entanglingbriars | Entries tagged with trans stuff

Gender exists in part to sort things: People, virtues, personality traits, aesthetics, animals, colors, genitals, etc. That's one of its main functions and most of its other functions follow after that. You can't have patriarchy until you've established some people as male and other as female. You can't have conformity and deviation to assigned gender at birth without assigning different genders to people at birth.

In the standard Western Gender Binary model, sex and gender are assigned at birth and retained through life. The assignment is seen as fundamentally not arbitrary in either the choice of which to select or in how, once selected, it should be enacted. The fact that intersex people exist is an anomaly to this model, but intersex people are rare enough that they can be safely ignored. In this model, both gender and sex are ontologically real and important; further, they are inextricably linked.( Read more... )

Note: the following is mostly me thinking out loud and should not be taken as authoritative.

If I say I'm gay, I am not necessarily communicating any information about myself. If I write "I'm gay" on a piece of paper and someone else picks it up a month later, they will know very little about the writer. The writer could be male, female, or nonbinary. They might be sexually attracted to men, women, or nonbinary people. They might not be sexually attracted to anyone and instead be talking about their experience of romantic attraction. They might be sexually active or not, and their partners might be of the same or a different sex. They might be cis or trans, and what cis and trans mean to them, especially in conjunction with "I'm gay," is impossible to tell.

"Gay," taken as an abstract term, means almost nothing. Even when we start to add more modifiers, the term doesn't become all that much more meaningful. A gay man could still be trans or cis, he might have no sexual partners or one or several and those partners might be of any sex. Because the closet is still a thing, we can't be sure of almost anything about a "gay man." It gets worse because gay is frequently a catch-all term that is also applied to bi and pan people, especially bi and pan men.

The problem is that none of these words I've been using, particularly the ones that refer to identities, actually mean anything. They are defined by their interrelationship with other words and their meaning depends on my ability to convince my audience to accept the meaning that I wish to convey. And while you might think that adding modifiers like "man" and "cis" to "gay" would begin to clarify them, you can perform the same exercise on those words as well. "I am a cis gay man" can mean something only if the speaker an audience can reach an agreement not only on the individual meanings of "cis," "gay," and "man," but also what they mean when taken in conjunction: "cis man," "gay man," and "gay and cis." Each additional word creates the potential to clarify what I mean by gay, but by the same token each additional word has the potential to further muddy the waters.( Read more... )

Gender as performative

Continuing my thoughts on gender from yesterday, the Western gender binary model assumes the ontological reality of gender; the most common models of trans identity share that underpinning while disagreeing with the conclusions the WGB model pulls from that assumption. But by doing so, it centers cis identities; all gender is related to cisness and to one's assigned gender at birth.( Read more... )

Gender as an ontological reality

"Trans men are men."

"Trans women are women."

These statements have implications that go beyond the affirmation of trans identities. To say that trans people are their identified gender is to affirm that gender is an actual thing that can be had. Purely socially constructive models, or purely performative models, are implicitly denied. And that's intentional. Purely socially constructive models of gender, and purely performative models, are frequently used to deny trans people's lived experiences; the hostility to these models is understandable. The generally preferred models tend to stress dysphoria and/or the inner experience of identity. In doing so, they affirm two statements that are almost never voiced, though constantly assumed to be true:

"Cis men are men."

"Cis women are women."

Trans men can be men because cis men can be men. Except that's not right. Say rather, trans men can be men because cis men are men. The models of gender that place its ontological reality at their core are fundamentally dependent on cis gender identities to exist.

Nonbinary people can exist in these models, but always tenuously. Since gender has been given ontological reality, there is room for the creation of different genders that are also ontologically real. But their (our?) existence is at a constant risk of being overwhelmed by the power of the Western gender binary (WGB); nonbinary identity is never stable when models of gender rely on the WGB as their starting point.

People who say there are a bunch of diverse ways to be nonbinary and that nonbinariness isn't just white, skinny, and androgynous need to recognize that they are speaking of an aspiration, and not the reality of people who aren't white, skinny, and androgynous and will therefore never be nonbinary.

There's an AU where I identify as nonbinary. It's not significantly different from the world I inhabit, but in it I use they/them pronouns, perhaps know a little more about putting on makeup and paint my nails more often, and opt for gender-neutral bathrooms whenever possible. In that AU, I treat the vague sense of discomfort I experience when people use he/him pronouns for me as indicative that those pronouns are inappropriate for me and that it is therefore worth it to ask people to use they/them pronouns for me.

I also get misgendered a hell of a lot more and intentional misgendering hurts far more than the unintentional kind. I have to explain what is apparently a complex and confusing topic every time I meet a new person. I have to fight with my family over their conception of me, and inevitably lose in at least some cases. If I choose to present more outwardly feminine, I risk rejection and violence; if I chose not to, I feel like I'm lying about myself.

