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Now that I've learned a bit about the definitions here, this actually seems even easier:
The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.
So, a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina.
Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.
I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course, but it seems pointless to discuss anything past this point without first agreeing to this point. If you reject this, then obviously you reject anything more radical, and I'm more curious where the possible middle-ground is. I don't like the modern trans "grab as much privilege as we can" attitude at all; I just want to pee in peace, and that requires at least some willingness to compromise.
(I am less familiar with trans men, I will admit. I get the impression their goalposts are more "remove boobs and grow a beard", which still doesn't refer to anything immutable or circular)
Hi! I was skipping a lot of the conversation you started, because I didn't want to contribute to the "explain yourself now, trans person" dogpile, but my ears perked up at that one.
My understanding is that this view is pretty outdated. WPATH seems to outright reject it, and to only use it cynically as a foot-in-the-door thing in countries with lower trans acceptance. They hold that it's all about "authenticity" and self-expression, and that doctor's empashis needs to be on removing barriers, and on patient autonomy. They don't even think it's about transitioning from man to woman, or the other way around, and are happily endorsing "non-binary" surgeries.
Would you say they are out of line, or is it that you're more old-school and no longer representative of the community?
I think a lot of trans women genuinely fall into the older, classic model like me. It's really hard to say if it represents the actual community, because there's some loud voices that want to make the newest ideology the only one, but I do think there's a lot of people like me, and still are, even if we're no longer the majority within the trans community. I think there's a lot more of us than you'd guess, simply because we tend to be quiet: we already got what we want, as long as we don't draw attention to ourselves.
I have a bit of trouble taking someone seriously as a "trans woman" if they just want to self-identify, don't have dysphoria, and aren't even taking HRT, but... I'm asking people who don't believe I'm a woman to call me "she/her" anyway, so I'm at least fine with names and pronouns even there.
If we accept the idea that I want to have a cis-woman looking body despite not being born with one, it doesn't really surprise me that some people might want "non-binary" mixes. I don't really understand the category well myself, though. I think a lot of non-binary is much more about abolishing gender roles entirely - most cis women I meet who identify as "non-binary" just seem unhappy with society's concept of "female", or are viewing that concept through a fairly narrow lens. All that said, if you're actually going out and getting surgery, I'm going to take you seriously.
Well, my guess was roughly what you're describing. I saw a pretty big generational difference in the trans community, and figured the more old school view is probably still strongly represented, but trended on it's way out I was wondering if an insider's view was different.
But my problem here is that this isn't a question of numbers and loudness, but one of position. Ten thousand reasonable trans women, who aren't bothering anyone, and just want to live their life, will easily be outweighed by a single Dr. Ren Massey simply by virtue of him being a doctor, and being in the position of training other doctors.
Well, if I understood the new approach to the issue, it's less about being trans without dysphoria and HRT, and more about taking HRT without dysphoria. The way you described it, HRT / pronouns / gender affirming care generally is something we do, because it's the best way to alleviate suffering. I'm not into causing unnecessary suffering, so I can go along with that, but the new view on this matter seems to be that there might not be any suffering involved to begin with, so this is where my patience starts to wear thin - I didn't sign up to be a part of anyone's grand project of self-expression.
That's interesting, because that's the opposite of my instincts. As long as it's about "roles" it's no skin off my nose, it's when doctors encourage body modification to express one's non-binariness that I'm starting to think that things are getting out of hand, and we need to put a stop to it.
That feels a bit oddly phased. Presumably it is the patient who is expressing a desire for this, and going through a fairly lengthy bureaucratic process - especially for anything non-binary. I don't think there's a bunch of doctors out there going "have you considered transition?" I would indeed find it super creepy for one's personal doctor to be offering recommendations like that unless the patient is listing off dysphoria symptoms.
That said, if someone knowingly undergoes surgery, and this routinely makes those people happier, I don't see any reason to stop it. I support people doing other forms of cosmetic surgery, getting tattoos, etc.. My general understanding is that very few people regret these surgeries, partly because there is still generally a lengthy bureaucratic process weeding out anyone doing this on a whim. If it makes them happy, why not?
I see nothing odd about it. A few years back there was a story about a patient who went to a psychologist, and expressed a desire to be blind (and, if you're curious how it ended, the psychologist did oblige), it's still the doctor's job to discourage rather than encourage it, in my opinion.
The process is neither lengthy nor particularly bureaucratic.
The issue I brought up is that there are doctors explicitly advocating for removing all guardrails, including age, history of mental illness, and even the incidence of gender dysphoria. The response that they're (probably, maybe) not going out of their way to sell transition, does not alleviate my fears stemming from the issue I brought up.
Well, you originally made it sound like it's a question of best medical practice. If diagnosis doesn't enter into it, and we're just fulfilling people's arbitrary desires, hoping it will make them happy, it would appear the original argument is invalid.
In any case the reason that I see to stop it, is that young people are not known for their good judgment, so I don't think we should be letting minors undergo irreversible procedures on the basis of their sayso.
There's also an argument for limiting access even for adults, but if we can't agree on minors, I don't we'll get far regarding adults.
