blinkandwheeze posted:that's the point, there are hegemonic positions in marginal social spaces which are conditioned and reinforced by bourgeois-patriarchal society
the point is that they're only "hegemonic" if its your job to take it seriously, i.e. as academic. most LGBT people have other jobs, which require them to take other, more directly hegemonic positions more seriously
by the same measure, this could just as easily be a discussion about the dunk-culture and pathological communication styles fostered by social media per se. if we want to discuss why some people might slot into that posture easily on this topic, ζη€ posed some plausible reasons.
for my part, i've seen the "sex is made up" idea a few times β certainly not as "orthodoxy," in my experience, but i can't speak to anyone else's. but i hear it as more of a cathartic expression that maybe has bled outward from its original in-group loci by way of memes. it may be that poe's law takes root there, and some folks overshoot. maybe that's inevitable.
to my understanding, the point is not that sex is meaningless or make-believe, but rather that sex is socially understood through the prism of gender, a necessary dialectical inversion of the "gender derives from sex" convention. coming to terms with this doesn't abolish sex, but it does suggest that reciprocal work must be done on both ends. in particular, i find a lot of promise in the idea that gender is best understood as a kind of semiotic system.
if someone has more nuanced ideas about "trans ideology" being a phrase with non-pejorative semantic content when discussing some liberal-hegemonic strain, that's fine and dandy. but it feels like an equivocation, in this case; to see the sort of thing i was actually referencing, a quick web search is illustrative:
Skylark posted:i hope that you will all have a very merry christmas. π Ho ho ho
likewise, unreservedly!
Edited by Constantignoble ()
c_man posted:second, my main point is that intra-LGBT debates are often relatively easy to avoid, even for LGBT individuals, because of their marginal status (relative to the pressures on LGBT life), often highly local nature (even with the internet) and relative ephemerality (compared to social structures that require more concrete reproduction to replace, like relations of production).
i don't think this is true at all because intra-lgbt debates aren't some ideological edifice imposed from external institutions but a natural ideological consequence of intra-lgbt social relations. the development of reflexive ideology and ideological disputes is a consequence of basic social organisation in these spaces. this is ideological by necessity, there is no nonideological common sense foundation for the concerns facing these communities
c_man posted:the point is that they're only "hegemonic" if its your job to take it seriously, i.e. as academic. most LGBT people have other jobs, which require them to take other, more directly hegemonic positions more seriously
yes obviously queer social spaces are less relevant in the lives of queer people in absolute terms than those of the workplace. but they have an outsized impact on queer people's lives as a fundamental driver of queer people as a political subject, a way of navigating and developing personal identity and development on a basic level in a society where such identity is not hegemonic or normalised, and a basic necessity for ensuring personal safety and solidarity against the positions that are hegemonic in their daily life and subsistence
but it really shouldn't even be a question why queer socialisation and community is fundamental to the personal lives and development of queer people. these identities don't develop fully formed on an individual level, theyre constituted by communal social activity outside of (but responsive to) hegemonic patriarchal society
babyhueypnewton posted:Also anyone who has participated in communist politics knows trans people are overrepresented.
enjoying reading thread so far, not done reading it, but this is a great point that always put the centrality of the trans movement to the amerikan political struggle beyond question to me. any action or meeting i have ever been to has been loaded with trans people. and when i see fascist actions they never have trans people outside of absurd and dreary tokenism. how is that not argument enough for anyone. i do wonder at times
Constantignoble posted:but it feels like an equivocation, in this case; to see the sort of thing i was actually referencing, a quick web search is illustrative:
this reminds me how so many of the gender critical/TERF people like the OP article are disingenuous in the same way right-wing turds usually are in how they use terms that are highly ideological charged and frame their questions in some ridiculously biased fashion so they can complain about being cancelled just "for askin' questions, wow my opponents don't even want a debate." i don't know why this forum has any patience for the same tactic being used here. when i checked the OP's twitter he was using the same sort of TERF lingo like "puberty blockers" to describe hormone therapy, etc. these people are just bigots.
