Thank you Martina! I avoided further thoughts I was wanting to discuss here for after making that first post because I realised that no matter how I phrased what I was trying to express, I ran the risk of potentially offending one subset of people here or another, and I simply do not want to cause offence.
But yes - individualism. We are all individuals, and that's one of the things that bothers me deeply about attitudes to transfolk. When thinking about cisgender folk, it is easy to make generalisations about easily-defined subsets like, say cisgender male heterosexuals. There are and have been so many of them that, whilst accepting that there will still be quite large differences between them, that
in general they are likely to be thus-and-so.
But us non-cisgender folk - we are so few, but even so, there are so many subsets into which we fall, and quite frankly, some of us don't understand folk in the other subsets than our own any better than cisgender folk do.
I've noted my own incomprehension of people born physically male that feel that they are female but that have no desire to have genital reassignment surgery. I also do not understand how folk who feel that they are neither male nor female must feel - but then, I was never unhappy with the gender binary, it was just that I was born the wrong side of the fence, as it were.
So - to lump all who identify as MTF together when talking about categorisation and how we should be regarded and treated socially seems to me to be inappropriate because we are simply too varied to make many generalisations that, if applied to all, would be fair to most. And it's not only cisgender folk who don't seem to see some of the problems, or are unwilling to admit them if they do - some MTF's don't see them either.
I understand the idea that gender roles are social constructs, and that the world might be a better and happier place were there to be no such constructs, so that each and every individual simply lived as felt good to them, so long as doing so didn't cause others harm. That would certainly seem to be a situation that would help those with dysphoria about gender roles, but it wouldn't help folk with bodily dysphoria such as I had one iota. And there is where at least some feminists seem to have a blind spot, they do not seem to understand that bodily dysphoria is not a psychological dysfunction - it is a mismatch between the wiring of the brain and the construction of the body.
So far as I am aware, the precise etiology is unknown, but it's thought that slight errors in things like the timing and strength of pulses of hormones that affect the foetus during its development may well affect the brain and cause feminisation where one might expect masculinisation and such like.
In practice though, most folk most of the time apply "duck theory" in their everyday dealings with others - looks like a duck, behaves like a duck - it's a duck, and who cares what ornithologists think?! Unfortunately, whilst some of us transfolk are able to pass the duck test all or most of the time and have few problems fitting into society, this is not true for all.
Those of us who can pass the duck test adequately well, though, do so because we are conforming to the societal roles and behaviours of the society into which we are born. And that society is, of course, still heavily patriarchal even in the West, let alone the rest of the world. So one COULD argue that in not only being
required to pass the duck test in order to be allowed to transition, but, as many of us are, being
happy that we can, that we are, therefore, supporting patriarchal values.
One could also argue that in buying our groceries from supermarkets that we are supporting the capitalist system and should therefore be regarded as traitors to good socialist values, or as heroes of neo-liberalism, depending on which side of that political fence you sit. The truth is - we don't have any realistic choice. And for those whose dysphoria is sufficiently strong, there is no realistic choice other than transitioning, because we live in the here and now, and for those of us whose dysphoria is bodily, that will never change, not even should a feminist Utopia come to pass.
Nature, quite simply, makes mistakes in the reproductive process, - that is what drives evolution, that is how humanity came into being and why we are homo sapiens rather than any other species of homo. And those mistakes are the cause of all the variety we see amongst us humans every day.
So - what makes a woman? I've talked above about things that make one physically male or female and that affect ones sense of whether one is male or female, but what makes a woman? Is "woman" something fundamental and unchanging - and if so what defines that term - or is it a social construct, and amenable to interpretation and change?
Is "woman" something we can pin down precisely, or do we have no pragmatic choice but to go with the duck test? Or something else? And if we go with the duck test, what about those poor souls who, genuinely feeling themselves to be women, nevertheless fail the duck test -as some do? How do we go about things such that all are treated humanely and with respect ? And if "woman" does happen to be a social construct - what then? To what extent and in what ways are we ourselves due to that which is innate and to what extent and how are we shaped by external factors?
It would seem to me that the very existence of folk after so many tens of millenia of human existence that do NOT fit the "norms" would strongly imply that variations in things like sexuality and gender identity and gender expression are indeed innate, because if they were primarily amenable to outside influence, then they would have vanished from society, given society's long history of disapproval, long ago.
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That video Martina; thank you! YES! That really does get to the core of things! I experienced this during a brief spell teaching use of IT to youngsters - the lads would charge ahead, often overconfident that they knew what they were doing when they often did not, whilst the girls were much more tentative initially, but just as able in the long run once they'd overcome their fear of doing something wrong and 'breaking the computer' (which back then were rarer things and more expensive).
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Originally Posted by Martina
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