That is very useful information - thanks for pointing it out. I always try to use the terms "black people" or "Jewish people" or etc. when discussing such topics, & I notice when people say "the blacks" or "the Jews" instead - it stands out. I'll attempt to modify how I refer to "trans people" - I didn't even realize I was doing that in my head until I read what you wrote.

Good on ya! Don't fret too much about it though, I was using "transwoman" up until at least 2020.

My teacher in HS explained it to a friend of my mine that "the [group]" sounds like saying "those people" and that stuck with me.


Getting back on topic, how safe do y'all feel as trans folks in your Neighborhood/Town/City? Have you ever been harassed on that account? What can be down to address something like that at the local level?

Quoting the wikipedia article for my neighbourhood:

The neighbourhood is extremely linguistically and racially diverse. According to the 2016 Census, a plurality of the neighbourhood (42%) is Anglophone and 13% is Francophone. Other major languages include Arabic (12%), Somali (11%), Nepali (4%), Spanish (2%), Creoles (2%) and Persian (2%). It is a plurality Black Canadian (32%), and is nearly equally White (31%). Arab Canadians also make up a significant proportion (15%). Other races include South Asian (7%), Filipino (3%), Latin American (2%), Indigenous (2%), Chinese (2%), West Asian (1%) and Southeast Asian (1%)

In my neighbourhood, I've never once encountered harassment because I'm trans. I've never felt unsafe because of it. I've encountered violence, but my attackers never misgendered me :lol:

However, within my building, my neighbour directly across screams through her door "pedophile!" when she sees me coming and going. I filed a police report over it 3 months ago. Since then, she's recently been adding the c-word to her greetings as well, so I'm not 100% certain it's an anti-trans thing, or if it might just be a crazy meth head thing.

It's mostly the small things you can do that help the most. Speak up for us (if you feel safe doing so) even if we're not around. Simple "that's not cool bro" if you overhear transphobic stuff. If you have a trans neighbour, going out of your way to introduce yourself and letting them know where to find you if they need help is huge.

Twofer.

1. Have you seen Sense8
2. If s how accurate was the trans portrayal?

If you haven't seen it nevermind/derp.

I saw the first two seasons, but I never saw the movie. Nomi is good representation.

Kinda shocked at Americans casually telling me what they carry or own to feel safe. Friends in Houston casually menton owning AR15 and they're Mexican liberal democrats not your stereotypical southern gun owners.

I wouldn't move back to the US without getting a concealed carry license and a handgun.

Moderator Action: Reminder: This is a question thread and not a comment thread.
 
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Getting back on topic, how safe do y'all feel as trans folks in your Neighborhood/Town/City? Have you ever been harassed on that account? What can be down to address something like that at the local level?

Safer than most, but I mean I still get catcalled, I still get slurred, I still get leered at. I’ve been stalked in the street before. I’ve heard some queer places are trans unfriendly - for instance this is a complaint I’ve heard made of the lesbian bar I frequent, but it’s not something I’ve encountered personally. I wouldn’t doubt it though.

It’s important also to take my word on this with a grain of salt. I’m white, young(ish), thin, I pass well. I have a stable job with good income and good insurance that covers transition care, and includes doctors familiar with the wpath soc. I’m very fortunate to have made it through my transition with a partner who still loves me, is still very much attracted to me and accompanies me on most things. I live in a state that allows self-id gender and name changes with no hoops, and was born in a state that allows self-id birth certificate changes.

Most of those things can be serious barriers for us. For instance when I first came out, I was broke and drowning in debt, living in a horsehockey apartment behind on rent to a landlord who, whether out of kindness or senility was letting me slide. Being out carried very real repercussions for me- he was nice enough when he saw me as a young man, but you never know how people are going to react to us; you get clocked and suddenly that sweet little old lady that you’ve known for ten years is moving heaven and earth to destroy your life. Likewise roommates become a potential threat: I was living with a stranger whose politics I didn’t know, and one word from her could leave me homeless. And while I was poor, I was employed and independent. Imagine if I was, say, ten years younger and living with and financially dependent on parents and you have the experience of a large chunk of my friends.

