Please see Styx thread on the Registered Shipmates consultation for the main discussion forums - your views are important, continues until April 4th.

Epiphanies 2019: TERFs, gender, sex, etc.

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Comments

  • As you can probably work out from the times of posting, my last comment was prepared before KarlLB's last comment and posted before I had chance to read KarlLB's comment. As I said. I haven't time now to develop matters further.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    I don't think the syllogism is as simple as you put it. Let's for the moment accept the first line and look at the second.


    [please don't use or repeat this analogy - thanks! L Epiphanies Host]
    Is it not better put that God does is create people who later turn out to be liars, thieves and murderers?
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    MaryLouise wrote: »
    Pomona wrote: »
    Also re @Steve Langton 's comments, it is only ever cis people who use the term 'sex change' and trans people simply do not see hormones and surgery as some kind of switch that changes their sex or gender. Most trans people would say that they were always their gender, it was others who assigned them as a different gender. I would say that 'sex change' and other terminology that places surgery (typically genital surgery) as being at the heart of what it means to be trans are very inaccurate and borderline offensive - I'm aware that they are often meant innocently, but it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what being trans means that particularly harms trans women and directly plays into the 'you're not a real woman unless you have a vagina' trope.

    Trans people themselves usually just talk about individual surgeries, often talking about 'top surgery' and 'lower surgery'. Remember that most trans people don't really want to talk about the state of their genitals in public, or with a stranger. Don't ask people if they've had 'the surgery' - for a start, which surgery??

    This. A trans friend of mine in Cape Town posted on social media last week that for them to be transgender is to feel the need to move across the socially imposed boundaries of your assigned sex at birth. Trans agency is the ability to change what your body means to yourself and others

    This is well said. It strikes me that anti-trans people often focus on anatomy, and declare that identity stems from this. This seems very old fashioned and patriarchal, as if we are all walking penises and wombs. Incredible that some feminists favour this.

    There is a tendency to focus on surgery amongst transphobes. Lots of talk about "mutilation" which I suppose helps to engage negative emotions.

    I keep thinking of Freud and "anatomy is destiny". How incredible that some feminists seem to echo this.
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    If we take for argument the (yet to be confirmed) proposition that God makes all people as they are, and the obvious situation that some people are "made" who don't fit into socially constructed definitions of "normal" (for the current discussion that could be the binary division of people into two genders assigned at birth - but, the same argument could be applied to sexuality, neurological status etc).

    The question is why do so many people seem to follow the argument that therefore God made some people "wrong"? Why not question whether the social construct that they don't fit into is the problem?
  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    To my mind, the point of Freud's argument is to assert that we are not entirely defined by our conscious will. We don't have entirely free and unmotivated choice as to who we are.

    The other point which merits some consideration is that cisgender people experience gender too, and that can be expressed as one of radical harmony between body mind and spirit. It seems to me that some cisgen people are trying in good faith to extend that experience of harmony to trans people by using a narrative of healing and restoration of harmony through surgery. Potentially offensive but not necessarily in bad faith.
  • I'm not necessarily supporting either argument. I'm just trying to get away from the idea that the speaker is per se sufficient grounds for dismissing the argument
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    [please do not repeat or use this analogy L Epiphanies Host ]
    Gee D wrote: »
    I don't think the syllogism is as simple as you put it. Let's for the moment accept the first line and look at the second. Is it not better put that God does is create people who later turn out to be liars, thieves and murderers?

    Thing is, people make themselves into liars, thieves and murderers by choosing to lie, steal and kill. They can stop being such by ceasing to lie, steal and kill. It's less what they are and more what they do.

    Trans people do not choose to make themselves Trans. They discover that they are.
  • TubbsTubbs Admin Emeritus
    If we take for argument the (yet to be confirmed) proposition that God makes all people as they are, and the obvious situation that some people are "made" who don't fit into socially constructed definitions of "normal" (for the current discussion that could be the binary division of people into two genders assigned at birth - but, the same argument could be applied to sexuality, neurological status etc).

    The question is why do so many people seem to follow the argument that therefore God made some people "wrong"? Why not question whether the social construct that they don't fit into is the problem?

    Because it neatly sidesteps the fact that if God made all people as they are, it also includes a dash of whatever we all got after the apple was eaten. (However you want to describe that). Making us all "wrong".

    They're really arguing that they're "right" and safe, superior, deserving of all the things. Unlike those "wrong" people over there. It's rooted in arrogance, control and fear.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    [assuming you missed host post due to timing- this analogy is off limits - ta. L Epiphanies Host]
    KarlLB wrote: »
    In the light of @Steve Langton 's clarification of his view, albeit in the Styx "Is Epiphanies Underused?" thread, I would like to observe that:
    ]
    a) Christian belief is that all people are created by God;
    b) Trans people exist;

    Therefore:

    c) Christian belief is that God creates Trans people.

    To rebut this, one must posit that either a, or b, or both are false.



    Which one are you claiming is false, @Steve Langton?

    Haven't time for now to follow this up fully and obviously I'm rethinking how to present things within the advice from Hosts and Admin. But as a starter for the discussion from what KarlLB has said there....

    a) Christian belief is that all people are created by God;
    b) Liars, thieves and murderers exist;

    Therefore;

    c) Christian belief is that God creates liars, thieves and murderers.

    Therefore it's not quite that simple....
    (I am not, BTW, equating trans people with liars etc - that also is not quite that simple....)

    Obviously people are welcome to look at the Styx thread; but here in this thread I would want to develop that point in a more gradual way with more background argument. What I said in Styx was rather stark to make a narrow point quickly, and doesn't fully represent my views overall.

    You have not pointed out any logical flaw in the conclusion. You've merely indulged in some whataboutery.
    Fred is a liar, a thief and a murderer.

    Does this mean God did not create Fred? No, it does not. In that sense, God does indeed create liars, thieves and murderers. So even by that definition, God still creates Trans people.

    However, lying, stealing and killing is something Fred has chosen to do. They are not intrinsic to him. Christian belief (the context here) is that all people carry the Imago Dei and all people are created to live up to that rather than to a marred version thereof.


    To posit that your version of the syllogism corresponds with mine, you would have to posit that being Trans is also a chosen behaviour, and similar a marring of the Imago Dei. However, this contradicts the reported experience of Trans people. The choice they have is to live their experienced gender or that assigned at birth; as I understand it (not being Trans) they do not have choice over what their experienced gender actually is.

  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host
    edited September 2021
    Hosting
    Please do not use offensive analogies and then try to hedge them after the fact. Also could other folk not repeat offensive analogies made by other posters? Thanks.

    Also please do not bring offensive material posted in The Styx under different rules into this thread.

    Thanks very much.
    Louise

    Epiphanies Host

    Hosting off
  • PomonaPomona Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    To my mind, the point of Freud's argument is to assert that we are not entirely defined by our conscious will. We don't have entirely free and unmotivated choice as to who we are.

    The other point which merits some consideration is that cisgender people experience gender too, and that can be expressed as one of radical harmony between body mind and spirit. It seems to me that some cisgen people are trying in good faith to extend that experience of harmony to trans people by using a narrative of healing and restoration of harmony through surgery. Potentially offensive but not necessarily in bad faith.

    Yes, I certainly agree that many cis people use the 'healing and restoration of harmony through surgery' narrative in good faith.

    Part of the problem is that so much trans research was destroyed by the Nazis - that famous photo of Nazis burning books is actually a photo of them burning books about trans identity and research, from Max Hirschfield's library. Research into trans issues literally had to be restarted from the ground up after WWII, and in a much different political climate than in Weimar Germany. Until relatively recently it was a *requirement* for a trans person to be attracted to the 'opposite' gender in order to get a gender dysphoria diagnosis - the concept of eg a gay trans man or trans lesbian was not considered by cis gender clinicians to exist, despite LGB trans people being very common. Trans women would be denied hormones because they turned up to a gender clinic appointment wearing jeans. The emphasis on surgery and particularly genitals is driven by a cis medical view of trans people, it's not something trans people want or have created. In the UK, the GIC process (gender identity clinic, who you must see in order to get a gender recognition certificate) still involves a great deal of frankly inappropriate and irrelevant questioning by clinicians (who are all cis - there aren't a lot of gender clinicians in the UK) even if the trans person doesn't want surgery at all. It's a standard part of the assessment to ask the trans patient how they masturbate - as in, asking them to describe how they physically perform the act of masturbation. And yet it's trans people, trans women especially, who get accused of being sexual predators.
  • Thank you, Pomona, for that. I didn't know that stuff about the Nazis.
  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host

    hosting
    Hi Steve Langton,
    the admins have said that you will get shore leave if you pursue the line of argument indicated in your Styx posts

    Therefore that line of argument cannot be imported or pursued on this board.
    Thanks
    Louise
    Epiphanies Host

    hosting
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    @Pomona, glad to see that aspect of trans erasure discussed. When I was doing some background study on Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, I came across the unpublished and suppressed archives relating to his gay relationship with German Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach, who had been influenced by Max Hirshfeld's late 19th-century studies in same-sex and non-binary relationships that would be explored in Hirshfeld's book Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (The Homosexuality of Men and Women). That Hirshfeld as a social scientist saw queer relations as normal and natural gave both Gandhi and Kallenbach a theoretical basis for rejecting racist and homophobic attitudes in a colony of the British Empire.
  • GwaiGwai Epiphanies Host
    @Pomona Your words combined with something else I read recently just gave me an insight about myself. Thank you. A while ago ago on the very messy thread that exploded and eventually inspired the creation of Epiphanies Lamb Chopped asked me a very sensible question that I couldn't answer. She basically asked me what being nonbinary meant. She noted that if it just meant not particularly feeling gendered than a lot of cis people are nonbinary.

    That was before I came out as nonbinary myself though I was thinking about it, wondering whether I should/could. Well, @Lamb Chopped if you are still interested, I can finally answer your question, at least as far as it relates to me. I'm nonbinary because the concept of woman/girlhood that I was born trying to fit into binds and restricts me. Binary gender isn't just neutral. It's clothes that don't fit and get in the way, chafing and rubbing.
  • I see the court of appeal has overturned the prior judgment, by the high court, that people under 16 could not consent to puberty blockers and other medication. This is not a surprise, as the ban ran counter to various Gillick laws in the UK, i.e. that children can ask for contraception, etc. I think this applies to vaccinations also, i.e. parental consent not required. The right wing will be gnashing their teeth, I expect another appeal.
  • Sorry, that is, consent without parental approval was blocked previously.
  • DoublethinkDoublethink Admin, 8th Day Host
    It was always a dodgy decision, in that they were saying children who could be judged able to choose to take hormones to avoid pregnancy - could not be judged able to take hormones to delay puberty. It was always logically incoherent on those grounds I think.
  • It was always a dodgy decision, in that they were saying children who could be judged able to choose to take hormones to avoid pregnancy - could not be judged able to take hormones to delay puberty. It was always logically incoherent on those grounds I think.

