By David Futrelle
I have to give the inhabitants of the “Gender Critical” subreddit credit for one thing: they are endlessly creative in coming up with new ways to be assholes.
Today, the TERFs-who-don’t-want-to-be-called-TERFs on the subreddit are working themselves into a lather over a report from one college student who was shocked and stunned to find the singular “they” used on a college exam in a slightly confusing manner.
How to fight this terrible gender-inclusive menace? Several commenters thought they had an answer : with a bad faith Americans with Disibilities Act challenge.
“Imagine having dyslexia and having to deal with this absolute word salad,” wrote someone called strawlesbian.”Pretty sure it would not hold up to an ADA challenge.”
I’m not quite sure what dyslexia has to do with it; I mean, dyslexia makes everything hard to read, regardless of whether or not a singular “they” is present. But at least one GenderCritter thought this idea was hilarious — and possibly workable.
“Lol, we might have to get ourselves classified as disabled,” wrote someone calling herself sojourner_truth_.
“My little ladybrain is so broken that when I see a man in a dollar store wig and lopsided fake boobs, I don’t see a woman at all! Poor widdle me! You have to accommodate me or else!” Dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.
In a followup comment, she made clear she wasn’t actually joking.
I joke around on here a lot and I know sometimes things don’t come out right. In all seriousness though, for my part I think it’s important to use any and all legal tools at our disposal to get the ship righted.
Of course I’m not suggesting violence or anything immoral here- but these protections were put in place to support the greater goal of making learning accessible for every student. This example fits that goal! OP said it was very difficult to understand and very frustrating as she was just trying to take her exam. Why should the TRAs get to make university exams harder for everyone else?
Just as I used a privacy law to shut down my university’s shitty racist program, I think it’s perfectly fair and good to use disability law to stop this compelled speech insanity.
You might want to check with some actual disabled people about that. Indeed, several other commenters called sojourner_truth_ out for being “demeaning to disabled students and students that need accommodations.”
But sojourner_truth_ was not dissuaded. Whet if, instead of simply presuming to speak for disabled people, they could find an actual disabled person to be the face of their bad faith challenge?
Are there any students in OP’s class who have a diagnosed disability, though? I think it’s much harder to prove without that key person involved.
I think this sub is onto a very valuable strategy for getting this trans nonsense out of school materials. If we can find the right person, one who has a doctor’s diagnosis already, then this could be a real victory!
It’s basically GamerGate’s #NotYourShield all over again.
NOTE: If your political strategies seem like they were directly cribbed from GamerGate, you’re probably not the progressive movement for justice that you’re pretending to be.
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The argument from more articulate TERFs usually goes something like this:
1. If we acknowledge that there is such a thing as gender identity, we have to acknowledge that being a woman is having some kind of mysterious female essence, or maybe even that being a woman is to enjoy baking cupcakes and cuddle children and what-not, having a certain kind of lady-brain, and that goes against the goals of feminism.
2. Therefore, feminism requires that we only recognize biological sex.
3. Also, sexism in society is only about repressing people for having a certain biological sex. It’s not about repressing people for having a certain inner essence or identity.
4. Okay, MAYBE you can be repressed just because people THINK you have female biological sex, so MAYBE cis-passing trans women who fully transitioned can get included SOMETIME. But those trans women (super important to not call them WOMEN, it’s gotta be “trans women” every single time) still don’t understand what it’s like to be BORN a woman and be sexually harrassed from the moment you develop boobs or even earlier. [They can’t fathom that there are cis women who don’t share this expereicen – for instance, cis women who because of disabilities are put in the “unfuckable” category rather than the “sex object” category, which is super shitty but in a different way from “sex object”. Overall, they can’t fathom that there isn’t a “THE female experience” even if you zoom in on cis women].
This is basically the TERF argument presented in public by TERF.s who wanna seem respectable and be taken seriously by, e.g., left- leaning social justice aware academics (unfortunately, there ARE a lot of these articulate TERFs and they ARE often successful in convincing people about their sincerity, which makes them super dangerous).
But even those people, if you look at what they write in TERF online forums or even their own Twitter threads, it’s usually a shitload of pure hate.
Troubelle wrote:
It is indeed curious. The recent anti-trans backlash seems to largely favor the infamous battle cry “There are only two genders!” despite being clearly primarily about binary trans identities. (Typically, you see the slogan uttered by people who seem to be broadly opposed to LGBT whatever.)
I suspect a lot of the time, transphobes are either perceiving or deliberately framing identities such as trans woman or trans man as some kind of novelty gender category, akin to nonbinary gender(s). Plus if you want to strawman the whole gender rights movement, it’s easy to go after people who demand recognition for novel identities and some really obscure neopronouns.
