#gender is social role with arbitrary standards

[dissolving-mansion]

It’s so weird that people consider Jonah feminine for being an 1800s lad when he’d probably consider modern men feminine for carrying all those umbrellas.

[thedawnofcrime]

To the gender criticals out there, know that when we say “let trans people in sports”, we are not suggesting that we should end the conversation at that. We are suggesting that with the topic of trans people in sports, y’all are not going in the right direction.

You cannot identify womanhood by any given trait or feature, besides the fact that somebody feels like a woman. That is what makes them feel comfortable in society and their bodies.

Not all cis women have uteruses. Not all cis women produce estrogen. Not all cis women have breasts. Not all cis women even have XX chromosomes.

These women are biologically female, and their womanhood should not be defined by arbitrary traits that you assign them. Besides, to imply that they are worthy of womanhood, and trans women are not, is hypocritical.

Gender isn’t just a social construct, it’s the way our brains perceive ourselves and our role in society from birth. You cannot be critical of things that are not subjective concepts. That is called ignorance.

The issue with trans people in sports (and I know there is one) is not that they’re a danger to sports, it’s that the system we compete based on is outdated, and biased towards a very stereotypical type of man and woman.

The solution is not banning a minority from something built for enjoyment, the solution is to abolish the system that they, along with many people outside of the minority, do not fit into.

There is no one-size-fits-all for sports separation, and different sports can be separated in different ways. If your system is built to regulate womanhood, it is not a system of protection, it is a system to oppression. We are all humans, and every day the excuses of “gender ideology” and “gender confusion” become more and more absurd.

Think for yourself. If you were born with something that made you different than other men or women, would you really be okay with everybody excluding you? From children’s soccer teams? From high school basketball practices? From putting in the years of effort to compete in the Olympics? All because you were born “imperfect” by their standards.

This isn’t something I’m willing debate. If you disagree with including minorities in sports, or allowing intersex people to compete, you need to do some long, individual reflection on why you care so much about how limited of a human experience a minority should have. Don’t try to reword yourself into the hero. Use some critical thinking.

[togglesbloggle]

Okie, here’s a slightly dangerous essay I’ve had rattling around for a while.  Dangerous because Discourse, which I usually avoid in this space, so I hope you’ll try not to reward it too much and provide weird incentives for me.  But it’s a pretty interesting little model, too handy to fully pass over in silence.

Expect mild gender-binary essentialism and heteronormativity for modeling purposes- invoking these things in an explanatory but not normative or ethical sense.

Aside from being aggressively horrible, the state of female beauty standards as a cultural force is also fiddly and interesting in a way that I can’t resist chewing on.  Naively, beauty ought to be a pretty idiosyncratic thing.  We understand differences in taste between Picasso and Rembrant, or a trip to the mountains and a trip to the beach.  But when it comes to human beauty, especially female beauty, we keep needing to reach for phrases like ‘traditionally attractive,’ and things in that vicinity.  It’s understood that this ‘traditionally attractive’ stuff has tremendous influence over how our society is ordered, but its origin seems… vague, at best?  And it clearly varies between cultures and times; it’s monotonic, not static.  And the further away you get from socially mainstream forms of sex, the more it breaks down.  Gay and kink communities seem to resist it somewhat, in the form of ‘types’ like bears and butches and whatnot, though it’s still lurking in the shadows a fair bit.  So, why?

I’ve arrived at a model that seems to have decent predictive utility, which is: (female) beauty standards are set principally by the ability to convince others that you can leverage male agency.

This is, notably, not exactly the same thing as actually leveraging male agency, or even actually being able to.  Male agency itself, though notably responsive to beautiful women in the general case, is of course a lot more complex when you start talking about individual men.  These may be asexual or gay, obviously, but even the ones attracted to women are going to have individual preferences, navigate those preferences in different ways, and be more or less responsive to leverage.  So to ‘be beautiful’ you’re attempting to land on a consensus, common-knowledge understanding of what everyone else thinks men are attracted to, one that’s anchored by the experiences and preferences of men, but because it’s women who try to achieve beauty in most cases, female-led social spaces are often where ‘beauty’ is processed and filtered from the complicated individual preferences of men and forged in to a coherent set of standards for women to work towards.  (Economic forces also play an important role, of course, and are gendered in different ways.)

That consensus, in turn, need not correspond to the preferences of any individual man, even though it’s still (in a removed sense) ‘about’ male preference.  An individual woman can even sometimes find more success in the dating market by deliberately stepping away from traditional beauty standards and finding something closer to the actual preferences of (a subset of) the men around her, though that means sacrificing real and important status in other circles.  Because as power, the concept of beauty depends on the state of common knowledge among people on both sides of the gender dynamic as much as it does on the behaviors and preferences of men.  This is part of what allows beauty standards to vary so widely in time and place (that is, they’re arbitrary to some degree), but be so strong wherever they appear- it’s a Schelling point that women can use to communicate both to men and to other women that they have some degree of influence over others.  Thus, one of the many tragedies that heterosexual romance has to navigate.  To achieve beauty as power, women have to get closer to that Schelling point, even though being ‘beautiful’ in that sense may actually make it harder to find a good partner that you like.  Beauty means the competition is tougher, you’re locked out of considering the preferences of individual men you care about, you’re locked in to fairly oppressive standards that sand off many of your own best qualities because they’re too rare to be included in the consensus, and you’re now filtering for men who date women generically for social prestige rather than having intrinsic interest in you as an individual.  But no human can opt out of the power game entirely; the consequences of ostracism in a social species are lethal.

Also, the old joke about ‘Woman Upset that Men are Staring at her Breast Implants’ is, in this model, a perfectly rational set of behaviors on the face of it- you don’t need to invoke either dysphoria or hypocrisy.  The woman in question is not interested in actually provoking male behavior, she’s interested in communicating to others, often and especially other women, that she could if she wanted to.  She wants enough social power to feel safe, which is a basic and sensible primate drive.  It also demonstrates how this particular form of power both promotes and benefits from restrictive male gender roles, particularly as regards when and how to respond to women.  The more restrictive the roles, the safer it is to accumulate power without being exposed to undue risk of unwanted (or unsanctioned?) male agency, and in turn the more power will be leveraged by beauty as a force.  Feedback loops.  Depending on the specifics of culture and local social networks, it’s quite possible for an individual woman to experience the benefits of beauty primarily as higher prestige in her interactions with heterosexual women, and for the dynamic between herself and men as a group to skew more and more negative as she achieves beauty, without beauty itself being net-negative.

(Aside: notice how increasingly restrictive standards of sexual decorum in men in the 21st century correspond to a leveling-off of female workforce participation rates.  Libertine attitudes from the 60’s through the 90’s correlate with an expansion of economic power among women as an alternative to gendered beauty.)

One of the reasons that I like this model is that it’s written in the same alphabet as displays of traditional (i.e. political, military) power within formal hierarchies, displays of wealth, or even physical prowess- using this framework, beauty, wealth, and hierarchical power are all measured roughly by the number of people that will do what you ask them to.  It makes sense that there would be commonalities between them, such as elements of a seemingly counterproductive red queen race, or brinksmanship in which neither side wants to actually deploy their power.  

The differences are also real, and significant- because of the intrinsic dynamics of heterosexuality, beauty-as-a-face-of-power is ‘flat’, without tesselating hierarchies, and it doesn’t scale up indefinitely.  This gives it a more limited scope than being a CEO or a president with control over employees, and a much more limited scope than you get through wealth in a tangled economic system.  It also means that beauty is much less winner-take-all, meaning that almost all women benefit at the margins from pursuing beauty.  It also peaks early and then degenerates over time.  All these together in a dynamic mix I think help explain a lot of the complicated relationships that many women have with their physical appearance.

For example, this model makes it pretty easy to talk about why both women and men would be averse to a woman asking a guy out, even in This, The 21th Century- a woman who takes the initiative is in a sense forfeiting a game in which women demonstrate how powerful they are, and making herself less interesting at the margins during a stage of courtship where nobody has much information about the other party.

