many people are more open to hugs from the same gender)
Obviously, you should ask about these things if you need to know, and I agree that in many cases being specific is important. However, many humans spend a lot of time policing other’s gender presentations. If I saw a male friend walking into a women’s restroom, I would warn them that they’re going in the wrong one. I would do this to my trans male friends but not my trans female friends. Maybe they would correct me and explain the situation. Maybe they would be hostile, in which case they would be rude. And if you need to know, or they need to tell you, they can.
If you’re not the type of person to be aware in the differences I’ve mentioned above, then maybe it is useless to you, but it’s not useless to all people, and the person telling you won’t necessarily know that.
On top of all of this, many trans people are gender abolitionists ideologically, but if they have to choose between being seen by society as a man vs. a woman, they are still going to make that choice even if they wish that society didn’t make the disctinction.
Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:
I appreciate that you provided specific examples but my immediate reaction to your list was one of bafflement.
While I personally don’t care what bathrooms or changing room anyone uses, to the extent someone does prompt a negative reaction for being in the “wrong” room it would be entirely predicated on how that individual is perceived by others (read: pass), not what they personallyidentify as.
Similarly, I don’t understand why I would care about someone’s gender identity when assessing their sartorial choices; they either look good or not and me finding out about their internal identity wouldn’t prompt an update. I recently had two friends come across an XXXL pair of overalls they both managed to fit into each pant leg. I was able to deduce that they were being silly through an astute analysis of several context clues; I didn’t need to know what body size they subjectively “identified” as to reach that conclusion.
With casual social touching, I’ve never met anyone who drew the line based on someone’s identity. If these people do indeed exist, I would be intensely curious to better understand the basis of their preference. Namely: what would the difference be between someone asking for a hug while announcing they identify as Y versus, ceteris paribus, announcing that they identify as X.
To the extent my post had a thesis, it’s that using gender categories to imputing predictions is highly inefficient and a highly misleading sorting mechanism, and that it is generally better to be specific than hope you hit the correct stereotypes in your audience’s mind. The examples you list demonstrate this point exactly.
As a further analogy, consider if a friend were to tell me “I’m not wearing a polo shirt now, but I identify as someone who is wearing a polo shirt, and I am telling you this information in the hopes that you’ll correctly guess that I enjoy golfing.” Why play these riddles?
You stated that I potentially don’t interact with people’s gender that frequently, and that’s probably true. I generally avoid making assumptions about individuals, for the reasons stated above. Originally you said that my post lacked an “understanding of the experiences of trans people” and I’m still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?
I think that one thing you’re missing is that lots of people… use gender as a very strong feature of navigating the world. They treat “male” and “female” as natural categories, and make lots of judgements based on whether someone “is” male or female.
You don’t seem to do that, which puts you pretty far along the spectrum towards gender abolition, and you’re right, from a gender abolition perspective there’s no reason to be trans (or to be worried about people using the restroom they prefer or wearing the clothes they prefer or taking hormones to alter their body in ways they prefer).
But I think you’re expecting that most people act this way, and they don’t! For example, there are lots of people who would be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a feminine gay man, but wouldn’t be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a trans woman, even if the two hypothetical people look very similar.
Some examples of X that I have seen include:
Women sleeping in the same room or tent as this person
Muslim women not wearing a headscarf in their presence
Women going to a bathroom or changing room together
Straight men or lesbian women being attracted to this person
I don’t really know how to explain this any more than I already have. To lay it out simply:
Here is this thing, gender.
Lots of people care about gender a lot
It’s a valid position to say “I don’t care about this thing and don’t understand why anyone else does”
Nevertheless, understanding that people do care will help you better understand why a lot of stuff around gender happens.
Note: I am not trying to convince you to care about gender! I am merely trying to explain some of the ways other people, both trans and cis, care about gender.
I think I finally understand the source of the confusion. Correct me if I’m wrong but it appears to me that you use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably, where a change in the latter is (or at least should be treated as) functionally a change in the former.
I definitely use sex as “a very strong feature of navigating the world” because I can readily point to endless circumstances where knowing someone’s sex (and the likely associated secondary characteristics) provides useful information (height, violence propensity, affinity towards trains, whatever). I recognize that someone’s sex is a dense piece of information to have because it has reliable predictive qualities.