I have a sister/former best friend, who takes up a LOT of space in feminist circles but is a raging terf. I’ve cut contact now, but before then she’d make the most outrageous comments, that I think sort of illuminates this shit. When I told her the woman I was dating (first ever gf) was trans her comment was “good for you, i guess you enjoy plastic tits? Does she have a fake vagina too?”
She met her later, tried hitting on her, told me I wasn’t a lesbian if no vagina was involved, continued hitting on her, meeting with her behind my back, still refusing to acknowledge that she’s a woman. Also refusing to acknowledge that I’m not a woman. This particular terf has a lot of other issues going on, obviously, but the point is she related to my gf like a woman in every way, but refused to see the problem with still referring to people like her as “plastic”
It’s gross. Now I’m sad
@Dvärghundspossen et al, this is the one I have trouble with – though I’m not a debatey person at all and indeed tend to avoid that kind of situation, I feel particularly ill-equipped with regard to this one. Any suggestions for discussing this particular point without falling into any terfy traps? Clearly most of us humans do have a sense of our gender identity, and equally clearly this has bog-all to do with cupcakes, cuddling or whether or not we like doing calculus, but I am crap at articulating this and how/why it is so.
@Snowberry
I’ve heard that argument from the TERFs, or at least seen it in action, and it always just leaves me shaking my head. One, because TERFs aren’t actually interested in abolishing the binary, and two, because it just doesn’t make sense to enforce something to abolish it. That’s like owning slaves in order to end racism. I’m aware that George Washington made a similar argument with his slave ownership, and it didn’t make sense then either.
@Lumipuna
I think the main reason they attack non-binary identities is because as a group, non-binary people are the easiest target. Even within trans* spaces, a lot of binary trans* people are opposed to non-binary folks. And legal recognition of non-binary people is limited to non-existent in most places. They’re a very easy target because they’re the lowest on the ladder, and few people will actually defend them because many people don’t understand or don’t want to take the time to understand.
@Daddy Longarms
I’m sorry your sister treated you and your girlfriend that way.
@opposablethumbs
My strategy when they bring this up is to try to explain that no, that’s not what gender identity means, I’m not the one saying that’s what it is, and try to explain how regardless of identity, people can express their genders in different ways. You can identify as a man and do feminine things, or identify as a woman and do masculine things, or any other combination.
So here’s what I think. Warning for long post.
People who DO claim that there’s a special lady-brain connected to traditional lady-hobbies and also being emotional and irrational and stuff, clearly do feminism a disservice. And sure, you can dig up trans people who say this. Often because they’ve been pressured to embrace that narrative by doctors in order to get access to transition (which is thankfully less common nowadays), but sometimes because they just have such conservative beliefs. Obvs you can find SOME trans people who simply have conservative and gender essentialist beliefs, because trans people are people, and they differ from each other and have all kinds of different views just like all groups of people do.
But MOST trans people and trans allies do NOT believe this, and this kind of essentialist belief is definitely NOT a necessary part of trans activism and trans rights.
Furthermore, you do NOT need to appeal to gender roles and gender stereotypes to explain why people physically wanna transition. (A TERF explanation you often see among the more articulate and “nice” ones, is that a man who feels serious discomfort with the male gender role that society pressures him to conform to, might find transition and then living as a woman easier, and the other way around.) Since there are many people who transition, even so-to-speak all-the-way-transition, despite their hobbies and interests being more closely aligned with the gender they were assigned at birth, it’s clear that the desire to transition isn’t born out of a desire to have a body that aligns with a certain gender ROLE. (I mean, obvs there are ALSO people who transition and DO like all the stuff typically associated with the gender they are, and the kind of body and look they have post transition, but it’s far from everyone.)
There’s an alternative explanation for why some people feel dysmorphic about their bodies and an intense need to transition, and that’s that the brain has a sort of inner “map” of what the body is supposed to look like and which body parts are supposed to be or not be there. This can get messed up in amputées who still “feel” their missing limb and experience phantom pains. But there are also theories (with some empirical support behind them!) according to which a kind of mis-match between the brain’s “body map” and the body one is born with can lie behind an intense discomfort with, e.g., having a penis and an intense desire for having vaginoplasty.
You can’t rule this explanation out just because your particular brand of feminism says that there’s a different reason people wanna transition, and that this is what you wanna believe.