It also, I think, makes a lot of the old Incel discourse more legible, though it’s probably wiser to leave that particular one as an exercise for the reader.  And it’s worth noting also that physical strength shares a surprising symmetry with female attractiveness in this sense, even if explicitly leveraging the social power of physical intimidation is taboo in a lot of modern urban cultures.

Anyway, it’s a good little model.  Like all models, it’s wrong, but I think the epicycles here are modest and it's a useful way to interrogate a wide variety of phenomena.

[thatstormygeek]

That’s because the Cass Review rejects the affirming model of care embraced by groups in the US like the American Psychological Association or the American Academy of Pediatrics and instead openly regards medical transitions as an unjustifiable last step to be pursued after blaming a child’s gender nonconformity on anything and everything else—social influences, comorbid mental health disorders, or the influence of social media among them. Contrary to its stated aims, the Review further pathologizes gender nonconformity itself, claiming “social transitions”—which can be as simple as a new haircut and clothes—”may change the trajectory of gender identity development” and thus should be avoided, a slippery slope argument that suggests letting your son play with Barbies will invariably lead to a vaginoplasty so best to hand him the monster truck and nip it in the bud. Most tellingly, the review claims limiting access to hormone treatments for adults may be advisable, theorizing “a follow-through service continuing up to age 25 would remove the need for transition at this vulnerable time and benefit both this younger population and the adult population.” The overall recommendation is to force patients to wait through psychological busywork and relevant-sounding delays, implementing a largely-arbitrary set of hoops to jump through with the hopes the patient just gives up. Focus on the patient’s anxiety, focus on their autism, focus on any other issue except their gender and their desire for a sex change because, as private British medical provider GenderGP said of the report’s underlying assumptions, “cisgender lives are judged to be more valuable or desirable than transgender lives and that healthcare services should prioritise encouraging youth to assume cisgender lives, regardless of the suffering that this causes.”

This is a democratic vision of medicine that doesn’t disregard empirical measures but, in fact, acts in their defense. These advocates rightfully recognizes that standards of evidence often regarded as “objective” are frequently enough built on the subjective biases of researchers and practitioners and the subjectivity of patients is a necessary corrective. Clearly, however, many politicians and right-wing activists are eager to have the medical state return to its role as a reliable partner for eugenic social engineering, closing paths toward “subjective satisfaction” and forcing patients towards rigid, essentialist understandings of not only who gets to be a man or woman but what men and women are for. You see this not only in the Cass Review nor just in regards to transgender medicine; it was a rife theme in the Supreme Court filings and arguments over the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, where a conservative set of doctors—one of whom also authored Indiana’s ban on gender-affirming care—demanded the return of restrictions against the drug which advocates long-held were based in stigma, not evidence.

[...]

The state doesn’t claim banning this care is in the best interests of transgender children—it simply asserts nothing in the Constitution prevents it from doing so. This is why transgender people’s autonomy will either spring from our own humanity and subjectivity or not at all: That right is limited when it is only granted with the blessing of pathology because, when asked to choose between their relationship to power or their relationship to their patients, many doctors like Dr. Cass will go leaps and bounds to choose their power over their patients. For much of the cisgender public—and even some trans advocates—that may come as a surprise. Gender transitions are understood as the treatment for a condition called gender dypshoria rather than a human right. And while the distress and dissociation that we call “dysphoria” is real, gender dysphoria’s existence as a diagnosis is simply the key that unlocks the cage transsexual people are put in to deny us autonomy over our own bodies, tying us to the conditional good will of a biased and compromised medical state.

The doctors who wish to once again be the masters of their abortion patients are now limited to the few cranks and conservative activists who would sign up to overturn the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Because transgender people’s autonomy challenges more assumptions about gendered life than abortion does, however—negating not just patriarchal power but the naturalized gender binary that serves as its foundation—and transgender people ourselves are still denied representation among the decision-making institutions that govern this care, the doctors running that playbook against us are welcomed as liberators by media outlets and politicians already convinced a transgender life is an unlivable life. As much as 19th-century gatekeepers couldn’t fathom a woman that would want to end a pregnancy in the absence of a life-threatening emergency, 21st-century gatekeepers still can’t fathom the desire to change one’s sex—particularly when the world still treats trans people like shit. Our “subjective satisfaction” is thus steamrolled by supposedly “objective” measures constructed around that failure of their own imagination, our misery living in a transphobic world treated as simply yet another reason to do away with transsexual life altogether.

[meadowlarkx]

One of my favorite things about the worldbuilding in The Left Hand of Darkness is the "perverts" in Gethenian society—those who are permanently in one of the kemmer forms. The "normal" person on Gethen goes through a kemmer cycle with periods of somer, but that's not every Gethenian. People whose bodies don't work this way get treated with repulsion. Genly compares them to "homosexuals" in his society, and that comparison is really instructive. Gethenians may not have gender roles and identities the way we do, but they do have societal norms, including about bodies and sexuality. And those norms leave people out. They are imperfect and sometimes they are unfair. I think this is part of the point.

In subtle ways, this theme is woven throughout the book's descriptions of Gethenian cultures. To stick to sexuality, something similar can be said about the different norms surrounding incest on Gethen and the empathic treatment of Estraven's past relationship with Arek. There is no taboo about incest between siblings on Gethen, only on siblings vowing kemmering, but if a child is born of it, the parents have to separate (and it seems like Estraven is separated from Sorve because of this). The reason for including this element, in my reading, isn't to impose our own moral standards by "showing" that Estraven's relationship with Arek was "bad" (in fact, we learn fairly little about it, beyond that Estraven cared deeply for him.) Instead, I think it's partly to demonstrate the dissonance between Gethenian mores and our own, and unsettle both. Because, like Genly, we see Gethenian norms as strange, we can notice that they bring about particular situations and cause particular hurts. Even the custom of vowing kemmering monogamously for life, which sounds more familiar, is shown as double-edged. Estraven breaks a taboo by making his "false" vow to Ashe, but was trying to build a new life with Ashe really wrong?

These things are not 1:1 to any "real life" issue, but like everything else in this story, I think they're chosen because they are provocative. It's really meaningful to me that even in terms of gender and sexuality, Gethen isn't painted as a utopia, but as a real place. Le Guin shows us two sets of norms and asks us not just "are our norms arbitrary and/or constructed rather than essential truths?" but also "are norms always socially constructed? Should we question them sometimes? What harm is done to maintain them? Who is being left out?"

[noisytenant]

kids are subjected to various unspoken and often unjust power structures which govern our daily lives. oftentimes "misbehavior" comes from trying to feel out the actual rules and limits of life--orienting oneself in the world.

it's interesting to observe how kids that are often caught "acting out" will also take it upon themselves to enforce rules and social norms with other kids. despite trying to break the rules themselves, they're concerned with fairness and equality and are really sensitive to double standards.

just as there are imposed and arbitrary hierarchies, there are also situations where authority is a sensible and necessary privilege; adults (ideally) have the knowledge and experience to keep kids safe and teach them the things they don't know.

in particular, it is important to assess consequences and to scale strictness of enforcement with the severity of effects. we should respond differently whether someone pulls the fire alarm, runs in the street, says a swear word, or walks out of a straight line.

because they are are dealing with the uncertainty of determining what the rules are, if they're fair, and what the consequences are, many kids strive for the security of being at the top of the pecking order.

they emulate authority, but only understand it as saying, "do this! don't do that!" without understanding why certain rules exist and when they might be broken. they also can't easily distinguish just rules (like remembering to share) from unjust rules (like performing certain gender roles).

now, i'm thinking about this phenomenon in the context of socializing as an adult.

i think a lot of us online feel tempted to enforce social consequences for the crime of being "annoying"--immature, clumsy, or misguided--in public.

after all, many of us learned that seemingly innocuous social blundering would be punished in disproportionate and humiliating ways. rules (stated or unstated) might be just or unjust, but the hammer comes down just as hard all the same.

when we catch someone who has been on the earth as many (or more!) years as we have who still hasn't had the messy and naive parts beaten out of them, there's an impulse to enforce the social rules we've learned. it's almost a kindness to teach them "how things work around here", before someone bigger and meaner steps in. and it wouldn't be fair if i got punished and bullied for doing something embarrassing while this other person didn't!