There’s plenty of other traits with similarly reliable predictive qualities and maybe it’s helpful to set aside sex/gender for a bit. If I knew nothing about a person except that they’re a Harvard graduate, it’s reasonable for me to guess that they’re more likely to be intelligent, ambitious, privileged, conceited, etc. Obviously not every Harvard grad fits those traits, and if somehow there’s a grad whom I assume is ambitious and conceited but who idles his days as a homeless beach bum, well the error is on me.
But suppose the only thing I knew about a person is they “identify” as a Harvard graduate. I would like to think that everyone’s first question would be “what does that mean??” and suppose this individual responds with “although I technically never went to Harvard, I am nevertheless intelligent, ambitious, privileged, conceited, etc. and it’s just easier/faster/simpler for me to implant that impression through a single informational payload rather than piece by piece.”
I may not endorse this tactic, but I get it! Of course, the natural follow-up question would be “but how do we know that you’re actually any of those traits you mentioned?” and also “but how do you ensure that you implant the intended impression?” These are the exact same questions I would ask of a trans individual.
There seems to be an attempt to reverse the inference flow. It brings to mind a post by Parrhesia:
To illustrate this sort of semantic ethical reasoning, imagine an ethical vegan who refuses to buy her child a stuffed animal. She argues that: a stuffed animal is an animal; it is wrong to purchase animals; therefore, it is wrong to buy a stuffed animal. If you think in words, then it makes sense. But if you start thinking about reality, you’ll notice an issue. Ethical vegans are usually vegan because they don’t want to cause animal suffering, and a stuffed animal—if you wish to call it an animal or not—does not experience suffering. Whether a stuffed animal is an animal is tangential to the ethicality of purchasing it.
We can apply this framework to any of your examples, and that’s what I was getting at in my post when I’d ask “Why does it matter?” So for example one of the concerns someone might have with undressing in public is avoiding the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers. A reliable assumption is that the vast majority of people only feel sexual attraction towards the opposite sex, which is why same-sex changing rooms are such a widespread solution to this concern (obviously this is not perfectly reliable, and it also relies on the assumption that same-sex attraction did not exist).
There’s a reason I linked to the Disguised Queries post on bleggs and rubes. The fallacy here would be assuming that the “good-enough” sorting mechanism is the end goal itself, rather than merely a useful tool to get us to our real destination. Unless you keep in mind the root purpose of the sorting mechanism, you risk coming to the erroneous conclusion that vegans think stuffed animals are immoral.
Hmm, no, I don’t believe I use sex and gender interchangeably. Let’s taboo those two terms.
I think that most people don’t care about a person’s chromosomes. When I inspect the way I use the words “sex” and “gender”, I don’t feel like either of them is a disguised query for that person’s chromosomes.
I think that many people care about hormone balances. Testosterone and Estrogen change the way your body behaves, and the type of hormone a person’s body naturally produces and whether they’re suppressing that and/or augmenting with a different hormone is definitely relevant for sports and medicine.
I think that many people care about appearance. Most people’s sexual attraction is keyed to whether a person looks a certain way. Examples include: Straight men being attracted to gay men in feminine clothing, masc lesbians and gay twinks accidentally hitting on each other or even making out without realizing they’re not “technically” attracted to their gender, straight women being attracted to butch lesbians.
I think that many people care about “intent-to-fit-into-and-interact-with-the-world-as-a-specific-social-role”, which is pretty hard for me to point at without the word gender. But our society does have two primary social roles, and committing to living in one social role is important to people. I think lots of people track who is in which social role and interact with those people in different ways.
It sounds like our disagreement is that you doubt that anyone cares about the “intent to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role”, whereas in my experience lots of people care a lot about this.
I’m not really sure the Harvard thing is a good analogy? Consider the following phrases:
I identify as a woman
I identify as a person with XX chromosomes
I identify as a Harvard Graduate
I identify as a Bostonian
I identify as an academic
I identify as a Christian
I identify as a lesbian
Which of those identify phrases mean things? It’s the ones which are about primarily social roles and not about physical fact. I think all of these are meaningful except the second and third.
Now, some of these could be lies, (I could say I’m an academic but not actually care about academics!) but they’re not nonsensical.
Now, obviously, you’ll tell me that the social role is the good-enough sorting mechanism and so we should discard it for better sorting mechanisms involving physical characteristics. That’s pretty close to gender abolitionism, to be honest, and I don’t really understand where you get off the following train:
Let me analyze an example you gave while my terms are tabooed: changing rooms. Our goal is to “avoid the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers”. Obviously, if we look at all four categories I proposed above, (XX/XY, testosterone/estrogen, masculine appearance/feminine appearance, male-social-role/female-social-role), all four of them have approximately the same distribution of attraction to the opposite category. However, only one of them is directly visible to strangers in the dressing room—masculine appearance/feminine appearance. (We could introduce a new category, penis vs. vagina, but then you’ll have very masculine vagina havers in the vagina room and very feminine penis havers in the penis room.)
