i’m asking this in good faith.
the most common argument is because gender is a social construct, which isn’t an argument that makes sense to me because race is a social construct too, but everyone thinks that you can’t change your race. what it means to be a man or a woman changes over time, but what it meant to be, let’s say white, also changed over time. people from italy or ireland flat out used to not be considered white and even before that with the one drop rule, you could be a white person with 2% black and be considered black. meanwhile, i don’t think that there was ever a point of time (except now, obviously) where you’d be born with a vagina and considered a man. at MOST the only thing that ever changed was the belief of how a man ACTS, i don’t think there’s anyone from any time of history that will argue the most basic definition of a man (grown human born with a penis/male chromosomes). it’s hypocritical for everyone to say that gender can be changed because it’s a social construct, but absolutely no one will argue that race can be changed. can social constructs go deeper than what everyone agrees on or not?
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Honestly here’s the point:
It’s not hurting anyone (as long as the person receiving a surgery or any kind is 18 or older), and it really just makes people (like me), feel better when they’re referred to as, say, a woman rather than a man. Like why would we not do this small thing to make people feel much better about themselves? I don’t see why people give so much of a fuck about it.
>meanwhile, i don’t think that there was ever a point of time (except now, obviously) where you’d be born with a vagina and considered a man.
Guess it depends on how you present. Nobody knew what was in Dr Barry’s pants until he died.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)
One thing that helped me understand a little better is that there really isn’t a black and white definition of gender and intersex individuals exist. Like most things in our reality, there is more a spectrum than a binary.
There are also lots of cultures that have some sort of “gender bending” going back throughout history.
As far as the “social construct” goes, for me it’s the fact that we look at things as a binary Male or Female and when you dive into the edge cases that’s really not biologically true.
I also echo what another person said and who cares I guess? It doesn’t have to make sense to you if it makes sense to someone else. At a bare minimum you can almost always ignore thinking about it because it probably doesn’t even come up in your life much, if at all.
To rebuff a singular point: transgenderism has been a thing for FAR longer than you think. It’s an accepted part of many African tribes, as well as (formerly) many native American tribes. They didn’t use the word transgender specifically, but the concept of swapped genders or dual/non gender exists in many places and has for a long time.
How does cis gender make sense? You were born with a penis and the doctors marked you as male. Now you correct people if they mistakenly use she her about you. Can you explain your gender?
I’m not seeing the hypocrisy at all.
You just stated that we have changed over time the way races can be categorized.
So socially, we can do the same with Gender.
Instead of Asian, you can say middle eastern, south Asian, southeast Asian, East Asian, north Asian.
Well with gender you can do the same.
Instead of male, you can say male, intersex, female presenting, transitioned female.
Maybe not everyone wants to be grouped together when they don’t see themselves similar to the rest of the group.
To force that assignment on them is archaic, stubborn, and mean.
The reason race is not a social construct yet is simply because not enough people want it to be one yet. Gender only changed once enough people were identifying as trans. Imo the reason that there’s been push for one but not the other is that gender stereotypes are much more influential than racial ones. There’s more confusion and rejection of someone deviating from their gender stereotypes than their racial stereotypes. In the future we may see transracial individuals, but as of now, not enough people feel constrained and willing to change for that to happen on the same scale of transgenderism.
Idk honestly it depends on who refers to themselves as trans imo, not everyone who does goes through a psychiatric process to determine a diagnosis. The social construct part of it is only half of the “issue” so to speak, mechanically all that’s happening is the individual is changing their gender presentation, should they pursue additional therapeutic means to counter act dysphoria then changes to their sex characteristics are considered.
Race is also a social construct, but I don’t think psychiatric conditions exist in which people feel dysphoric towards a label that is socially constructed and projected onto them, even if we stick to ethnicity as the variable to consider, people may feel prejudice against them and could lead to feelings of self loathing for one’s ethnic belonging, but again that’s not a psychiatric disorder, that’s just society.
There are multiple facets to being trans: physical/medical, social and legal. Some people need to transition in all the areas, some mix and match. The types and degree of transition is specific to each person, because it comes down to what helps manage/reduce/eliminate that person’s gender-based dysphoria. Since it’s little -to-no harm to anyone else whether there’s a few less or more or fewer men/women in the world, the best thing to do is mind one’s own business and let people live their lives. Anyone who is in a position to have to make a bigger adjustment (like a partner or work colleague) is also in a position to work with that trans person individually and find out how best to interact productively with them.
