Writing yesterday’s post got me thinking about what it means to identify as something. (Not for the first time, but that’s how it always is with thinking about big issues: you do it a little at a time, and when you feel like you’ve travelled down all available paths, you let it rest for a while and return back later to find new angles and corners to explore.)
[Guess who once again did not start writing today’s blog post in the morning? Me!]
For a long time, I thought that everyone would choose to be male if they were given a choice, and the only reason anyone would ever say differently was because it was a wrong thing to want and therefore a shameful thing to admit. Whether because it was in accordance with God’s plan or because one’s body was part of some “true” self, both my religious upbringing and more secular worldviews strongly pushed the idea that genuine happiness and peace could only come from accepting one’s body (and also the gender assigned on its basis).
Once, when I was a teenager (maybe fourteen, or fifteen) I stood with a group of teenage girls, and one of them actually asked whether we would rather be men. One after the other shook her head, looking to all the world like they really, truly meant it, maybe even slightly puzzled, as if they’d never had even a second of doubt and longing about the question.
When they looked at me expectantly, I quickly bit my tongue and shook my head. I had learned quite a while ago that outing oneself as a freak was not a good idea, and now this desire – one I’d considered ubiquitous, if taboo – was one more thing making me one.
(Strangely, I never had the same issues with being attracted to women. Despite a staunchly heteronormative religious community, I had no trouble at all with accepting the idea that people could fall in love with others regardless of their gender, and when I wondered about my own attractions, I didn’t feel like they made me a freak in the slightest.)
It was not until I started reading blogs written by trans women years later that I started honestly considering that some people liked feminine-coded things not just despite their association with femininity, but in some cases and to some degree even because of it. That some people actually liked being female. That for some people, their femaleness was not something they had to grit their teeth to bear, but something they valued and wanted recognized and seen.
That someone could feel like maleness was a burden pressed upon them as much as I felt like femaleness was a burden pressed upon me.
It’s still not something I can genuinely understand without putting it through at least one layer of abstraction (by comparing it to my own feelings about gender, for example). And it’s not about the feminine-coded things themselves – I don’t have trouble understanding how people could like swooshy skirts, or dangling earrings, or colorfully painted nails, or eyes emphasized by eyeliner, or lips made shiny by gloss. I don’t have trouble understanding how someone could like feeling graceful, or being kind.
But the idea of myself as a woman in a swooshy skirt, rather than a man? A woman with artfully painted nails? A woman moving gracefully, or being kind?
Does not compute. Feels wrong, in an unnatural, stilted, awkward way, like trying to artificially construct an image of gracefulness or kindness or me in a swooshy skirt around a hollow core.
This is what I mean when I say I am male. There is a core part of me that clicks with maleness, and fails to do so with femaleness. All the frustratingly vague and uninformative definitions or explanations of what the term “gender identity” means are trying to get at this core, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a really good way to explain it.
Maybe try to frame it in a different way than by thinking about your gender – you might be so used to taking your gender for granted you can’t tell what it even is, or you might not have a very strong gender identity (or any gender identity at all). Imagine it’s you-but-not-you, imagine you’re wearing a mask that looks really very much like your face but is still off, imagine that feeling most people get sometimes when they leave their house that there’s something – some indefinable thing – they forgot, imagine a familiar music piece with the rhythm or the instruments or the tune just sounding wrong and strange without you being able to name what exactly is wrong. Maybe there’s some aspect of yourself you consider fundamental to who you are, a certain way of thinking, certain preferences, a certain way of viewing or interacting with the world: imagine one of those gone, or strangely foggy and murky and unreachable or hard to remember.
Does that make sense to anyone out there? I don’t know.
Even if it does, it might not make sense to you to that one of those fundamental aspects should be someone’s gender. It doesn’t make sense to me either. It seems weird that there should be an aspect of my identity that somehow naturally lines up with this very specific cultural concept.
On the other hand, there are parts of me I consider rather essential that don’t have words to describe them. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that this one happens to be one there’s a word for. (And it’s even arguable that there is a word for it – after all, maleness means quite different things to different people.)
Alex (1976 – September 6, 2007) had a vocabulary of over 100 words, but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and was asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly. He could understand that a key was a key no matter what its size or color, and could figure out how the key was different from others. One day, he asked what color he was, and learned “grey” after being told the answer six times. This made him the first non-human animal to have ever asked an existential question. [x]
Alex’s last words were also “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.” [x]
These were the same words that Alex would say every day when his owner left the lab.
a parrot actually said these words, and meant it, before he died.