I would guess that you don’t agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct? If I’m right about that, what part of the above analysis do you object to?
I don’t understand your objection to the Harvard analogy exactly, especially since you included it in your list. I also don’t understand how exactly you’re distinguishing “social role” from “physical fact” (which one is ‘lesbian’?) or why identifying as a Bostonian is meaningful but Harvard grad is not?
Given that lack of clarity, I worry we have different understanding of the phrase “social role”. My definition would be something along the lines of “the set of behaviors, expectations, and responsibilities associated with a particular position or status within a group or society”. Assuming you agree with that definition, I absolutely understand why someone would care about wanting to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role.
But desire for a particular social role is not a sufficient condition for attaining it. Babies are a social role. No one complains when they sleep all day instead of going to work, and no one is surprised when other people clean them up when they shit their pants. Babies are treated this way because they’re vulnerable and they lack this capacity to take care of themselves because of they haven’t sufficiently developed at their age. And while age is a really good proxy for self-sufficiency (especially early on) it’s obviously not the only one. See for example how we treat the elderly and the severely disabled. The simplistic analysis here would be to deny a vulnerable person the pampered treatment just because they’re too old to be a baby.
Conversely, if I had the intent to be treated the same way as a baby — fed Gerber and pampered by a dedicated two-person team while I sleep all day — it would be reasonable to ask why I am warranted that role. If I’m able-bodied and self-sufficient, it’s reasonable for me to be denied that social role. You can call this a sort of “price of admission” to the social role if you’d like.
I would guess that you don’t agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct?
I’m not sure what made you think that? I don’t have an opinion on what the “correct” segregation method for dressing rooms should be; it would all depend on the goal you’re trying to accomplish. I brought up “minimizing sexualized attention from strangers” as just one of many possible objectives.
I think that if someone self identifies as a woman to you, and you use a gendered term to describe them (she, policewoman, actress) that is not a social gaffe on your part. I think that it is fine for someone to identify as a woman, but advocate for the use of gender neutral language in all cases even applied to them, but they should not put pressure on those who do so differently.
I would not make this assumption about cis women, and so I also wouldn’t make it about trans women. If you’re living in two subcultures, one with few trans women but many cis women who this assumption applies to and one with few cis women but many trans women who this assumption applies to, I could see how you would arrive at this and find it doesn’t work very well.
It is possible you don’t interact with people’s gender that frequently, which is fine, but this isn’t true of most people I interact with. Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:
Which bathroom they use, and whether you can go to the same changing room in a pool/gym.
Which clothing they will wear, which clothing they will shop for, and how you should react to them wearing said clothing. (Is your friend being silly by wearing a skirt? probably if he’s a man, but unlikely if she’s a woman.)
With whom they are okay with casual friendly touches (for example, many people are more open to hugs from the same gender)
Obviously, you should ask about these things if you need to know, and I agree that in many cases being specific is important. However, many humans spend a lot of time policing other’s gender presentations. If I saw a male friend walking into a women’s restroom, I would warn them that they’re going in the wrong one. I would do this to my trans male friends but not my trans female friends. Maybe they would correct me and explain the situation. Maybe they would be hostile, in which case they would be rude. And if you need to know, or they need to tell you, they can.
If you’re not the type of person to be aware in the differences I’ve mentioned above, then maybe it is useless to you, but it’s not useless to all people, and the person telling you won’t necessarily know that.
On top of all of this, many trans people are gender abolitionists ideologically, but if they have to choose between being seen by society as a man vs. a woman, they are still going to make that choice even if they wish that society didn’t make the disctinction.
I appreciate that you provided specific examples but my immediate reaction to your list was one of bafflement.
While I personally don’t care what bathrooms or changing room anyone uses, to the extent someone does prompt a negative reaction for being in the “wrong” room it would be entirely predicated on how that individual is perceived by others (read: pass), not what they personally identify as.
Similarly, I don’t understand why I would care about someone’s gender identity when assessing their sartorial choices; they either look good or not and me finding out about their internal identity wouldn’t prompt an update. I recently had two friends come across an XXXL pair of overalls they both managed to fit into each pant leg. I was able to deduce that they were being silly through an astute analysis of several context clues; I didn’t need to know what body size they subjectively “identified” as to reach that conclusion.
