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This one is probably going to catch me a lot of heat from both the extremes, as it touches on that most sensitive and landmine-laden of topics: gender identity and the expressions thereof.
First, the parts which are going to piss the TERFs off: I am a proudly cisgender, XX-chromosome-having ("womyn-born-womyn" as they'd say) lesbian, with a strict policy of dating only other lesbians (after some bad experiences with bisexual women)...and I am also trans-inclusive. This is going to draw the usual predictable howls of outrage, and might even get me called "traitor to the lesbian race."
*Again.*
Because yes, that is a thing that happened once. Satire sometimes writes itself.
Incidentally, if someone knows where the lesbian race lives, please by all means send me a couple of plane tickets; I'm getting married soon and would love to have the reception there. Hopefully it's somewhere with nice beaches!
And now the parts which are going to annoy non-TERFs: some of the TERF arguments hold more water than their detractors give them credit for. In particular:
1) There are biological differences between the sexes. Note that this does *not* mean I believe transwomen and transmen are deluded or faking their lived experiences; it means that gender is not purely a "social construct," that one's brain structure and hormones play heavily into it. Incidentally, this is *not* an anti-trans argument. If anything, this is the reason I support trans* people in their transitions. Nature screwed up somewhere and put the wrong sort of mind/brain in the wrong sort of body. I can't imagine what that's like, but I can take their word for it, and having seen the real, positive changes in trans* friends of mine once they started hormones only cements this support.
Again: not being a gender essentialist here, and certainly not committing that stupid "physical sex and/or chromosome cohort *is* gender" fallacy. I'm on your side, I'm just not going to fall for the stupid, mush-headed "thinking" that attempts to reduce something as complex as gender to "just a social construct." Real data has borne out that this is not the case.
2) Trans* people do not have the lived experiences of cisgender people of the sex they are attempting to pass as. Transwomen: you do not bleed, you did not go through female puberty as a child/young teenager, you will never be pregnant, and you were not seen by society at large--this is different from "not seen by molesters and paedophiles!"--as potentially and primarily objects of convenience, sexual and otherwise, for men.
3) Expanding on 2 above, I support cisgender-women-only spaces. This does not mean I don't view you, transwomen, as "real women." Your experiences are your own, and if you feel so badly mismatched to your body that you want to change it, to me, that is enough to qualify you as "real women." Just...not cisgender women. Again, different life experiences.
So please, if some of us want *some* space that's not dealing with trans* issues, please, please, give us that. You can be in the inclusive spaces, and even start transwomen-only spaces; I will not intrude on those, because I do not have your lived experiences, and can't imagine what you've been through. I only ask that you extend us the same courtesy.
4) Having a genital preference does not make you anti-trans* or transmisogynist. I am a lesbian. I like ladybits. This means I'm not going to date a pre-operative MtF, no matter how well she passes otherwise. We can be friends, but we're never going to have sex. Of course, this one is a moot point *anyway* since I'm already taken, but even hypothetically, it's not going to happen. It's not personal, but it's also not negotiable.
5) Surgery does not change your chromosomes or your lived experiences. This is actually not anywhere near as important as TERFs make it out to be, since at least to my mind, most of gender and gender identity is performative anyway. I'm also not saying to feel invalid or less of a human because of who and what you are. But at the same time, understand that history is history, and it can't be retroactively changed.
Just understand that the social transition is going to be bigger than the physical one for you. We can spot otherwise well-passing early-stage transitioning MtFs very well based not on any physical cues, but based on behavior. It takes time to lose that male privilege, and understandably, some of you are going to be reluctant to let it go. It sucks on this side of the gender divide sometimes.
6) Please understand that much of the backlash from the TERF camp is because women have always, always, always been marginalized and shoved aside for mens' interests, and some of us feel that men are intruding *even as they become women.* There's hardly any discussion of FtM people compared to MtF, and I don't hear hardly anything about FtMs having trouble integrating into groups composed of cisgender men the way MtFs tend to kind of stomp all over womens' spaces sometimes (in my observation, mostly early in transition).