A lot of the horsehocky we experience is actually not violence, intentional, conscious hostility, or explicit prejudice - although to be sure that stuff still happens a lot all over. Rather, it is more frequently the day-to-day banal suck of living in a world which has not been designed with us in mind, and in many cases is openly hostile to our existence. It’s the difficulty of getting your documentation changed, of a medical system that makes a bunch of horsehocky up about us and pathologizes that made up horsehocky instead of talking to us, it’s doctors that don’t trust us or treat us as people and sabotage our transitions through ignorance or malice, it’s a medical insurance system that imposes onerous hoops that regularly denies care that is essential for us to live, or views aspects of that essential care as cosmetic or nonessential. It’s the administrative hurdles meaning that a lot of your day-to-day business entails subjecting yourself to constant deadnaming and misgendering, which grinds you down. It’s the fear every time you walk into a store or a bathroom, or sit down for a meeting that somebody’s going to say something and you’re going to have to deal with that. It’s the knowledge that you may be the only trans person this person has ever seen, and so must act and speak with the weight of the entire community on your shoulders. It’s the knowledge that your struggles and oppression are not well-understood by others, and so when you get upset or angry, or even just unobliging, you’ll be viewed an angry, crazy, or frigid ***** and treated with hostility, simply for responding reasonably to harm that the other party doesn’t know and can never understand. In other words, it’s the same experience that every other oppressed group deals with.

As for what you can do: get involved in your local politics, *especially* school board meetings. Show up to hearings for public comment. Speak out against efforts to curtail our rights or dehumanize us. At the local level, even small shows of force really move the needle. Big fights are happening at the state level. Speak out against efforts to curtail our rights, and push your governor and representatives to enshrine protections for us in your legal code.

If you see a trans person being abused - disrespected, misgendered, and the like - speak up for us. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had horsehockey experiences with pharmacists or clerks and the like where I was being mistreated and getting increasingly visibly upset and the cis people around me just stood and watched. Even one person advocating for us makes a huge difference when we’re so consistently alone in the world.

Do not vote for republican candidates or any candidate that advocates any kind of anti-trans policy. That includes sports bans and restrictions on gender affirming care for youth. “Reasonable concerns,” are generally not reasonable and are patently wedges from bad actors to ram through more heinous policies. Stand up to your friends and relatives who try disassociate the policies of the party they support and the people (often family and loved ones) who are affected. The party is engaged in an active effort to genocide us, the time for fence sitting or silent opposition is over. Do not let them skate by on “well of course I oppose their social policies but we need a party with sensible tax plans,” a vote for republicans is a vote for genocide. Full stop. If you see a friend or family member engaging in transphobic behavior, confront them. Do not countenance misgendering, deadnaming, or slurring in your presence.

Do not deadname, misgender, or weaponize transphobia against those trans people who stand in the way of our liberation. Our identities are not privileges, they are not conditional on good behavior or being well liked. You do not get to revoke them just because you wear an ally pin and you really don’t like this particular trans person.

Do not resort to transphobic tropes or cliches to insult, demean, or belittle anti-trans cis people, and do not use us merely as rhetorical props to win an online argument; that horsehocky only shows that, again, our identities and our oppression are abstract and conditional to you, and tells us that you are not a person to be trusted. Listen to us when we tell you things about our lives and our struggle. We are not a monolith, and one of us does not speak for all of us, but also remember that as a cis person, you will not be able to *know* our experiences or our struggle. Use your best judgment when trying to figure out who to believe, but understand there are things that are true, but will sound intuitively unreasonable or absurd to you simply because you are not trans and haven’t lived our lives.
 
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On the radio today there was a piece about book banning, and they had a bunch of teenagers talking about how books had been helpful in making them realize that they weren't alone/crazy/worthless for being who they were. Are there any particular books that you would recommend that were helpful to (younger) you?
 
Hi I am Alexander, a heterosexual cis male. I have a friend who might be lesbian or trans that is in my D&D party (I honestly forgot ngl). I am going to be a dungeon master soon, so how should I deal with the gender change for their character? (I usually talk to her about other stuff - I use the person's origional pronouns because I don't know what part of the LGBT+ is she in)
 
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Well, you should mostly just talk to them? Like, is their character changing genders? Since you are not the master, that's a different adventure and presumably even if the character has changed character, this has effectively happened before you start the adventure anyway so... I don't know what to tell ya.
 
Well, you should mostly just talk to them? Like, is their character changing genders? Since you are not the master, that's a different adventure and presumably even if the character has changed character, this has effectively happened before you start the adventure anyway so... I don't know what to tell ya.
Thanks Johanna
 
On the radio today there was a piece about book banning, and they had a bunch of teenagers talking about how books had been helpful in making them realize that they weren't alone/crazy/worthless for being who they were. Are there any particular books that you would recommend that were helpful to (younger) you?