As for how it makes sense? How does synesthesia make sense? Or misophonia? It’s just how that person’s brain is wired. It doesn’t have to match your experience to be real to them, and affect the way they operate because of it.
I think instead of trying to compare transgenderism to racial identity it makes more sense to just try to understand transgenderism in isolation. The comparison brings too much complexity to help understand either matter better. There is a lot that can be said about racial identities and how people within racial identities will pick and choose aspects that they want to accept and reject parts that they don’t associate with. Some people may even take aspects of different cultures and integrate those into their own lives. I think that it’s hard to seperate race and colourism from an American context, so I can understand why you might get confused on a surface level. It might be easier to understand if we try to understand these two nuanced issues separately, rather than comparatively.
So does transgenderism make sense by itself? If someone who is born with a penis wants to be perceived as female, and feels more comfortable presenting as female, is that so difficult to accept? They might embrace certain parts of femininity and reject other parts, just like any other woman. It seems strange to me to assume that everyone born in society will automatically embrace the aspects of society that align with their genitals at birth, rather than their own individual sense of self that they develop as they grow up in a diverse environment.
Sometimes wires get crossed at birth. I always understood the trans thing as having a dude brain in a chick body or visa versa. Maybe it’s hormonal stuff, maybe it’s micro plastics and 5G, but that’s neither here nor there for us on the outside.
It’s also a fixable problem; one can change the body to match the mind more closely via transitioning.
Intersex people exist – these are people with secondary sex characteristics that are not clearly male or female at birth.
Biological expression of hormones that lead to secondary sex characteristics being expressed is a spectrum. The levels of hormones fluctuate from person to person leading to different expressions of these characteristics.
On a biological level, there is a spectrum of sex hormone production and expression.
Why would gender expression be any less diverse than the sex expression you are comparing it with when identifying someone as transgender – meaning their gender identity does not match the expression of their sex hormones they were born with.
>the most common argument is because gender is a social construct, which isn’t an argument that makes sense to me because race is a social construct too, but everyone thinks that you can’t change your race.
I believe a good argument is that gender and ethnicity are cultural, but sex and race are biological. Gender is by definition the culture where we signal and amplify our biological sex. “Race” tends to reference differences in phenotype, which are biological, but in everyday application we usually mean the cultural delineation of ethnicity. This is especially true if we refer to classically multiracial populations, like “urban” communities in the US or Latin American populations.
I would think of a transgender person as playing a different cultural role in defiance of biology, just like someone can be trans-ethnic in defiance of biology. I wouldn’t worry myself when a white person “acts black” or a black person “acts white”. Same thing with people who choose to play different gender roles. They are just doing what makes sense to them.
>what it means to be a man or a woman changes over time, but what it meant to be, let’s say white, also changed over time. people from italy or ireland flat out used to not be considered white and even before that with the one drop rule, you could be a white person with 2% black and be considered black.
I believe this supports my comment above.
>meanwhile, i don’t think that there was ever a point of time (except now, obviously) where you’d be born with a vagina and considered a man. at MOST the only thing that ever changed was the belief of how a man ACTS, i don’t think there’s anyone from any time of history that will argue the most basic definition of a man (grown human born with a penis/male chromosomes).
Most cultures have some gray area around biological sex and gender. Because gender is a social construct, it represents the positive and negative traits we crudely lump onto men and women. That makes it a great vector to assign masculine and feminine virtues and vices. All throughout history men have been called women as an insult, implying they lacked these masculinized virtues. Women have also been similarly ridiculed if they lacked femininity.
I’m a gender conforming heterosexual male and I have been repeatedly told I’m not masculine enough because I’m small and shy. I’ve been called the f-slur. I’ve been threatened with sexual violence by men who thought it made them more manly. There are lots of people who would like to see me as a woman, most of them bad actors. Transgender people face the same kind of abuse when they are expected to conform to a role they are not interested in playing.
>it’s hypocritical for everyone to say that gender can be changed because it’s a social construct, but absolutely no one will argue that race can be changed. can social constructs go deeper than what everyone agrees on or not?
Again, I would strongly recommend considering the distinction between biological labels and cultural labels. You don’t have to agree with it, but more and more people are doing it. Again, gender and ethnicity are cultural, sex and race are biological. A transgender person is simply someone to acts out a gender role opposite their biological sex. However, not all advocates of transgender people agree. There are some really deceitful advocates who insist even biological sex and race are social constructs. Those people are the real issue, not people who make a distinction between biology and culture.