The reasons for this are probably complicated. They likely have something to do with male being the "default," so FtMs are basically going from other and different to default, if not "normal." And the MtF friends i have, both of them, both told me there was a tremendous backlash against them for abandoning being male, mostly backed up by "WHY would you want to be a chick?!" with the unspoken corollary being "womens' lives suck."
I am, again, not a TERF, and I will defend you against them in all arenas. In return, please keep the above in mind.
This all sounds reasonable enough, right? In the end, doesn't it just boil down to the golden rule, treating others as they want to be treated, taking their basic humanity (a level well below gender expression, mind you!) into account? But I'm sure this is going to catch me more flames than a California wildfire. So be it; I'm wearing my asbestos nightie. Have at it.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday March 06 2018, @03:06PM (9 children)
Amusing how similar we are in outlook despite minor variations on themes in politics. The "asbestos nightie" concept is hilarious, if some 1950s pinup art doesn't exist, it should.
The lesbian race ethnostate, I love it. I also love the idea of the Jewish ethnostate (move them all there so they stop getting progrom's and holocaust'd, because millennia of experience proves they can't live with any other social group) and especially I like the white ethnostate. Where is the white ethnostate again, BTW?
I like straight white male only places. The world ran better, better for everyone BTW not just SWMs, when those were the military, politics, and workplaces.
Being trans is essentially having a mental health issue. The analogy with "OCD hand washing" is critical to understanding how the right views trans issues. Imagine if a fraction of one percent of the population has debilitating "OCD hand washing" problem such that the skin on their hands is getting literally rubbed off via unstoppable hand washing and infected and paranoia about germs and stuff. Now the way we treat this today is to fix the OCD.
The analogy with trans today is we'd get the entire media to declare its allegiance with OCD hand washers, declaring it incredibly brave (because they have the unified support of the entire nations legacy propaganda organs, its brave?) and make a couple of them celebrities, much like how making school shooters celebrities results in more school shooters with the same exact purpose... OCD is upgraded from a condition to an identity, you can give up your ethnicity, for example, and become an officially identified OCD person, perhaps. Then get the government to change the laws such that we need bathroom sinks in every room in every building in the entire nation to support OCD hand washers as a handicap, and the government can destroy any small business that doesn't want to sell cakes celebrating the glorious joyous superiority of having hand washing OCD disease. And trust me, we get it, the people with the mental illness of OCD handwashing are, aside from the hand washing, nice normal people who really truly and devoutly believe in their hearts they must wash their hands 10 times per waking hour of the germs will contaminate their precious bodily fluids, we're not accusing them of lying or being inhuman, merely pointing out they're mentally ill. The next step is for the media to normalize it as much as possible, why its perfectly normal to have OCD handwashing illness, every reality TV show has someone standing at a sink for hours, every soap opera, every TV drama even the weird cop shows have a plot revolving around hand washing continuously, etc. "I'm very brave, I don't see handwashers and non-handwashers, I only see the human race" Then comes the axe... it would be wrong to convince hand washers to stop, but its OK to chop their hands off, after all not having hands means they're not washing them combined with intense propaganda that the problem was entirely contained in the bits, and having chopped them off means they're indistinguishable from people without OCD, right? It becomes a major left wing social mistake to claim they're in any way different now from natural non-insane people who didn't get recently chopped. Then mentally ill parents desperate for attention start posting to twitter that they somehow knew their little newborn was born to be an OCD handwasher so they chopped their newborn kids hands off, and the media outpouring of support universally describes that as incredibly brave. And anyone who suggests that maybe a pill or two and a couple months or years of therapy would be better for 99% of folks with OCD handwashing than chopping off hands is of course a Nazi and any problem that OCD victims have in society related to being insane or having chopped off hands is of course solely and exclusively due to Nazis and/or secret Russian Spy interference.
Its rather stereotypically politically correct that given someone with OCD disease wanting to chop their hands off and normies recoiling in horror, with the "unspoken corollary being" that normies who don't have a cool identity like "OCD" suck or normies hate people with OCD and its all about non-OCD privilege and giving up handedness privilege which we should all strive to eliminate to be good people, or at least good for five minutes until the next leftist madness sweeps in to ruin more lives.