...i am not a saint of nonjudgment; i can't help but assess my own behavior and others' against my running understanding of "the rules". i'm strongly affected by secondhand embarrassment, even if i mostly keep it to myself.

but the extremity of this judgment is precisely why i try to avoid taking it out on the people causing the strongest reactions in me. it's easy--reflexive--to screenshot someone and make fun of them, to call them names, to parody and mock them for a general audience. these are the ways that we express what we think someone should or should not do. but are these rules always in everyone's best interests? is the severity of the swift enforcement proportional with the actual consequences?

as adults, we are no longer beholden only to someone else's rules; we get to write our own, and justify and enforce them for ourselves.

with all this said--i really don't want to use the authority i have been granted through my life experience to belittle and suppress others. that isn't earned authority, that's the posturing of a child who's scrambling for stability in a confusing world. it's not something we can learn from.

it's embarrassing when i see someone bumbling, not having learned the rules as i did, but i think it's more embarrassing to choose to live my adult life only pretending i grew up.

most of us were punished, sometimes quite harshly, for the crime of not knowing any better. sometimes we were told the rules over and over but couldn't internalize them. we can't give ourselves what we don't have for others, and vice versa; i think we all deserve a little more patience and understanding.

in essence, of all the rules we learn and unlearn, i think "don't be immature or wrong in public" is one of the most common--and least useful. it's not serving anyone in the long term.

and we don't have to completely ignore wrongheaded behavior, but we can exercise the just authority of experience to guide, rather than the unjust authority of punishment and shame.

now that we are old enough not just to know the rules but to write them ourselves, let's make it a little easier to make mistakes and be clumsy sometimes, okay? ☀️🌱

[daydreamodyssey]

This ended up being longer than I planned, so I'm sorry beforehand. It was about a whatever video of a girl using heightism, saying something stupid but possibly insidious, and me reflecting on our culture toward smallness, particularly with men and how it deals with gender.

(There's a fun present for those who read the whole thing, I promise!)

I saw a tiktok of a girl candidly and cheerfully saying she'd never date a short guy (5'8 or below, she was 5'2) because of a Napoleon complex.

Standard stuff, though still crossing into prejudice.

But then she goes off, in a chipper mood, about deleting them. That really stuck with me.

Best scenario, she just means deleting them off dating sites. Which is still crass and wouldn't fly if she said something similar about other attributes.

Worst scenario, which wouldn't be the first time I heard it, she means literally and physically delete them. She was talking to a guy out on the streets too, so this isn't done terminally online jerk. A lot of women saying they want men dead isn't cute or funny.

I hope people understand that having a preference or having a bad history with whatever group are different than this rhetoric. Even if that person can control something, as opposed to the near permanence of height, it shouldn't mean this group is inherently bad. The issue is the personality, not how long your limbs are or what genes you have. It's a really weird bioessentialism that says if you look different than your gender norm, you are a suspect and a creep in waiting.

There's also this other connection with many men smaller than (the US) average being men of color, which can have a racist and nativist tone. And since height can be affected by the environment, along with making many short people less likely to have high paying jobs and roles, there's probably a classist element, too. A lot of trans men are also short if you want to include transphobia, who already get barely any acknowledgement about how they're treated.

With a lot of women saying "it's in our genes or brains," and one I saw saying for short men to Stay In The Gym, there is this unspoken rule that men MUST be large and dominant or they're not seriously men. With the whole obsession over genetics and strong men, there is a dangerous overlap with trad and fascist ideals, especially with how radical right wing propaganda works (in the 30s/40s and now with the Chad Trad shit).

I don't think a lot of people, men or women, consciously think about this stuff. They could just be shallow assholes. But smallness is almost always seen as infantilism or criminality with no nuance in humanizing, let alone respect as lovers and workers. Maybe there's some taboo part of our private brain that still latches onto "big = strong against predators and rivals" and we don't want to admit and question it like with women and how we judge their looks.

When people say Napoleon complex, it's always vague, like it can mean anything from being aggressive to just being confident to someone taller. It doesn't mean anything and it just causes a Catch 22; you either accept your place on the arbitrary social ladder or you're insecure and in the spotlight. You can't win because you're not supposed to win.

For every short jerk, there's also a tall jerk. A tall jerk who has popularity, fans, girls, money, and literally more weight to throw around. Am I surprised there's a preference? No. I can still be upset about it because I'm human and I'm naturally going to be mad at things that feel unfair and need leverage. And I'm going to be upset when it feels ignored or derided because people don't want to admit they have biases that are more socially acceptable. I'm going to be upset that I and others who are around my height or even shorter have to push limits every day just be treated equally. I can't imagine having dwarfism and seeing these videos or hearing others on the street.

I hear pretty much everything from "short men are rapists for wanting women to be attracted to them" to eugenics and wanting us just dead. There's definitely other traits that compound the toll on a person (weight for myself) that can be greater or lesser, but it's definitely consistent and I've been seeing it rise over the years after some acceptance in the mid '10s.

We need to have honest conversations and reflections about our relationship with size and what it means to be a man. If you want to abolish the patriarchy but still insult a guy because he doesn't look as big and strong and dominant as other men, then you're playing the same side as the men in power or manosphere chuds. The amount of radfems I see hating short men is honestly funny. Like there's no tall misogynists or abusers out there.

If short men, or just A short man messed you up, I'm sorry you had to go through that. But it wasn't like he was infected with the Small Virus, he might've been just a jerk, the same way tall people might be jerks. Just understand that you're overlooking many people because of a bad experience and how dangerously close that mentality is when applying to other people, or toward yourself.

If you read long enough, I congratulate you, and I offer you this one hell of a title I saw in a flea market the other day.

[bluedalahorse]

When I say I love queerness in my media I do mean I love depictions of same-sex attraction and desire and intimacy.

But I also mean that I love the entire queer umbrella. I love characters deliberately or unknowingly pushing against socially-mandated gender roles and gender expression. I love characters leaning into these rules in an exaggerated way so as to showcase their arbitrariness. I love it when characters discover their gender or experiment with it. I love characters blurring the lines between platonic and romantic affection. I love characters refusing to put their relationships in some kind of hierarchy, or navigating that relationship hierarchy in unconventional ways. I love it when intimacy doesn’t follow standard scripts about who is “taking the lead” or whatever. I love that kink exists even if not all kinks are my kink. I love polyamory. I love relationship anarchy. I love expanding the definitions of things like marriage but also throwing marriage out the window entirely when necessary. I love the creative ways queerness invites us to reinvent language to meet people’s needs and honor their truth. I love the way queerness emphasizes dialogue and understanding the specificity of our feelings. I love it when characters aggressively claim labels and also when they aggressively refuse them. I love the deep valuing of friendship that is so essential to queer life.

Anyway, Ayub and Simon on FaceTime with one another as they’re about to go to sleep, and holding emotional space for one another in a way that boys aren’t usually encouraged to do, feels just as queer and wonderful to me as every time Wilhelm and Simon hold hands.

It’s kind of hard to explain that sometimes, but I think I managed to put it into words just now.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bernard Lane

Published: Mar 25, 2024

Not good medicine

The dominant “gender-affirming” treatment approach—which promotes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and mastectomy for minors—is “fundamentally incompatible with competent, ethical medical practice.”

That is the conclusion of a new paper by academic psychiatrist Andrew Amos in the journal Australasian Psychiatry.

Dr Amos says treatment guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne (RCH) “assert without evidence that pathology plays no part in the development of gender diversity,” which is said to be part of nature.

“If it is admitted there are some pathological causes of gender diversity, then it becomes necessary to assess the health or illness of all presentations [of gender identity],” Dr Amos says.

But the gender-affirming model insists that self-declared gender identity be affirmed, not interrogated for underlying mental illness.

“The emergence of non-binary and fluid genders means there are no boundaries to self-reported gender identity, which may include a gender consistent with one of the two biological sexes; a combination of features consistent with both sexes; the absence of features of gender; an identity as a voluntarily/involuntarily castrated eunuch; or arbitrary and rapidly changing variations,” Dr Amos says.

