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
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
These seem like good faith questions, I like it.First thing first, trans people don’t need any justification for being trans, they can present how they want and need no one’s permission. There’s a lot to be said that physical sex is as much of a construction as gender. At least 1% of people are born intersex, not to mention the history of women athletes getting disqualified for high testosterone levels. Sex isn’t even necessarily intrinsic to chromosomes, because your DNA changes over time and something like a bone marrow transplant can give you DNA of the opposite sex. There’s also 46,XX/46,XY, a chimeric condition where an outwardly female seeming person will have ovaries, breasts, and a uterus, but has XY chromosomes. When you mention this kind of thing to reactionaries or terfs you’ll often hear them say something like “that’s a disorder” or “people aren’t supposed to be born that way.” Well ok, intersex people exist and we live in a reality with them. They’re proof that physical sex isn’t some absolute written into the laws of reality, but furthermore they’re normal people who deserve acknowledgement.
Also it depends on the trans person. Not every trans person is in agreement on this stuff. Also, not every trans person wants to be the opposite gender, because many want to be neither, or both, or something else entirely.
i think the best thing to consider though is trans people are just people with their own experiences, they don’t need any medical acknowledgement, and I’ve met some who felt uncomfortable pointing towards intersex people to help explaining gender, and I get that
Thanks!
Biology is complicated. I’m clearly not an expert so I appreciate all the information. So, trans is a broad category that includes all people who want to be another sex or gender than the one they’re assigned to. That’s really simple and I don’t know why I got confused about that.
Yeah this is the way I wish more people framed it. I’m Trans. I don’t know or care why, I do things that help me feel better and more comfy at no expense to anyone else, and there is no reason this should be controversial. It low-key bothers me when people argue you shouldn’t hate trans people because they were “born that way” or “didn’t have a choice” or whatever, because while I do believe those things for me, if someone wakes up one day and decides to switch gender it isn’t harming anyone so who cares. You shouldn’t hate trans people because it doesn’t fuckin’ effect you in any way what other people do with their bodies.
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.
I’m not trans, so what I have to say should be secondary to what any of our trans comrades care to comment. But from my reading of Les Feinberg’s Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, it seems clear to me that it depends on the person. Not only are there the western genders that you’re intimately familiar with, and the concept of being nonbinary or transgender/sex, there are genders that were understood in other cultures that differ in category from any of these. So the answer is, both and more, depending. I think there’s a focus on flattening the gender/sex/sexuality spectrum along the most physically realized aspects partly because capitalism commodifies any and everything into its most physical aspects. Surely there are some trans women and men that would feel satisfied being transgender and not wanting any sort of affirmative surgery if not for the various social pressures of capitalism; but those social pressures are a real force. Who’s to say how everyone would shake out under different cultural systems. As for Trans Liberation, there are wonderful cases presented of all of the above, people that identify with indigenous gender identities, people that identify as crossdressers or transsexual, and of course Les Feinberg hirself who identified with the “male” gender as nonbinary had seemingly little interest in any sort of surgery . I would highly recommend it as a relatively short read that exists largely to present radical trans acceptance from a variety of perspectives and contexts, as Les speaks to different groups and includes letters from a wide variety of people.
:cat-trans:
