What is gender, anyway?

Originally published by Sarah Ditum at the New Statesman

This can be perplexing terrain, in which it’s not at all clear that everyone is speaking the same language, although they might be using the same words. In popular usage, “gender” is often simply a synonym for “sex”, and it’s unquestioned that “woman” and “female”, and “man” and “male” are naturally and irrevocably paired. (This could be called the essentialist account, or “gender is in one’s pants”.) Essentialism comes in slightly more sophisticated variants too, and one current proponent is Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, who has written extensively on what he calls “the essential difference”, claiming that the male brain is inherently systematising and the female brain inherently empathising, leading to a natural division of roles on the basis of a physical difference. (Baron-Cohen does allow that “not all men have the male brain, and not all women have the female brain”, but the fact that “systematising” roles occupied by men tend to be well-paid and prestigious, while “empathising” ones performed by women are less valuable or even entirely unpaid, is regarded as an unfortunate coincidence.)

Feminist analysis has vigorously challenged that view.

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The relentless tide of sex stereotypes

Originally posted at Purple Sage

Another day, another article about a child who is being taught that she is the opposite sex because she likes the wrong things. May 18th’s victim of gender roles is Shanice/Shane, who is a girl who likes “boys’ things,” and is therefore being transitioned to a boy. The 1950s-style sexism in this article is enough to make me vomit. I swear, somebody somewhere is being paid to churn out these articles daily and they’re required to include as many sex stereotypes as possible. It’s all part of the public relations campaign for traditional gender roles and expensive surgeries.

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Birth wars: the politics of childbirth

Originally published by Glosswitch at the New Statesman

To be of woman born is a universal experience, yet women themselves remain a diffuse, fractured group. “What is a woman, anyway?” is still considered a deep, meaningful question to ask. The polite answer is, of course, “whatever anyone wants it to be”. More than that would close off the vessel, seal the hole, glue back together the broken shell. There’s a sense in which women are simply not meant to be whole. We need to be in pieces so that men can survive intact.

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What I Needed: An Open Letter to Therapists from a Detransitioner

Originally posted at Youth Trans Critical Professionals

The main thing I wish were different about the therapy I received before and during my transition is I wish my therapists had been trauma competent.

I was in therapy right after my college rape. I was in therapy for the many years I was wondering if I was some kind of trans. I was in therapy when I decided I was trans and needed to get my letters for hormones and surgery.

All three therapists knew about my college rape. All three therapists knew about my stressful childhood in a home with daily violence. The second two therapists knew about me going through an experience of being virally hated on on the internet. Looking back, knowing about dissociative states, it’s crystal clear that was a traumatic experience I had classic trauma reactions to- dissociation, depression, anxiety, avoidance. We talked over my rape. We talked over my childhood. We talked over a pack of strangers hating me on the internet. We talked and talked and talked.

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Why I Won’t Accept The Politics Of Gender Identity

Originally published by The Morning Star

THE concept of gender identity is being enshrined into law in several countries now, giving new legal protections to transgender people on the basis of their identities.

In the United States, the Obama administration recently signed a declaration that all public schools in the country must recognise the gender identity of their students.

Canada has recently announced new legal protections for transgender people. In Britain, there is interest growing in allowing people to legally define their own gender.

As a person on the political left and as a member of the LGBT community, I am expected to applaud these changes to legislation, but instead I am critical.

This is because the concept of gender identity is poorly defined, and the politics of transgenderism is harmful to women and girls and rooted in individualism rather than collective action.

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Arson at Canada’s only sex change clinic

Originally posted at Purple Sage

Recently an arsonist set fire to Canada’s only sex change clinic, located in Montreal, and caused $700,000 worth of damage. Pro-trans journalists speculated that it was a hate crime and that it was evidence of transphobia. It was immediately obvious to me that the person who set this fire was a former patient. Gender critical feminists aren’t setting fire to surgery clinics, and neither are right-wing conservatives. We simply don’t believe that men are women, but we have no desire to physically harm anyone or damage property because of our beliefs. The people who tend to terrorize others and cause trouble are male-to-female transsexuals—the autogynephile type.

