> This gets brought up sometimes in terf talking points, but as a practical reality, it's nonsense.
Okay so if not that, why are these women calling themselves men?
This comment is actually kind of a really good example of what I was explaining up above. It's a very terf kind of thing to look at a comment saying "gender is complicated and individual and doesn't fit into a box and transgender communities understand that" and to immediately say, "gender does fit into a box, it's whether or not you have a penis, and if you don't have one then you're just 'pretending' to be a man."
And then to somehow claim that reducing and denigrating the experience of both manhood and womenhood to pure biology in this way is somehow "feminist."
The entire terf experience is looking at transgender people who are engaging with gender identity and gender expression in thoughtful, sophisticated, multi-faceted ways and saying, "haha, they're men, look they have an adams apple." Because there's nothing more feminist than critiquing people's bodies, apparently. /s
And it really just gets across why the "transgender people are the real sexists" argument is so ridiculous in the context of how these interactions play out in the real world. One group (the trans community) affirms your gender no matter how you express it, and the other group (the terf community) constantly demands to see what's in your pants and yells at anyone who looks masculine while wearing a dress. It's kind of obvious which group is reinforcing toxic gender norms.
Well then, that goes straight to the heart of my point. Men don't have to be masculine. And women don't have to be feminine. All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".
A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting. Just like men feeling that they're not "real men" because they don't conform to cultural stereotypes of masculinity. It's regressive, restrictive and ridiculous.
> constantly demands to see what's in your pants
What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection? No, of course not. Sorry but your prepackaged rants about "terfs" are irrelevant.
No, very literally the opposite of that. I'm saying if someone calls themselves a man, I believe them. I don't care if they wear dresses or slacks, I don't care if they're muscular, I care what they tell me their identity is, because it's not my job to decide other people's gender. I'm not the gender police.
This is what's great about queer communities and why they tend to be so accepting of non-gender-conforming expressions. Because their criteria for gender isn't what your chromosomes are, or how you dress, or how you act, or what your presentation is, or what stereotypes you fit into -- their criteria is asking you your gender.
And it turns out that's a really supportive environment to be in if you're a man or a woman or any other gender identity and you aren't in total alignment with social expectations of that gender. It turns out that having people ask what your gender is and just saying "okay" regardless of how you present - is pretty great and goes a long way towards removing the pressure to present in a specific way or live up to social expectations for that gender.
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> A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting.
I love the gall of repeatedly misgendering trans people against their wishes, and then acting like you're defending their gender expression by doing that. If a man calls himself a man, just hecking believe them. You deciding for someone else what their gender is is not feminism, it's sexist prescriptivism. You looking at someone who tells you they're a man and saying, "well, you just feel that way because etc etc..." is not you breaking out of gender norms, it is you putting people into a box based on your personal criteria for what makes a man or a woman. It is you denying them agency to identify outside of that box.
That's not progressive, you're not helping them. You're imposing your social criteria for gender onto them, very openly against their wishes -- it is a denial of their agency. But oh of course, they don't know what they want, right? They're just confused, right? You can't trust them to know what their gender identity is, you have to treat them like children and talk about how they're being pressured into whatever decisions they're making. /s
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> What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection?
I'm curious, when you say that a "woman" calls themselves a "man" -- what criteria are you using to decide for them what their gender is? I mean, you're saying they're wrong. You're saying they're not men, so you must have some kind of test or standard that you're using to determine for them what their gender is, since you're so confident that they're wrong about themselves.
Is that test perhaps... what their chromosomes are? What genitalia they were born with? What's in their pants?
You can say you don't care what's in their pants, but you obviously do or else you wouldn't be misgendering them. You have a test you're using for whether they're a man or a woman, a test that they're not measuring up to, and I can pretty confidently guess that test is biological.
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Look, in the interest of being charitable here and trying to build bridges, I want to at least take the chance that you're saying all of this because you genuinely just don't understand how transgender identity works. Earlier, you said:
> this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men. And that if a woman does that too, then she's a man.
If transgender identities worked that way, it would be toxic and sexist. Calling someone a woman because they act in a certain way or wear dresses, or calling someone a man because they like football -- all of that would be extremely sexist.
