trying to disappear

im not interested in the guy that made this or making any statements about him specifically, but this flowchart does rub me wrong. it essentially says that behavior that is mansplaining cannot truly be mansplaining if the man in question would listen if told to stop or that he was not as knowledgable. I can see how it might be tempting for a man to frame a sort of wrongdoing as actually not bad if he would listen if asked to stop, but needing to ask someone to stop is part of why being mansplained to is annoying. Just because you would listen doesn't mean you didn't assume i didn't know something in the first place. my partner is a man and sometimes he sort of "mansplains" to me, and he's even better than the chart. He would listen and apologize if i just said the word "stop". I wouldn't need to calmly explain "actually I already know about X". I could curtly say "you interrupted me" and he would stop, apologize, and let me proceed because he is kind and respectful. That kind and respectful man also sometimes mansplains to me because he assumes I won't know something. That doesn't make him evil, but not being evil doesn't change the fact that he's a bit of a mansplainer. I'm no man, but for what it's worth, I think men should check themselves with more grace than using this flowchart would have them do. Just because you wouldn't bully a woman if she asked you to stop mansplaining does not mean you weren't. Besides, mansplaining is like kinda annoying at worst, so the stakes aren't really high here for men to be so defensive.

my recent gender exploration has reinforced my perception that transsexuality is fundamentally different to transgender-ness and squeezing both concepts to fit inside the same word "transgender" renders it completely incoherent.

building off of this: my point is not that transsexuality and transgender-ness are not related nor that they do not often coexist. i don't think that being transgender is fake nor stupid nor inherently less serious than being transsex. what i do think is that our society is far more cissexist than transgender-phobic. by this I mean that our laws, social norms, and institutions are more concerned with the immutability of the social construct of "natural sex" than of the construct of "uniform gender". People (including queer and trans) are far less accepting of a change to sex than a change to gender. this is made clear by the attitudes amongst most cissexual people that sex cannot truly be changed. transgender people and their allies often repeat hackneyed phrases like: "no one is saying they can change sex just gender" or "biological man/woman". The trans community, which for better or worse i am a part of, has a massive cissexism problem, and having the words to describe it is the bare minimum for being able to address it. trans sexes are just as natural and legitimate as cis sexes. it is not disrespectful to be described as cissex(ual) or as transsex(ual). Flattening both concepts into "transgender" eliminates our ability to discuss these issues.