Zinnia has a terrific post from last December explaining how and why trans people got shoved into hyper-gendered boxes.

When it comes to transitioning, many people seem to equate living as a woman with being stereotypically feminine. It’s a common assumption that trans women express their womanhood via conventional or even excessive femininity. Movies and TV shows often depict trans characters as far more feminine than most cis women – at times absurdly so. Tabloids focus on conventionally attractive models and actresses; when Christine Jorgensen became one of the first widely known trans women in 1952, front-page headlines described her as a “blonde beauty”.

Sound familiar? It sounds to me exactly like the reactions to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover. It sounds exactly like that patronizing “ooooooh great job of being a gorgeous woman!!” commentary, as if that were the whole and only meaning of being a woman. [Read more…]

Originally a comment by Salty Current on Nail polish.

I think part of the problem is the conflation of identity with all of the cultural baggage that’s come to be associated with being a man or a woman. I’ve always felt that I’m a woman, felt that my woman’s body was “right,” and this has never had anything whatsoever to do with my preferences, interests, emotions, or abilities. I didn’t question whether I was a boy because I liked sports and math and had no interest in dolls or having children. I wasn’t confirmed in my girlness because I nurtured (stuffed and real) animals or liked playing with other girls or dancing. The thought that I might actually be a boy simply never occurred to me, and in the years since, as I’ve learned about people whose experience was very different, I understood them but still never shared that experience. And I believe this is true of everyone: people understand their identity, however complex that might be; they don’t develop that identity on the basis of what they like or what interests them. I’m sometimes a man in my dreams, but I don’t wake up confused about my identity.

I just don’t think there’s a connection – I don’t think trans women know they’re women because they like nail polish or weddings or whatever is associated with women in their culture. I think they know they’re women, and then, like everyone else in the culture, often have (stupid) ideas about what that entails.

None of the nonsense associating women with some things and men with others is the fault of trans people. They can reproduce it, as we all can, but the problem is with the culture generally. So when I as a feminist challenge some aspect of patriarchy – including the media or public response to a trans woman – I’m not trying to lay the problem at their door. [Read more…]

Originally a comment by Seth on We need to talk.

I think Ian Cromwell (www.crommunist.com, formerly of this very blogging nexus) has made some very cogent analyses of race that can, mutatis mutandis, be appropriated to gender analysis with respect to gender identity and gender expression. To paraphrase Ian, race is a social construct, and as such is equal parts ‘how one sees oneself’ and ‘how one is seen by everyone else’. (There is more involved, to be sure, but Ian’s archives are free for the perusal of the curious.)

Similarly, I think gender can be described as a confluence of ‘how one sees oneself’ and ‘how one is seen by everyone else’. Ophelia, MrFancyPants, and I are more-or-less comfortable with the gross dynamics of how we’re seen by ‘everyone else’ in regards to our genders, though indeed we all have some very strong disagreements of the specific assumptions that come along with that assignation. None of the three of us particularly identify with being men or women very strongly, in the same way that Ophelia and I don’t particularly identify with being white people. We understand that that is how we fall under the social classification system, we acknowledge it, and we don’t feel misidentified when other people look at us and say ‘Oh, there goes a [woman/man/white person]’. (Of course I’m being a bit presumptive, but I think it’s a fairly safe presumption, given my familiarity with Ophelia’s archive; I’m open to correction.)

Indeed, this is the very definition of what it means to be cisgender: when society (aka ‘everyone else’) looks at us and shoves us into a box, we do not grumble about the label on the lid of the box. We don’t feel a fundamental wrongness with the overall shape of the box. We could take or leave it, really. For many people like us (and, indeed, for the three specific people I’ve named here, including myself), we might disagree with the colour of the box, or with some of the other items that get shoved into the box along with us that we’re expected to contort ourselves to accommodate, but the box itself isn’t the issue. [Read more…]

Jane Clare Jones at Trouble and Strife puts it this way:

Feminism, as a political movement aimed at the liberation of women, has long theorized gender not as an innate essence, but as a hierarchical system enforcing women’s subservience. Characterizing certain personality traits – compliance, nurturance, the desire to be pretty or objectified – as ‘natural’ to women, is, according to feminist analysis, a primary mechanism for maintaining gender hierarchy. As a result, many feminists have genuine questions about trans ideology’s assertion that ‘gender identity’ is both natural and universal. It comes perilously close to naturalizing the oppression of women.

This is not trivial, and it needs to be discussed. But it has been decreed that it cannot be discussed, because to discuss it is to ‘deny the right of trans people to exist.’ Trans ideology collapses the fact that trans people exist into the theory of why trans people exist, and judges anyone who questions the theory to be a transphobic bigot intent on denying the very existence of trans people. Indeed, even those trans women who persist in existing despite subscribing to the feminist critique of gender are denounced by many in their community as self-hating or treacherous. This is argument by non-argument, and it functions to close down discourse by rendering feminism’s long-held analysis of gender unsayable.

[Read more…]

Elinor Burkett wrote a think piece for today’s New York Times.

She asks if women and men have different brains, and notes that an affirmative answer to that question has been known to elicit heated dissent.

But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

“My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.

This was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner was greeted with even more thunderous applause.

And some doubts or questions or amplifications, from Laverne Cox for instance.

And from Burkett.

A part of me winced.

[Read more…]