“From a psychiatric perspective, the proposition that psychopathology plays no role in gender diversity is absurd.

“The most detailed personal description of the experiences of psychosis is that of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who minutely described his belief that God had turned him into a woman and was sending ribbons from the sun through his body to impregnate him and repopulate the earth.

“It is difficult to imagine a more pathological aetiology [or cause] for gender diversity, yet the [gender-affirming model] provides no framework for assessing such a patient, and does not view Schreber’s case as an absolute contraindication to social, medical or surgical transition.

“As Schreber illustrates, it is certain that pathology causes some cases of gender diversity. Differentiating between healthy and pathological gender diversity, or, more likely, gauging the relative contribution of healthy and pathological processes originating within or in the environment of each patient, can only be achieved by the comparison of an individual’s patterns of behaviour with patterns of normal and pathological development.

“While [gender-affirming] advocates have argued transition is safe in patients with psychosis because it is easy to differentiate psychotic from non-psychotic aetiologies of gender diversity, they have provided no guidance on how to do so, and no empirical evidence that it is safe to try.

“To the extent they discuss the role of psychosis or severe personality pathology in the development of gender diversity at all, it is only to deny that either might prevent transition.”

RCH Melbourne’s treatment guideline—promoted as “Australian standards of care”1 and used by children’s hospital gender clinics across the country—states that psychosis in a minor “should not necessarily prevent medical transition.” It does not explain how to discern those cases when psychosis should indeed rule out transition.

In the leaked WPATH Files, clinicians were revealed debating how to manage “trans clients” with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities or alters) in which “not all the alters have the same gender identity.”

Dr Amos argues that gender-affirming treatment guidelines “abandon the clinical discipline of diagnosis and make treatment contingent upon the unconstrained subjective experiences of children and potentially disturbed adults.”

“This is unethical, because modern medicine relies upon accurate diagnosis and evidence-based clinical reasoning to ensure that treatment is likely to help and not harm patients.”

Dr Amos notes tension in the 2023 gender dysphoria policy of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists between a traditional mental health approach and the unevidenced assertion that, “Being trans or gender diverse does not represent a mental health condition.” This policy area has occasioned sharp divisions within the college since 2019.

“Although it is clear that this [2023 policy] compromise balances the concerns of different stakeholders, the medico-legal implications for psychiatrists and their patients may be too important to long defer a conclusive position on the aetiological role of mental illness in gender diversity,” Dr Amos says.

He points out that the lack of evidence for the gender-affirming model has led an Australian medical defence fund, MDA National, to restrict coverage for private practitioners facing claims because of their involvement in the medical transition of under-18 patients.

[ Video: England’s NHS has radically restricted puberty blocker drugs, but it’s business as usual for Australia’s gender medicine lobby ]

“A patient should be more than a number, but detransitioners [who regret gender medicine treatments] can’t even get that. Reclaiming one’s biological gender after a gender transition is so taboo, that there is no way to document it in a medical record with an official diagnosis code.”—FAIR in Medicine fellow Aida Cerundolo, opinion article, The Hill, 15 February 2024

“International Classification of Disease diagnosis codes label patients’ medical issues and electronically shuttle them through the US healthcare system. These letter-number combinations facilitate communication, help prevent medical errors and signal insurance companies to reimburse for treatments. 

“Codes exist for patients ‘struck by orca, initial encounter,’ or who have ‘problems in relationship with in-laws’ and even for those ‘sucked into [a] jet engine, sequela.’ However, detransition remains an unrecognized medical entity because it has no corresponding diagnosis code.”

Taking cover

On May 9 last year, GCN reported that MDA National planned to restrict cover for private doctors assessing minors as eligible for medicalised gender change or initiating cross-sex hormones for them.

The insurer cited “the high risk of claims arising from irreversible treatments provided to those who medically and surgically transition as children and adolescents.”

The news appears to have alarmed the lobby group LGBTIQ Health Australia (LHA)2, whose access to federal Health Minister Mark Butler produced an “URGENT one day turnaround” brief from his department on the issue, according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information law.

These documents suggest Australia’s federal government is focused not on the international debate about safety concerns and the lack of evidence for youth gender medicine, but on expanding access to gender-affirming treatment as requested by well-connected LGBTQ lobbies.

On May 23, LHA chief executive Nicky Bath—who sits on the government’s LGBTIQA+ Health and Wellbeing 10 Year National Action Plan Expert Advisory Group—alerted Mr Butler’s office to MDA’s proposed restriction of insurance cover. (By market share, MDA is the second largest medical defence fund.)

That same day, the Department of Health and Aged Care3 secured a detailed account from MDA chief executive Ian Anderson of the insurer’s rationale for the change to take effect from 1 July 2023.

In its urgent brief sent to Minister Butler on May 30, the department relayed Mr Anderson’s explanation that—

While MDA itself had not received any claims arising from gender medicine, the insurer was aware of claims emerging with other indemnifiers in Australia and overseas

Members of MDA had expressed concerns about growing demand pressuring general practitioners (GPs or primary care doctors) to prescribe cross-sex hormones for minors

Those concerns included whether the usual consent would be sufficient for children, given the life-changing, permanent effects of such treatment; and reliance on medical opinion influencing that treatment decision in the event of a claim brought by a former patient

For these reasons, MDA had investigated the underwriting risk of claims arising from gender treatment of minors and concluded that it was unable to quantify and price the risk, quantum and frequency of claims; nor was it able to source appropriate data

MDA members with experience in gender medicine had stated their view that the best model for assessment and treatment of gender-distressed children involved a multi-disciplinary team backed by “a significant hospital”

In its brief, the minister’s department makes no reference to systematic reviews overseas showing the evidence base for paediatric transition to be very weak and uncertain.

However, the note suggests that if the regulatory Medical Board of Australia had to intervene in a case involving gender treatment of a minor, it would use the treatment guideline issued in 2018 by the gender-affirming clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne (RCH) and badged as “Australian standards of care.”

“In determining what is safe clinical care and what is the best available evidence, doctors should have regard to relevant Australian standards of care,” the briefing note says.

There is no hint of the controversial status of the RCH treatment guideline.

The department’s note says the RCH guideline “clearly outlines the role of GPs in the assessment and care of adolescents with gender dysphoria”, which the note says includes prescription of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones “in collaboration with a paediatrician, adolescent physician or paediatric endocrinologist.”

However, towards the end of 2023, the RCH gender clinic changed precisely this section of the guideline consistent with a campaign by the gender-affirming lobby to ramp up GP provision of cross-sex hormone treatment for minors—the very issue that MDA was concerned about.

Gender-affirming clinicians see the mainstreaming of hormones through local medical practices as one answer to long waiting lists at children’s hospital specialist gender clinics, where older adolescents may age out before treatment.

The current, version 1.4 of the RCH guideline still says a multidisciplinary approach is “the optimal model of care” but adds new advice that, “GPs with sufficient expertise and skill in initiating and monitoring [cross-sex] hormone therapy can consider initiating and optimising hormone therapy for [minors].”

“This would typically be within a primary care-led multidisciplinary team tailored to the patient’s needs and availability of services…” (Emphasis added.)

It is not explained how GPs will know when they can go ahead without a multi-disciplinary team. Version 1.3—still available on the RCH website—did not recommend that GPs initiate cross-sex hormones without the precaution of specialist back up.

In November 2023, gender-affirming GPs keen to mainstream hormones for 16- and 17-year-olds without specialist back up complained of mixed messages as to whether or not they would be covered for this4 by the country’s largest medical defence fund, Avant.

Avant, which is understood to be defending psychiatrist Dr Patrick Toohey against a 2022 claim by detransitioner Jay Langadinos, told GCN it had not changed its cover. The fund did not answer the question whether it would cover claims arising from GP members initiating opposite-sex hormones for 16- or 17-year-old patients without the backing of a multi-disciplinary team.

Version 1.4 of the RCH guideline did not cite any new evidence supporting the practice of GP-led hormones, nor was the opportunity taken to cite fresh data reported since the guideline was first issued in 2018.

The RCH document makes no reference to systematic evidence reviews in Finland, Sweden and England since 2019. These reviews, undertaken independently, found the evidence base for hormonal treatment of minors to be very weak and uncertain.

==

"Gender affirming care" is pseudoscientific faith-healing quackery.

[tagapagsalaysay]

Incomplete Irenator Gender Analysis Ramble

First things first. Irene is a trans woman and pretty much anyone on here knows this. The gender analysis isn't about his transition specifically, or proving reasons that he's trans. This is actually about gender roles that come up specifically about parenthood, traditional unit of the family and major medium of patriarchy and whatever. I was thinking about his whole approach in the usual but I felt like jokingly looking back on dumb shit so here we are.

I went with interpreting narrator's role in the equation as a parental figure, but it came from an odd place I think. I saw a while back someone trying to discredit romance between narrator and Stanley because narrator was a paternal figure to Stanley and well that's just dumb and I don't care. But the individual idea of narrator being a paternal figure not for spite is kind of interesting to continue on.

I'm gonna build a picture of mod nator first. Pre-gamergate, masculine voice leading masculine character. Would I say this is before he would examine his gender, yes probably. But my focus is on family dynamics. What advice is he giving, what expectations is he setting, etc. Even if he's not an actual canonical father, he operates as both a guardian figure and like, dad giving dad advice to another. The expectation of someone being as much of a macho hero as possible and then the other half where narrator manipulates him using his obligations as a father. Working for your family. Pleasing your wife. Being a strong man, which also translates into being a good father.

The male action hero archetype was shunned but for different reason. You simply needed to be rational and normal and wish for your own autonomy. It wasn't an outright reaction to harmful gender roles but it's close enough.

The dynamic doesn't change much in the first game either. The weight of the familial social structure is still there presented in altogether the same way. What next?

Tangent: Novelty. The mod/game was novel in terms of gameplay, but it can't be novel in everything. It was also Okay social commentary, but what I'm saying here is. Being ahead of its time isn't an objective goal to be self conscious about as a creator. It's something that depends on what is and isn't being discussed. And what people talk about is... subjective, more often than not. You can be ahead in terms of meta but lagging behind on everything else, things like gender. And that isn't a moral or creative failure. Nor an excuse.

Okay, from here, there are a lot of details I am missing. I wanted to bring up Irenator easing over nicely on the gender self-realization and presentation thing with no problem (Again, still outside the whole family discussion, and just personal interpretation) but realizing that he has yet to examine gender externally, especially through the familial structure. Or even just gender roles in general. Would he consider shifting his own moral guardian schtick as well?

And that comes in a lot on... untouchable ground. Yeah, like, I'm not playing the new game in a billion years at least, but it would have some of my answers. All I get is this picture of narrator examining not only Stanley's family and relationships but himself as well, and it would probably be so funny, but would also complete this entire analysis. But it's radioactive and I'm not touching a damn thing until I redeem myself in some arbitrary way.

I can only guess. Narrator envies Stanley's near-perfect (to cisheteropatriarchal standards) relationship, and somewhat realizes there could be unconventional ones outside a paternal and maternal figure. He then proceeds to either be envious or vain about it, because that's just what he does. The only context clues I get are personal hells.

I was wondering about this for the usual Irene distant backstory stuff, but it turned into an interesting exercise to practice for gender class. It's likely still shallow. But I also wanted to put an arc about Irene's journey of becoming pretty much a matriarch. Yes he's everyone's favorite funny grandma. But we would all like to hear how he's become one. And so it goes 💥

Man if you read all of that have a burger. I know there's probably also still the usual bias so feel free to fill me in on what your take is. -> 🍔

[housebutcharchives]

Hello! My name is Maia, or Daisy!

I use they/them pronouns and some neos if you are part of my family.  I’m 23 years old, and I’m autistic and I have ADHD.  My main blog is @autisticspecialeducator, which is where I like posts from. 

My main labels are agender soft butch lesbian. I don’t have an internal gender identity and am uncomfortable with most definitive gender labels. However, my gender expression is very distinct in ways I want to understand further, so that I can begin to do it on purpose.  This blog is here to document labels, pictures, and values I want to incorporate into my gender expression.

On the simplest level, my gender expression is associated quite often with daisies, dogs, and the Sun.  These aesthetics or objects will be tagged as such. I am butch, but I don’t relate to the term “masculinity” or most masculine terms. If I’m referred to with gendered terms, I prefer that they are used interchangeably. 

But most importantly, my gender expression as a soft butch is deeply associated with values.  Cis-hetero-normative men and masculinity adheres to a mandatory, arbitrary set of values in order to retain their inescapable, mandatory status as Men.  My gender expression appropriates this system, and transforms it into genderless, non-mandatory, non-universal values and standards of behavior.

Firstly, a value of community, family, and healing, which all fall under the guiding principle of Home.  I use home-themed neopronouns with those who are part of my household to remind me to uphold this value. Aesthetically, cottages, flowers, and dogs appeal to me because they remind me of home.  Bread, cooking, and kitchen activities also are part of my gender expression to uphold this value. Feeding my household and my guests is somewhat of a gender role to me, in itself. Healing and safety take up a large part of my affect and how I conduct myself.  

Secondly, I live in the value of chivalry fully divorced from military duty. It means I defend folks who have less power than me. I seek to be aware and invested in social justice. I’m physically strong and work on my endurance so that I can serve my household physically and perform manual labor. I work to be patient, reliable, and aware of my environment and my household’s needs. Aesthetically, I’m drawn to knights, though I’m aware that the knights I’m drawn to aren’t historically accurate. I’m drawn to them more as a representation of an ideal. Angels and guardian mythical creatures also interest me in a gendered way because of their ability to watch and protect.

I’m very aware of the pitfall of a hero complex with my values. I don’t necessarily see myself as the Knight or the hero. I’m aspiring to that ideal, which is ultimately out of my reach. I am always capable of hurt and mistakes and evil, and I can make choices to be better in those areas.

Each of these concepts will be tagged with “#my gender as (concept)” throughout this blog, along with commentary.

[askgothamshitty]

Hello I'm 17 years old and I'm having a hard time with being afraid of ageing and becoming a woman. I just feel like the world is so scary to teenage girls but as a woman I will be expected to be more responsible and I'll have to do things like date, get a good job, get married, have kids, and get into fashion and makeup. But I don't want any of that. I'm scared because I don't want responsibilities and I'm afraid of men and I don't want to get old because youth is beautiful and ugly old women are treated badly. Help, how do I fix myself?

First of all I want to say that your feelings are totally valid and you are not alone! So many girls/women feel this way, and it's totally logical to considering how incessantly these gender roles are shoved down our throats by nearly every aspect of society. Please know that it's okay to have these thoughts and feelings, and that it's not you that's the problem, it's the culture.

Second, you don't have to do anything you don't want to. Dating, marriage, having kids - you don't have to do ANY of that. The idea that a woman must go down this path to find true happiness is a LIE! Studies show that the happiest demographic are single and childless women.

I'm sorry to say that you probably will have to get a job at some point (trust me, I hate this reality too LOL), but don't put pressure on yourself to have a "good" job on anyone else's terms but yours. What's "good" to you should be something that pays the bills and doesn't make you feel like shit. I know other people/society at large put so much value on climbing the corporate ladder and being a workaholic but you do NOT have to play that game.

You also do not have to get into fashion and makeup! Now, this is definitely a harder area to divest from since it ties in to self-esteem and self-worth, but it's totally possible to break free from beauty standards and feel confident, happy, and whole without that stuff. For me, personally, I've found that not keeping up with trends and using less makeup have been a huge positive. I spend less time getting ready, am less hyper-focused on my appearance, and save loads of money.

The journey to accepting yourself as is and not caring about the beauty standards doesn't happen overnight, but it does start with the mindful intention to just let go. It means understanding that those standards are completely arbitrary, completely socially constructed, and not at all realistic or attainable. And it means deciding that you're not going to let these unjust, fake rules ruin your life. It may take a while to fully and genuinely feel that but it has to start somewhere.

