The David Reimer case is not really "evidence" of anything. At best it's more like a hint or a suggestion. "Evidence" should mean there is a scientific theory and someone conducted an experiment to prove or disprove it and, hey, look at the evidence, it tells us something about the theory. The Reimer case was a complete destruction of a person's life, but it was not perpetrated as an experiment of any kind. Although if I remember correctly the perpetrator did claim he was testing a theory, the unethical and haphazard, disorganised way in which he went about it completely discredits any pretense to science.
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
I'm trans and I'd be fine with it and I think of the arguments that it's transphobic as misguided at best, malicious at worst. There seems to be a vocal contigent of transwomen who identify as lesbians who try to argue that a lesbian who is not trans and doesn't want to have sex with a transwoman (even one with male genitalia) is transphobic. This sounds to me like a kind of very, very bad pickup line.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
I want to start a family in the traditional sense like my parents and grandparents have done before me, so I would be disappointed to find out I was dating a transwoman. Similarly I'd be disappointed to find out if a woman didn't want children or wanted to live a lifestyle incompatible with my own. It isn't going to work out and I'd have to ultimately call it off.
It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.
I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.
If you have these preferences then the onus is on you to disclose them. As long as you say "I would like to be in a relationship with someone who can have children with me" on your first date, and not discriminate between e.g. trans women and cis women who can't give birth, it's ok.
I'm a little bit confused. At first you talked about "dating" someone, now you're talking about starting a family. These seem to be different, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily identical, goals. Can you explain?
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
Sure. Dating is essentially the way we assess a suitable potential partner. The end goal in (hetero) dating essentially boils down to starting a family and this is also implied and assumed unless stated otherwise.
I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.
Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.
It's not a new thing. In some parts of the world at least transgendered women
typically transitioned during their puberty, at 13 or 14. A great source for
this observation is 'Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian
Transgendered Prostitutes' by anthropologist Don Kulick, who followed a group of
trans sex workers in Salvador. Most of them transition from young boys to
teenage sex workers after a sexual encounter with an adult male. From personal
(though anecdotal) experience this is a common pattern in many cultures of the
so-called Global South, if we include in that South East Asia. Basically for
most of the 20th century, most transwomen who transitioned, transitioned in
their puberty and went straight into sex work.
What has changed recently is that many more trans women transition later in
life, after having lived for many decades as men, having married and had
children and careers well outside sex work etc. Perhaps because of a more
general shift of ideas about gender and sexuality (gay men are nowadays not
considered effeminate or feminine just because they fancy men) most transwomen
in western countries were generally of this later kind.
Then the wheel shifted again. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the
number of people transitioning later in life and in a context that had nothing
to do with underage sex and sex work, helped convince society that transition
does not have to mean sex work (although in most of the world, it still does,
by and large, so what I say applies to more western societies) and that gave
more space to younger trans women and also young trans men to express their
identity without fearing that a life of humiliation and inevitable sex work
awaited them.
In my part of the world, when I was transitioning in the late 90's a trans woman
who was not into sex work was something unheard of and indeed I had to immigrate
to be able to do anything with my life. As to concerns about giving young
children puberty blockers etc, I would have to say that this is much better than
13 year olds taking cross-sex hormones without medical supervision and then
going to the red light district to display their budding breasts with pride.
I hope all this doesn't come across as "wokeness". My concern about other trans
women has always been the limited opportunities they've had in life, in my part
of the world, and the squalid, degrading and dangerous conditions in which they
had to survive as a result (google a bit about the transgendered community in
Istanbul if you have strong nerves). I tend to think of all the outrage
about identity issues on Twitter as a pleasant change of tone from the grim
darkness that was before.
> On the contrary, that's a terrifying amount of political clout and power to steer discourse.
This one reminds me of the old joke about Jews controlling the media. One jewish man asks another why he's reading all those tabloids that are full of antisemitic lies. The othere one replies that no matter how bad things are in real life, the newspapers always make him feel great because according to them the Jews control the banks, the media, the world governments and everything else.