When I was young there wasn’t much in the way of explicitly trans-coded media. I would say for me, the things that helped me find myself and feel affirmed came into two categories:

cis and straight media (mostly cartoons) that played with gender, usually in the form of one-off gender-swap stories and the like. Danny Phantom and Fairly Oddparents did this, Adventure Time does this with the Fiona and Cake eps, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Lab, and so on. Marvelous Land of Oz was a big one for me growing up, and I read that book obsessively. A lot of people my age and a bit younger have stories about these being their favorite episodes of media growing up for reasons that were only made clear later.

The second category are straight media that has a lot of queer coding or trans coding via metaphor. Wizard of Oz is of course a notorious example, Spirited Away was a big one for me, personally. My Life as a Teenaged Robot, Teacher’s Pet, Luca and Seeing Red (for a more recent examples).

My memories are littered with media that resonated deeply with me for some reason but I couldnt explain why at the time, but the really formative period for me personally in terms of coming to grips with my transness was in my early 20s, shortly after college. The media at that time that was deeply meaningful and transformative for me were:

1) Adventure Time, both Fiona and Cake, which I was obsessed with, but also Marceline more broadly. I loved every episode she was in
2) Steven Universe, everything about that show is super queer and the fusion as metaphor for queerness generally is very good, but it’s especially good for understanding transness imo. The first episode that introduces Steveonnie was a big “oh” moment for me.
3) Freaks and Geeks, as odd as it sounds. I was obsessed with Lindsay’s character. I also strongly identified with Sam’s experience, which at the time I ascribed to being a scrawny boy in high school. With the benefit of hindsight I think now it’s because Sam’s character is kinda a mega-egg.
4) Sword Art Online. I learned about the show through a gender-bent fanfiction that I read online, but gave it a try when the story stopped updating. There’s a subplot in season 2 where the title character is frequently assumed to be a woman because his avatar is a twink with long hair, and of course I loved the horsehocky out of that.

Hi I am Alexander, a heterosexual cis male. I have a friend who might be lesbian or trans that is in my D&D party (I honestly forgot ngl). I am going to be a dungeon master soon, so how should I deal with the gender change for their character? (I usually talk to her about other stuff - I use the person's origional pronouns because I don't know what part of the LGBT+ is she in)

Hi Alexander. So first of all, trans and lesbian are not mutually exclusive. I’m trans AND a lesbian. The simple answer for how to handle it is to listen to them, and respect their wishes. They may want to keep playing as their current character, they may want to roll a new character, they may want to retcon their character as a different gender, and they might want to do an in-story genderswap. Respect what they want to do at the moment that they want to do it. Don’t try to shoehorn in a genderswap or bring trans elements where they aren’t wanted, it’s not gonna be good and you’re gonna make them uncomfortable. Ultimately your job as DM is to facilitate your players’ ability to tell their stories. Trying to tell their story for them is not doing a very good job of that.
 
cis and straight media (mostly cartoons) that played with gender, usually in the form of one-off gender-swap stories and the like. Danny Phantom and Fairly Oddparents did this, Adventure Time does this with the Fiona and Cake eps, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Lab, and so on. Marvelous Land of Oz was a big one for me growing up, and I read that book obsessively. A lot of people my age and a bit younger have stories about these being their favorite episodes of media growing up for reasons that were only made clear later.
I've never seen Danny Phantom or seen much of Adventure Time (one of my sisters was really into Adventure Time), but I did watch a lot of Powerpuff Girls when I was young and even then I kept thinking to myself that being a girl was better than being a boy. Later I heard one of my friends say he couldn't get into Powerpuff Girls because it was the main characters girls and at the time I couldn't understand why (he had a while earlier say that Link from the Legend of Zelda was the perfect blank slate character that anyone can relate to, even though Link is a male character). Fairly Oddparents came out at the time when I started to get out of cartoons because that was what was expected for someone my age and not because I didn't want to stop watching cartoons, but I do remember the genderswap episode and felt that if it was possible, I would've wished to become a girl even if I didn't know why, I would've just thought it would be good to experience life as a girl.
 
When I was young there wasn’t much in the way of explicitly trans-coded media. I would say for me, the things that helped me find myself and feel affirmed came into two categories:

cis and straight media (mostly cartoons) that played with gender, usually in the form of one-off gender-swap stories and the like. Danny Phantom and Fairly Oddparents did this, Adventure Time does this with the Fiona and Cake eps, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Lab, and so on. Marvelous Land of Oz was a big one for me growing up, and I read that book obsessively. A lot of people my age and a bit younger have stories about these being their favorite episodes of media growing up for reasons that were only made clear later.

The second category are straight media that has a lot of queer coding or trans coding via metaphor. Wizard of Oz is of course a notorious example, Spirited Away was a big one for me, personally. My Life as a Teenaged Robot, Teacher’s Pet, Luca and Seeing Red (for a more recent examples).

My memories are littered with media that resonated deeply with me for some reason but I couldnt explain why at the time, but the really formative period for me personally in terms of coming to grips with my transness was in my early 20s, shortly after college. The media at that time that was deeply meaningful and transformative for me were:

1) Adventure Time, both Fiona and Cake, which I was obsessed with, but also Marceline more broadly. I loved every episode she was in
2) Steven Universe, everything about that show is super queer and the fusion as metaphor for queerness generally is very good, but it’s especially good for understanding transness imo. The first episode that introduces Steveonnie was a big “oh” moment for me.
3) Freaks and Geeks, as odd as it sounds. I was obsessed with Lindsay’s character. I also strongly identified with Sam’s experience, which at the time I ascribed to being a scrawny boy in high school. With the benefit of hindsight I think now it’s because Sam’s character is kinda a mega-egg.
4) Sword Art Online. I learned about the show through a gender-bent fanfiction that I read online, but gave it a try when the story stopped updating. There’s a subplot in season 2 where the title character is frequently assumed to be a woman because his avatar is a twink with long hair, and of course I loved the horsehocky out of that.



Hi Alexander. So first of all, trans and lesbian are not mutually exclusive. I’m trans AND a lesbian. The simple answer for how to handle it is to listen to them, and respect their wishes. They may want to keep playing as their current character, they may want to roll a new character, they may want to retcon their character as a different gender, and they might want to do an in-story genderswap. Respect what they want to do at the moment that they want to do it. Don’t try to shoehorn in a genderswap or bring trans elements where they aren’t wanted, it’s not gonna be good and you’re gonna make them uncomfortable. Ultimately your job as DM is to facilitate your players’ ability to tell their stories. Trying to tell their story for them is not doing a very good job of that.
Thanks Soph! (apparently you said that people call you that)
 
I am wondering if anyone can watch this and respond to the major issues it raises?

Moderator Action: Video removed. ~ Arakhor
 
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I am wondering if anyone can watch this and respond to the major issues it raises?

She's anti trans and so are you.

It's honestly gross seeing anti trans propaganda posted in this thread and then for you to ask trans people to endure it, rather than just being forth right with your views and just asking us the questions you seek answers to.

Context for other trans people itt and because i can't directly quote it:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/trans-genocide.678490/page-14#post-16321996

Reread my post as you don't seem to have understood any of it. Also, putting suicidal people into institutional care where they can get proper medical help and oversight is not some WW2 concentration camp no matter how much you want to pretend it is. It is obvious you are being dishonest with that comparison.

Especially since the origin problem is self harm and self harming rates remain virtually unaffected. Then we have the high rate of de-transitioning people who remain severely effected and permanently harmed by these I effective "interventions".

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/trans-genocide.678490/post-16321988

If it was medication then we have to follow the basic medical Tennant of first due no harm. These supposed medications do immediate and irreversible harm sterilizing children for life, stunting their growth, if administered at a young age it leaves males permanently unable to experience orgasm for life, it decreases bone density, and ultimately leaves people life dependent upon these "medication" meaning they die if they stop taking them. That is a lot of irreversible harm especially since it doesn't even solve the original problem you mentioned in the OP about suicide rates. Suicide rates are almost entirely uneffected by this supposed "care".

Add into the fact that the vast majority of these people are mentally ill, a majority are also autistic at least for m2f, and it really doesn't look good. There is very little science to support harmful interventions which don't help the original issue.

Dude's just straight up against us transitioning.

Don't waste your time with this one
 
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I am wondering if anyone can watch this and respond to the major issues it raises?

<link to video snipped>

It's a 21min video, and it starts off with "it's like watching the human species fall off the cliff in realtime". This is absolutely not the thread for that. You have questions of us, ask them. You want to push crap and expect us to respond to the "major issues it raises", there's other threads for debate.
 
It's a 21min video, and it starts off with "it's like watching the human species fall off the cliff in realtime". This is absolutely not the thread for that. You have questions of us, ask them. You want to push crap and expect us to respond to the "major issues it raises", there's other threads for debate.

Dude would rather have us suffee and deny us healthcare then have to grapple with the concept of bodily autonomy for people he views as inferior.

Straight up transphobia that is barely one step removed from the rhetoric of those that would deny cis women their reproductive rights.
 
On the radio today there was a piece about book banning, and they had a bunch of teenagers talking about how books had been helpful in making them realize that they weren't alone/crazy/worthless for being who they were. Are there any particular books that you would recommend that were helpful to (younger) you?

Apologies, missed this one earlier.
It's not quite a book, but if I'd read the Gender Dysphoria Bible earlier, it would likely have saved me years (possibly decades) of confusion and self-doubt. I've read several autobiographies and other trans-focused books over the last few years and don't recall any particular one that really clued me in, but by then I'd accumulated a lot of "oh that's just sci-fi" (or "oh that's just fetish stuff") thinking that prevented any more factual book from delivering that message. It was socializing among transitioning trans folk that brought me around - and what better way to realize you're not alone than by being among similar people?
 
I just noticed this tread, so I have some catching up to do, in terms of reading everything, but I am going to lazily skip the line and ask without checking to see if its already been answered...

Does trans identity depend on a fundamental, binary/traditional conception of men and/or women as a baseline? I guess another way of asking, is, does there have to be a "correct" framework of what a woman is first, in order for people to meaningfully identify as a woman?

I'm not sure I'm articulating my question exactly the way I want, but I'd rather have a question now than a perfect question later. I'll tag Sophie (@schlaufuchs) since you're the OP but I'd really love to hear from any trans friends.
 
I think it ultimately depends on the trans person, but everyone does start with a basic idea of male/female because that's what society tells us all our lives (there's even a word for this - heteronormativity) and for a trans person there's a sense from a young age that what gender you're supposed to be isn't right and you're not even sure why. There doesn't have to be a strict idea of what a woman is or what a man is or something has to be masculine or feminine and there are trans people who identify with neither, both or something else entirely.
 
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Does trans identity depend on a fundamental, binary/traditional conception of men and/or women as a baseline? I guess another way of asking, is, does there have to be a "correct" framework of what a woman is first, in order for people to meaningfully identify as a woman?

I said it in the cis thread, but at least in the definition as I understand it, all that is required for trans to exist is:
1) a person is assigned a gender by someone else
2) that person has an internal understanding of their gender that is different than the gender they were assigned
3) the disjunction between (1) and (2) is culturally, socially, and/or linguistically relevant enough to warrant a term or categorization for this person.

Nothing in there *requires* a male/female binary, but none of this stuff exists in the abstract. Rather, it develops historically as part of a trialectic between the body/biology, culture/society, and the self. I think at some level male and female genders are innate or intrinsic to humanity, as they are present in some form or another in every society we have ever observed.

Moreover, it is pretty undeniable that an inherent internal sense of gender is intrinsic to a human individual; studies have found transness to a) be genetic to a degree (i.e. if you have trans people in your family it is more likely that other people in the family will also be trans, even without contact), and b) that the innate sense of gender we all have emerges prior to socialization and acculturation in a specific gender presentation. We also know this is the case because trans people exist everywhere, even in communities where the concept of gender is held as immutable, where nobody is taught that it is possible to be something other than the gender assigned at birth, and where any deviation from gender norms is met with violence, trans people exist and persist.

So it’s not the case that “male/female” are in some sense innate to humanity AND ALSO trans people are intrinsic to humanity, but rather that trans people are intrinsic to humanity BECAUSE male/female are in some sense intrinsic to humanity. In fact, trans people are trans not because they are somehow alien to human society, but rather *because* trans people have the same innate sense of internal gender that everybody has.

This isn’t the end-all be-all though, of course. Non-binary people also exist, and have the same internal sense of gender identity that we all have. So if male/female are intrinsic to humanity, then so too would nonbinary identities. Moreover, gender doesn’t exist as an inert biological essence, but rather exists as a living, breathing cultural institution. Again, some of this stuff is rooted in biology, both in functions, parts, and appearance, but also in the way the world is perceived and interacted with. On estrogen men smell different to me, I perceive colors differently, sensations are more vivid, I feel emotions more strongly. These sorts of biological realities are reflected in cultural and social stereotypes about genders that span time and space, even among societies with no contact.

