TokenTransGirl
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User ID: 3226
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
words don't really mean anything.
We can obviously agree, empirically, that there are two major clusters in how people get treated, male and female. "Ma'am" refers to one of those two clusters. The "ma'am" cluster includes both people with penises, and people with vaginas. This all seems like a basic objective observation of reality to me.
Given that, I don't get how this is any more circular than any other subjective category, like "nerd" or "tall" or "centrist"?
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Sure, but what does ‘female’ and ‘male’ mean?
They're clusters that were originally based around sex, yes, but plenty of cultures use the categories without referring back to sex these days. It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.
The actual definition of a trans woman
I mean, every word has multiple definitions, especially a controversial phrase like that. But also: that wasn't the question that was being asked.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
(Hello! I'm new here and this is my first post, so apologies if I'm messing up any social norms here. Please feel free to call me out! :))
That seems like a pretty easy challenge. Here's my definitions:
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
Sex: the biological reality. A messy mix of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.
So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?
To me, I'm looking out at the world and seeing "Objectively, society classifies people into two clusters, which it calls male and female."
For historical reasons, these clusters tend to correlate with biological sex, but are clearly independent of it - even cis people get misgendered. I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex? In the classic case, gender seems to be something like "best guess as to your genitalia", but people can still guess wrong. In trans-positive spaces it's more like "my best guess which pronouns would make you comfortable", which removes the legacy connection to genitalia entirely
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