Skylark posted:But i do feel that a lot of the stuff that's popular these days is legitimately regressive and harmful, or presupposing an imagined post-misogyny post-sex cartoon utopia that we are not even close to,
i think this is not really relevant to the trans issue. the idea of being "transgender" is very specifically a response to gender, which is kind of established as a concept. we can actually demonstrate that transgender people are discriminated against. if someone wants to identify as a demisexual, i say good luck to them, and ihope that they ask, are demisexuals a historically oppressed social group and based on what evidence? bringing up the silly, introspective tesselations of the "trans concept" performed by bourgeois people who don't want to be confined by gender either, is like bringing up child brides as a response to gay marriage. boom canceled
vimingok posted:Every article like this has a line about I am rabidly anti-imperialist and ecologically minded so I suppose I'm what you may call a ''''leftist''''''?- meaning they've decided those terms are real leftism and anything they don't like and refuse to honestly engage with isn't. And that's all there is to know about 'radical in my self-ordained bubble' leftism/communism/etc. Btw the punk MLM article from the other thread yearns for the same universe as this one using different words/terms. Ie one where I don't get to pay attention to context. Instead I get to pump every last drop of my fear and confusion into you because I need to become worthy of these important terms that are for me and my friends. This isn't 'online petite booje leftism', it's fascism plain and simple which is the hackneyed ideology of the crisis-beset parasitic classes. I'm guilty of it, as is virtually everyone born into said classes. No way out of it if we're living it. At best we can avoid letting it turn us into dumbass shameless monsters. This guy neither understands nor wants to undersntand how to ban porn, he wants to "critique" it in his boring dumbass way which obviously makes him a radfem anti-imperialist whatever. Apparently no porn actresses who are obviously pro-porn want to criticise/change the industry that oppresses them, they just want to criticise movies. The most effective way to get rid of porn is to get rid of the devices that play/transmit it, the electricity that powers them so radicals like him can critique cop shows for being racist. Deny those resources to the industry tormenting 100s of millions divert them into bettering their lives. Might there be some sort of connection between the two kinds of exploitation, hiding in plain sight because it's grotesque to those who benefit one way/another? He doesn't care, he wants to critique porno and movies at the same time. Nine o clock empire news is naughtier than any porn I've ever seen and I bet that like me this guy jacks off to it. He wants to ban prostitution but has he asked prostitutes what they think about that? Maybe they want prostitution to flourish on their terms, for example in the Scandinavian model he mentions where only the buyer is penalised and as a result the power dynamic inverted at least to an extent. I don't know much about that policy but I doubt the purpose of it from the prostitutes' pov is to end prostitution. Maybe they prefer having sex all day instead of, idk, droning on for hours about how prostitution bad as prostitution recovery consultants. Not to mention that there is nothing radical about those policies because applied to a small, easily pacified demographic in a rich parasite nation but what are the implications of broadening that logic to the max? And why isn't that happening? Author doesn't care, he just wants to ban stuff, like entire industries. That's how radical he is. But just specific industries that fascists also want to ban, not other industries connected to them physically, culturally, racially, even biologically. Those just need to be critiqued. Radically of course. What else? Trans women are social reality and actual women are biological reality, established beforehand by the fact that porn and prostitution are bad because they oppress actual women. Where does society end and biology begin? Is it social or genetic reality that causes the black body to be starved, deformed, shot at and caged? It's genotype->phenotype either way. Is place of birth not a social, political and geographical reality at the same time, consequently birth itself apart from being a biological reality. Only women can have babies and breastfeed them, which is author's sacred 'biological reality' whose honour he wants to defend. I'm sure women are overjoyed to know this asshole's life mission is to proclaim it from the rooftops. Author doesn't raise the question of whether the masculine desire to turn people into receptacles of one's seed is compatible with objectively wanting to know for sure if the dehumanised victim can conceive children. Doesn't care because radical. Well actually because he wants to stand outside women's bathrooms looking for trannies so he can beat the shit out of them right then and there.
this post is unreadable but the parts that i could sort of parse seemed stupid
blinkandwheeze posted:c_man posted:second, my main point is that intra-LGBT debates are often relatively easy to avoid, even for LGBT individuals, because of their marginal status (relative to the pressures on LGBT life), often highly local nature (even with the internet) and relative ephemerality (compared to social structures that require more concrete reproduction to replace, like relations of production).