Gender is also affected by material relations: anthropological research has shown that immediate-return Hunter gatherer societies tend to produce roughly egalitarian communities, with men and women existing in separate spheres which are perceived within the community as equal in social esteem and access to resources. By contrast, societies where subsistence relies on access to fixed resources, like farming or fishing tend to produce patrilocal marital relations (i.e. the bride leaves her home to live in the husband’s community), which in turn produces patriarchal societies.

Different power relations produce different stereotypes, archetypes, and socialization. Toxic masculinity, is not inherent to being male, but rather is a consequence of social and cultural norms around how masculinity ought to be performed. Likewise a lot of GCs love to harp on about how womanhood necessitates a particular set of universal experiences which “all women” have: being catcalled or sexualized by older men the instant puberty begins, being punished for acting out or behaving in a way that boys get a pass for, being constantly ignored or talked down to. Being shamed for dressing too provocatively and too prudishly, being shamed for being too thin or flat and too fat or curvy. Being shamed for being too made up and for being not made up at all. Being on the receiving end of sexual assault, harassment, or rape. We can know these things exist, because trans women start experiencing them the instant they start being perceived as women, and obviously being subjected to these things constantly throughout one’s mental development will have profound and far-reaching effects both on one’s mental health and on one’s personality and perception of the world.

Finally, culture plays a big role. Culture is of course affected by social and economic relations, as patriarchy imbues femininity with certain norms which are manifestations of our oppression. But nevertheless, dress, attitudes, roles, conceptions of the self, cultural consumption, hobbies - these are all historically contingent and change over time. They feed into one’s internal sense of gender.

This is all to say that everything intersects and mutually constitutes. The body and biology inform society, and one’s relation to their own body and a given society’s instilled norms about the body informs their internal relationship to their gender. However in turn society also affects perceptions and definitions of the body - in medieval European society women were perceived as innately sexual beings, dangerous creatures to be guarded against, lest they seduce you and rob you of your manly virtue. Maidens we’re viewed as masculine entities, virtuous for not giving into their feminine impulses. By contrast, Victorian society viewed women as meek, docile and chaste. Averse to bawdy displays who required male protection and shielding from corrupting influences. Virginity was viewed as the apogee of femininity, as womanhood was chaste and pure in nature.

So to answer the question, transness and nonbinariness do not require some kind of gendered norm, as an inherent sense of internal gender is innate to every human and precedes acculturation to gender norms. However that innate gender also exists in relation to gendered norms and socially contingent gendered experiences. In all worlds I would want to be a woman, but my conception of womanhood is informed both by my socialization, and my experiences with culturally and historically contingent institutions like feminism, leftist theory, queer theory, fashion, the media, my sexual identity, cis women, and other trans people.
 
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I think it ultimately depends on the trans person, but everyone does start with a basic idea of male/female because that's what society tells us all our lives (there's even a word for this - heteronormativity) and for a trans person there's a sense from a young age that what gender you're supposed to be isn't right and you're not even sure why. There doesn't have to be a strict idea of what a woman is or what a man is like something has to be masculine or feminine and there are trans people who identify with neither, both or something else entirely.

I said it in the cis thread, but at least in the definition as I understand it, all that is required for trans to exist is:
1) a person is assigned a gender by someone else
2) that person has an internal understanding of their gender that is different than the gender they were assigned
3) the disjunction between (1) and (2) is culturally, socially, and/or linguistically relevant enough to warrant a term or categorization for this person.

Nothing in there *requires* a male/female binary, but none of this stuff exists in the abstract. Rather, it develops historically as part of a trialectic between the body/biology, culture/society, and the self. I think at some level male and female genders are innate or intrinsic to humanity, as they are present in some form or another in every society we have ever observed.

Moreover, it is pretty undeniable that an inherent internal sense of gender is intrinsic to a human individual; studies have found transness to a) be genetic to a degree (i.e. if you have trans people in your family it is more likely that other people in the family will also be trans, even without contact), and b) that the innate sense of gender we all have emerges prior to socialization and acculturation in a specific gender presentation. We also know this is the case because trans people exist everywhere, even in communities where the concept of gender is held as immutable, where nobody is taught that it is possible to be something other than the gender assigned at birth, and where any deviation from gender norms is met with violence, trans people exist and persist.