However, when it comes to gender identity IN ITSELF… I have, like, ZERO idea myself what that is supposed to be. I kind of roll with “woman” because I don’t exactly have a problem with it, but it’s not like I feel that I’m a woman, and I have no idea what that feeling would even be like…? I think I can to SOME extent imagine what it would be like to feel completely alienated from your body pre transition, because it’s just WRONG (I know far from all trans people who transition like this description, but I have two trans women friends who really described it that way), and finally, after transition, it’s right, it’s YOUR body. But when it comes to gender identity in itself, I’m completely blank (and this is NOT for lack of reading on the subject, believe me).
Even given this, though, I think the burden of proof lies on those who claim that respecting other people’s talk about their gender identity, and referring to them in their prefered way (names, pronouns and just not calling, e.g., someone a woman if they don’t identify as one) somehow hurts feminism.
I do think it’s clear that a lot of oppression IS based on how other people PERCEIVE you, rather than on your identity. Like, if people keep referring to you the wrong way and if you’re made invisible, that’s a kind of oppression directly related to who you are, but stuff like being more exposed to sexual harrassment, rape, lower salaries for the same job, not being taken seriously in debates and mansplained to etc etc etc, are all about how others PERCEIVE you. But we can talk about this in feminism without going TERF!
Philosopher Kathryn Jenkins suggested that we use both the terms “women” (identity-based, because any other definition is gonna be oppressive and discriminatory) and “people classified as women” – in some feminist contexts, the latter is what’s relevant. “Classified as a woman” can mean you’re a cis woman, a more or less transitioned trans woman who’s therefore classified as a woman by people in general and treated as one (sexual harrassment-wise, salary-wise etc), a non-transitioned and closeted trans man who’s perceived as a woman, non-binary AFAB who’s perceved as a woman by most people, etc etc. You can, for instance, talk about how people classified as women are paid less. That’s useful in some feminist contexts. In other contexts you might simply wanna talk about women.
However, and related to this, we should also 100 % recognize (and TERFs are super bad at this) that even in the area of “how you’re perceived by people in general”, it’s not binary. It’s not like the general public either perceives you as a man and then pay you more or perceive you as a woman and pay you less, for instance. In order to get the male perks, you have to be perceived, more or less, as “regular man”. If you’re perceived as “weird-in-between”, “man-in-female-clothes”, “weird-ass trans person” etc, you’re gonna be MORE harassed and MORE discriminated against than if you’re simply perceived as “woman”, not less.
So yeah if someone asks me specifically what gender identity IS, over-and-above both what you feel your body ought to be like and as something different from society’s gender roles, I really have no idea. But that in itself isn’t reason not to respect people’s gender identities. You can respect people even if you don’t understand them. We know that people feel really hurt when you don’t respect their gender identity, and even if you can’t understand WHY someone is seriously hurt by something, you shouldn’t hurt people without reason. So in order for us to dismiss gender identity talk, we would AT THE VERY LEAST need the stronger claim that it’s somehow hurtful and destroys feminism – and if that’s your claim, I’m gonna place the burden of proof on you. (“you” in this context is obviously not anyone in this thread. 🙂 )
@Dvärghundspossen
I’ve observed this as well in how TERFs present their other bigotries. Professional Liar Gail Dines is a TERF, but makes most of her money lying about porn performers and other sex workers. And she puts forth a lot of effort to appear sincere and well-meaning – it’s mostly when you start fact-checking, or looking at what her claims ultimately mean, or simply noticing the glaring inconsistencies, that it becomes clear that she has anything but the best interest of the people she claims to be “helping” in mind.
Re strenghtening the binary in order to destroy the binary – maybe that’s how SOME TERFs argue, but I’ve never heard that. The usual argument I’ve come across goes roughly like this:
TERF: “There’s biological sex and socially constructed gender. When I say “I’m a woman”, I mean that I have female biological sex and nothing more. It’s really important to talk about how society oppresses people with female biological sex, i.e. women, in order to end this oppression.
“Female gender” is just patriarchal society’s idea that women ought to have certain hobbies and interests and be a certain way. This is a bad idea that ought to be abolished, and we should immediately start doing so by refusing to acknowledge gender in any way whatsoever. So it’s not just the so-called gender binary that ought to go, but GENDER. Trans people are so wrong, because trans people wanna keep the tool of patriarchy which is gender.”
There are all kinds of wrong with this, but takes a little more effort to refute than merely going “haha, how could you abolish something by strengthening it?”
@naglfar
Not so very long ago, most people transitioned post puberty. It was much harder to get information, to understand what the problem was and to get treatment. Both my trans friends got married trying to will themselves into being cis men. Some people even waited until after they retired (no problems with employers any more). Consequently, transwomen with male pattern baldness used to be a thing.