Imagine the above being rewritten for hoarders, rapists, or drunk drivers. The problem with "trans as a contemporary issue" isn't the trans person or the illness or the treatment, its the weird way its being handled in society. Not on a wise path, not at all.
Ditto for race/culture, for example.
Its a human nature thing the same way recent religious converts or recent basic military training grads or recent college grads are incredibly annoying extremists compared to the pool of people they're entering. And a side dish of that human nature is they calm down after awhile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:41PM (1 child)
the few people with OCD that I know would happily take 2 pills a day for the rest of their lives to cure or greatly diminish their OCD. Some would even opt for surgery if a method was known to fix the problem.
is there maybe another example that could be more appropriate? debilitating illnesses and nazis and russian spies really only mix when you include repetitive religious rituals with no real meaning in there as well.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @07:58PM
> the few people with OCD that I know would happily take 2 pills a day for the rest of their lives to cure or greatly diminish their OCD.
Just make sure it's always exactly two pills. Don't change the dosage!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:53PM (6 children)
I had no idea that amount of self-serving horseshit could exist in one place without collapsing on itself into an anus-shaped naked singularity of utter shitheadery.
As it is written: "I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." As it is also written: "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday March 06 2018, @09:09PM (4 children)
Paraphrasing that as "You're correct, but I don't like it, so I'll change the topic by saying you suck", not an A+ on the debating team, but you write it creatively and entertainingly.
(Score: 4, Troll) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 07 2018, @03:46AM (3 children)
Okay, first of all...do not, DO NOT, EVER attempt to place me on a level with you, you inbred sack of caiman shit. You have to look up to see an earthworm's belly from where you're standing, and you'd damn well better salute and call it "sir" when you do.
Second: the strawmen, false analogies, and plain old outright non-sequiturs in that post of yours are competing for attention so hard I don't even know which to address first or how. It's like one of those cartoon "ball of violence" sequences, except it's all bullshit.
Where to even begin with that pile?
Okay, let's start here: you're combining a false analogy ("rapists, hoarders, drunk drivers...") with a slippery slope argument ("butbutbut if we accept THEM, what NEXT? Cats and dogs living together! Lookit me I'm an Apache copter hurr hurr brrrt!"). Just curious, do you you think I as a cisgender but homosexual woman am also "essentially suffering from mental illness," and in what way is this comparable to people who MAKE A DELIBERATE CHOICE TO RAPE OR DRIVE DRUNK?! Fucking asshole!
You also conflate OCD with, based on your example of cutting a hand off, some sort of body dysmorphic disorder. The two aren't even close. Interestingly, though, I recently read that there may be a link between gender dysphoria and bodily integrity disorders...which, pay attention here, are organic and caused by malfunctions in the brain, NOT some kind of "lifestyle choice."
So far none of what you've said is coherent. Worse, it appears to have been said with the specific intent of making a point that can't actually be made when the premises are examined closely; in other words, you've Dunning-Kruger-bukkake'd all over yet *another* thread, showing once again not only your complete lack of understanding and cognitive ability but your utter poverty of basic human decency as well. Do you think you're clever or something? Do you really think this kind of clumsy misshapen bluster is going to win anyone over to your side who wasn't already on it?
Good Lord, I don't actually think there's even anything else to analyze in there. It seems like you didn't even make this up out of whole cloth, just copy-pasted a bunch of thought-terminating cliches from 8chan and called it a day's work. This wasn't even a coherent troll attempt. What were you trying to do?
I take it back about mercy on your soul: you can piss right off to hell with this crap.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @03:58AM (1 child)
Don't hold back, Azuma.
Tell us how you really feel!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 07 2018, @04:34AM
What, you thought the asbestos underthings were for *other peoples'* benefit? :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday March 07 2018, @04:57AM
Entire journal worth it just for this one line. VLM, that's got to leave a mark, if you were not just a blob of amorphous racist jelly.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @05:32PM