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I fought for civil rights. It is offensive to compare it with the transgender fight.

Originally published at The Charlotte Observer

Let us be clear: HB2 cannot be compared to the injustice of Jim Crow. In fact, it is insulting to liken African Americans’ continuing struggle for equality in America to the liberals’ attempt to alter society’s accepted norms.

Recently, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch compared HB2 to Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws were put into place to keep an entire race positioned as second-class citizens. HB2 simply says that men and women should use the restroom of their biological sex in government buildings and schools. This comparison is highly offensive and utterly disrespectful to those families and individuals who have shed blood and lost lives to advance the cause of civil rights. I take this as a personal slap in the face because I was an active participant in the civil rights movement.

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My Canuck Sisters, Say Goodbye

Originally posted at Mancheeze

Internal experiences and sensations are not material realities and cannot be legislated. Gender resides in your psychology. It’s interesting they use the term ‘sense.’ We can’t legislate senses because they are highly inaccurate. Also if ‘there are a variety’ of individual experiences of gender, which ones matter?

Moving onto ‘Gender expression’ we see the words ‘behaviour’ and ‘appearance.’ A person’s behaviour and appearance aren’t connected to a person’s sex.  Sex is independent of gender. You cannot change your clothes in order to change your sex. You are born a sex that is clearly defined and immutable.

Gender is independent of sex. Gender is an invented concept of patriarchy. It’s a hierarchy with ‘femininity’ at the bottom and ‘masculinity’ on top. Gender behaviours and appearances are learned, and it means they can be unlearned. A female infant is not born with a predilection to play with dolls or wear pink. She is taught that this is her ROLE. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but this is mainly for people who don’t understand the differences.

Feminism rejects gender because it teaches females behaviours and attitudes that are detrimental to our freedoms as human beings.

Transactivists are enforcing gender stereotypes ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity.’ They’re saying if a boy plays with dolls, flicks his long hair, and claims he’s a girl, he really is a girl.

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A Bathroom of One’s Own?

Originally published at The New York Times

Relatively few Americans considered bathroom access a civil rights issue until last week. They deserve to hear the arguments pro and con before making up their own minds. Much remains to be said and learned about the issue; truncating this conversation just as it is beginning is wrong (and arguably violates the Administrative Procedure Act).

Here are just a few questions that people might have asked before making up their minds. How uncomfortable are people with the prospect of those with different anatomies sharing their bathrooms? Is this discomfort likely to grow or decline? Since gender identity cannot be confirmed before entering bathrooms, how great is the risk of voyeurism or other abuses? How costly will it be to provide gender-neutral bathrooms, and how would people of all genders feel about such alternatives? Will market pressures such as the boycotts against North Carolina’s bathroom regulation produce a better mix of solutions than the government’s one size fits all?

And how many transgender people actually experience indignity when using traditional bathrooms, and what is the nature of this indignity? Discomfort about using a urinal when men at nearby urinals think one is a woman? Annoyance at having to wait for a stall to conceal one’s anatomy?

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Is “Trans” predicative?

Originally posted at The Big Board

I think the term “woman” is, or should be, predicative. Yes, there is a bit of vagueness to “woman” if you want to split hairs. But I think it’s pretty clear that folk-prototypes across a lot of cultures are in close agreement about who women are. The sophistry of genderists thrives in this narrow band of vagueness, but I can’t see how a boy born with a wang and nads who made a career of doing male stuff in the Olympics is going to be able to break through that vagueness barrier and be near the core concept of “woman” just because of what he thinks or what he wants to do.

The whole point is that “trans” is attributive and not predicative in the senses logicians use those terms. X is a trans woman does not simply imply that X is a woman by logical structure. “Trans women are women” is not axiomatic the way some think it is. “Trans” is not a clear subset of “women”, and may not be a subset of women at all. I think it isn’t.

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