i don't think this is true at all because intra-lgbt debates aren't some ideological edifice imposed from external institutions but a natural ideological consequence of intra-lgbt social relations. the development of reflexive ideology and ideological disputes is a consequence of basic social organisation in these spaces. this is ideological by necessity, there is no nonideological common sense foundation for the concerns facing these communities
c_man posted:the point is that they're only "hegemonic" if its your job to take it seriously, i.e. as academic. most LGBT people have other jobs, which require them to take other, more directly hegemonic positions more seriously
yes obviously queer social spaces are less relevant in the lives of queer people in absolute terms than those of the workplace. but they have an outsized impact on queer people's lives as a fundamental driver of queer people as a political subject, a way of navigating and developing personal identity and development on a basic level in a society where such identity is not hegemonic or normalised, and a basic necessity for ensuring personal safety and solidarity against the positions that are hegemonic in their daily life and subsistence
but it really shouldn't even be a question why queer socialisation and community is fundamental to the personal lives and development of queer people. these identities don't develop fully formed on an individual level, theyre constituted by communal social activity outside of (but responsive to) hegemonic patriarchal society
This all seems fine to me and im not sure what we are actually disagreeing about. In the spirit of the holidays i propose a posters truce
- Transgenderism is obviously a social phenomenon obviously influenced by modern conceptions of gender and sex which are obviously influenced by the enormous porn industry.
- No-one should have to resort to physical surgery and often harmful medical treatments to change their perfectly healthy body because they feel it is somehow defective.
- It seems dangerous and harmful to deny people with a born-female biology their own identity.
- There is absolutely a concerted effort to make the make-up, fashion, plastic surgery, porn, prostitution industries "woke", progressive, cool, even Leftist, and this is Bad.
- Nonetheless, people should of course have the right to live their lives as they please, do with their own bodies what they want, et cetera; that doesn't mean we have to ignore why people's needs arise and who influences them for what purpose, and we can criticise a phenomenon yet still be practical in our handling of it.
This is all extremely controversial, apparently. People get angrier about this issue than they do about open, overt advocating of the cleansing of non-whites from the West. It's difficult to not get cynical about the whole thing when, being situated in a city with a large Muslim population, the place I work spends a lot of money and advertising on making sure LBGTQI people are welcome but wearing a Hijab means you get fired immediately.
Edited by ultragauchiste ()
ultragauchiste posted:- No-one should have to resort to physical surgery and often harmful medical treatments to change their perfectly healthy body because they feel it is somehow defective.
how obvious would you say it is, that someone experiencing clinically significant distress that can be alleviated by gender confirming medical treatments, isn't perfectly healthy
toyot posted:i have a radical notion about sex--
1. sexual life is by far the most common form of reproduction on earth, in plants, animals, and fungi
i feel like this probably doesn't hold up numerically given that most macroorganisms are host to astronomical numbers of asexually reproducing microorganisms
ultragauchiste posted:Being a little older and having gotten some 2nd wave feminist thought passed down through my parents, feel like:
- Transgenderism is obviously a social phenomenon obviously influenced by modern conceptions of gender and sex which are obviously influenced by the enormous porn industry.
said industry is and always has been indispensible to the production of transmisogyny, it has done nothing but exploit and oppress trans lives
c_man posted:In the spirit of the holidays i propose a posters truce
two posters enter, one poster leaves!
ζη€ posted:ultragauchiste posted:
- No-one should have to resort to physical surgery and often harmful medical treatments to change their perfectly healthy body because they feel it is somehow defective.
how obvious would you say it is, that someone experiencing clinically significant distress that can be alleviated by gender confirming medical treatments, isn't perfectly healthy
I'm not against medical treatments. Benzodiazepines alleviate various kinds of distress as well. Medication against schizophrenia does work. I'm in favor of giving people whatever if it ameliorates their life. Nonetheless, we can criticise the impulse to resolve stress through medical procedures, the industry profiting off it, the theoretical basis for believing the issue can be medically solved. I feel like saying that the body-modification industry is a little fucked up and probably unhealthy is a perfectly legitimate claim and it's extremely suspect that the anglosphere (and americans in particular) get really queasy about criticising any part of the beauty complex industry nowadays.
ultragauchiste was probated until (Dec. 31, 2020 01:20:51) for this post!
ultragauchiste posted:I'm not against medical treatments. Benzodiazepines alleviate various kinds of distress as well. Medication against schizophrenia does work. I'm in favor of giving people whatever if it ameliorates their life. Nonetheless, we can criticise the impulse to resolve stress through medical procedures, the industry profiting off it, the theoretical basis for believing the issue can be medically solved. I feel like saying that the body-modification industry is a little fucked up and probably unhealthy is a perfectly legitimate claim and it's extremely suspect that the anglosphere (and americans in particular) get really queasy about criticising any part of the beauty complex industry nowadays.