With casual social touching, I’ve never met anyone who drew the line based on someone’s identity. If these people do indeed exist, I would be intensely curious to better understand the basis of their preference. Namely: what would the difference be between someone asking for a hug while announcing they identify as Y versus, ceteris paribus, announcing that they identify as X.
To the extent my post had a thesis, it’s that using gender categories to imputing predictions is highly inefficient and a highly misleading sorting mechanism, and that it is generally better to be specific than hope you hit the correct stereotypes in your audience’s mind. The examples you list demonstrate this point exactly.
As a further analogy, consider if a friend were to tell me “I’m not wearing a polo shirt now, but I identify as someone who is wearing a polo shirt, and I am telling you this information in the hopes that you’ll correctly guess that I enjoy golfing.” Why play these riddles?
You stated that I potentially don’t interact with people’s gender that frequently, and that’s probably true. I generally avoid making assumptions about individuals, for the reasons stated above. Originally you said that my post lacked an “understanding of the experiences of trans people” and I’m still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?
I think that one thing you’re missing is that lots of people… use gender as a very strong feature of navigating the world. They treat “male” and “female” as natural categories, and make lots of judgements based on whether someone “is” male or female.
You don’t seem to do that, which puts you pretty far along the spectrum towards gender abolition, and you’re right, from a gender abolition perspective there’s no reason to be trans (or to be worried about people using the restroom they prefer or wearing the clothes they prefer or taking hormones to alter their body in ways they prefer).
But I think you’re expecting that most people act this way, and they don’t! For example, there are lots of people who would be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a feminine gay man, but wouldn’t be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a trans woman, even if the two hypothetical people look very similar.
Some examples of X that I have seen include:
Women sleeping in the same room or tent as this person
Muslim women not wearing a headscarf in their presence
Women going to a bathroom or changing room together
Straight men or lesbian women being attracted to this person
I don’t really know how to explain this any more than I already have. To lay it out simply:
Here is this thing, gender.
Lots of people care about gender a lot
It’s a valid position to say “I don’t care about this thing and don’t understand why anyone else does”
Nevertheless, understanding that people do care will help you better understand why a lot of stuff around gender happens.
Note: I am not trying to convince you to care about gender! I am merely trying to explain some of the ways other people, both trans and cis, care about gender.
I think I finally understand the source of the confusion. Correct me if I’m wrong but it appears to me that you use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably, where a change in the latter is (or at least should be treated as) functionally a change in the former.
I definitely use sex as “a very strong feature of navigating the world” because I can readily point to endless circumstances where knowing someone’s sex (and the likely associated secondary characteristics) provides useful information (height, violence propensity, affinity towards trains, whatever). I recognize that someone’s sex is a dense piece of information to have because it has reliable predictive qualities.
There’s plenty of other traits with similarly reliable predictive qualities and maybe it’s helpful to set aside sex/gender for a bit. If I knew nothing about a person except that they’re a Harvard graduate, it’s reasonable for me to guess that they’re more likely to be intelligent, ambitious, privileged, conceited, etc. Obviously not every Harvard grad fits those traits, and if somehow there’s a grad whom I assume is ambitious and conceited but who idles his days as a homeless beach bum, well the error is on me.
But suppose the only thing I knew about a person is they “identify” as a Harvard graduate. I would like to think that everyone’s first question would be “what does that mean??” and suppose this individual responds with “although I technically never went to Harvard, I am nevertheless intelligent, ambitious, privileged, conceited, etc. and it’s just easier/faster/simpler for me to implant that impression through a single informational payload rather than piece by piece.”
I may not endorse this tactic, but I get it! Of course, the natural follow-up question would be “but how do we know that you’re actually any of those traits you mentioned?” and also “but how do you ensure that you implant the intended impression?” These are the exact same questions I would ask of a trans individual.
There seems to be an attempt to reverse the inference flow. It brings to mind a post by Parrhesia:
We can apply this framework to any of your examples, and that’s what I was getting at in my post when I’d ask “Why does it matter?” So for example one of the concerns someone might have with undressing in public is avoiding the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers. A reliable assumption is that the vast majority of people only feel sexual attraction towards the opposite sex, which is why same-sex changing rooms are such a widespread solution to this concern (obviously this is not perfectly reliable, and it also relies on the assumption that same-sex attraction did not exist).