One of my trans friends did wear a very bad wig for about a week after she decided to go for it and before she found a sympathetic hairdresser. Before she learned about make up she frequently overdid it and looked rather odd. That’s a long time ago now and they both pass just fine.
Trans children still have far too much to cope with, but puberty blockers prevent an awful lot of misery.
@Naglfar
I’ll happily corroborate this as a dyslexic person who also uses they/them pronouns! I struggle to read things NOT because of the words ‘they’ or ‘them’ but because my brain struggles to comprehend letters or words correctly. Sometimes it swaps order, other times it makes me get lost in a sentence, other times it decides that I should be misreading words for other words (making for some amazing sentences by pure chance).
In fact, I find the same confusion in ‘they’ and ‘them’ as I do sentences with ‘he’/’she’ and ‘him/her’ because sometimes it’s the WRITING that is really bad and confusing.
Anyone who claims to use us as their ADA compliance pawn and doesn’t give a fuck about us can go shove their transphobic rhetoric hard.
Even if there were massive numbers of trans women who had male-coded characteristics like this, it still wouldn’t make a difference to how their gender identity should be respected. It’s no TERF’s business to police trans women’s fashion choices, just like it’s none of their business how cis women choose to dress and use makeup.
In other TERF news, an update on yesterday’s Meghan Murphy/Library dustup:
The Toronto City Council (you know, the one Doug Dipshit–er, Ford took the axe to) voted to review the Library’s space rental policies in light of letting a transphobe use their space.
Seriously, Kristyn Wong-Tam is going to be mayor of the city one day. And it will be glorious.
Oh hey look, a familiar name has decided to weigh in on it.
Thank you, Dvärghundspossen and everybody in this conversation. I struggle with articulating anything around these points, and being able to read you is a real help.
@Allandrel
She probably does more SWERFy stuff because while TERFism is becoming less and less acceptable in progressive spaces, anti sex worker stuff still seems to be allowed and even encouraged. Also, because there is more money in SWERFism.
The TERFs try to present themselves as “helping” as well. They claim to be protecting cis women and saving children (either from some sort of brainwashing that they think is being carried out or from some strange misunderstanding they have about how childhood transition works).
@Katamount
This Sue-Anne Levy person seems to actually be worse than DiManno. Also, way more melodramatic.
The clearest example of the hypocrisy is that I can almost guarantee that if the opposite were happening, and TERFs were protesting a trans* speaker, all the conservatives would leap to defend them as “exercising their freedom of speech”. Is there free speech in Canada? I don’t know, I’ve visited a few times but haven’t studied the law.
The part where she admonished LGBTQIPA+ people to retreat to safe spaces is especially ironic, seeing how conservatives tend to misunderstand the concept of safe spaces. Conservatives have their own safe spaces, and they’re way less willing to leave them for anything.
@Dvärghundspossen
thank you, this is brilliant, and it makes perfect sense.
There’s a lot of them on twitter talking about “male energy” and claiming cis women who defend trans women are actually male based on the language they use. And Kathleen Stock did an infamous piece about how we can tell whether someone’s male or female by looking at them and ~nearly always~ get it right, and if that means a few butch women get hassled in the toilets it’s a price worth paying for the common good.
(I did a blockquote. Pray for me)
@Nicholas Kiddle
I’m sorry, but WTF? Not to you, but to the TERFs. I thought TERFs believed that people’s gender was fixed at birth. To claim that someone’s gender is different based on how they talk…is just wrong and weird and self-contradictory in so many ways. I don’t even know how to respond in full.
But how does it contribute to the “common good”? I am reminded again that TERFs also dislike butch cis women and effeminate cis men (especially the women).
Your blockquote turned out just fine. 🙂
The claim is that whichever cis woman they’re speaking to is actually lying about being female assigned and is really a trans woman, which the terf can infallibly detect because she said something aggressive or swore or something. Apparently your body parts control which words you are able to use – one told me that nobody who can give birth would ever use the word “fuckhole”.
It keeps the nasty males (defined such as to include men, trans women, and anyone who looks slightly mannish) out of the sacred feminine space. Which is actually only good for feminine looking cis women, but they’ve convinced themselves that those are the only people who matter.
@Nicholas
So their argument is that cis women should be ladylike and not curse. Some feminists they are. Of course, we knew that TERFs are misogynistic by nature, so I’m not surprised.
