Comment by danadannecy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danadannecy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In today's language (in the US at least), gender is a state of mind, precisely because talking about the mental aspect of gender/sex is very useful both for talking about transgender people and for studying how mental gender identity affects people's lives. As for "feeling" a certain gender, I get it. What you say makes sense, but humans aren't creatures strictly operating by logical principles. Sometimes, what our brains tell us doesn't make sense. But, if you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with, are you going to trust logic, or your own experiences? You can't just say to yourself, "guess I'm being illogical, I'm gonna stop feeling this way now". I recently happened to watch a video by a trans woman where she summed up her experiences with trying to understand why she felt this way as: "And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman. That's it. I mean, I can describe my experiences and my feelings to you to help you understand better, but I can't logically prove anything. And I'm super fucking sorry if you can't handle that mankind was set adrift in an absurd world. That must be super fucking hard for you. Tell me all about it." This was after spending years of her life trying to find a more satisfying explanation and failing to be convinced by any. As far as reinforcing the gender binary, trans women are just as able to be girly girls or tomboys as cis women are, and the same goes for trans men. On top of that, there are plenty of non-binary people, which depending on who you ask, either fall or don't fall under trans. Gender is confusing, I agree, but the fact that there are so many people feeling this way means that we can't just simplify and say "you can't really know what it means to feel like a woman" when the lived reality of these people is much more complex and something they've been struggling with for a while.

> But, if you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with, are you going to trust logic, or your own experiences?

Do you support applying that same logic to transracialism? E.g. white woman identifying as a black woman?

I don't know much about transracialism at all, but it makes sense to me if you look at it as a cultural identification kind of thing. Both my brother and I were born in and grew up in the states, but I identify more with American culture while he identities more with the culture our parents are from, so culture at least is a mental identity thing rather than a physical reality.

If it's purely a racial/ethnic kind of thing that's about your genetic heritage, I agree it doesn't make sense to apply the same concept. It's like the distinction between sex and gender I mentioned above, trans people identify as a specific gender regardless of their sex, and I think people can identify with a specific culture regardless of their race/ethnicity. To better complete the analogy, I could definitely imagine a white person growing up in Japan their whole life and feeling a general unease about the mismatch between their cultural identity (Japanese) and their race/ethnicity (white), and in cases where that unease is severe enough, potentially being willing to go through surgery to better reflect their identity. Dysphoria over racial/cultural mismatch (if it even exists, idk) seems much less common than gender dysphoria, but I don't see why you wouldn't apply the same logic to both.

White/black may be widely viewed as preposterous but things like Hispanic/white are often a matter of self identification and culture more than genetic reality.

Thanks for your response; I was expecting to be on the receiving end of downvotes/abuse.

> you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with

I have no problem with believing that some people aren't the gender they physically represent. But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.

> And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman

Again, they don't actually know that they're a woman. They know they're not male, for sure, and I'm fully on board with that. But insisting that they're female... I'm not sure. Is 'trans woman' not sufficient?

Benjamin Boyce has a YT channel that deals with some of this stuff that I watch occasionally to try help understand.

> But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.

I think for trans women, it isn't so much a conclusion following from not identifying as male as it is simply 'I identify as female', but this runs into the same issue that you brought up in your first comment of not actually knowing what being female is. But then again, doesn't knowing they're not male imply they know what being male is despite not being male? I think it's just too philosophical of a point for most trans people to concern themselves with when they're dealing with who knows how many other issues.

I recommend either reading or watching more stories about trans people's personal experiences if you want to get a better sense as to why people feel that way, as different people probably have different reasons. I don't personally have any recommendations (the quote I mentioned earlier was a small comment from a video on a completely unrelated topic), but thanks for the recommendation for Benjamin, I'll check him out!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com