I’m getting choked up
Alex the parrot is actually one of my favorite animal intelligence stories/examples. What a smart birb.
Why am I emotional right now?
I had thw pleasure of presenting her findings in my Evolutionary psych class this semester and Alex was a very smart birb. Some more fun facts! He had object permanence and could count up to 7. He understood concepts of bigger and smaller, and he could use the word no properly!!! And he’d also get an attitude if he didn’t get what he wanted and hed keep interrupting the task that he was meant to be working on at that moment to ask for something else or to go to a different location in the room!!!! He was a Sassy Burb
Alex would also interrupt other African greys they were trying to teach words to with the correct answer, so he would get the reward instead. I remember reading about him correcting the other birds’ pronunciation on ‘v’ sounds, as that’s a hard one for birds to make. Usually when they were trying to pronounce the number seven. He’d say the word as it should sound and then say something like “say it correctly”.
This bird also invented his own words for things. He did not know what an apple was, but he was familiar with cherries and bananas. So what did he decide an apple was? A banerry. Because it was red like a cherry but light on the inside like a banana or something. And he was so set in his ways that he was correct in saying it was a banerry and not an apple, that he would try to teach his human companions how to say it. In the same slow pronunciation that they would do at him when teaching him new words.
all African greys have the capacity to be this smart and it makes me so sad that so many wind up in rescues or are cared for poorly in their homes
@dollyp shared a story on twitter about refugees after the news of trump’s new ban (which has, thankfully, for the moment been stayed by a federal judge)
Last December, I came across a post with an intriguing excerpt from a Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) workbook and a link to the full text. I saved the link, planning to read the whole thing when I had more time, but neglected to save the text itself, and when I came back later, the site was offline.
However, today I found a working link to the same workbook! This time, I saved it immediately. The excerpted page was page 29, Reality Statements for Interpersonal Effectiveness, and if the whole workbook is like this page, it could be very helpful to me. So I’ll read it, and I’ll probably have some thoughts and comments about it which I might leave on this blog. Feel free to join me!
A few years or so ago, my circle of awareness was abuzz with people voicing enthusiasm for non-violent communication (NVC), and while it seems to have died down by now (the last time I heard anything about NVC was almost exactly a year ago, and only in the form of a flyer promoting a workshop), I’ve been thinking about it again lately.
Every now and then, someone makes a statement like “men are socialized to not listen to women”, or “men feel entitled to women’s time”, or “men constantly cross women’s boundaries”, and almost inevitably someone chimes in with “not all men” – not all men are like that, not all men feel like that, not all men do that, etc.
Yeah I can’t really see how it’s surprising that the word “pussy” was used a lot in protests against a man who is infamous for saying he “grab[s] women by the pussy.” That’s not about transmisogyny, JFC.
In general, the modern feminist movement really has to find a way to be inclusive to trans women and to be able to talk about how much cultural misogyny is based around wanting to control cis women’s reproductive capabilities. It’s good to acknowledge that not everyone who gets abortions identifies as female, but not if you’re going to obfuscate the fact that much of the cultural opposition to women’s rights is rooted in seeing it as a “women’s issue.” Not everyone who opposes abortion does it out of misogyny, but enough people do, particularly the people with actual power over legislation, that we can’t leave that out of the conversation. (Also, I feel like this is related to the weird way Internet SJ fetishizes non-op trans people, considering that HRT keeps trans men from getting pregnant. But that’s a rant for another time, etc.)
Like on the one hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of women at the protests who didn’t realize that having a vagina/ovaries/etc. is not central to being a woman! And that could be out of hatred or simple ignorance. The one I attended had a lot of older white women who probably aren’t up to date on online feminist discourse and didn’t think through that, so I appreciated seeing younger women (cis and trans) carrying signs that advocated for trans women’s rights and inclusion. And hearing Wendy Davis include trans women in her speech at the march.
We need to be more inclusive with our language. But that shouldn’t mean we have to shut down conversations about really common forms of misogyny – especially when we’re protesting someone who engages in them.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with talking about oppression against cis women’s reproductive issues, but I think the singular emphasis on that fact can dangerous in that I’ve seen way too many people make the logic jump that “women’s reproductive capabilities are controlled by men > an experience trans women don’t face > trans women are privileged in this front!1!!” and not “but
on the other hand, if women had penises like pre-op trans women, they’re…pretty much dead so yeah society hates all women (not to mention that the difference is trans women don’t have the societal power to police cis women, but cis people in general lashing out at trans women is very much supported by most societies)“.