    I think it's been seen as a horror show decision by many people, running counter to Gillick, for example. Now it will go to the Supreme Court, and the transphobes will be ranting and raving, no names no pack drill.
  • Also, there has been the fear that rolling back Gillick on this could lead to rolling back on other issues, e.g., abortion and contraception, never mind vaccination.
  • edited September 2021
    Some Christian people decidedly do not believe this simple idea:
    KarlLB wrote: »
    a) Christian belief is that all people are created by God;
    I don't. Without too much space taken up, some believe that humanity is corrupted by sin such that distortions of ideal humanity are commonplace.

    Others like me believe that genetic potentials are massively influenced by environmental triggers (social, cultural, familial) such that all kinds of diversity is normal for humans. Epigenetic it's called. Human development throughout the lifespan is a team project of genetic potentials, influences of experiences and interactions during life, having the ability and power to express what is felt as real and true, with endless feedback loops.

    God? She/He/choose your pronoun, is spectator. Set it in motion, disregards the quiet interactions of DNA and all the biomolecular consequences of environmental and experiential triggers for gene expression.
  • Gwai wrote: »
    @Pomona Your words combined with something else I read recently just gave me an insight about myself. Thank you. A while ago ago on the very messy thread that exploded and eventually inspired the creation of Epiphanies Lamb Chopped asked me a very sensible question that I couldn't answer. She basically asked me what being nonbinary meant. She noted that if it just meant not particularly feeling gendered than a lot of cis people are nonbinary.

    That was before I came out as nonbinary myself though I was thinking about it, wondering whether I should/could. Well, @Lamb Chopped if you are still interested, I can finally answer your question, at least as far as it relates to me. I'm nonbinary because the concept of woman/girlhood that I was born trying to fit into binds and restricts me. Binary gender isn't just neutral. It's clothes that don't fit and get in the way, chafing and rubbing.

    I find this very interesting, as many of my clients in therapy expressed disquiet with gender. I don't know how many would use the term nonbinary. For myself, I always found the notions of manhood/masculinity oppressive and claustrophobic. But where does one go? I don't know, and that seems OK at the moment.
  • PomonaPomona Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    Nonbinary is also an umbrella term, so many use more specific terminology like neutrois (-trois as in third gender), genderqueer, genderfluid etc. Gender has always been a spectrum rather than a binary, and includes those who may not identify specifically as trans or nonbinary but equally are not cis - eg, butch lesbians for whom that functions both as gender as well as sexuality. I would really recommend the book Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg if you are interested in gender identity and the questions that come up around that.
  • DoublethinkDoublethink Admin, 8th Day Host
    edited September 2021
    It could be argued that the function of gender has changed from; being a way of non-verbally signalling your sexual, romantic and social role preferences, to being a form of self-expression. In other words, fulfilling a different social function than gender did in our society 100 years ago.
  • Gwai wrote: »
    @Pomona Your words combined with something else I read recently just gave me an insight about myself. Thank you. A while ago ago on the very messy thread that exploded and eventually inspired the creation of Epiphanies Lamb Chopped asked me a very sensible question that I couldn't answer. She basically asked me what being nonbinary meant. She noted that if it just meant not particularly feeling gendered than a lot of cis people are nonbinary.

    That was before I came out as nonbinary myself though I was thinking about it, wondering whether I should/could. Well, @Lamb Chopped if you are still interested, I can finally answer your question, at least as far as it relates to me. I'm nonbinary because the concept of woman/girlhood that I was born trying to fit into binds and restricts me. Binary gender isn't just neutral. It's clothes that don't fit and get in the way, chafing and rubbing.

    I don't generally post in Epiphanies, but since you mentioned this, well... it was actually via PM as I recall, as I didn't want to upset anybody, but what I wanted to know was if it was primarily not fitting the social expectations of the gender (in which case we ought to sink even more effort into changing those expectations, as it seems to me cruel to force individuals to choose between personal change and suffering when it's a societal oppression causing most of the pain) or if it were something innate--some sort of "marker" on the soul which I myself happen to lack altogether. In which case I myself would be agender. You see then why I have a personal interest. Not that it would make any difference to my life at present, as I've basically told everybody to fuck off who has a problem with my nontypical gender behavior, and by and large, they have (fucked off, I mean).
  • I find this very interesting, as many of my clients in therapy expressed disquiet with gender. I don't know how many would use the term nonbinary. For myself, I always found the notions of manhood/masculinity oppressive and claustrophobic. But where does one go? I don't know, and that seems OK at the moment.

    I tend to get lost trying to think about the difference between identity and behaviour. To me, @Gwai's description sounds more like not wanting to fit gendered behaviour norms, but I think that's because I don't really completely grasp the difference between identity and behaviour.

    Behaviour is easy - it's the things that you do, or want to do. It's observable, and concrete. We say that identity is something different from behaviour - that someone can be a cis woman and reject societal expectations of female behaviour, or they can also be non-binary, and reject those same expectations, and that those things are different: I confess that I have a difficult time really understanding what identity is.