when i realized i was trans around age 7 (i dont think porn tricked me into this discovery) i didnt have the knowledge or vocabulary to understand my condition beyond knowing that it was something i should never talk about growing up in a conservative religious family in the south. for decades i lived in denial, went through therapy, tried psychiatric and behavorial means of blunting the discomfort i felt and corollary depression and anxiety. you can't solve being trans with antidepressants and benzos. conflating gender confirmation treatments with cosmetic beauty industry body modification is sorta shitty, like you're redirecting the question of whether it's reasonable for folks to get sex reassignment surgery that can have a drastic positive impact on their wellbeing towards a critique of nose jobs for fashion models
i guess it sound like what you're implying, and maybe this is projection on my part, that being trans is a psychological disorder, that gender confirmation surgery is a cosmetic gloss that can't help that underlying pathology, which could just as well be ineffectually covered up with brain meds
Edited by zhaoyao ()
ζη€ posted:you can't solve being trans with antidepressants and benzos
*benzos and antidepressants spill from my slack mouth* WHAT?!
toyot posted:i have a radical notion about sex--
1. sexual life is by far the most common form of reproduction on earth, in plants, animals, and fungi
2. this confuses biologists, because asexual reproduction costs less energy*, and should therefore, in the first evaluation, be more common than sex, able to make more offspring with the same amount of energy
3. what can be said for certain, is that sexual life speciated to fill every energy niche faster than asexual life did. (in doing so, it maximized the energy to the whole clade.)
4. sexual life is penalized for mate selection outside of the species -- if a mare mated with a bull, it does not produce offspring, it wastes energy
5. so all sexual life must have a means to evaluate mates similar to themselves, meaning, at a minimum, able to make viable offspring**
6. life, to avoid making non-viable offspring, compares phenotypes of self against phenotypes of mate
7. identifying a mate that shares phenotypes, is more likely to double, over-express, the genes responsible for the display, especially if they live in different loci in the chromosome, than by mating at random, or by asexual reproduction
8. this process continues over generations, mate selection directing gene flow, leading eventually to speciation
9. sexual life, by mate selection, speciated to fill earth's energy niches faster than asexual life, and faster than natural selection alone
10. sexual life, from the smallest amoeba to blue whales, consciously evaluates its own direction of evolution by mate selection, like finding like within a species, with natural selection playing a minor role in gene flow
whitey's modern biological ideology, that non-human life are all stupid automata, without a sense of 'self' and 'other' (because, and this is the actual experiment, they aren't interested in mugging for reflective glass), fails to account for how life is able to identify its own species to mate with, as opposed to everything mating with everything, and hoping for the best.
*(like class science, and physics, modern biology rests on an energy principle, 'fitness' refers to a maximization of its intake, minimization of its expenditure. it's strange that so much of science relies on energy principles, when energy is not empirically measurable: there is no such thing as an 'energometer')
** 'species' among sexual life has a biological definition ('able to make viable offspring') which is unhelpful to mate evaluation, only known after the fact, circular here. life obviously doesn't look up its species in a book to figure out what to mate with.
i think your characterisation of biology is pretty bizarre here. i've never really heard of any biologist claiming that asexual reproduction should be more common than sexual just because it costs less energy. like, in textbooks you'll read that sexual reproduction introduces genetic variation which can't be introduced asexually, and that's probably why it developed as a separate method of reproduction. i don't understand what you mean when you talk about energy and fitness either, since fitness doesn't really have anything to do with energy, it's a measure of how likely an individual is to pass their genes on. you seem to think that sexual selection drove the evolution of all sexually reproducing organisms, but it's more specific than that - sexual selection refers to cases where mate choice has emphasised a feature that we might otherwise not expect natural selection to favour, like a set of large tail feathers used in mating displays that are bulky and slow the animal down for example. plenty of sexually reproducing organisms have had their evolution driven more by natural selection than sexual selection. the stuff about mate selection seems a bit bizarre too - why would an animal need a 'sense of self' to try to reproduce with something?