> I was hoping for some raunchy limericks or something.
Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho!
OK, here's my own joke. I'm trans and this is a trans joke taken from, like, life, dude.
There's this guy sitting with four ladies and another
guy and he starts saying how he knows a tranny when he sees one.
"I mean, they all have like, what, size-7 feet? I mean come on, it's so
obvious!"
"I got size 7 feet" says one of the ladies.
The guy blinks once, then goes on:
"And their hands! Have you seen their hands? They're like two times the size of
my hands!"
The second lady holds up her hands. "My hands are bigger than your hands".
The guy pauses for a mere second and goes on.
"But the dead give-away is their voices. They have loud, booming, bass
voices..."
"I can sing in the entire baritone vocal range" says the third lady.
The guy stops, clears his throat, looks around, then leans in conspiratorially.
"You know what's the real way to tell a trannie apart? They can explain the
offside rule in soccer".
"That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any
of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of
the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the
second-last opponent".
The guy is now sweeating bricks. He turns to look at each of them carefully.
"OK" he says. "Was even a single one of you born female"?
> Yay because being trans is all about being raunchy hey ho
To be fair, while that is a common attitude toward trans identity, it’s also a common attitude toward humor (that is, lots of people equate good jokes with raunchy ones.) It’s hard to tell which consideration is in play.
> "That's easy" says the fourth lady. "A player is in an offside position if any of their body parts, except the hands and arms, are in the opponents' half of the pitch, and closer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent".
<ex-ref>
But that is just explaining offside position, which is only part of the offside rule.
</ex-ref>
> And yes, I don't think that those "trans women" are, or should be considered, women. Actually, not even "trans".
You say this very lightly but it's obvious to me that you haven't really considered the consequences.
For example, you say "people who didn't undergo any gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy". But you don't seem to consider that those are medical interventions. I think if you thought of them in that light, you would be a little more thoughtful about demanding that people undergo medical interventions for any reason, no less as the price of being recognised as their claimed, or lived gender.
Such requirements are common. In some countries in Europe until very recently transwomen were not allowed to change their papers to identify them as women and to declare the female names they used everyday unless they could demonstrate that they had been rendered surgically sterile, by castration. Germany was one such case.
I wonder also if you have a slightly romantic idea of surgery and hormone
therapy. The truth is that surgery doesn't magically transform a man into a
woman, no matter what some surgeons want us to believe. Some transwomen will
always look like men, no matter how much they cut off and throw away. Others,
will look like women without having taken any hormones in their entire lives. I
know that's hard to believe, but it's how it is. The human species is only very
lightly sexually dimorphic and some males can pass for women, and some females
for men, with very little intervention. In the case of transwomen, for many it
is enough to remove their beard (by electrolysis or photolysis) and take care of
their hair, to be immediately identified as women by everyone that sees them. On
the other side, history is full of females who cut their hair short, wore pants
and lived the rest of their lives as men.
But, I know the above is hard to believe so OK. Just please try to keep an open
mind and remember that you don't automatically know everything there is to know
about transwomen (and transmen).
> I have said "I am a trans woman" many times in my life.
Me too!
> Can you please explain to me how "trans women are women" is transphobic?
The relevant statement is "trans women are trans women," which is how Adichie responded when asked if trans women are women. Of itself that statement is of course not transphobic, it's a tautology.
The problem is that in this case "trans women are trans women" and "trans women are women" are shibboleths for a set of beliefs about whether trans women should be seen as women (like lesbian women) in the eyes of society and the law. When people say "trans women are trans women," and go on to say that because we're trans we shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms, and other spaces for women, with the unspoken implication being that we aren't "real" women, I think that's transphobic. I don't know all of what Adichie believes. I know she finds JK Rowling's views reasonable, and that she has hinted at agreeing with them before (such as in this instance.)
