Like, I say I cannot understand trans people at all, and people will jump on me because I’m rejecting them and making them feel bad, when I’m just stating a fact.
There’s a lot of this stuff.
When you say "I don't understand trans people", trans people have heard this many times before. Unfortunately for you, many people who have said this phrase before followed it up with "...and therefore I hate them. I will legislate against them; I will pass laws against their existence in public space; I will demonize them; I will jail them; I will murder them."
Those are the stakes, so the pushback is in proportional to the life and death nature of what's going on here. When you say "I don't understand trans people" they are expecting you to follow it up with more of the same. And I get that's not great for the general public's understanding of trans people. But understand that it's a reaction to years and year of abuse from other people who also proclaim that they "don't understand."
Your general confusion is being received in an environment where people are literally fighting for their lives. Maybe in a different time, when people aren't facing down the vast power of the state to dictate their existence, there would be more room to treat you gentler. But the pressure has been ratcheted up to 11 by powerful forces bent on a 21st century new moral panic, and that's not the fault of trans people and their defenders, but the people who are trying to make their lives hell for no reason other than intolerance.
Seems like a weird thing to say. I don't understand FORTRAN at all and as such I stay away from people discussing it.
Why do you want to tell trans people that you don't understand them? Wouldn't it be easier to read some literature so you can gain a basic understanding?
On the other hand, there is no such agreement around gender. People are using terms such as "gender", "man" and "woman" to refer to vastly different concepts ranging from "how someone subjectively feels inside" to "what physiological traits someone has" to "how someone is treated by society".
To the extent that not understanding someone comes from not understanding how they personally define gender and how that fits with how other people are using the same term, it seems quite reasonable to be confused.
Just because "I know it when I see it" applies to your personal lens its an inarticulate way of viewing the world.
If this is the case, it’s only the case in the most vanishingly contemporary moment of ours. Both the Holocaust and the American system of chattel slavery were fundamentally predicated on questions of identity (“one drop”). Both moments also fundamentally shifted how and when people consider themselves Black or Jewish, because they are aware that others might consider them so for the purposes of persecution.
Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think this needs qualification: I don't think that treatment of individuals on the basis of gender (or sex) is just in the abstract, but I do think there are social policies that are inequal in scope that are justifiable on the basis of making all individuals more equal.
> Incidentally, my view on a lot of gender issues is that's it's not so different, and that the reason trans women experience so much pushback as it least partially due to stigma which is also directed at cisgender men.
I think a lot of people agree with this! The tension is again in scope: the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
I pretty much agree with that. But I think that most people are thinking about rights being as assigned to gender in the abstract. It seems to me that the reason there's so much fuss about statements like "trans women are women" is because the assumption is that "women's rights" are assigned to women in the abstract, and that who gets them is therefore determined by who counts as a woman.
> the stigmas and cultural pressures that cisgender men are subjected to don't generally induce people to kick us out of our homes as teenagers, to threaten us in bathrooms, &c.
That's only true if you accept that cisgender men won't want to act in ways that we associate with trans or cis women (e.g. wearing dresses or make up (and if you define gender in terms of identity then you could even include making changes to their bodies here)). And IMO that assumption is pretty sexist. I also think that there is a tendency to assume that such men are trans women, but identity doesn't work like that, and if we want to talk about assigned-gender-non-conforming people in general then we should talk them instead of trans people. I guess I don't really accept that that trans women are under more pressure to behave in certain ways than cisgender men are. But if you have a good argument as to why you think they are, then I'd be interested to hear it.
Or see this op-end regarding the ADL changing their definition of racism to require it be against "people of color" and Whoopi Goldberg claiming the Holocaust was not about race: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/03/whoopi-go...
The same kind of postmodernist thinking that is comfortable redefining well understood biological terms like "male" and "female" to be about "not doing the dishes" or "liking climbing trees" instead of generally unambiguous biological properties is just as comfortable deciding that you're "white" on the basis of not wanting to extend the protection of anti-discrimination laws and norms to you.