I'm not talking only about surgeries, but about the whole "gender affirming care" package (blockers, hormones, surgaries). Further, my entire point is that specific doctors, and organizations like WPATH are explicitly working towards abolishing any such process, wherever it exists. If the reason why you're not worried about people undergoing these procedures is that there are safeguards in place, then I think the biggest worldwide association of gender care providers arguing to abolish them should be a bigger deal to you.
In any case what you said is inaccurate. Until recently you could get all of these things, with zero questioning, and few bureaucratic hurdles, even as a minor. In response some jurisdictions decided to clamp down on the practice, and impose age limits through legislative action. In other places, this was done through medical oversight institutions finding little to no evidence for the effectiveness of the practice. But there are still many jurisdictions that did not regulate the practice, and even doubled down on making it even more accessible.
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I note that this is an empirical statement, not a normative one (like "adults have the right to modify their body however they please, and it's none of your damn business whether you think it's a good idea or not"). Hypothetically, if you were presented with persuasive evidence that the majority of trans women who fully medically transition later come to regret their decision, feel markedly less happy afterwards (according to, for example, a PHQ-9 or HAM-D survey), or feel that their quality of life has declined as a result of their transition - would that persuade you that trans ideology is a bad thing on net?
Well, keep in mind: I know thousands of trans women online. That's a lot of evidence that it is successful. So any study has to overcome my prior, and explain why there's a huge cluster of visibly-happy trans women, but I never meet any of these people who regret it. I'm the sort of trans woman who wanders onto The Motte and TERF forums and so forth, and I have yet to encounter any such cluster. (There's certainly a few, of course)
I'm also referring to actual studies when I say we feel happier, so you'd have to reconcile why the two studies disagreed.
But, yeah, if 10% of trans women regret it, I think we maybe need to tighten up the gates a little bit, or at least make that warning a LOT clearer within the community. If 50% regret it, I think I'd have to spend a few days seriously reconsidering my world view.
This is all assuming actual regret, too. Right now, "happiness" is a bit tricky to measure: Maybe someone gained 100 happiness points from transitioning, but lost 150 because now they're subject to a lot more bigotry. I think in that case, the right solution is to fix the cultural bigotry, not to block transition.
Just FYI, that was a literal hypothetical question. I'm not personally aware of any strong evidence that the majority of medically transitioned trans people eventually regret their decision, although the increase in subscriptions to /r/detrans over time suggests that the rejection rate is higher than the most outspoken trans activists would have me believe.
It takes a great deal of intellectual integrity to acknowledge that and I commend you for doing so.
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If "trans woman" was defined as "a male person who has undergone a surgery to change their penis into a neovagina", I think that's a definition I could get on board with: it's straightforward, non-circular and trivial to verify. Perhaps we could be even a little bit more generous and define it as "a male person who has undergone a surgery to change their penis into a neovagina, or is actively seeking one (has applied to the relevant medical practitioners etc.)".
I'd just like to gently point out that such a definition excludes almost everyone who identifies as a trans woman: only 5-13% of trans women have undergone genital surgery. Even if we allow that for every trans woman who has undergone genital surgery, there's another trans woman who has applied for it but is stuck on a waiting list (or even two such women), your definition still excludes anywhere from 61% to 90% of males who consider themselves trans women.
This is not intended as a "gotcha", it's a completely sincere question (echoing @Amadan, I'm genuinely grateful to get the input of someone with "skin in the game", so to speak). You're a trans woman who has medically transitioned. Supposing you're having a conversation with a visibly male person who has told you that her name is Samantha and her preferred pronouns are she/her. During the course of the conversation, the topic of medical transition comes up, you start talking about your own experiences, and Samantha mentions that she hasn't undergone bottom surgery. She also mentions that she has no interest in undergoing it and is perfectly happy with the configuration of her genitals as they stand.
Once she's made this clear to you, do you continue referring to her as a woman? Or no?
I mean, personally, I'm not harmed at all by her. I personally have no objections to this. I'll call her "she/her" and Samantha, because it seems rude to do otherwise. My mental classification will be "female" because to me female just means "person I refer to as she/her".
Other women have expressed that, for instance, they would not be comfortable dating Samantha because of it. I think that's reasonable.
If Samantha goes on a rant about how people are transphobic for not dating her, just because she has a penis, I will think she's full of shit and making the rest of us look bad.
Okay, well now it seems like you're just flipping between definitions according to the needs of the moment. This time yesterday you said "a woman is someone with a vagina" (or neovagina). Now you're saying a woman is someone you refer to as she/her, even if you know for a fact that that person doesn't have a vagina (or neovagina). I find this inconsistent. Maybe the idea is that the word can have multiple meanings, e.g. a woman is anyone who has a vagina, or anyone who has a neovagina, or anyone who has expressed a desire to be referred to with female pronouns.
But now we're right back to circular definitions! A woman is anyone who has expressed a desire to be referred to with female pronouns. What are female pronouns? The pronouns we use to refer to women and girls.
Well I'm glad to know we agree on that much at least.