toyot posted:that's true, eukaryotic life has external and internal ecologies with prokaryotic life... around half the planet's biomass is eukaryotic and sexual, which would mean if animals had similar sexual behaviors with the plants and fungi, then around a quarter of the planet's biomass would be male. but that isn't the case, because of the trophic level difference between the light-eaters and the eaters of those, something around 9 out of 10 grams of eukaryote has chloroplasts in it. and the plants, because they are tethered to the earth, do not have sex like animals do, they do things like self-pollinate and bud new stalks off their roots. so MOST of life is optionally self-sexual or mitotic. the existence of the animal male (this small but significant fraction of life) is somewhat still a mystery to biologists who maybe wonder (and self-wonder), why don't all animals have some kind of womb or ability to procreate? why are there males?
i don't really understand a lot of what is being said in this next post at all. plants and fungi do reproduce sexually - that's what pollen and flowers and cones and spores and most of their other reproductive structures are for. they do of course also reproduce asexually through vegetative propagation and so on, but there are plenty of animals that have asexual methods of reproduction too. i don't get the thing about a quarter of biomass being male at all - do you think that males only exist in animals? because that's incorrect, plants can be male. i don't mean to be rude but a lot of the sentences in these posts read like you're throwing around biology terms without totally understanding them.
also plants don't eat light since they don't have a digestive system and light is not a food. if plants really have to be described as eating then they eat glucose
Life is neither a grey goo set to eat as much as possible, appropriate the most energy, and multiply nor a self-directed game of mate selection, it's an emergent property of semi-random physical processes turned chemical turned biological in infinitely complex ways. Sexual reproduction isn't exempt from the fundamentally random nature of gene flow just because individual animals have some choice in mating
Edited by colddays ()
toyot posted:lo posted:
i don't really understand a lot of what is being said in this next post at all. plants and fungi do reproduce sexually - that's what pollen and flowers and cones and spores and most of their other reproductive structures are for. they do of course also reproduce asexually through vegetative propagation and so on, but there are plenty of animals that have asexual methods of reproduction too. i don't get the thing about a quarter of biomass being male at all - do you think that males only exist in animals? because that's incorrect, plants can be male. i don't mean to be rude but a lot of the sentences in these posts read like you're throwing around biology terms without totally understanding them.
female-ness and male-ness as humans/animals experience it, is rare in the sexual eukaryotes (which are ~1/2 of biomass), obligate m's and f's are each much less than 1/4 of biomass. i wrote,
"then around a quarter of the planet's biomass would be male. but that isn't the case"
you said 'plants can be male', obligate-sexed plants, are only around 5% of all plant species. you're missing the forest for the ginkgo and cannabis...
you said, "fitness doesn't really have anything to do with energy"
fitness has everything to do with metabolic energy-- how does something reproduce without food? reproductive lifecycles are timed for annual food availability... even humans don't have random lifecycles, there's a birthday spike in september, around harvest... because the only common thing that can be said about biological reproduction is that it's a chemical process of turning food into offspring.
"a feature that we might otherwise not expect natural selection to favour, like a set of large tail feathers used in mating displays that are bulky and slow the animal down for example"
yes b/c bulky feathers would affect the animal's relationship to food, either acquiring it or becoming it. fitness means ability to feed oneself and the subsequent generation in utero, ovo, seed, that's how fitness can be assessed, and why the peacock's feathers raised naturalist eyebrows in the first place. otherwise the definition is circular ('things are good at reproducing because they're good at reproducing', vs, 'things are good at reproducing because they can acquire food')
a critter needs an adaptable sense of like-self to reproduce, so it does not mate with something which will produce sterile offspring. it could be a chemical ID, pheromones, it could be visual, audible like a unique mating call, but a creature which can ID a mate, will pass on its genes with greater fidelity, than one which can't. this isn't something to take for granted, that animals know which other animals to mate with! and whatever 'tell-tale' sign it is, it must be adaptable, and change during speciation. so i'm saying, this is a spectrum -- mate identification can go beyond running to the nearest mating call. the greater overall chromosomal similarity, the better the 'error-checking' during meiosis. but since the creature can only assess what it can sense, the phenotype not genotype, this is an opportunity eg for duplication of traits, if that which led to the common phenotype, is in a different location in the chromosome in each mate, or different genes expressed the same thing. then imagine this principle acting over generations.
i tried to take a 'radical' notion about sex, in the sense of 'radis', getting to the root of things... now i see it's a derail.
