liskantope's tumblelog

What I'm going to say here is primarily an anecdotal claim coming from personal experience, although it seems to me to be backed pretty well by common-sense-level layperson's science.

Sans the recent growing prevalence of modern types of medical intervention in certain regions of the world, there is a very very but just not 100% watertight reliable way for humans to ascertain whether another human is male or female by looking at them, apart from their chosen presentation.

This is what one would expect within any sexually dimorphic species, even one which is admittedly less dimorphic (as the OP says) than most animal species. Most animals within their species are innately equipped to tell their fellows apart by sex, you know? It would be rather strange if homo sapiens (a species which, if you go far enough back, lived about as basic an existence of striving to survive and reproduce as any other mammal) were any different?

And that has been my experience my entire life, save many instances starting around this decade of people presenting more gender-ambiguously because gender medical treatments have become much more popular and effective. Mind you, I was a late bloomer in learning to tell humans apart by sex, to the point that when I was four or five years old it was a serious concern of my parents and probably considered part of the Developmental Disorder I was being diagnosed with. (I really did initially only recognize woman vs. man from long hair vs. short, and even bizarrely at one modeled it as curly hair vs. straight even though I was a boy and my own hair was curly -- maybe I got the idea from the fact that many women had perms in the early '90's??) Here on the Neurodivergence Website there are probably a lot of other people with a similar history to mine in that regard. But even my "developmentally disordered" younger self by middle childhood had no problem telling apart men and women from their physical characteristics. A lot of this has to do with secondary sexual characteristics, of course. Perhaps my distinguishing boys vs. girl among kids of my own age was more about their clothing and hairstyle, but when looking at anyone past the onset of puberty, it was extremely and immediately obvious. I remember people also occasionally misgendering (mis-sexing?) me up until I began puberty and then never being misgendered again in meatspace.

There were occasional exceptions to the rule which I find memorable mainly because they were so exceptional. The only one, and perhaps the most recent one, I can think of (up until 2019 when I met a nonbinary person who'd done lots of hormone therapy and who I mistook as AMAB when they were AFAB) was most of twenty years ago, when I was in college and spent a lot of time using the bus system, and there was one middle-aged person I saw at bus stops repeatedly whose sex I couldn't distinguish. I'll use "she" here because eventually I became like 70% sure she was a woman, but I couldn't quite tell. She was physically disabled and generally not quite normal in appearance, and I remember going to a town hall meeting about a pending reduction of local bus routes and that she got up to speak and talked about her disability ("it just means I have a hard time getting from point A to point B") requiring her to use the bus frequently. My only other specific memory of her is hearing her tell her son at the bus stop, when he was complaining about something, "What have I always told you about who in the world always gets what they want? That's right: almost no one." That is my one fairly vivid recollection that amounts to the exception proving the rule, as far as I'm concerned. There have been other very occasional times I think when I glanced as someone and couldn't tell their sex, and probably occasional other instances of passing by someone and unknowingly mis-sexing them, but this is the recent (and perhaps the only) example I can think of, modulo encountering trans people who have done hormones beginning in 2019, where I had repeated encounters with someone and couldn't quite be sure of their physical sex even though I leaned towards "female".

So, in other words, ever since getting past a delay in this ability during my early childhood, I've effortlessly been able to pretty immediately distinguish other humans by sex by looking at them in what must be around 99% of cases (or maybe even higher). I'm beginning to wonder if the experiences of a large swath of other humans are completely different somehow. But if even if your experience is different, you can imagine how strange I find posts like the ones above, or at least the second one that I'm immediately reblogging. You can imagine how I blink and how my mouth drops when I see someone (in their 30's at least!) making a comment like

the idea of pronouns corresponding to sex specifically makes me really uncomfortable, and is not how I have ever used pronouns for anyone at any point in my life. [boldface mine]

Now it's fair to ask how I (along with, I suspect, most people) distinguish physical sex based on looking at someone when, as I acknowledge, humans are sexually dimorphic in much less obvious and single-axis ways as most mammals (lions with manes, deer with antlers, and so on) and also, granted, humans unlike other animals wear clothes that conceal genitalia and have a poor sense of smell compared to e.g. dogs, etc. Well, I don't entirely know, because I can't break down and analyze from a completely objective perspective the cognitive processes I'm innately wired to perform, and I'm not a doctor or a biologist. But I would suppose that there are a number of (mostly secondary) sexual characteristics that differ on separate axes (such as facial structure, testosterone-ish vocal timbre characteristics, general body shape including fat/muscle distribution, and others) but extremely non-independently, so that they very heavily cluster at two nodes, which we are very well wired to distinguish between. There's certainly some fuzziness around the nodes: some people naturally have hormonal abnormalities, and some people have an exceptional value of a sexual characteristic along one or two of the axes. We still instinctively classify such a person according to where most of the values of the physical traits cluster. For instance, it also so happens to be my college years that I occasionally encountered a man who worked in my university's math department whose voice sounded pretty much female. Since every other physical characteristic I could perceive pointed to "male", I never doubted for a moment that he was male, and I've always figured that the voice was due to some fairly rare but not unheard-of disorder (compare John Fiedler and George Washington Carver). There's a whole thing about this in Yudkowski's Sequences about setting up categories to divide up our "thingspace" by "carving reality at the joints" and so on.

