Our sex should obviously not be a major part of our lives outside of, like, medical things. But our society forces gender on us as a set of roles, expectations etc. to follow based on our sex. So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
But trans people throughout history have wanted to present as the opposite gender. This is in addition to cis people who oppose their own gender’s roles and do the opposite things. But trans people, obviously, go much further than any cis person does.
Is this because trans people want to actually be the opposite sex and for a long time being the opposite gender was the only possible thing? But now thanks to medical advancements they can get closer to that goal than any other time?
Why is this? Is it something in the brain, like with gay people? So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans? Would that even help? Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people. So, uh, scrap that.
Any essential books for reading up on all this stuff? Thanks
I can only really speak for myself here, but I want both. Like I want to be physically female, to the point where I could be a biological mother. Unfortunately, that’s not possible at the moment, but I’m going to try my best to get as close as possible. But even though I say “I want” it’s not actually a choice. Before I started taking estrogen, I was very depressed to put it mildly. If I stop taking estrogen, I’m pretty sure I will feel the same way again. None of this has anything to do with my gender. If I live in a society with no gender, assuming such a thing is possible, I would still have the same medical needs. But I also want a certain gender expression. It doesn’t matter that gender expression stuff is socially constructed. There’s lots of other things people want that are socially constructed, self actualization is a basic human need.
There are some trans people who medically transition and never present differently. It’s usually trans women who start hormones as adults (sometimes they call themselves manmoders). I’ve talked to people who have done this for like a decade. After they take estrogen for a while they look pretty feminine, but most people don’t really know what a male on hormones looks like, and so with a short haircut you can probably present as a man forever. In theory, these women as a test of someone who wants to transition their sex but not their gender. However, my sense is that most of them aren’t very happy about their situation. The reason they present as men is because it’s not safe for them to do otherwise, because they’re still figuring out how to go about socially transitioning, or because they’re afraid of looking like one of the horrific caricatures of trans women that dominate our culture (which, yeah, I’m afraid of that too).
So, ideally, there would be no gender, right?
I’m really out of my depth here, but I don’t actually think gender abolition literally means that there should be a society where a person’s sex carries exactly social or cultural implications of any kind. I think it’s more about how sex-based hierarchies are bad. But none of that actually matters for trans people who exist today, because it’s a goal or an ideal. If you go outside, there are gender roles alive and well right now, and sometimes we have to go outside. Expecting trans people to somehow live without gender or whatever because that’s what you think society should be like is like expecting a communist not to own a smartphone.
Actually, I can imagine it helping in an ideal world, but in our fascist reality that will probably just end up genociding people
This is exactly how I feel about it. Lots of people disagree, but I definitely didn’t act like most little boys as a child, and during puberty dysphoria just kind of destroyed my life. If you believe that a person is their brain, as in materialist monism, then some feature of a person which causes major effects on their life would logically have to exist as a physical structure or process within the brain. Assuming the brain scan was good enough, there’s no actual reason why you wouldn’t be able to identify this structure or process. However, I hope the scans never actually get good enough. Pre-natal testing has largely eliminated babies with Down Syndrome from many European countries. I used to work with some students with Down. They had major difficulties with some things, but they were also perfectly capable of understanding lots of stuff and are generally very happy. Sometimes, I would think about what it would be like to explain to them that they may be among the last generations of themselves who will ever be born. It’s kind of horrifying. I don’t trust cis people not to pull the same thing on us.
Books? I guess Whipping Girl by Julia Serano.
Scenario 1 doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If I lived in the future trying to be whatever a 2023 woman is would be like trying to be an 1880s woman now. But I think gender is inevitable, and I’d always want to be on the more feminine side of things.
But also 2 is true, everyone’s gender is constrained by society and you can’t really get around that
So, can you do a brain scan to see if people are actually gay or trans
no. that shit was an argument they used for gay rights but its led to transmedicalization which is not an acceptable outcome—people should not require medical survey to be ‘allowed’ to express the gender they want
but anyway the homo v hetero brain scan studies are really flawed, we know from a vast corpus of asking people sexual orientation is not a 1 / 0 binary but these jokers stare at brainscans they’ve lumped into these fake categories and vibes their way to conclusions
I read about how the brain scans today are probably very biased and that “male” and “female” brains might not even be a real thing. Wild.
the differences they observe are completely informed by the semantic categories they put on the groups of brains before they even start observing them. anything gleaned by looking at pregendered brains is going to reenforce biases that existed going in
Enlightenment science :brainworms: try to deconstruct and categorize the world, which is related to how our brains use signification to simplify the reality we perceive via our senses. This is why binaries can feel correct to people, and why stereotyping is a real aspect of human brain cognition. This isn’t always a terrible thing, it’s part of survival mechanisms and such.
Reality and material conditions don’t care though, and trans people along with lots of other marginalized humans that don’t fit into the category buckets easily are often repressed due to this reactionary mindset. As we learn more about the realities of the complexity of the world via science, we start to see how poorly the accepted understandings are. Just look into lateral gene transfer to see that the orderly ‘tree of life’ concept is not an accurate representation of genetic lineage and evolution for example.
In regards to your question, just accept that people have different understandings of themselves. Categorization and labeling can help people connect to each other via these significations, which is positive, but it also can feed back into sectarianism and other negative reactionary impulses. See the friction between forms of transness and gay/lesbian sexuality as an example. Once the category becomes a faction, these reactionary impulses can become repressive to the transcendent folks.
The problem is attachments to categories that no longer serve the practice and purpose of science. It’s a social process, and so it has similar pitfalls of social dynamics. The reactionary nature of defending established understandings is what I think needs to be guarded against. A binary is a shorthand way to describe a spectrum for instance, but if only the binary understanding is what is taught as established knowledge, it is all to easy to deride the reality of the spectrum as an affront to established science. This pattern has played out numerous times over the short history. This is why study of science as a social practice is really invaluable.