So it’s not the case that “male/female” are in some sense innate to humanity AND ALSO trans people are intrinsic to humanity, but rather that trans people are intrinsic to humanity BECAUSE male/female are in some sense intrinsic to humanity. In fact, trans people are trans not because they are somehow alien to human society, but rather *because* trans people have the same innate sense of internal gender that everybody has.

This isn’t the end-all be-all though, of course. Non-binary people also exist, and have the same internal sense of gender identity that we all have. So if male/female are intrinsic to humanity, then so too would nonbinary identities. Moreover, gender doesn’t exist as an inert biological essence, but rather exists as a living, breathing cultural institution. Again, some of this stuff is rooted in biology, both in functions, parts, and appearance, but also in the way the world is perceived and interacted with. On estrogen men smell different to me, I perceive colors differently, sensations are more vivid, I feel emotions more strongly. These sorts of biological realities are reflected in cultural and social stereotypes about genders that span time and space, even among societies with no contact.

Gender is also affected by material relations: anthropological research has shown that immediate-return Hunter gatherer societies tend to produce roughly egalitarian communities, with men and women existing in separate spheres which are perceived within the community as equal in social esteem and access to resources. By contrast, societies where subsistence relies on access to fixed resources, like farming or fishing tend to produce patrilocal marital relations (i.e. the bride leaves her home to live in the husband’s community), which in turn produces patriarchal societies.

Different power relations produce different stereotypes, archetypes, and socialization. Toxic masculinity, is not inherent to being male, but rather is a consequence of social and cultural norms around how masculinity ought to be performed. Likewise a lot of GCs love to harp on about how womanhood necessitates a particular set of universal experiences which “all women” have: being catcalled or sexualized by older men the instant puberty begins, being punished for acting out or behaving in a way that boys get a pass for, being constantly ignored or talked down to. Being shamed for dressing too provocatively and too prudishly, being shamed for being too thin or flat and too fat or curvy. Being shamed for being too made up and for being not made up at all. Being on the receiving end of sexual assault, harassment, or rape. We can know these things exist, because trans women start experiencing them the instant they start being perceived as women, and obviously being subjected to these things constantly throughout one’s mental development will have profound and far-reaching effects both on one’s mental health and on one’s personality and perception of the world.

Finally, culture plays a big role. Culture is of course affected by social and economic relations, as patriarchy imbues femininity with certain norms which are manifestations of our oppression. But nevertheless, dress, attitudes, roles, conceptions of the self, cultural consumption, hobbies - these are all historically contingent and change over time. They feed into one’s internal sense of gender.

This is all to say that everything intersects and mutually constitutes. The body and biology inform society, and one’s relation to their own body and a given society’s instilled norms about the body informs their internal relationship to their gender. However in turn society also affects perceptions and definitions of the body - in medieval European society women were perceived as innately sexual beings, dangerous creatures to be guarded against, lest they seduce you and rob you of your manly virtue. Maidens we’re viewed as masculine entities, virtuous for not giving into their feminine impulses. By contrast, Victorian society viewed women as meek, docile and chaste. Averse to bawdy displays who required male protection and shielding from corrupting influences. Virginity was viewed as the apogee of femininity, as womanhood was chaste and pure in nature.

So to answer the question, transness and nonbinariness do not require some kind of gendered norm, as an inherent sense of internal gender is innate to every human and precedes acculturation to gender norms. However that innate gender also exists in relation to gendered norms and socially contingent gendered experiences. In all worlds I would want to be a woman, but my conception of womanhood is informed both by my socialization, and my experiences with culturally and historically contingent institutions like feminism, leftist theory, queer theory, fashion, the media, my sexual identity, cis women, and other trans people.
Why is genetic psychology, rather than genetic genitalia, a better, or more accurate way of sorting gender identity?
 
Why is genetic psychology, rather than genetic genitalia, a better, or more accurate way of sorting gender identity?

Because my brain says I'm a woman, even if my genitalia says I'm a man. And my brain is the part that matters - genitalia can be (to some degree) adjusted, but so far no one has figured out how to adjust the brain's gender identity.
 
genitalia can be (to some degree) adjusted, but so far no one has figured out how to adjust the brain's gender identity.
Adjusting the brains gender identity would open up a can of worms......
 
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