Height would be one of the axes of physical characteristics that's so loosely correlated with physical sex that it just kind of hovers in the periphery of the clusters of characteristics that form the nodes; obviously height is an extremely unreliable metric for determining sex. The teacher in the anecdote from the post above mine, by jumping to height, clearly had some similar instincts to mine but not a ton of ability to articulate the likely explanation and also not a ton of patience so argued rather stupidly. (As for the comment about how "Gendering was mandatory", delivered with a tone indicating how strange and arbitrary this is, I mean... our language for millennia has indicated, both in personal pronouns and in a number of gendered nouns, the apparent physical sex of a person we're speaking to or talking about, until the past decade when a particular social movement has been trying to unilaterally sweep that aside, so I don't see what's so strange about that? For instance, it seems that my parents' alarm when I in the early '90's seemed unable to reliably distinguish the physical sex of those around me was perfectly reasonable?)

no dude, I don't think you're evil for not examining a social microtrend or seeing how it ties into broader problems culturally. we are literally all doing that sometimes. I do think that you are a little bit annoying for making this all about your feelings right now, though

For me, to put it very simplistically, topics are divided into those I know tons and tons about, and those I have an average or below-average familiarity with. For the former, I'll correct people who say something I know to be wrong with a level of confidence bordering on arrogance, while for the latter, I'll do a lot of "well that seems really counterintuitive for sure but the world is complicated and there's a lot I don't know about this subject so the other person could be right and I'd rather let ten 'guilty' people 'go free' by assuming that they're telling the truth than one 'innocent' person get called deluded or a liar".

I have a hard time fully digesting your thesis here, so I can't give a full response, but I am generally in sympathy with the idea that the actual substance of the trans theater of the culture wars is not about language and that it's unfortunate that it's gotten so bogged down in a linguistic battleground. Then again, part of the reason why it's gotten so bogged down in language is that language plays something closer to a front-and-center role in our culture-wide struggle around gender identity than it has in almost any other cultural struggle that I'm aware of other than (outside of the Anglosphere) battles which are themselves over the potential extinction of a language (this is not to deny that most social struggles have involved somewhat of a linguistic battleground of course).

i dont think misgendering is atypical here. it seems like treating this as "exceptionally" a case of fights about belief and language is just not true, and really this is not fundamentally unlike other arguments where someone might claim they are being silenced or asked to express things they do not believe, the same could happen if someone wanted to express a belief that homosexuality was a sin or a threat to children or whatever, or that women shouldnt be working, etc.

I vaguely suspect you're conflating an object level with a meta level here.

In every debate over social beliefs/policy, there's potential for a meta-level battle over who is allowed to voice their opinions where and whether their being allowed a platform to voice them is itself oppressing some group or whether instead silencing them is an unfair form of oppression, etc. The trans part of the culture war is different from most* in that one of the major object-level topics of dispute is which gendered nouns/pronouns to use when referring to someone. (You clearly wish this weren't such a major topic of dispute so that we could focus on discussing the more substantial and concrete rights like being having access to certain kinds of medical care or women's spaces, etc., and I'm inclined to agree with you, but that is clearly not the reality.)

i think the linguistic aspect, pronouns and such, the idea of wanting certain terms to be used that came up in posts i was thinking of when responding here, is better thought of as a meta level dispute than an object level one. that is, the reason this is under contention, is not a fully free floating preference for terminology here, rather, its about what is being expressed by the use of gendered terminology. in this sense, i do not think its fundamentally a different kind of fight than ie, about the acceptability of homosexuality, the linguistic angle seems like a red herring

so, what is expressed by gendering someone? well obviously, people will make different claims of varying degrees of plausibility as to how they might define a gender, but well, i dont think i have a verbal definition of man or woman (or nonbinariness beyond negation of the former two), but i would say, gender is a real attribute someone can have which is not unrelated to all sorts of things we can say about them, and predictions we can make about them, and that trans people are not exceptions to this. that is gendering someone is a meaningful descriptive, not just normative(?), claim. this can include like, anything from how they act, to what they are like as people, to what their bodies are like, to how other people and social structures treat them, to what established social role in society they occupy, to what sort of things they might wish to do in relation to their gender, to what their appearance is, to like, yes, what their psychological relationship is to gender identity.