What has helped me is finding likeminded women to bond with and reading feminist theory. Having friends who feel the same about gender norms helps you carve out a space in your life where you can interrogate and resist them. Expanding your mind with feminist knowledge helps you see through the norms which present themselves at absolute truths.

<3 my inbox is always open for venting

[rametarin]

TERFs are incorrect for many reasons

However something needs clarifying. TERFs are not correct in the how or why of something, but their detractors are also wrong about something.

Yes, in fact, there have been people saying that unless your sexuality conforms to the idea the differences between people are 100% purely cultural or arbitrary, mental identity, and you bend yourself to where you accept a self-identified woman’s penis, or self-identified man’s vagina, is just as much an object of sex for you as the opposite sex’s standard cis conformation of sexy parts, and perform as if that’s true, then you’re a transphobe.

There are those that acknowledge that while self-identified gender is as people say it is, you cannot change sexuality, and that sexuality is hard wired to biology. These are the exception and may not be aware as to the extent of the depth the social conconstructionists argue how self-identified gender identity is the dominating force above all. Partially or primarily because doing so would make them perceptible as somehow aligning with or sympathizing with the rest of the stupid shit TERFs have to say on the subject to argue against transgendered people in what they feel should be exclusively female sexed spaces.

Yes, there are people that think if someone identifies as a woman, you being straight means their dick should be appealing to you as a woman’s dick. Or else, if it’s not, that’s you being a bigot. This is not up for debate. This is a thing that is argued for. That is not how sexuality works. Human sexuality does not hinge itself on social rules, unless you are a psychopath. It’s the very reason why same-sex attraction could never be stamped out by the social rules and structure of, say, religious fundamentalism intruding on the how and why of everything humans do in society and culture. You can monkey babble and philosophize and demand punishment for non-conformists all you want, but there’s nothing you can do but vilify the reality that people that aren’t attracted that way, cannot and will not perform that way and be healthy.

TERFs try to capitalize on this the way they try to narrate and pathologize the differences between males and females with some good ole fashioned Class Struggle Theory to fill in gaps and declare woman to be an inherently oppressed class in the species of human and demand society conform to this idea and compensate them for sufferage and greviances, outside what history and the law would show us are the true objective disparities between the sexes. TERFs try to argue for gynocentrism in whether something is equal or equitable, and draw clear biological borders but use arbitrary and social ideas about gender to slough off any idea of a role they must perform for society, as woman. They deny any validity to self-identification to gender, whether that’s for interactions, or sex, or reproductive rights.

However, irrespective of what a TERF thinks about sexuality and the female role in it, it is true that you cannot identify as something and systematically enforce it to be a moral failing of somebody else for not seeing you as a prospective sexual partner on the basis of your gender. This is a no. It does not work that way. Sexuality is a layer deeper than socially constructed gender, whether you like that or not. If you think this inability to pigeonhole other people to participate somehow proves you’re not the gender you identify as, well, that’s kind of incel-like mentality and behavior.

And while TERFs absolutely go off about how “those nasty transwomen want to force us into sex,” as they do, no different from how any alarmist fuddy duddy tries to project the worst boogyman image on the group they find potential in harming them, it isn’t a lie to say that those people and that mentality do exist. TERFs try to paint the whole opposition with the brush, when the reality it’s not all of them. But there most definitely is that school of thought that argues, “they identify as a woman, you’re a transphobe unless your PP get hard for them the same as a ciswoman.”

This nuance gets lost, because conceding the point while a TERF is making it invites them to start screaming, “SO YOU AGREE? I’M RIGHT THEN? GLAD WE GOT THAT SQUARED AWAY.” When no, once again, the radfem bitch is taking liberties of narrative and then screaming and accelerating passed that to yell about something else, again. The TERF is still wrong about this point because it’s not a ubiquitous position that all trans rights people argue. It does not apply universally, because people recognize sexuality is deeper and more biological and more primal than the social onion layer of gender.

But that doesn’t eliminate the population of people that believe it, or the school of thought they worm into the argument for trans rights’ validity being because biological sex is irrelevant and that the only factor you should care about is self-identification, for rights, rules, laws, reproductive features, and sexual availability, and language on valid sexuality. And that say unless you see no distinction between a cis and trans partner for this, you’re being a bigot.

In particular, this hedging the discussion of what is valid sexuality by co-opting and appropriating the language we use to describe sexuality, but demanding it conform to socially constructed gender, not sex. Because, they argue, if you say a man is gay for having sex with a transwoman, you’re saying that person isn’t a woman.

No. That transwoman isn’t female. Pretending that biological sex does not factor or does not matter is deliberate deplatforming and erasure of heterosexual people and cisgendered sexuality, it’s just the equivalent of narrative erasure of homosexual people from validity in society, and only seen as acceptable because, “at least it’s not being imposed on a minority.” It’s still using words and law to invalidate and redefine a group of people’s orientations and dispositions out from under them by arbitrarily saying they’re wrong and don’t matter, because they don’t fit into the social order desired. The same kind of fallacious thinking that said to be a gay man was to just be nonsense because it was inconvenient or other people saw no validity or merit in it.

So demanding that terms such as gay and straight conform to self-defined gender identity as the deciding factor flies in the face of sexuality as a biological function and factor and says the only needs that matter are those of the transgendered in defining how it works. This fallacious thinking is somehow unacceptable when it’s used to describe another minority supposedly forcing the majority to conform to it, so I can’t understand why they think it’s acceptable in this case.

If we were being honest, we’d sanction the creation of new terms that properly reflect contemporary sentiments. Straight, for example, would be kept as “a cisgendered, heterosexual person that cannot be attracted to a person they know is transgendered.” And similar, for gay. Then another term would be added that effectively means, “Straight, but they can accommodate for the transgendered, but they cannot function with another same-sex person of the same gender.” That would enable singular word distinction that tells you all you need to know about what they define themselves as, what they have going on in their own bio-biz, and what they’re looking for (and specifically, what they are NOT looking for.) And, similarly, one that means, “Gay, but they can accommodate for the transgendered. They like their men with dicks or vaginas.”

Technically this would be under the umbrella of bisexual, but the reason for the distinction would be to specifically undercut those that will uncharitably read that and do the TERF thing of going, “AH, SO YOU AGREE? TRANS(men/women) AREN’T REAL(men/women) AFTER ALL?” The entire purposes of these new words to fit these additional terms for sexuality and gender would be to validate the gender they say they are, but also validate someone can still be unattracted to you because of your sex, and that sex does matter. The same as gender matters.

But a certain school of thought in people argues that unless you abandon biological sex as being valid and mattering in how things are defined, and that self-identification doesn’t override or overrule it, you’re a threat to transgendered peoples lives and existence and the preferred logical order. This is not true.

And it’s a topic that those that feel this way and those that are for trans rights that don’t need to face eachother about and have a serious discussion on. Because it’s wrong to invalidate the rights of the transgendered to be normalized and above the board, but it’s also wrong to treat the sexualities of the cisgendered and cisoriented as bigotry. No different from treating being homosexual like a sin or a mental illness because it does not conform to the cisheteronormativity they would prefer be the deciding factor in the human animal and all its societies.

So those that believe the only deciding factor for sexuality, orientation and gender should be self-identification and the authority of institutions to validate that as true, and make  laws and structures of power enforce that from said authorities, should square up and announce themselves. Distinguish yourselves from the ones that believe biological sex is also valid, that sexuality cannot be changed or modified or redefined by redefining gender, and that one need not drastically invalidate the other in order for both to co-exist as entirely real.

Then we can have a real conversation about exactly what that should mean in language, law and social relations.

 And for gods sake, abandon this idea that something is more valid because it’s a minority. Being a minority is not a merit in itself. Those that believe eating shit gives you superpowers would be in the minority. Their opinions and way of life are not MORE valid or specifically valid just because as a school of thought, they’re a minority against the vast majority that do not believe shit eating gives you superpowers. And you shouldn’t be considered a bigot solely for contradicting (”oppressing”) a minority, solely because you aren’t in their group and oppose them. This stupid operating logic that gives the concept of a minority special berth and privileges beyong reproach just because “they’re oppressed” needs to go away. You can be in the minority, and be incorrect or invalid.