    I understand "I want to have a different body" - that's an observable change. I understand "I want to behave in these ways". But I'm told that identity isn't either of those things, and may not involve either of those things, and it's hard for me to get my head round what identity means once you disconnect it from anything physical. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I don't know what the statement "I think I am a man" actually means.
  • Identity may be those things, it also might not be. It's different for different individuals. I think actually it's not too far off discussions of works vs faith, if that makes any sense?? As in, why for some people a different body obviously flows from a different identity, but for others they're not logically connected in the same way. There's also the often-neglected idea of gender euphoria, the opposite of gender dysphoria - it can be connected to an opposite action/item/body part etc that brings on gender dysphoria, but it doesn't have to. It's basically the feeling of being very happy and connected to your gender in that moment and via that action/item/object etc.

    I honestly think that the biggest obstacle to the sexuality debates within the C of E are down to a huge lack of understanding and insight (including self-insight) from cishet people with regards to gender and identity - which I mean in a broad sense, including everyone since all people are gendered in some way even by others if not by themselves. It's quite hard to discuss why trans people might or might not want a different body if cis people haven't thought about why they do or don't want a different body. I don't mean that in response to you specifically @Leorning Cniht but using it as an example. Many cishet people go through life never ever questioning their sexuality or gender, and for many trans people that is such an incomprehensible idea that it's difficult to work out how to discuss gender with someone who has had that experience. I say sexuality or gender because many trans people (not all) experience a change in or change in emphasis of sexuality during/as a result of transition. For example I know many many trans men who previously identified as lesbians who now identify as gay men (I'm not one of them).
  • Gwai wrote: »
    @Pomona Your words combined with something else I read recently just gave me an insight about myself. Thank you. A while ago ago on the very messy thread that exploded and eventually inspired the creation of Epiphanies Lamb Chopped asked me a very sensible question that I couldn't answer. She basically asked me what being nonbinary meant. She noted that if it just meant not particularly feeling gendered than a lot of cis people are nonbinary.

    That was before I came out as nonbinary myself though I was thinking about it, wondering whether I should/could. Well, @Lamb Chopped if you are still interested, I can finally answer your question, at least as far as it relates to me. I'm nonbinary because the concept of woman/girlhood that I was born trying to fit into binds and restricts me. Binary gender isn't just neutral. It's clothes that don't fit and get in the way, chafing and rubbing.

    Thanks for that ... as I'm non-binary.

    For many of us, non-binary can be a bit like being on a spectrum. Then the spectrum can be stable or unstable. For some non-binary people it's more akin to a 3-dimensional view on gender. For some it's an alternate universe, even for me.

    Some non-binary (gender-fluid, bi-gender) folks are "almost" pure binary trans-gender, just honest enough to admit it. Speaking as a non-binary person, some types of non-binary I can find hard to grasp too, it's not a homogenous identity by any means.

    Some binary trans people I know hide behind by calling themselves non-binary ... they'll only tell you this if you get very close to them. But I know more than a few, it makes life easier for them and I totally get it.

    I did a one-page slide on non-binary types which was widely shared (and critiqued!) on "Trans Twitter" a few years ago. I learned a huge amount doing it trust me. I can share if there is interest, and discuss.

    As I talked with more and more people, I learned to simply accepted their lived realities and cherish their complexities as (I hope) others will cherish mine too.

    And please, if not clear, never conflate transgender/non-binary folks gender(s) and their sexuality. This is really Rule #1.
  • Pomona wrote: »
    Identity may be those things, it also might not be. It's different for different individuals. I think actually it's not too far off discussions of works vs faith, if that makes any sense?? As in, why for some people a different body obviously flows from a different identity, but for others they're not logically connected in the same way.

    I get the idea that some people feel the need to modify their bodies and some don't. I think I see where you're going with works vs faith: someone might say "I am a Christian" as a statement of identity, without actually behaving in any way that looks outwardly Christian. We might think that they're not a very good Christian, if they're not behaving in a Christian way, but if they believe that Jesus Christ is God, then that's enough to be a Christian.

    The difficulty I have with the gender identity discussion is that this faith statement I made is an objective statement. It's a statement of belief about Christ. What's the objective reference for "I am a man"? I don't have a problem with the idea that some people might add "and therefore I want this operation" to their "I am a man" statement, and some wouldn't - that bit is fine. It's that first "I am a man" statement that I have trouble grasping.

    I mean - I can personally make the statement "I am a man", but when I say that, I mostly mean "XY chromosomes, penis, on average taller than women, ..." And perhaps that means that my sense of gender identity is sufficiently aligned with my biology that I don't notice it, or perhaps it means that I don't have a sense of gender identity at all - I don't know that those are distinguishable.

    I've gone through "if I could have been born with a different body" thought exercises, and there's several details about my body that I'd like to change. I'd like one with better skin, that tolerated hot weather better, and was a little less prone to saving up for a hard winter. But when I've imagined "what if I was born a girl", I've assumed that I'd have more or less my personality and intellect, but be a straight cis girl. And I can sort of imagine that - I can't imagine me, personally, being a girl, but it's easy enough to imagine a girl who was an alternate reality version of me. And she'd be me, but a bit shorter, have a female body, and be attracted to men.