Words have multiple definitions, yeah. I think one can draw a reasonable consensus at "a woman is someone with a vagina", but I personally, in my head, use it to mean "someone in the ma'am cluster." If we are arguing about how you categorize people, I feel unreasonable imposing my personal definition. But if you ask me how I personally categorize people, I want to be honest about the system I'm actually using.
I don't think there's anything invalid with the category "people who want to use female pronouns". We can talk semantics about circular reasoning and all of that, but at the end of the day it seems very obvious that some people are delighted by "ma'am" and some people are extremely offended by it. Do you have some problem with me, personally, calling Samantha a woman and saying she/her?
Frankly, I think the two definitions of "woman" you're using (one commonsense and straightforward, the other postmodern and controversial) amount to a motte-and-bailey fallacy, and I don't like motte-and-bailey fallacies on general principle.
If you said "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", I would think that definition was incoherent and circular - but at least I'd know exactly what you meant when you used the term "woman" in conversation. If you said "a woman is a person with female reproductive organs", I would likewise know exactly what you meant whenever you used that term.
But if the single word means both of those things, then that gives you a blank cheque to jump back and forth between the definitions on a whim according to the needs of the moment, depending on who you're trying to persuade and what rhetorical point you're trying to make.
It also makes the basic act of communicating a nightmare, because if I want to communicate honestly without misleading anyone, I have to laboriously explain exactly which definition of "woman" I'm using whenever I make a statement like "women cannot impregnate people" (true according to the second definition, false according to the first), "all women should undergo regular breast cancer screenings from the age of X onwards" (true according to the second definition, except for the minority of women who have already undergone a mastectomy; a complete waste of time and medical resources for many people if we're using the first), "in post-pubescent pre-menopausal women, amennorhea is a cause for medical concern" (true according to the second definition; false according to the first, as that set includes many perfectly healthy members who are physically incapable of menstruating), "women are dramatically less physically strong than the strongest men" (true according to the second definition; if using the first definition it would be false, because that set includes many members who would be competitive in tests of strength against men, by virtue of being male). And if someone were to insist that both definitions are equally valid, but refused to specify which definition they were using at any particular moment, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that, at best, they hadn't really considered the implications of using a single word with two such radically different definitions (as the examples above illustrate); at worst, that they had considered this and were knowingly trying to sneak something past me.
Compare with some of Scott's examples when he popularised the concept: does "God" refer to a specific Abrahamic deity, or is it just another word for the order and beauty in the universe? Is "racism" just an unconscious bias which can't be fully controlled and which everyone is guilty of to one extent or another; or is it prejudice + power (ergo anyone who's not white conveniently can't be guilty of it, except Asians for some reason)? I dunno, maybe for all of the above examples you'd say "it means both of those things", but at some point I think you'd have to acknowledge that there's something a bit underhanded about the whole rhetorical technique, regardless of to what end it is aimed.
You asked me what I personally thought, and I assumed that meant you wanted to know how I use language in practice. When I am off in trans spaces, everyone uses "woman" to mean one thing, and I'm trying to be honest and open about that. That's it. I am explicitly acknowledging that "gender is a feeling" is a bailey: it is not a defensible position. I am explicitly acknowledging that "women are people who have/want a vagina" is my motte; it's the position I can actually defend.
I believe in something I can't defend: I can't prove that I "feel like a woman" but it doesn't mean that I don't. It would be dishonest to hide the fact that I do feel like a woman. But it would also be a different sort of intellectually dishonest to act like that's a defensible motte that I can reasonably expect other people to respect. All you have is my word, and there's certainly at least a few bad actors out there who are happy to parrot the same words.
I'm not even sure how I could pull a motte-and-bailey when I've got them marked out for your convenience like that?
I think I've been pretty clear about what definitions I'm asking about in any given conversation thus far. If I do slip up, I'm happy to clarify.
(Unlike a lot of trans activists, I also think we can use a little common sense and assume "only women can get pregnant" obviously refers to people with uteruses, even if I disagree and think we should call people women once they've got a vagina. I don't want to get bogged down in stupid semantic games when it's absolutely obvious what you mean by that sentence. I do not think we have any disagreement over who has large gametes, who has a uterus, or who can get pregnant.)
Okay, thanks for clarifying, I see where you're coming from. I apologise if I came off as hard-headed or combative, that wasn't my intention and people tell me that's how I tend to come off when discussing all sorts of topics, not just politics.
I appreciate the response and I'm glad I could clear stuff up. I don't mind a bit of combative when people are still willing to listen and continue the dialogue in good faith like you :)
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Yes, and this is a body dysmorphia, like phantom limb syndrome.
It may well be that the best treatment for gender/sex dysphoria is some form of physical transition surgery. But, if you can acknowledge that that is what is going on here, the only thing we really might disagree on is where exactly that line is on various axes of treatment.
Of course, you're no longer talking about anything like 'gender' as separate from sex. Trans women are natal males who are born with an intense desire to be female and vice versa. This desire can cause such serious stress that it becomes clinical and they must be treated in some way, possibly (and, honestly, probably, once the evidence base catches up) including surgical transition.
Yes, and they're the people I have a problem with. At heart, they're communists or the useful idiots of communists and their whole ideology destroys everything it touches, intentionally.
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