Edited by toyot (today 12:21:10)
i still don't understand the significance of the 1/4 figure or why we should expect that to be the case. sex determination is very different in a lot of organisms other than humans but i'm not sure where the idea that a quarter of biomass should have its sexes a particular way came from. things aren't necessarily good at reproducing just because they're good at acquiring food. that depends on the situation. an organism that uses energy less efficiently than another one might still be better at reproducing, depending on the kind of environment it lives in, the adaptations it has, etc etc, which is why fitness is defined only by how effectively an individual can pass genes on, it's not directly related to how that individual uses energy. the stuff about mate choice seems excessively focused on behaviour, but many animals don't have any behavioural mechanism of mate choice at all - corals or a lot of sea animals that disperse their gametes into water currents for example, there the only thing ensuring that they reproduce with the correct species is cellular and genetic mechanisms. the animal itself has no way of ensuring that it will mate with anything in particular.
I think ive earned the S-word pass!!
Ok anyway... This is probably going to sound bad but I feel like it's worth pointing out that a lot of these issues are either beneficial or irrelevant to men*, so it can be really easy to support it and "be nice" without worrying about or even being aware of some of the more dangerous implications. Like all of the sex-posi/pro-porn/pro-prostitution stuff that is everywhere these days very conveniently increases men's sexual access to women; it's trendy to act like sex is the same as any other job, and there's nothing wrong with consent being dependent on a financial transaction, when people need money to survive (it's true.. Look it up.)
@Toyot.. You edited your post but you called me out specifically earlier. Im sorry if it was rude to downvote your post, I dont usually do that but I was checking out the thread and I didnt want to bother writing a whole nother post, and I dont want to be mean. I just felt so confused like... Trying to give you the most benefit of the doubt as possible, it jsut seems irrelevant to bring up the sports comparison, because people who are criticizing the sex industry are not criticizing the physical "wear and tear" on ppl's bodies. Maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at. But the criticism is that purchased consent is not really consent. And another problem with pornography is the attendant ideology, which I think a lot of people are in denial about. But porn definitely has an impact on the way that men think about women. There's a good book about it by Andrea Dworkin called "Pornography: Men Possessing Women", which is mostly about dissecting the implicit messages in porn; it's available for free with her other works here! http://radfem.org/dworkin/ I recommend that (and her other books!), she's fun to read, and her directness with language is a breath of fresh air. π Again... I stan.
*I hope this doesnt come across like I hate men or something.. Straight men, you are the hottest ppl on the world. And i love you.. Just trying to be feminist sorry. But please keep being hot. I love u.
Unfortunately I think a lot of the stuff im critical of that's largely harmless for dudes can be dangerous for women and transexuals. I think the sex-posi culture we're living in now is dangerous for a number of reasons, including that it makes it more difficult to call out /confront predatory/grooming behavior especially in vulnerable subcultures. And I know theres been a lot of back-and-forth about whether or not there is a "dominant gender ideology", because of course all sorts of people have all sorts of opinions. But to make it simple, I guess I can say Im talking about the political demands of the major LGBT advocacy groups like Stonewall and Equality California, which have changed immensely in just the last few years. Obviously a lot of the progress is good, and Ive benefited from it, but Im worried about implications of some of the newer stuff. I don't want to pick on nonbinary too much, and maybe it makes me look crazy or like I have a bone to pick or something, but it seems to have accelerated the decoupling of material conditions and lgbt political demands. For example, the law has already changed here in sunny California π΄, where, if you wanted to change your legal sex, you used to have to show the court, among other things, a note from a doctor saying that you are socially living as the sex for which you're petitioning legal recognition. Obviously that's not perfect, because you have to be able to see a doctor is cooperative, and not everybody can do that. But the law has been changed in accordance with the new political demands of LGBT advocacy groups, which were shaped by the nonbinary movement that emerged basically within the last decade, allows people to change their legal sex to M, F, or X (nonbinary) without any such requirement beyond asking. After all, there's no way to prove that you are "living as nonbinary" in the world, because it doesn't correspond with anything in the world at all. Does legal sex matter? Idk, maybe it doesnt. But it makes me nervous that things are going in this direction (bathroom legislation, for example, now goes by "professed identity" as the sole criterion), where "gender identity", which was a problematically-vague concept in the first place, but was designed to enshrine legal rights for transexuals, and even the word "gender" itself, are getting converted into these other abstract concepts that, in my view, promise to ultimately screw them over. I could say a lot about the troubling implications of this stuff, but this post is already huge and that could be a whole other post. Avialable upon request! [Note: Unlocking that post also requires a minimum of βFive Upthumbsπ on this one.] 4now I'll sum it up by saying that I think politics should correspond with what is happening irl, as long as things are dangerous irl! More on this at the bottom of this post, but going in the other direction.
ultragauchiste posted:Being a little older and having gotten some 2nd wave feminist thought passed down through my parents, feel like:
- No-one should have to resort to physical surgery and often harmful medical treatments to change their perfectly healthy body because they feel it is somehow defective.