I mean, yeah, of course. I completely get why people get nervous about really vagina-centric language in feminist movements. But there needs to be a solution other than “you are not allowed to talk about how having a vagina factors into your own oppression, even when a sexist dude literally invokes it.” That also pushes cis women into the arms of TERFs, when they’re the only group that lets them speak openly about their experiences.
Also, as people have pointed out in other posts: a lot of the “pussy/vagina” signs I saw were pretty personalized, like “This pussy grabs back!” I don’t see how something like that referring to yourself implies that everyone who experiences misogyny has a pussy – anymore than my “Michigander Against DeVos” sign suggested you needed to be from Michigan to oppose Betsy DeVos.
The point is we need to find a way to let all women talk about their experiences. We should be able to talk about the specific forms of misogyny that one group of women experiences without suggesting that another group with another set of experiences is somehow “more privileged,” doesn’t “really” experience oppression, and doesn’t have their own parallel experiences. Because you’re right, it’s not like Donald Trump sees trans women as his equals, either. They experience their own hellhole of misogyny and sexual harassment from men.
But that still doesn’t change the fact that the lack of access to abortion and birth control is a thing that specifically women with vaginas would experience (and non-women with vaginas). And that historically, misogyny has been pretty heavily tied to male fear and shame around “female” genitalia. And that is a huge problem that those women deserve to be able to speak about without constantly hedging. They also need to listen to trans women when they speak about the specific forms of misogyny they experience that cis women don’t. That’s where the real problem lies here, that cis women don’t do that.
This is a really good discussion and I am reblogging it for truth, but also to point out a (not so) minor nitpick I have:
“considering that HRT keeps trans men from getting pregnant”
This is a myth and there’s been trans men who had surprise pregnancies because they believed that was the case. Trans MSM on hrt still need to use contraception.
(However, most trans men do get hysto at some point even if they don’t get SRS, so it still stands that abortion issues only affect us temporarily)
Ah okay. I’d heard that from trans guy friends, but I wasn’t totally sure. I’ll edit that out of the original version of the post, since it’s pretty tangential to my point. Can’t do anything about the reblogs, unfortunately.
Thanks for the correction, I don’t want to be spreading medical misinformation that could hurt people.
Reblogging again for the medical info in case anyone needs it
Another thing though…
It’s not just about talking about oppression.
It’s also about talking about our bodies.
There’s a huge taboo against talking about female bodies. A lot of conservatives weren’t upset at Donald Trump because he bragged about sexual assault, but because he said pussy.
And there’s also a lot of cultural consensus that female bodies are disgusting.
Feminist culture defies those taboos and related taboos as an end in itself. Not just for the sake of talking about reproductive justice.
I just read EA Has A Lying Problem and realised that it was similar to some things I’ve said in private conversation before. So I decided I might as well paste my thoughts from chat into Tumblr for interested parties to see. This is just a copy/paste I added some links to, so don’t expect a quality post. But, like, if you want to know what I think about this, here you go:
This also doesn’t handle the ‘what if EA is wrong (or being done) wrong’ problem very well.
Like, you don’t have perfect information about the world. No one does. We each know what our map of the world looks like, so what we have to do is phrase things as “I am someone who thinks they are X” rather than “I am X”, and go from there.
The correct perspective for EAs to take isn’t “I am part of a movement that is going to save the world” but “I am someone who thinks they are part of a movement that is going to save the world”.
Then you step back and take the outside view. What is the track record of people who thought they were part of a movement that was going to save the world?
Spoiler alert: It doesn’t look good.
As far as I can tell from history, most ideologies that think they’re saving the world are wrong.
So EA needs to be done in such a way that even if it’s wrong (which is a hugely important possibility based on priors), it fails gracefully.
You need to act such that, if your ideas are right, you’ll have made the world a better place; but, if they’re wrong, you’ll just be embarrassed.
The world would be a much better place today if Lenin had simply embarrassed himself.
If EA is wrong, we want to have done less harm in the time we thought it was right than, say, Christianity did during its period of thinking it would save the world if it just crusaded a little harder.
If you cry “Deus Vult!” or your belt buckle says “Gott mit uns”, you can still be the baddies.
And if you have an idea that you can only implement using lies, theft, abuse, and murder – don’t try. You’re probably wrong, because your predecessors were.