    But if I imagine "would I change the body I've got", then the answer is no. It's fine. I could wish that there were things it did better, but that's just idle musing.
    Pomona wrote: »
    I don't mean that in response to you specifically @Leorning Cniht but using it as an example.

    You can poke at me as an example if you like, if it helps the discussion.
    Pomona wrote: »
    Many cishet people go through life never ever questioning their sexuality or gender, and for many trans people that is such an incomprehensible idea that it's difficult to work out how to discuss gender with someone who has had that experience.

    Perhaps this is why I have such trouble understanding what the statement "I am a man" means.

    I could imagine, for example, clustering people based on behaviour. Imagine recording how people behave in whatever circumstances, perform a principal component analysis, and plot the leading two or three components. I could imagine that you might have a clump of people who were mostly cis men, and a different clump of people who were mostly cis women, but it doesn't seem right to identify anyone close to the cis-man-dominated clump as a man.
  • Responding in general terms (ie not just to you, @JuanaCruz) well, also different trans and nonbinary people (not all nonbinary people identify as trans) view the terms differently to start with. For instance, there are people who identify as nonbinary men and nonbinary women but I wouldn't consider it appropriate to tell them that they're not nonbinary.

    I'm not nonbinary but personally reject the term 'binary trans' as I don't believe that gender is a binary in the first place. Something can't be both binary and a spectrum; I don't see how it's possible to acknowledge that gender isn't binary and then reinforce that by identifying as a specifically binary identity. If a code contains the number 2 then none of the numbers in it are written in binary, even if all the other numbers are 0s and 1s.
  • Pomona wrote: »
    Responding in general terms (ie not just to you, @JuanaCruz) well, also different trans and nonbinary people (not all nonbinary people identify as trans) view the terms differently to start with. For instance, there are people who identify as nonbinary men and nonbinary women but I wouldn't consider it appropriate to tell them that they're not nonbinary.

    I'm not nonbinary but personally reject the term 'binary trans' as I don't believe that gender is a binary in the first place. Something can't be both binary and a spectrum; I don't see how it's possible to acknowledge that gender isn't binary and then reinforce that by identifying as a specifically binary identity. If a code contains the number 2 then none of the numbers in it are written in binary, even if all the other numbers are 0s and 1s.

    Indeed, I fully understand, agree with all that 100%, for me it probably goes without saying. But yes I am guilty of over-simplifying.

    When you chat with someone who's gender identity sits completely outside the gender binary and is pansexual, you rapidly learn how much norms on attraction and partner choice are defined by cishet people. It's quite enlightening.

    I will see if I can (and host) find that slide on non-binary types, it tooks months of feedback and refinement via Twitter because it's a very sensitive area as you can imagine - lots of nuance in the trans/non-binary community.
  • JuanaCruzJuanaCruz Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    For those interested ... Non-Binary* or Gender-Queer** Identities (*/** both used as an umbrella term - open it to understand better)

    https://postimg.cc/ZCRcc7Tv
    ... if my hosting and posting works!

    While I know many non-binary people do not identify as trans, and some trans people would not agree that non-binary people are trans ... there was general acceptance on this slide after multiple iterations and conversations from a huge trans and enby crowd on Twitter.

  • ....
    The difficulty I have with the gender identity discussion is that this faith statement I made is an objective statement. It's a statement of belief about Christ. What's the objective reference for "I am a man"? ....

    "I believe I am a man."

    Given that very few of us have actually had our chromosomes checked and there are intersex people, people with differences in sex development, people who are chimeras, etc. it could be considered a faith statement in some cases.

  • JuanaCruzJuanaCruz Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    JuanaCruz wrote: »
    For those interested ... Non-Binary* or Gender-Queer** Identities (*/** both used as an umbrella term - open it to understand better)

    https://postimg.cc/ZCRcc7Tv
    ... if my hosting and posting works!

    Apologies, you may need to remove the first "https://"; to access it.

    Not sure if a Moderator can sort this out? I'm struggling and out of "Edit time" ...

    [I've fixed it. Cheers L]
  • ....
    The difficulty I have with the gender identity discussion is that this faith statement I made is an objective statement. It's a statement of belief about Christ. What's the objective reference for "I am a man"? ....

    "I believe I am a man."

    Given that very few of us have actually had our chromosomes checked and there are intersex people, people with differences in sex development, people who are chimeras, etc. it could be considered a faith statement in some cases.

    To turn it around 180%, for non-Christians how can a personal faith statement be any more "objective" than a gender statement by a trans or non-binary person? Unless you can only conceptualize that gender = biological sex ... which is true for many sadly.

