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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Passing is mostly used by trans people to refer to "appears similar enough to a biological woman nobody can tell". A (clever) trans interlocutor says - 'woman' does refer to, usually biologically determined and innate - physical and psychological traits, as well as social roles, appearances, ways of dressing and acting, and acknowledging that isn't "transphobic" - it's just that I want to possess those traits! - be cute, feminine, wear skirts, etc. But the entire thing doesn't mean much

If womannees (the social meaning) was actually useful to discuss then passing would be about passing as a woman. Since I can correctly infer most people's pronouns thats what it would mean to pass.

Since passing is actually about passing as cis -- that is, passing as female (the physical meaning) then it is deceptive because its goal to cause observers to make false inferences.

You intrigue me with your clever hypothetical where the terms are defined as conflating the physical and the social into one category. Of course, any category buckets things so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Could you elaborate on that?

Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling. I've had progressive acquaintances react with what seemed like genuine surprise and apprehension when I referred to third parties who in my eyes obviously did not pass as trans (in a non-hostile context; we were having a completely non-adversarial discussion about diversity metrics at our university). When pressed on this, they insisted that they really didn't know and reacted to my reasoning (masculine voice, height many SD above the biological female mean, large hands, impractically feminine presentation (like frilly skirt in a hardware shop setting), uncommon and conspicuously feminine name) in an "wtf, you caused me disutility by planting this pattern in my head" way. It seems to be more akin "passing" as in "passing a college course" - meeting a standard that is itself up to debate, and generally at least in an American setting understood to be ideally determined according to a principle like "as low as we can get away with without causing too many problems".

The blue tribe wasn’t exactly a bastion of gender conformity before all this, either- it’s possible they’re just genuinely bad at reading clues.

Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling.

Not just being bad at telling, the entire gender ideology's concept of gender identity as a purely inbuilt phenomenon that no one can gainsay is making being able to tell irrelevant by stating that what you can tell doesn't actually represent someone's "real" gender.

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