To be very, very clear, transgender communities don't do that.
Transgender communities do not impose gender on anyone, your gender expression and presentation are not your gender identity. If you are a transgender man and you are still in the closet, and you act in a traditionally feminine way to everyone around you, transgender communities will... ask you what you want them to refer to you as.
There is no imposition here or expectation that you act in a stereotypical way. Trans theory rejects the notion that other people get to decide for you what your gender is -- regardless of what you wear, how you act, or how you think. If you're saying all of this because you legitimately believed that transgender people were going around saying, "sorry, but you wear a dress, that makes you a woman", the really good news is that nobody does that. You can be a man and wear a dress and act "feminine" however society defines "feminine", and you can still use he/him pronouns and you will be welcome in trans communities as a man. Trans communities are extremely supportive of this, this is not a group of people running around saying "if you act too feminine then you're a girl now, sorry we're just deciding that for you."
The only people who are deciding for you whether you're a man or a woman based on their own criteria -- are terfs and gender-critical movements.
As a biological "man" i don't feel like a "man" or "woman". I simply am what i am. My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.
Doesn't the need to feel like a "man" imply that the person has an internal image of what a proper "man" is? Isn't that image based on the stereotypical presentation of a biological "man"?
You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you. So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.
We could have a long conversation about this, but the actual useful short answer here is, I don't. I don't call it. Anything.
Because it's not my job to decide for you your gender.
I want to keep on circling back to this point. You are still trying to come up with the rules about who is and isn't a man; what the criteria is that they have to meet. I reject those rules. If, as you are saying, gender impacts nothing and you have no concept of it, then there is no reason not to treat transgender people with respect, to gender them correctly.
If you're arguing that the word "man" and "woman" means nothing, then why are you out here saying that someone is mistakenly calling themselves a man or a woman? (note that if you are arguing that the words man and woman mean genitals or chromosomes and everything else must extend from there, I am going to call that out as biological essentialism, literally hundreds if not thousands of years of feminism exist that talk about the problems with that kind of reduction of male and female experience).
I do have theories about what gender is and how it works and what its limitations as a concept are. They might be right, they might be wrong. But what I really reject is the sexist notion that it is my job to determine for everyone else the limitations and rules of gender, pronouns, presentation, and especially identity.
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> My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.
And I want to keep hammering this point -- then why are you misgendering people? You have no concept of gender... but you're calling men women against their wishes.
I reject the notion that gender needs to be a prescriptive, socially-assigned identity. Not because I don't have my own opinions, but because I reject the sexist notion that this is my decision to make for other people.
I think that wrapped up in the need to understand why a transgender man or a transgender woman knows they are a man or a woman, is this instinct that has been hammered into all of us by society that people have to prove their gender to you. But they don't. It can be really interesting to talk about the why, and if you go into trans spaces where people feel really safe, they do talk about the why.
But the "why" is academic. The practical side is, "I don't have to prove to you that I am who I am. You are not in charge of my identity."
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> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you
To expand on the above, the entire point of the trans movement is social and legal rights. The point of the trans movement is equality for trans people.
Trans people themselves are not a movement, they're simply people who exist who have a gender identity (like many cis people who also have a gender identity and will also be very offended if you misgender them). The transgender movement is a response to oppression of transgender people, that's all that it is. It is not a demand that you think about gender in a certain way, it is a demand that groups like the GOP stop trying to oppress transgender people, drive them out of public society, and remove their bodily and social autonomy.
It is a small thing, but people respecting you enough to use the gender that you identify as when they refer to you is, I think, a pretty straightforward ask. People act like this is really weird, but try misgendering cisgender people for a day and see how mad they get. In this comment section you're seeing people get mad about the term cisgender. So let's not act like the transgender community has all of the fragile people here.
Again, this respect boils down to: do you feel like you're in charge of everyone's gender? Do you feel like their identity is your decision to make? Do you feel like their pronouns, their appearance, how they go through social spaces is your decision based on your criteria, or do you respect their understanding of their own identity?
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> So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.