To my probated queen.. A lot of this post is super valid imo, and I would buy you Reddit Gold if I could milady. This one point I quoted from the post is the one I feel iffy about, so Im going to use it as a jumping-off point to talk about issues I have with GC claims in general (not you in particular!). You put it pretty mildly but Ive seen some ppl taking crazy extremes along these lines, I'll give an example in a min.. But first of all I want to say that it's kind of impossible to draw the line between what is "necessary" medical intervention and what is "unnecessary". A cleft palate "correction" is not really required, but ppl generally would opt for it if it's available. Historically intersex people's genitals have been "corrected" too, by being surged into more "normal" genitalia until recently, and that's wrong because, as babies, they didn't have agency over what happened with their bodies. The ideal is people having decision-making power over medical intervention, in my opinion, and I feel like it's a mistake to conflate (totally legitimate!) issues with the medical industry with medicine as such. Like, one of those issues is that, in the United States, the only way to get a transition-related surgery considered to be "optional" is to declare it to be an urgent life-saving medical necessity, when they could probably for the most part be described more accurately as "Would be nice!". Insurance sucks and the medical industry sucks and you have to play the game to get what you want, and maybe that plays a role in making the surgery culture look worse to ppl who are on the outside of it. Heres an anecdotal story from my life: I had to talk to a therapist to get a recommendation letter, and they were asking me questions like, "How is your life? How do you feel about your body" and i was answering like, "My life is great! I would say that im really happy," & so on, and after a while the therapist said, "Look, this isn't working. What they are looking for is you basically saying 'im going to freaking kill myself if i dont get this surge ASAP!!!'" so i was like ok yea maybe just put that then. It's fucked up hahaha
Ive had a "pretty large" amount of plastic surgery, and I think it's cool, and I'll probably get a little more at some point.,. Recovery is hard and theyre dangerous, and sure like I guess maybe people downplay how big of a deal they are. But I see a lot of GC people making a claim that it is better to have a "natural" body than an "unnatural" one, which is just completely absurd to me. Everything is "unnatural". But also, everything is "natural". Do you know what I mean..It just doesnt really make sense. When I was first exploring GC stuff i remember this one blog I found, where the blogger took on a 'challenge' from tumblr called "10 Questions for Terfs" that were meant to short-circuit terf brains like in Tron or something. I just watched Tron last week. One of the questions was, "How much body modification do you think is okay?", or something like that. And the answer was completely bonkers, she straight-up said that she thinks people should stay "natural" to the extent that they don't even clip their nails or cut their hair or dye it or anything like that. Got to respect her standing her ground lol. Obviously most people wouldn't say that but I think it illustrates how impossible the "natural"/"unnatural" distinction is.
To wrap up, Im gonna take us back to the beginning of the thread. Im going to bring it back to page 1 baby, while addressing another common gc argument I have an issue with (not one anybody brought up here tho). It's super common for GC people to say that transition is not the answer, and instead of modifying healthy "natural" bodies, the solution is to simply change gender roles/abolish gender, and thus eliminate the need people feel to transition. Like Ultragauchiste said:
ultragauchiste posted:Transgenderism is obviously a social phenomenon obviously influenced by modern conceptions of gender and sex which are obviously influenced by the enormous porn industry.