I don’t care if it’s the most amazing, logical, obviously-right idea ever-
Don’t. Fucking. Try.
When I visited [EA group redacted], a lot of people said it was obviously correct to kill five people in the trolley problem if the one person is an EA, because then they’ll donate money and save even more people to offset that.
And I said this was hella suspicious because pretty much every ideology will come up with reasons why its own members are more valuable to the world, so it completely fails the “what if EA is wrong” test.
Like, pretty dramatically, really.
Especially given how much of a known mind-virus this is. It isn’t some new plague we haven’t developed immunities to. If you haven’t been inoculated against it, this means something is wrong with you.
(And maybe if we stop thinking about things in terms of “Treating my friends as special is actually a plot to help them save the world! Yay, morality!”, we’ll do less of the less-bad-but-super-annoying thing of always justifying aid to friends as “This is actually indirectly EA!” instead of “I want to be nice to my friend”.)
(Like, maybe this is good for some people, but when I wrote a post complaining about people doing it to me I got flooded with private messages of the form “THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS! I didn’t know how to talk about what was making me so uncomfortable so thank you for putting it in words.” So, like, a ton of people are also upset by this.)
(Also, the fact that they felt the need to confide in me, a virtual stranger, instead of telling the people doing this to them to stop, is kind of problematic. It means something has gone seriously wrong here if people feel like they can’t talk about it.)
Anyway, back to the point: Don’t kill normies in favour of EAs in the trolley problem, dude. Don’t do things that would be deeply immoral if your ideology was wrong.
If your ideology is hanging out in the parking lot behind the school whispering to you “Hey, kid, wanna try some seductively plausible moral justifications for why Your People deserve more protection than The Outgroup?”, then you have to stand firm and say “My mommy epistemology says drugs justifications for things which have been wrong every other time they were justified are bad.”
It doesn’t matter how convincing the argument is, either. It could be pure, perfect, and flawless logic. You might have no counter argument. It might be so brilliant that it’s completely convincing. You still have to stand your ground and say “You’re lying”. No exceptions.
I mean, sure, maybe some day a time will come when it would be correct to think the people close to you need life more than the people you don’t know. But, if ever you think that day is today, you will be wrong. Don’t try.
But, hey, maybe you’re special. Maybe you’re unique in human history. Maybe you’re the one person who can assess the arguments perfectly such that you would never ever be misled by a bad one that flattered your biases. In fact, presumably, you don’t have biases! Your cognition is perfect and flawless and you’ll never be misled by a convincing argument. Sounds like you, right? Right?
In shocking, breaking news: Overconfidence is also a bias.
Biased! Biased biased biased! None of you are free from bias!
(And, if you’re astonished at my doctrine, go read the sequences again.)
How deep does this rabbit hole go, though?
You draw a line between ideology and morality here – saving the world (or as many people as possible) is good and right, this is morality, and the method of doing this (e.g. killing five non-EAs) might be wrong and is ideology. But what if you are wrong about what constitutes saving the world, or whether saving as many people as possible is actually good? (It might be a first premise, depending on your particular morals, but it might not be – after all, many consequentialists value the prevention of suffering, the creation of pleasure, the fulfillment of preferences, or some weighted combinations of those, not life itself. And others do value life itself. Not sure what is true for most EAs there.)
So, what makes you confident that your morality is correct? Why stop at asking “what if EA is wrong” and not move on to asking “what if saving lives is wrong”? I mean… if my morality was wrong, acting in accordance with my morality might be deeply immoral, just as acting in accordance with my ideology might be deeply immoral if my ideology was wrong.
And what makes you think that you can accurately assess what is merely embarrassing vs. what makes the world a worse place? (I should think that this is very much a non-trivial problem; embarrassment is highly subjective, and – again, depending on your values – making the world a worse place at some point is impossible to calculate confidently due to insufficient information.) Maybe *insert some favorite dictator here* would find his actions merely embarrassing or mildly regretful if being told they did not lead to the wanted outcomes, rather than being horrified.
What is the track record of people’s moralities, anyway? Does it really look any better than people’s “saving the world” track record? Is your confidence here justified? Crusaders presumably cared about spreading their religion, not about preventing suffering; telling them that crusades were the wrong way to go about spreading their religion (that their ideology was false) is a different matter entirely than telling them that their religion was incorrect (that their morality was false). Or am I going wrong somewhere here?
Omphaloskeptomai 