Right here you're kind of close to vocalizing something very important. I would not say that gender means nothing, but I would say that (I personally believe) it is a social construct. And the question I ask is: if gender doesn't ultimately physically mean anything, if it is a set of categories that are socially defined, then why not play with it? What natural law or moral code is being violated by playing in that space, changing it up, exploring it, bending it, even rejecting it? The space is a social construct, we can do with it what we want.
And so there are transgender people who identify as agender and who are totally neutral on the concept. Some who are nonbinary. We have transgender people who are nongender who reject the notion of gender entirely (and not in the weak 'gender-critical' way where terfs are still very much embracing gender, just tying it harder to biology).
There are transgender people who go by "it". There are transgender people who use meta-pronouns. There are gender-fluid people.
And you might think that's silly, but it does have a really cool effect: if you're a self-conscious girl or boy who feels weird about gender norms and feels like society is constantly telling you that you need to act a certain way because you do or don't have a penis -- suddenly there's this community that could not give a darn about that. They aren't going to tell you that you have to act a certain way to be a man, they aren't going to tell you that you can't wear a dress, they aren't even going to tell you that you have to call yourself a man or a woman.
The cool thing about stripping away both the social rules and all of the "no, you don't understand yourself, you're just confused, let us tell you what you are" talk -- the cool thing is that when you strip that away, what you're left with is authentic, unburdened, honest expression. The kind of authenticity that doesn't require you to constantly prove your identity or perform for other people. You end up with a community that just... accepts you.
And I think that's a wildly positive thing if we're actually trying to push past gender stereotypes and to question the toxic patriarchal norms that society drills into our heads day after day about what manhood and womanhood mean. Maybe you think that agender people are silly. Or if you don't have an internal concept of gender, maybe it's the opposite and you think that agender or nongender people are the only non-silly ones! But it doesn't matter where you fall on that, these spaces are really positive grounds for people to question gender and to question their relationship with gender. Not only do I not see the harm, I see the benefits.
And then I look over at the gender-critical and the terf side and I see... bathroom bills, and people snorting about how they can "always tell", and book bannings, and denial of bodily agency even for transgender adults, and concern-trolling about fertility, and all of this toxic stuff that is so weirdly common in terf circles -- all bundled up into this general prescriptivism around manhood and womanhood that is so clearly not helping people or moving forward any kind of serious conversation about how a social construct impacts our lives and how we should react to it.
It doesn't mean anything to say that you're rejecting gender if you don't have the actions to back it up -- but the transgender community actually has the actions to back it up.
It's not the entire purpose. That's part of it, the rest is about enabling abusive men to insert themselves into any place that women and girls have separate from men and boys. They won't accept that women have the right to say no. These men have a rapist mindset and the trans movement is their shield and sword.
And so whenever anyone says that transgender groups are reinforcing gender norms I kind of have to shake my head, because it's difficult to find a group more obsessed with the idea of stereotypical gender norms than the supposedly "gender critical" crowd. And unsurprisingly, that leads to a lot of reinforcement of toxic gender stereotypes; both in the idea of men as an intrinsically, biologically distrustworthy group, and in the practical reality that they are constantly looking at other women and thinking, "is this person a spy, is this person a man in disguise, is this person feminine enough that I can trust them."
And it's just so omnipresent. The above is a comment by someone who looked at a thread about whether or not transgender communities reinforce gender norms, where both sides are reasonably trying to be compassionate, and they could have tried to present a picture of terfs as anything other than what I described them as above, they could have tried to dispute my characterization of gender critical communities -- but they just couldn't help themselves, they couldn't stop themselves from jumping into the conversation and claiming out of nowhere that transgender people all have "a rapist mindset."
So yeah, if you're gender non-conforming, or you don't like gender stereotypes, or you're pushing away from a socially defined set of rules for gender, unsurprisingly, the communities that accept you as you are are all going to be healthier for your development than the communities that are constantly one "she looks too muscular" take away from calling you a rapist.
And it's helpful that whenever I try to explain this to people and they seem doubtful, a terf will literally register a new account just to jump in and prove my point for me <3