    As a non-Christian, I trust and respect a Christian's faith statement and lived experience at face value and treat them accordingly, without challenging whether God is an imaginary contruct.
  • GwaiGwai Epiphanies Host
    I tend to get lost trying to think about the difference between identity and behaviour. To me, @Gwai's description sounds more like not wanting to fit gendered behaviour norms, but I think that's because I don't really completely grasp the difference between identity and behaviour.
    For years I thought that's what it was too. So I didn't change anything and tried to be a woman on my own terms. Finally during the pandemic I gave up bothering after finding how freeing it was when one person began using they pronouns etc. So I decided that though the terms were related, it was the being female that was a problem for me too. It's not logical in that surely the choices I feel now were available then. But it is what it is. I feel freer and happier as a nonbinary person, so it is right for me.
    Behaviour is easy - it's the things that you do, or want to do. It's observable, and concrete. We say that identity is something different from behaviour - that someone can be a cis woman and reject societal expectations of female behaviour, or they can also be non-binary, and reject those same expectations, and that those things are different: I confess that I have a difficult time really understanding what identity is.
    I think for me what's important is that I'm not a woman without having to be a man either. I asked mom in 3rd grade whether I could be a boy, but she said no. And I haven't seriously tried since. So that meant I had to try to be a girl and then a woman. Now I just have to be me, and that's easier, no trying involved. I am not dysphoric about my body. I don't want it to change. It's done me well this far. I just didn't want to have to be a woman just because it's my body.
  • GwaiGwai Epiphanies Host
    @Lamb Chopped The simplest answer is that I did nothing for as long as that was the easiest thing to do. As longing as it was as simple as not wearing dresses because they were wrong, that was all I did. If you are agender but don't care that anyone knows, don't want anything to change, maybe there's no point coming out.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    Gwai wrote: »
    @Lamb Chopped The simplest answer is that I did nothing for as long as that was the easiest thing to do. As longing as it was as simple as not wearing dresses because they were wrong, that was all I did. If you are agender but don't care that anyone knows, don't want anything to change, maybe there's no point coming out.

    I'm a bit confused--well, ALWAYS confused, which is nothing new or surprising. Answer--did I ask a question? Or do you mean my earlier question, or .... ? Forgive me, I'm very brain drained today.

    As for this bit, "If you are agender but don't care that anyone knows..." my point is that I don't know if I am agender. I still don't know what that means, really. I went from birth to age 53 or so blithely assuming that minds had no genders, had no species for that matter, that it was all simply Mind from God all the way down to bumblebees, and that things like gender, race and species were matters of the body. The only differences I ever perceived or believed in as far as mind (=nonphysical bit of people and other creatures) was that some were, shall we call it "bigger" than others? As God is bigger than a human being, and a human being than a bumblebee. And also of course the individual differences that experience leaves on everybody.

    I was vastly surprised when I heard people on the Ship talking as if a mind had a gender (to my knowledge, nobody yet has suggested it has a race, though I think we may have touched on species before). I then started asking questions, as try as I could, I simply could not imagine how a female/feminine mind would differ from a male one. I mean, there was all that ancient and medieval bullshit about women being incapable of certain things such as calculus or Latin or what have you, but that was well and truly exploded long ago, so never formed a part of my image of undifferentiated mind-stuff floating about the universe, if you see what I mean? It certainly did not explain this new idea (to me) that the nonphysical could be assigned male or female/masculine or feminine--unless one subscribes to the old essentialism or to yin/yang dualities,which are two totally different kettles of fish.

    So I then began to question, as I said. What is it that people are describing when they speak of themselves as being X in contradiction to their birth-assigned based-on-body gender? I figured it was either something innate (in which case I wanted to know, because I didn't have one, whatever it was!!!!!) or it was a case of ingrained social expectations forced upon people. There may be a third option I'm not seeing.

    And I asked you, and you were kind enough to share your thoughts with me. Now I've got one data point which seems to be in favor of social expectations, though correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to get other data points (=people's testimonies) but really don't enjoy the experience of misusing a phrase in all innocence and then getting my ass handed to me--which is why I really, really don't like posting here. (And I very much fear it's going to happen again on this thread, and I will kick myself for being fool enough to break my own policy in the hopes of learning something new.)

    I do not feel I have enough data to say that I'm either agender or not. I don't think I know what the hell I am. My previous position was that I was ... me. A mind and a body, the body being gendered. I was not disturbed by the gender of that body, and still am not. But after long and careful thought over many years (Star Trek started it, don't you know) I have always been of the opinion that if I were somehow miraculously translated into a male body, it would make no difference to my comfort level. Oh, it would be annoying to have to adjust to things like a different center of gravity and the weird reactions of others (who would also be told to fuck off, good all purpose expression in my life) but I doubt it would take me long to settle down in that transformation. I just don't care. Is that a thing? Is that agender? Or is that just being a care-for-nobody who yells "fuck off" rather a lot?

    I have enough other neurodivergences that it would not surprise me to learn that I am different from the norm in one more way--but if so, I really want to know what that norm is!!!! Because if gendered minds are a thing, I don't have one. And that leaves me like a color-blind person dying to know what red or green is.

  • Very interesting points from Leorning Cniht, about identity. I have always struggled with this, as it seems adjacent to essentialism. However, doing lots of meditation in 80s and 90s, I started to think in terms of identification, which made it easier (for me). I can see some of the things I identify with, not macho masculinity. Of course, this is notoriously complex, see Hemingway's apparent longings for the feminine. So one identification may conceal something else. Working as a therapist showed this big time, personality is like filo pastry.
  • I forgot to mention the use of plural nouns in gender studies, thus, "masculinities" was almost de rigeur. I found this useful, as it got away from the idea of monolithic identity. Hence, gender identities seems similar. This reminds me of Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes". What a genius.
  • I do not feel I have enough data to say that I'm either agender or not. I don't think I know what the hell I am ... I have enough other neurodivergences that it would not surprise me to learn that I am different from the norm in one more way--but if so, I really want to know what that norm is!!!! Because if gendered minds are a thing, I don't have one. And that leaves me like a color-blind person dying to know what red or green is.