It's definitely true! We're all shaped by all kinds of social and historical forces we have no control over. My guess is that a lot of trans identity starts when a little kid internalizes various messages from the world around them as a lil kid or baby or whatever, forms an identity in response to that, and then stays sad about it. And then just have to deal with that in whatever way is most livable. So, for me, that GC argument fails in the same way that some of the TRA things I was complaining about in my other post fail, in that it appeals to some hypothetical future utopia instead of addressing the world as it is, the world that, for better and for worse, shaped our brains as babies and we have to try to live in. I totally agree with π
chickeon posted:It is not the responsibility of trans persons to provide theoretical justifications for their own existence
ANd just like that, we are back on page 1. But it felt seamless.. epic even. Like we have gone around the whole world, or a Lord of the Rings adventure for the ages. To be honest, I don't think it's possible to abolish gender, really, at least not with the definition of gender I was talking about. At the end of the day (for now at least.. You know a bish is playing Cyberpunk 2077! Who knows what will happen in 2077, but you bet your arse it will be poggers) we are animals, and were freaking HOrny for certain other animals. We're instinctively going to identify sex characteristics in each other, and probably always make some kind of assumptions based on what we see. It would definitely be great to scale back those assumptions as much as possible. I just think its really important to stay focused, when we're speaking politically, on the experiences people are having in the world as it is now. And we can talk about how we think things could be, or how we would like them to be in the future. What frustrates me is what seems like self-delusion or dishonesty, and bad-faith arguments that are everywhere in public clashes on this issue on both of the sides arguing, since I like actually have a stake in it. At the very least, more honesty, material analysis and compassion would be cool. And subscribe to my Onlyfans as well. Peace n luv guys β
yr elaboration about law and identity in sunny ca π΄ is important context for me, in temperate tennessee ππ things are much different and im sure this plays an outsized role in how i have so little idea what you're even talking abt sometimes. you can't change your legal sex for any reason here, what's nonbinary lol, its 100% ok to tell a tenant to gtfo if you think theyre gay. using the wrong potty is a crime and the only reason its not yet legally considered child abuse to let your kid get trans medical care is that the pandemic closed the statehouse before they got around to overwhelmingly passing that bill
when i first heard the term non-binary within the last couple years my thought was "cool this allows me to be somewhat out with the small # of folks i trust about this stuff while avoiding any tmi bs about the current state of, or my aspirations regarding, the condition of my genitals". this is why i am a little defensive
id love to hear more about troubling implications bc to me the entire conversation is academic
Acdtrux posted:In "Woman Hating" Andrea Dworkin writes:
probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty soΒciety. Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of exΒtremely adverse social conditions.
A conclusion of this is that in a non-faulty society, there are no trans people. To me this sounds unreasonable (as if every trans person who identifies as a particular gender is just "compromising") but I'm not sure what the trans perspective on this is.
(just noticed skylark addressed this)
"community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior."
i guess my take is basically agreement with the exception that id have written "the phenomenon of transsexuality, as we know it, will dissolve into & transform into new modes of sexual identity and behavior"
Edited by solidar ()
solidar posted:Skylark posted:And as for the person who said not to use the word "simp", if u will allow a small flex, I think ive earned the S-word pass!!
i'm not sure what you mean by this - it reads as a nonsequitur to me to the point that i almost think we are coming from different usages and meanings of 'simp'
my complaint/critique is that 'simp' was largely popularized on 4chan and the worst parts of reddit. that it, along with the memes that feature it and other similar terms and memes are grounded in a purposefully sexist world view. even as the term has since spilled out in popular culture, i still see that it is used to frame men that are feminist or trying to be caring towards women or respectful of women as the same as men that "white knight" (dishonestly being kind, affectionate, or respectful as a way to trick women into having sex with them) since that is the only possible motivation for that type of behavior according to that worldview. i was not trying to say that it is a slur as you seem to be implying (all men are trash, kill all men, who gives a fuck) but would instead would compare it more to something like the usage of "elites" that gets thrown around in rightwing conspiracy circles: there may be some unproblematic way to read that usage, but it requires significant decoding, a complete shifting of the context that the term sprang up from and how it is commonly used. without the reworking of the rightwing conspiracy background (which like i said is a significant effort, to the point that anytime i've seen it done, it means throwing out the term "elite" and explaining how from a materialist or marxist approach what really needs to be considered is the "bourgeoisie") the term just continues to carry with it the framework of it's rightwing conspiracy origins and is little more than an antisemitic dogwhistle. there is no pass to be gained or earned there - anytime someone starts talking about "the elites" it is cause for concern that, at best, a different shared vocabulary/framework is needed to have a productive conversation, or at worst that the conversation is going to take a fascist turn
from that point of view, i think it is counterproductive for anyone that is a feminist or on the left to pick up these terms, use these memes, etc. there may be some nugget of truth in them (like there often is in rightwing thinking) but to pull that out and twist it towards something worthwhile practically requires a book. while using those things uncritically just further reinforces and spreads the purposefully sexist worldview that spawned them
lotta words about how pepe the frog is an alt-right symbol