TERFs also uphold this idea about the “oppressed minority” always having the right of way and benefit of the doubt and validity, because they use the same operating logic that concludes a woman is oppressed by a man, that intersectional feminists use to conclude to be LGBT is to be oppressed by “the straights.” There it is. The fucking ugly reflection in the mirror. The hideous logic TERFs use to scream about oppression from all corners, most especially from men, and act like this oppression gives them infallibility against their detractors. If you hate TERFs for what they are and what they do, not just that they make these arguments on behalf of being a woman vs. an even smaller minority, you’d dispose of the logic that being a minority makes you inherently oppressed, abused and exploited. It begs the transitive property that things adjacent to them are their abusers and owe them something and are morally wrong. It’s a view that needs to be tossed aside, whether talking about the rights of women, LGBT, or anything that may come up in the future more surreal and cerebral than sexual orientation and gender.

If you hate TERFs and what they do, you’ll stop emulating their thought processes and just applying it to other minorities, just because they’re minorities. TERFs aren’t just wrong because they’re gynocentrists and supremacists, the entire basis of their philosophy and outlook on life is wrong. And they’ll accommodate just enough objective proofs to interpret through their subjective outlook to insist everything they are is “science,” while speaking the equivalent of religious dogma and demanding you see it as empirical science, and argue the data rather than the factors they used to interpret it. It’s tiresome.

[gingerswagfreckles]

Queer is my fave word, thanks for posting about that book, I'm gonna try to get a copy! It's just awesome to have an umbrella term for not feeling cis-hetero but not entirely certain where you fit under the umbrella yet.

Ahh yes!! You mean Gay New York by George Chauncey? That book is THE book on queer history in the US (it's really not just about NYC, but it is focused there). Not only is it the most meticulously well researched book I have EVER read, it is just. So brilliant in how it analyses the construction of and intersection of gender, sexuality, biological sex, class, race, and society. Like I read it for a class in freshman year of college and trust me I was already EXTREMELY liberal and well versed in queer discourse. Yet it completely I mean COMPLETELY changed my understanding of not only sex and gender but just like. What identity is, how much of what we see as static and natural are actually very contextual social constructs. And it really showed in a very concrete and reality based way how every identity exists and is defined through the context of its environment, and that while our experiences are very inherently real, the lines we draw around these experiences to define them are not. Like. The existence of a queer identity the way we generally think of it now did NOT exist in the same way throughout history. The intersection of so many facets of life have been interpreted so completely differently throughout history and in different places and social contexts. The queer community has never been some static and well defined club that one is or is not a member of. It is and always has been a nebulous and highly changeable social network of people with common experiences and interests who have defined their own communities in wildly different ways depending on where you look. Trying to strictly define who does or does not belong in or who has or hasn't existed in the queer community throughout history is completely pointless, because in reality we are talking about an absolutely enormous group of people who have been variously connected to and socially isolated from others, who have seen their own identities and their own communities in completely different ways.

It really highlighted for me how pointless 99% of the discourse on this website is, and how much almost all of it boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what identity is. NONE of the identities we think of as inherently real are inherently real, and arguing about who should be included in a community or who's identities are "valid" just shows that you think the framework through which you understand sex and gender is universal rather than cultural, contextual, and highly individual. Like, identities overlap! Identities step on each others toes!!! Words and labels change, and people do not universally agree on what they mean at any point in time!!! You would not believe how many people who you would think of as being part of the queer community didn't think of themselves as part of the queer community, and you would not believe how many people who you do NOT think of as part of the queer community DID see themselves as part of it, and were accepted!!

Like, for example, the interpretation of what it even meant to be "homosexual" was SO different depending on what period on time you look at, what location, what social and financial class these people were part of, what racial identity they saw themselves as (and that's a whole 'nother can of worms!) Sexuality was often seen as MUCH more connected to gender performance and sexual roles one took than it is today, and a lot, I mean a LOT of men who always topped did not see themselves as homosexual/gay/part of the queer community at all, especially in working class communities. And!! Guess what!! This is the part that will really blow your mind!!!

T H E Y W E R E N ' T W R O N G!!!!!!!!!!!

They were not WRONG about how they defined their identities or how they saw themselves in relation to a certain social community!! Because they were using their OWN social and sexual framework to interpret their identities and their actions!!! And saying they were WRONG in their interpretation fundamentally misunderstands that the criteria YOU use to measure whether someone is part of an identity or social group is not any more correct or real than the criteria THEY used! Saying these people were "wrong" is to impose one's own modern and highly contextual social framework on people from the past-- and TBH it's fine to see people from the past through modern lenses, and to recognize that they would be seen as gay/a certain identity by modern standards. That's fine! But the way they saw themselves then wasn't wrong, it was just different, and your criteria for what you see as gay or straight or part of a community is just as arbitrary and based on the context of your environment as theirs was.

People like to argue with this all the time, saying things like that these individuals were just suffering from internalized homophobia, gender bias, ignorance of what this or that identity "really" means, and these people are really really really misunderstanding the point. These are usually the same people who say things like "words mean things!!" when points like the one I'm making are brought up, because they continue to misunderstand how much these words yes, mean things, but mean things within historical and cultural contexts that are NOT shared by the entire world. Like, ok, you may say our example man from the 1910s is gay whether he recognized that or not, because he engaged in homosexual acts. But what does it mean to have homosexual sex? To have sex with someone of the same biological sex? Well what is biological sex, and how do we define what makes ones biological sex the "same" or "different" from your own? Is it someone with the same type of genitals as you? That's not a universally shared opinion, and the way you define the "types" of genitals are not universally shared either. What if I told you that there have been cultures throughout history who have categorized biological sex through the length of the penis, with people with shorter penises being seen as a separate sex than those who have longer penises? So two people with penises could have sex with each other and not be understood as having sex with someone of the same sex, in that culture!

Oh, that's not what you meant? That's wrong? Why? Why? Because your personal understanding and your culture's general perception of what biological sex is is more valid and real than that culture's? Why? WHY? Could you really explain why, or is it just that the difference is making you uncomfortable, because it threatens your perception of a LOT of the ideas you see as inherently real?

And we could do the same thing with the ACT of sex! I mean, what is sex? What physical acts are sexual, and what aren't? Is it just someone putting a body part inside of another person's body in some way? Well what about handjobs and other kinds of outercourse? Is sex then some physical thing we do in pursuit of an orgasm? What if you don't orgasm? Is it not sex then? Is sex the use of our bodies to derive general physical pleasure? Well what about a massage? Is a massage sex? In some times and places, many people would have said yes!

These aren't just theoretical questions- Chauncey outlines how these differing definitions of what sex is and what makes it queer not only allowed for a lot of people we would unquestioningly think of as part of the queer community to exclude themselves, but also resulted in the inclusion of people we would never consider to be queer now. Like, most female prostitutes who served only male cliental absolutely hands down refused to give blow jobs in the early 1900s, because blowjobs were seen as an extremely deviant expression of sexuality and were understood to be part of "homosexual" activity, regardless of the sex or genders of the people involved, because it was sexual activity that explicitly was not seeking to create a baby. This was a widely understood concept at the time, and persisted despite the fact that many of these women were using contraception and therefore obviously not seeking to get pregnant. Blowjobs were still seen as perverse and "homosexual," and thus not something most regular female prostitutes were willing to engage in.

Therefore! Female prostitutes who only ever had sex with male cliental but DID provide oral sex (and many other not-penis-in-vagina-activities) were often lumped in with lesbians!!! And treated as such in arrest records and propaganda! And guess what?? As a result, guess who these women usually hung around with, and where they usually could be found? Within the queer community and queer spaces!! These women were seen by the broader society as well as by much of the queer community as QUEER, and many of them likely understood themselves this way as well!

And for the record, these questions of what sex is and what gender is and what makes it gay or straight or whatever are not questions that belong strictly to the past. Survey the general population about what act they consider to have been the one where they "lost their virginity," and you will get wildly different answers. Survey self identified gay or straight people on what kind of sex acts they engage with and with who, and you will similarly find an enormous variation in reports.