    @Lamb Chopped my most useful shared experience is probably that to understand my gender-identity, I had to find similar people to talk with (there is of course a large an rather tight trans and non-binary community on Twitter, Reddit and no doubt other places).

    To cut a long-story short, I was lucky enough to acquire a friend and mentor along the way who was a similar age and recognised I was similar to them ... through many chats they helped me realise "roughly" where I was in terms of being non-binary, and why I had been so confused for so long, as they'd been through very similar until a few years ago.

    Having reached that point I made an effort to reach out to maybe 12-15 non-binary folks on Twitter who seemed to have the same gender identity to ask if by sharing their experiences, they could help. Almost all said yes and were wonderfully helpful and understanding.

    Maybe 2-3 were very similar to me and that's when I knew pretty closely my gender identity. It was like talking to a couple of long-lost sisters, there is no other way I can describe it ... because we shared almost exactly the same experience of gender. I could say things they'd immediately grasp, and vice versa.

    Words like "Agender" can mean slightly different thing to different people. "Gender-fluid" and "bi-gender often" get conflated and so on and so on. If you start talking to enough people in the community ... my experience is you'll find help and guidance ... and that there are others like you.

    Happy to share a lot more if you feel it can help you, but definitely would have to be on PM!

  • Thank you, but the thing is, I'm perfectly happy as I am. It's an academic interest only--a rather intense one, but probably not one worthy of disturbing folk with it.
  • MarsupialMarsupial Shipmate
    edited September 2021
    I understand "I want to have a different body" - that's an observable change. I understand "I want to behave in these ways". But I'm told that identity isn't either of those things, and may not involve either of those things, and it's hard for me to get my head round what identity means once you disconnect it from anything physical. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I don't know what the statement "I think I am a man" actually means.

    I think the language of gender identity may be part of the problem here, because it's ambigious between a finished product ("I identify as a man") and one of its component parts, which is a subjective internal sense of gender. The other part of the problem is that people usually seem to notice the existence of this subjective sense of gender in themselves only when it is at odds with our anatomy and/or our gendered interactions with other people.

    Based on my own experience as a nonbinary person navigating a mostly cisgender world, I'm pretty sure that generally speaking cisgender people have some subjective experience of gender just as much as everyone else does. But cisgender people seem to have great difficulty parsing out their subjective internal sense of gender from the other things that make them identify consistently with their natal sex. Or otherwise put, if your visible anatomy is telling you you're male and your interactions with other men are confirming this as well then it may be hard to hear your brain* telling you it thinks the same thing.

    (*or whatever it is that creates this subjective sense of gender)

    We don't have the same problem with minority sexual orientations because of most of understand the concept of sexual attraction from our own experience. So the idea that somebody might be sexually attracted to someone of the same sex is a thinkable thought even for people who disapprove of homosexuality.

    I can't speak to anyone else's subjective experience, but I think it's highly likely that there is wide range of subjective experience of gender that is consistent with identifying as female, and which may be felt much more strongly in some people than in others. And likewise, a wide range of subjective experience of gender that is consistent with identifying with male. So as Pomona says, even "binary" gender isn't really binary.
  • ....
    The difficulty I have with the gender identity discussion is that this faith statement I made is an objective statement. It's a statement of belief about Christ. What's the objective reference for "I am a man"? ....

    "I believe I am a man."

    Right, but what is "man"?

    JuanaCruz wrote: »
    As a non-Christian, I trust and respect a Christian's faith statement and lived experience at face value and treat them accordingly, without challenging whether God is an imaginary contruct.

    You may or may not think that God is an imaginary construct, but we could agree on a rough definition of what the word "God" means, without reference to whether or not He actually exists.

    Do we have a non-circular definition of what a "man" is? I can sort of imagine starting with the assumption that most people are cis, so you take the set of XY penis-owners, and look at what most of them have in common, and what they tend not to share with XX vagina-owners, and label one thing "man" and the other thing "woman" - but I think that's just the behaviour-based principal component analysis that I mentioned earlier.

    I think you can, at least in theory, do this with behaviour, and get a consistent and non-circular answer, and I'm guessing what you get is a cluster that you label "man", an cluster that you label "woman", and some scattered people elsewhere on the map who you could label as various sort of agender, or other non-binary categories.

    But then that's all about behaviour, which isn't what we really want. I can imagine that a similar analysis looking at self-perception rather than behaviour might arrive at a non-circular definition of gender, but I don't think I know how to think about framing the sort of questions one would ask in a non-circular way.
    Marsupial wrote: »
    We don't have the same problem with minority sexual orientations because of most of understand the concept of sexual attraction from our own experience. So the idea that somebody might be sexually attracted to someone of the same sex is a thinkable thought even for people who disapprove of homosexuality.

    It's objectively definable, even if the person doesn't "understand" the attraction. I have a friend who identifies as asexual - she does not feel sexual attraction to anyone. But even though she has no personal reference or experience for what sexual attraction is, she can define all kinds of different sexualities in objective terms. She may not understand sexual attraction at an instinctive level, but she certainly understands what it is intellectually (and that she doesn't have it.)

    That's sort of what I'm trying to do with gender, I think. I don't think I have a sense of my mind having a gender - whether that's because I have one, but as you suggest, it's sufficiently aligned with my biology that I don't notice, or whether it's more like @Lamb Chopped's ungendered mind inhabiting gendered body, I don't know - I don't know how anyone would tell the difference. So I'm trying to get an intellectual handle on what "I am this gender" means, and am struggling.