@Naglfar:
Sue-Ann Levy used to refer to Toronto City Hall as ‘Socialist Silly Hall’ when David Miller was mayor (pre-Rob Ford). She ran for provincial politics in my riding once and when she lost screamed about how we were going to get the government we deserved. She probably voted for Faith Goldy for mayor in the last election. She’s also been a columnist for the Toronto Sun for years.
Which is kind of a long way of saying that Rosie diManno is the right-wing contrarian for a vaguely left-wing paper, and Sue-Ann Levy is the extremist who makes the rest of her right-wing paper look vaguely rational in comparison.
As for Free Speech, depends on your definition. The actual relevant law is Section Two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees Freedom of Expression, which includes speech. That said, Canada also has a more formalized set of exceptions, to allow for Hate Speech laws. That would be enough for the Free Speech absolutists to say that Canada doesn’t ‘really’ have Free Speech.
One of the big differences between Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the U.S. Bill of Rights is that Canada’s Charter explicitly recognizes that rights cannot be absolute because they will come into conflict with each other, and that a functioning society may require occasional limitations on rights to keep things balanced, as well as spaces which can be filled in later. Otherwise you end up with Free Speech only for the bullies and those who can afford the biggest megaphones.
@ Dvärghundspossen:
I’ve met a lot of people who say this, and while it’s possible they’d feel differently if people routinely misgendered them, I also wonder if many people are effectively “cis-by-default,” i.e. not all that strongly attached to the gender they were assigned at birth, but also not identifying with any other to the point of being willing to argue or rock the boat?
I’ve also come to suspect over the years that gender is not only a spectrum, it’s a spectrum along several different axes (really this is probably true of just about any aspect of human identity).
@Moon Custafer, Dvärghundspossen:
Years ago, somebody else on this site once said that in their experience, there were two different categories of people who didn’t ‘get’ trans issues: those who were so strongly attached to their assigned gender identity that they couldn’t understand why anybody could possibly be different, and those who were so loosely attached to any gender identity at all that they couldn’t understand why anybody would feel strongly enough about it to want to change.
That statement crystallized a lot of things for me as I realized I was in the second category myself.
Based on discussion, yes, I expect a lot of people are ‘cis by default’ in that sense. And it would tend to be even less obvious to the outsider than asexuality.
In TERF-land only trans women exist and we are the source of all evil. If a company does something to validate enby customers, TERFs will scream about trans women destroying femininity.
If a company does something to validate their trans masc customers, which happened recently with Always, TERFs will scream about how trans women are destroying femininity.
I suspect I fall in to the “cis by default” group. If I looked less coded female- I would have questioned things more in younger years. As it is, I dislike claiming labels for myself, I always have, and I’m questioning things in my 50s. I’ve never really felt a solid claim on being a woman in my culture or being heterosexual. But yeah, the body is easily identified as female, so cis by default happened.
re: “cis-by-default”, I’ve had similar thoughts from time to time myself. In fact, it was conversations like these that led me to realise I’m probably agender rather than cis. (I’m not sure how others define the term, but I define agender as “lacking an internal felt sense of gender identity”).
Having seen many TERF/transphobe arguments, I’ve occasionally wondered whether many of them may in fact be agender and not realise it. There are some arguments that come so close to realising that gender is socially constructed and separate from genitalia, and then instead of actually recognising that, they decide to deny gender exists at all and claim that socially constructed gender is itself oppression. (“I never chose to be a woman, society assigned oppressive roles to me because I was born with a vagina” and so forth… that’s not actually wrong, but they then assume those roles are what is meant by gender, and hence wish to be “gender critical”, as in “abolish oppressive gender roles”. Or that’s my best attempt to steelman it, anyway; I honestly don’t think a lot of them have really thought it through.)
This, as well as the at best baffled incomprehension they often express as to why someone might want to transition, makes quite a bit of sense if the person expressing it doesn’t have a sense of gender identity and only experiences gender as something externally imposed. Being agender, I do find it hard to comprehend what gender identity feels like, but it’s easy enough to acknowledge that it’s a real thing other people have and accept that it matters a great deal to them. If I were a solipsistic sociopath instead, I could assume everyone else’s psychology of gender works like mine and anyone who says differently must be a liar… but then I’m not a TERF.
It is weird, though, how so many who claim to be “gender critical” (which, as I’ve said, seems to steelman to “gender roles are bad and we shouldn’t impose them”) instead seem to believe in very dimorphic sex/gender stereotypes and advocate for rigid, conservative gender roles on the basis of sex. They can’t even keep their own ideology straight. And therefore I must conclude that, even if I’m right about how some of them arrived at the name, in practice “gender critical” is just a fig leaf because they realised TERF doesn’t sound good any more.