And these questions MATTER! These questions matter, not in that we have to find some way to answer them, but in order to understand that we can't, definitively, and that thinking our own perceptions of any of these things are more valid than others' perceptions is incredibly harmful and dismissive to the lived experiences of other people. You can't define other people's identities out of existence just because they threaten or overlap or contradict with your own understanding of some concept, because your definitions of literally any of the criteria you are using to try to build your boxes are ALSO up for interpretation!

Like, I'm sorry I know I am rambling soooo much but you opened the same floodgates that this book opened back when I read it. If the people on this stupid website had any understanding of the history they claim to know so much about, they would see how their attitudes of "this identity is more valid than that identity" and "you can't sit with us because you're not actually part of this or that identity because my definition is better than your definition" is nothing new or woke or progressive, but is the exact same shit that has always been done and has been used to marginalize people who's existence or behaviors threaten the status quo. Like yelling at asexual or pansexual or nonbinary or aromantic people or whatever other group that they don't belong, or that their identity isn't real because it threatens the perceived integrity of another identity...it's all so stupid!! Your identity is also just a way for you to define yourself within your cultural context! Like I've literally seen people be like "asexality isn't a real identity bc if we didn't live in a society that was so sex obsessed then you wouldn't feel the need to define yourself this way." And it's like....what?? Yeah, ok??? But we do live in this society???????? And you can say that about LITERALLY ANY identity??! Not even ones related to sex and gender! Like "you aren't really deaf and deafness isn't real, because if we lived in a world without sound then you wouldn't notice you couldn't hear." Like yeah?? But we do live in a world with sound?? So...people find this term useful to articulate their experiences? And they might even dare to form an identity around it, and maybe a community, and might even become proud of it, even though it is a social construct, just like pretty much everything else??

It just drives me nuts. We go around and around in circles without ever understanding that so much of the bigotry we face is the same thing we are perpetuating with each other, because we don't understand that it is natural and normal for people's definitions of certain identities to conflict, and for their interpretations of the world to run up against each other sometimes. And that there is no strictly defined queer community, and who does or doesn't "belong" is not a decision that any one person or even any one culture gets to make, ever.

To try to finally actually wrap back around to what your actual comment was to begin with, I think queer is a wonderful word, and that GENERALLY SPEAKING in our current cultural context, it is used to encapsulate so much of the messiness and overlap that makes people so uncomfortable, but is what makes the queer community so great!!!!! That being said, it of course has had different definitions in different time periods and cultural contexts just like everything else, and some people may still have negative connotations associated with it and therefore not feel comfortable using it to self-identify. And that's fine too, as long as you don't try to force other people to stop using the term to describe their own identities on the basis that your definition is more real than theirs, which is the opposite of what queer history is all about.

If anyone is interested in the book I am talking about, you can buy it as an ebook, audiobook, or paper copy here: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/george-chauncey/gay-new-york/9780786723355/

It goes into way way way more depth about everything I'm rambling about here, and backs it up with the most research and evidence I've ever seen in one single book. The physical copy is about as thick as two bricks stacked on top of each other, so if you can't get an exclusionist to read it, you can always just whack them over the head.

[pixelsandpins]

My Gender is Crab: How Fantasy and Sci-fi Helped Shaped My Non-Binary Identity

On Twitter and in casual conversation I have described my gender as the following: crab-person, one of the creatures from “Behemoth’s World” by 70’s sci-fi painter Richard Clifton-Day, a bird demon with a funny hat, the Pokemon Gengar, and “a lady, I guess, but…you know…not on purpose.” The non-binary experience is, by its nature, weird as hell in the context of a system that, at its best, describes itself as a spectrum between set points, and, at its worst, demands you fall into a discreet category of only two options. Are you neither? Are you both? Are you sat somewhere squat in the middle? And the answer is just sort of…yes? My relationship with my own non-binaryness is informed by a patchwork of neurodivergencies. At its core, though, it stems from a pervasive intellectual disconnect from existence as a human as we, collectively, understand it. Sci-fi and fantasy is both an instigating factor, and, as a writer, an exploration of that thought process.

The first time I feel like I saw a real deconstruction of the gender I was assumed at birth was in a book by Harry Harrison. In West of Eden there’s this species of hyper-intelligent matriarchal dinosaur people called the Yilané . Among the Yilané , the females run everything and the males are these little blobfish lookin’ dudes who get relegated to the breeding pen. And at twelve years old? My mind? Totally and completely blown. And this wasn’t because it was women in charge. Not really. I’d been raised on that unique brand of 90s/early aughts girl power already. Buffy, Xena, various Disney channel everygirl heroines, Powerpuff Girls, Daria, whatever the fuck Cleopatra 2525 was trying to do. I had been told that girls could do anything boys could do without sacrificing their femininity blah blah blah.

But the Yilané ?

They weren’t any of that bubblegum, spandex, high-kick pop feminism that my female cohorts vibed with so easily. They were morally complicated and intelligent and calculating and vicious. More importantly, they were the first version of “woman” I truly groked. Their whole existence wasn’t centered around either adhering to or being in defiance of some arbitrary standard of femininity. They lived unburdened by the expectations that my own horrific corporeal form had been saddled with. They were monstrous. So while I admired the Janeways and Hermiones and Dana Scullys and Zoë Washburns with which I had been presented as formidable models of womanhood, I didn’t want to be them. I wanted claws and teeth and the ability to smell blood on the wind.

“So you’re just a scaly/furry?”

Shush.

Shit, maybe?

It’s not quite like that.

I don’t/didn’t really want to be an animal necessarily (though, like, if someone offered to turn me into a dragon…who the fuck is turning that down). But when no version of womanhood, be it traditional or progressive, feels right and you can’t pinpoint why, just being a horned demon from one of the middle circles of hell seems like a way easier plan in the long term.

Over the years, without intellectually understanding that I was doing it in my writing, I started crafting sections of world and lore where the rules for sex and gender and the expression of both were different at a fundamental, biological level. Female elves became boxy and tall, almost indistinguishable from their male counterparts in androgynous elven clothing. Ariesians could only be told apart by the color of their horns. The dimorphism of drakkakens shifted from their initial designs in my early sketch books to favor, larger, imposing females. Goblins, that I finally got around to including in The Terrible Persistence of Memory, were designed as hermaphrodites. I’ve been working up the details for a band of tri-sexed species, tacking down their reproductive process, and a member of this clade appeared as the lead in The Center of the Universe.

Naxos was the first time, though, when proverbial pen was put to paper that the personal feelings about my own identity latched to a specific character. Ysa is a bull-creature. She’s been made into something weird and strange through a combination of her own will and magic that she doesn’t quite understand. And she’s me. And Ari, her romantic partner, doesn’t see Ysa in terms of any social construct. Ari doesn’t see a man or a woman or a monster. She sees Ysa. To make this as a story between women. To make and market it as a yuri game. For me, it was a radical reinterpretation of the role of “woman” I felt like I was regularly being forced into. That I couldn’t escape.

Since I put out that game in 2018, what began as a re-invention turned into what I realized had always been a rejection, one I hadn’t really figured out the parameters of, yet. One that had words I had only really just learned as an adult. That despite how much I wanted womanhood to incorporate that which I was, it just kind of….didn’t. But that it was, indeed, something I could escape. And the instant I gave myself a place, however fictional, to actually do so, I started to see myself hiding underneath.

[teddy-feathers]

i want to be a guy

but ive spent my whole life being a girl

its easy to feel fake. its easy to set arbitrary standards

and then realize how fucked up those standards are because. if this toxic behavior and midset is what it takes to be a man then maybe i dont want to be one - which is a lie because some part of me admires and longs for that attitude, emulates it especially when around other guys

and then theres the question of performance

i cant look or sound or be right. and even if i coud would it change my flights of fancy? would i shame myself of wearing or behaving certain ways?

in some respects i already do

but gender isnt a performance really. it can be preformed of course but fufilling all the right check boxes in the world cant make someone something theyre not

it comes down to what makes you comfortable. it comes down to things like what you want and what role you want to fill and how you want to fill it and how you want to be perceived.

i have.... a lot of social issues in general so of course my social dysphoria would be high