mickycass

[mickycass]

On Bathrooms, or Why Gender ID is a Minefield

A major component of transitioning is that a trans person gets the right to have their previously assigned sex altered on their documents to reflect their transitioned state.

Related to this, there have been attempts - founded on understandable issues with medical gatekeeping that tends to prioritize what doctors (who tend to still be predominantly white and cis-male) will ‘allow’ over what a trans person wants - to change the requirements around gender identity so that self-attestation is permissible.

And herein lies the problem: all it takes is for one person to act in bad faith to contaminate the entire process, and it’s unclear what the legal penalties are for doing this; aside from fairly standard laws against assault, voyeurism, and so on, it doesn’t seem that there is a specific penalty for what amounts to either transitioning under false color of dysphoria, or falsely declaring a change of assigned sex for the purposes of committing a criminal act and/or accessing spaces normally denied to a person.

A rather good example of this is the movie Soul Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Man_(film)

(Tumblr is doing funny things with links in this post so please forgive the ad hoc changes in the way I link things as I write)

In Soul Man - presented as a comedy - the fact that a white man becomes “black” to be able to access resources granted African Americans by reason of historical disadvantagement is somewhat glossed over, but the intrusion is no less real. It’s ultimately an act of bad faith that prioritizes the main character’s own interests over those of many others who would’ve been elgible for the scholarship he got.

Voyeurism in women’s bathrooms is a known problem. See for example, this link below:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-voyeurism-dorm-bathrooms-connecticut-college-sparks-police-probe-n968876

As such, given historical reasons for women wanting their own private spaces in which to conduct private business, and given the above voyeurism incidents, it is unfortunately almost certain that at some point an abuser of gender ID laws (by the sheer weight of evidence, likely to be a cis-man) will try to use their newly legalized sex and gender to go somewhere they would otherwise be socially prohibited from being.

The intrusion discussed here is actually even more personal than the black scholarship example noted above - here, it’s going into what’s supposed to be a safe space and making it unsafe.

This is a particularly fraught matter for the LGBTQIA community because in our tent we have not only trans people, but lesbians as well as bisexual women.

As such, we need to be able to reconcile the understandable desire of the cis-women in our community to not be intruded upon by cis-men, with the also understandable desire of trans people (trans-men and trans-women both) to be able to fit themselves into prevailing social norms about what “a man ought to look like” or “a woman ought to look like”.

To further this reconciliation, one key aspect, I think, is that we have to guard against people who act in bad faith. Transitioning is not a toy. It’s not a lark. It is an involved psycho-medical process that all too often runs into barriers that create disparate health outcomes.

For a cis-man to particularly treat the process of becoming a woman as though it were a licence to be a bad actor is an act that discredits trans people as a whole. It devalues and mocks the trials and burdens of transitioning.

And it is in this that trans people can find allies in feminism: cis-women no more want cis-men intruding where they are not wanted than trans people do, albeit for different reasons.

But part of this needs to include recognizing that gender ID laws can be abused, and that self-attestation, while worthy, must have its own safeguards.

[mickycass]

On Premises, or Why Post-Modernism in Language is Useless

Words have meanings.

Discussions about prescriptivism, gatekeeping, and other such aside, it is still true that words convey information about concepts, things, animals, people, and so forth.

As a result, a necessary step is to accept the premise that for good or for ill, the words we use on a daily basis have to mean something which doesn’t change from one moment to the next. (In the long term, words can change meaning and that’s the evolution of culture and language, but if I say “the sky is blue” - and the color ‘blue’ is generally accepted as having a certain range of wavelengths - I can’t arbitrarily redefine ‘blue’ in the next sentence to mean a different set of wavelengths.)

Therefore, as a corollary, since this is a blog which discusses gender, I have to start with the premise that biology has meaning. If humans are a species of mammal, and mammals which are closely related to humans exhibit similar traits such as chromosome-related sexual dimorphism, then the definition “XX = woman/female”, “XY = man/male” is uncontroversial, since with XX and XY come a host of primary and secondary sexual characteristics that we readily use to identify dogs, cats, monkeys, et cetera, as male or female. So it shouldn’t be a surprise we do the same thing for human beings.

(This blogger is fully cognizant of the exceptions to the rule, and wishes to state that the sexual binary is a good enough approximation to cover ~99% of cases that it has usefulness in everyday life)

As one example of how this biology does have meaning is the very crucial aspect of medically noted differences in the heart attack symptoms felt by cis-men versus cis-women. This has direct implications for trans-men and trans-women, and this is why letting doctors and EMTs know one’s original biological sex is a good idea.

So to touch on post-modern use of language here, in recent years there has been an insistence that the terms “trans men are men” and “trans women are women” have complete meaning within themselves and need refer to nothing else.

But this is ultimately unhelpful and absurd in the extreme.

The biological categories of “man” and “woman” have cultural and historical impacts and effects. By themselves, “man” and “woman” are simply markers for what we now know to be expressions of chromosomal arrangements. (This blogger notes that the terms used here refer to cis-people, or biologically assigned sex in the case of trans-people, but of course the complicating factor of how they present to the public is there as well.)

But they are not simply these terms alone, for societies worldwide have a tendency to create structures which disadvantage women, be they currently so or who were born as such. So if societies even now still carry an inherent bias against women, then uncritically stating “trans women are women” ignores the fact that the personal life history of a trans woman includes a time period where, while presenting as a boy (or as an adult, a man), the privilege accorded a male went to them. As such, in presenting as a woman (or to consider the reverse case of trans man) it’s not a simple matter of saying, “I now conform to the prevailing social notion of what a woman looks like; please consider me as such in all respects.”

As such, the historical oppression of women and the continuation of at least some forms of such oppression today, mean that while presumably made in good faith, the concept of erasure of biologically fundamental categories of humans leads to the problem similar to that of stating “I don’t see color”. It’s a good faith anti-racist statement, true, but it ignores vast historical antecedents that instead require acknowledgement that color exists. It would be like saying “black people are people”. A true statement, but unhelpful.

Words mean things - and they always will.

Therefore, similarly we must first acknowledge that the biological categories XX and XY mean far more than two simple chromosomal arrangements that give rise to primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Only from that point can we then usefully discuss the natural overlap between what LGBTQIA+ people are fighting for and what radical feminists are fighting for.

[mickycass]

About This Blog (and Blogger)

Hi, everyone!

This blog, as you might tell from the description, reflects my belief that both LGBTQIA+ people and radical feminists (who may be straight, lesbian, bi, pan...) both have reasons to question the current social consensus around what gender and gender roles should look like.

This blogger has chosen the nickname “Micky Cass”. As anyone who has read Alien Nation books knows, this character was a reporter who purposely chose to reveal nothing personally identifying whatsoever: in that vein, I choose to do the same, and state that all you will ever know about me is that I am a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The reason is that, as the character stated in the book, people want to put others in easily labelled boxes. This isn’t necessarily wrong; it’s a convenient shorthand we all use to “package” information about people in a way that reduces our mental load in our interactions. It’s also a convenient way to start from what a person says they are and follow the road to whether or not you want to interact with them. But the downside of that is evident: legitimate statements with legitimate thought-value are cast aside because of who says them.

And I need not touch too heavily on the corollary that prejudice is also born out of this mental shortcut people use on a daily basis.

So, in the vein of removing the ablity to say “this blogger is (x) so I can ignore them”, I’m being minimal on the personal information front, and asking you to take me at my words and engage with them. I will always discuss anything in good faith and will not resort to rhetorical one-up trickery.

My next post will take up some of the premises I start from in order to discuss topics noted in the first paragraph.