  • Very interesting points from Leorning Cniht, about identity. I have always struggled with this, as it seems adjacent to essentialism. However, doing lots of meditation in 80s and 90s, I started to think in terms of identification, which made it easier (for me). I can see some of the things I identify with, not macho masculinity. Of course, this is notoriously complex, see Hemingway's apparent longings for the feminine. So one identification may conceal something else. Working as a therapist showed this big time, personality is like filo pastry.

    You mean, all a bit flaky, and you have to dig into your pie get to the real meat underneath?

    I totally agree we don't "become" trans or non-binary, we discover it, or stop ourselves hiding it, or become tired of hiding it. 5 years ago I could not have said that. In fact I would have been trying to bake another layer of filo or two on top to conceal who I was ;-)

    Physical dysphoria and desire to change one's body is a result of gender identity, not a causation of gender identity. As one explores one's gender identity more deeply, the need for bodily change may increase or decrease.

    The problem with my "pie" metaphor is that if one assumes a kind of inate identity "the real meat", one would assume it includes both gender and sexuality surely? Yet I fully know that Transitioning can and does cause changes in sexuality in some people, including a friend. So that implies either that -

    - we actually have a kind of inate gender-sexuality identity pairing? (my own assumption tbh)
    - or that sexual identity is more flexible than we think because it does change for some during and after Transition ... we just don't know why?
    - or that a cathartic process of Transition allows other repressions to be released? (I suspect this would be the view of psychosexual professionals)

    Yeah, you got me thinking on what is "identity" too now!
  • I forgot to mention the use of plural nouns in gender studies, thus, "masculinities" was almost de rigeur. I found this useful, as it got away from the idea of monolithic identity. Hence, gender identities seems similar. This reminds me of Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes". What a genius.

    He kinda nabbed that from the Gadarene Demoniac.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    mousethief wrote: »
    I forgot to mention the use of plural nouns in gender studies, thus, "masculinities" was almost de rigeur. I found this useful, as it got away from the idea of monolithic identity. Hence, gender identities seems similar. This reminds me of Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes". What a genius.

    He kinda nabbed that from the Gadarene Demoniac.

    /Tangent with some relevance/

    Nope, @mousethief, Whitman's inspiration was not the exorcism of Legion in the New Testament. He was looking back to the original literary protean shape-shifter Odysseus, the 'person of many twists and turns' who takes on or becomes numerous identities in the wanderings of the Odyssey. Including a 'non-self' when he names himself 'Nobody' in order to trick the blinded Cyclops in the cave.

    /end Tangent/
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    I've found an intersectional approach to be helpful in considering questions of how we come to accept or question identities. Thinking about @quetzalcoatl's metaphor of the layers of phyllo or filo pastry, that analogy works well in one way but doesn't allow for the conflicts and contradictions many of us experience in finding ourselves positioned as simultaneously misgendered, racialised, diaspora in exile, using 'crip' strategies to counter ableism, countering linguistic losses and splitting, trying to develop a sense of selves both personal and in solidarity with others.

    As someone born into a colonial society in Africa, it bothers me that the loss of my mother tongue Shona still haunts me so much and how much discomfort I have with the cultural arrogance implicit in English, Portuguese and French. As children we were not allowed to speak Shona at home or at school after the age of five because it wasn't a 'real' language. Anyone who speaks a number of languages (and not by choice) has to deal with a plurality of selves since language provides the social codes and code-switches that we have to mimic or borrow in order to present ourselves as not defined by place of origin or poor linguistic performance. Redefining gender for me has been bound up with retrieving a stigmatised non-self from an erased language. For years I've had an autofiction by the queer Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff on my bedside table as inspiration: Claiming an Identity They Taught Me To Despise.

    What @LambChopped wrote about the ungendered mind resonates for me because as a child I discovered that in books I could read without limitations imposed and nobody could tell me how to read as a girl or stop me from reading my favourite authors as androgynous, other unlimited minds making sense of this fractured reality or finding beauty in unlikely places. Encountering their voices on the page was a pathway to finding my own muted or stifled voice speaking back to those great generous minds around me.
  • DafydDafyd Hell Host
    MaryLouise wrote: »
    Whitman's inspiration was not the exorcism of Legion in the New Testament. He was looking back to the original literary protean shape-shifter Odysseus, the 'person of many twists and turns' who takes on or becomes numerous identities in the wanderings of the Odyssey.
    Why do you think that? Whitmsn isn't Joyce or Walcott. I'd thought an explicit allusion to the Odyssey would be at odds with Whitman's program of making a completely new poetry for a new world. I think that program was impossible, but even so the antecedents seem sufficiently explained by Emerson's interpretation of German idealism. I'd add Wordsworth's Prelude but actually IIRC that was published after Leaves of Grass.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    @Davyd, Whitman talks about how Ulysses or Odysseus was a model for him in the later Civil War letters, though I doubt I'd find the exact reference now. A couple of years ago I did a couple of refresher online courses through University of Iowa on Whitman's Song of Myself and his Civil War letters and lecturer Christopher Merrill mentioned the influence of the Odyssey. Yes, Whitman was interested in making new poetry for a new emerging society but he didn't arrive without being indebted to some older mentors and metaphors.
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