There’s a reason I linked to the Disguised Queries post on bleggs and rubes. The fallacy here would be assuming that the “good-enough” sorting mechanism is the end goal itself, rather than merely a useful tool to get us to our real destination. Unless you keep in mind the root purpose of the sorting mechanism, you risk coming to the erroneous conclusion that vegans think stuffed animals are immoral.
Hmm, no, I don’t believe I use sex and gender interchangeably. Let’s taboo those two terms.
I think that most people don’t care about a person’s chromosomes. When I inspect the way I use the words “sex” and “gender”, I don’t feel like either of them is a disguised query for that person’s chromosomes.
I think that many people care about hormone balances. Testosterone and Estrogen change the way your body behaves, and the type of hormone a person’s body naturally produces and whether they’re suppressing that and/or augmenting with a different hormone is definitely relevant for sports and medicine.
I think that many people care about appearance. Most people’s sexual attraction is keyed to whether a person looks a certain way. Examples include: Straight men being attracted to gay men in feminine clothing, masc lesbians and gay twinks accidentally hitting on each other or even making out without realizing they’re not “technically” attracted to their gender, straight women being attracted to butch lesbians.
I think that many people care about “intent-to-fit-into-and-interact-with-the-world-as-a-specific-social-role”, which is pretty hard for me to point at without the word gender. But our society does have two primary social roles, and committing to living in one social role is important to people. I think lots of people track who is in which social role and interact with those people in different ways.
It sounds like our disagreement is that you doubt that anyone cares about the “intent to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role”, whereas in my experience lots of people care a lot about this.
I’m not really sure the Harvard thing is a good analogy? Consider the following phrases:
I identify as a woman
I identify as a person with XX chromosomes
I identify as a Harvard Graduate
I identify as a Bostonian
I identify as an academic
I identify as a Christian
I identify as a lesbian Which of those identify phrases mean things? It’s the ones which are about primarily social roles and not about physical fact. I think all of these are meaningful except the second and third.
Now, some of these could be lies, (I could say I’m an academic but not actually care about academics!) but they’re not nonsensical.
Now, obviously, you’ll tell me that the social role is the good-enough sorting mechanism and so we should discard it for better sorting mechanisms involving physical characteristics. That’s pretty close to gender abolitionism, to be honest, and I don’t really understand where you get off the following train:
Let me analyze an example you gave while my terms are tabooed: changing rooms. Our goal is to “avoid the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers”. Obviously, if we look at all four categories I proposed above, (XX/XY, testosterone/estrogen, masculine appearance/feminine appearance, male-social-role/female-social-role), all four of them have approximately the same distribution of attraction to the opposite category. However, only one of them is directly visible to strangers in the dressing room—masculine appearance/feminine appearance. (We could introduce a new category, penis vs. vagina, but then you’ll have very masculine vagina havers in the vagina room and very feminine penis havers in the penis room.)
I would guess that you don’t agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct? If I’m right about that, what part of the above analysis do you object to?
I don’t understand your objection to the Harvard analogy exactly, especially since you included it in your list. I also don’t understand how exactly you’re distinguishing “social role” from “physical fact” (which one is ‘lesbian’?) or why identifying as a Bostonian is meaningful but Harvard grad is not?
Given that lack of clarity, I worry we have different understanding of the phrase “social role”. My definition would be something along the lines of “the set of behaviors, expectations, and responsibilities associated with a particular position or status within a group or society”. Assuming you agree with that definition, I absolutely understand why someone would care about wanting to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role.
But desire for a particular social role is not a sufficient condition for attaining it. Babies are a social role. No one complains when they sleep all day instead of going to work, and no one is surprised when other people clean them up when they shit their pants. Babies are treated this way because they’re vulnerable and they lack this capacity to take care of themselves because of they haven’t sufficiently developed at their age. And while age is a really good proxy for self-sufficiency (especially early on) it’s obviously not the only one. See for example how we treat the elderly and the severely disabled. The simplistic analysis here would be to deny a vulnerable person the pampered treatment just because they’re too old to be a baby.
Conversely, if I had the intent to be treated the same way as a baby — fed Gerber and pampered by a dedicated two-person team while I sleep all day — it would be reasonable to ask why I am warranted that role. If I’m able-bodied and self-sufficient, it’s reasonable for me to be denied that social role. You can call this a sort of “price of admission” to the social role if you’d like.
I’m not sure what made you think that? I don’t have an opinion on what the “correct” segregation method for dressing rooms should be; it would all depend on the goal you’re trying to accomplish. I brought up “minimizing sexualized attention from strangers” as just one of many possible objectives.