My actual sense of gender, dysphoria, and so on in that AU is not at all different from what it is in this world. There are things about that AU that are preferable to this one, but on the whole I'm okay that I've opted for the world where I identify as cis and male.

There is, I suppose, an AU where I identify as nonbinary and am out of the closet about it in some contexts, and closeted in others, but that sort of dual existence is something I've also tried and disliked, and is ultimately worse than either of the alternatives.

I've been of the opinion for a long time that the proper name for a person or group is what they ask you to call them and that by extension the proper pronouns for a person are the ones they ask you to use. However, in the past several months I've had a new experience; of fundamentally not wanting to use a requested name, of feeling that the request to do so is an unreasonable imposition. It's been an unpleasant experience. I stopped identifying as nonbinary in part because there were people who deliberately misgendered me and considered using the/them pronouns an unreasonable imposition. I considered that response rude and disingenuous. And yet, here I am.

In November 2018 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requested that it no longer be referred to as the "Mormon Church," "Mormonism," or "LDS"; that its members be called "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," not "Mormons." If we must abridge the name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints they suggest "the Church," ""Church of Jesus Christ," or the "restored Church of Jesus Christ" as alternatives. The key, for President Nelson, is that the name Jesus Christ be centered when referring to the Church (I'm not sure, given that, why "the Church" is acceptable but "LDS" is not, but that's not really my business).

I feel this is an unreasonable imposition for several reasons, but ultimately my reasons shouldn't matter. If I wish to maintain integrity I need to refer to the restored Church of Jesus Christ by the name they've asked me to use. The fact that I don't believe the restored Church of Jesus Christ is actually a restoration of anything, that I consider using "Church of Jesus Christ" to be unnecessarily vague, that I think "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" is impractically long... none of these should matter. I should respect the name the restored Church of Jesus Christ has requested I use.

Either that, or I stop thinking that misgendering and deadnaming trans people is wrong. Because I can't maintain moral integrity while believing it's okay to request a specific name in one case and ridiculous in another.

So like, there are a lot of trans and nb people who would like to make it a cultural norm to ask people for their pronouns and to announce what your pronouns are. I also have a trans friend who absolutely loathes being asked his pronouns and would rather be misgendered because he knows that most people who ask him for pronouns do so because they've clocked him as someone who needs to be asked. Which is why I felt really uncomfortable today when I was around a gender non-conforming person and had to choose between a) doing exactly what a close friend of mine hates and that it would make sense if others hate too (asking someone for their pronouns because I clocked them as gnc) or picking a pronoun and going with it. I don't know if I made the right choice. The problem is that if you ask most cis people what their pronouns are, they won't take it as a neutral question, they'll take it as an insult, possibly a severe one, and openly flouting social rules when there's little to no gain for it in the short-term is hard.

So I found an article on Catholic Patheos (cw: transphobia, shockingly) about a fourteen-year-old trans boy whose having his eggs harvested. The article quotes Dr. Wylie C. Hembree, who says, “Most children who have gender dysphoria actually lose it. There may be only 10% to 15% whose dysphoria continues throughout childhood and into puberty.”

It's not clear to me whether the blogger concludes from that that we shouldn't put prepubescent kids on hormone blockers (more on that below) or that we shouldn't start puberty blockers at all, that we should only start HRT after the completion of puberty; they don't allow comments on their blog so I can't inquire.

Curious, I clicked the link to Dr. Hembree's quote.

...

It's a 58-page pdf. But being an intrepid researcher, I am undaunted. I find the quote on 28 of this issue of Endocrine News. As far as I can tell the publication is reputable enough, and the article Dr. Hembree's quote appears in doesn't seem antagonistic at all to trans people. Except... there's no citation of Dr. Hembree's claim. However, there is a link to the Endocrine Society's guidelines for treating gender dysphoria which includes the line "We recommend against puberty blocking and gender-affirming hormone treatment in prepubertal children with GD/gender incongruence" (1.4). No explanation is provided, but at this point it looks like Dr. Hembree's quote probably reflects the general consensus of endocrinologists. I still don't have proof of that, but I'm not going to comb through medical journals to find out.

Importantly, the Endocrine Society does not recommend delaying treatment until the completion of puberty; in the section of treating adolescents they go into great detail about how to use puberty blockers and HRT on adolescent trans people; i.e. they don't think gender affirming therapy should start until the onset of therapy, not its completion. But based on the quote the blogger provided, and their comment that puberty has a "85-90% success" rate, I don't think that's the conclusion they wanted their readers to draw.