it is in this sort of sense that misgendering can be incorrect, that its making a false statement about someone. i dont think my disagreement with transphobes is purely something where i think we should draw lines, i think transphobes are wrong about trans people. one way they are wrong is in having, well, a fairly incoherent attempt to define gender (generally claimed to be about biology, but really more like a permanant metaphysical tag they imagine which is quite detached from it), but also they are wrong in other ways along the lines i mentioned, they imagine things about trans people that are not true. maybe the easiest thing here to point to is how transphobes seem frequently ignorant of how hrt works, but there are a lot of things here - consider how common it is to ie attribute predatory attitudes to trans women that are said to be characteristically male, or how people make up false theories of gender "etiology" like autogynephilia or social contagion/ROGD stuff, or how they seem to want to deny examples of trans woman being treated like women by patriarchy, or even just wanting to maximally exaggeratedly insist someone looks unlike their gender, etc. but at a smaller more individual scale, theres really a lot here but its hard to express, it seems transphobes want to consistently claim trans people are unlike their gender, in any given way, and they are often wrong about this! so like, ok honestly im not sure this is the best way to describe things or really all the phenomenon. but this often means, transphobes are wrong about trans people, in difficult to elaborate but real ways, and this is relevant to what they are expressing when they misgender someone.

(some may argue there is also more here in terms of like, intersex neurology or even metaphysics, and i have sympathies in that direction, but for our purposes i think we can treat these as hypotheses of additional features of gender rather than its definition which is probably? in line with my views on those possibilities myself)

so, theres another thing that can be expressed here, which is political or assertive, its saying "yes we are going to treat this person as [gender]" this is the second thing that seems relevant here. it is, obviously, also an important one. and can include like, references to real actions someone plans to take or think should happen. this is another way it matters. this is i think most obvious looking at transphobes - its clear that misgendering is often done with deliberate effort and with spite.

but things can i think go a bit off the rails here, when focused exclusively on the idea of assertions of inclusion or exclusion. what i mean by that is, looking at this part, especially when emphasizing social roles or identity in the prior, there is a tendency to end up treating gender solely as a category that is quite free floating, even from any particular consequence of action. this tendency is very strong among like, well meaning cis liberals, and is related to the whole implicit "transness is a delusion im humoring" attitude some of the more obnoxious stuff in that direction can sometimes fall into. or see also "using AFAB and AMAB so as to include trans people, but then using that to say stuff which is just transphobic false assertion of alignment with assigned gender". and a lot of "debate" gets, i think, warped around this direction.

and i think from there, its quite easy to end treating the whole thing as about language or pronouns, instead of treating language or pronouns as expressions of something. this ends up plaguing a lot of how people talk about transness imo!

Part of my general difficulty with engaging with your arguments is that I find "transphobe" a bit of a slippery term: certainly there are some attitudes, such as thinking trans women are generally sexually deviant predators, that clearly fall under that umbrella, but I'm not so sure that the disparate set of stances on different aspects of trans issues cluster together quite as frequently to divide us all into transphobes vs. non-transphobes as the way you write about it vaguely imply, in spite of what I'm going to say some paragraphs below about how tribalism on this issues operates. (For instance, I'm not sure believing in Blanchard-Bailey but generally having liberal attitudes towards allowing trans people to live as they like puts someone in the "transphobe" camp.)

its clear that misgendering is often done with deliberate effort and with spite.

I suppose so, "often", don't really know since I haven't encountered many people maliciously misgendering other people except in the occasional conservative-outlet written article I stumble across or in Jordan Peterson's spitting-with-ire video from summer 2022 about his ban from Twitter where he very deliberately and effortfully referred to Elliot Page with repeated phrases that switched between different pronouns for him. (Cue all the people saying that I just haven't been around enough of the hard-core Right and its genuine hatefulness, which is probably a valid criticism here.)

But I would suggest that perhaps a solid majority of the time that people mispronoun someone, unless that person is very well passing of a binary gender, it's not out of spiteful effort but out of a lack of effort. (It's once again relevant to note that the mode type of person-asking-for-non-AGAB-pronoun-use is most probably nowadays an AGAB-presenting enby going by "they/them".)

You seem to be arguing something roughly like "the battleground over language is downstream of the more substantial issues around gender identity and people's deeply-held attitudes towards trans people or about transness, and the resentment over pronouns is sort of a proxy for these things". I'm sure that's true in a lot of ways and on some parts of the battlefield, but I see no reason to assume it isn't just as often the other way around.

To illustrate this, first of all, consider that for your everyday average joe, in many cases the pronoun use (and gendered nouns) thing is probably the only way the whole culture war battleground interacts with their everyday life: they aren't a (cis) woman who regularly shares public spaces including restrooms or locker rooms with trans women or a (cis) woman who is serious about sports or having a daughter in a social environment where half her friends have come to identify as trans and are going on hormone therapy, etc.

And secondly, the questions you designate as object-level, which you say transphobes are objectively incorrect about, are each one where the two main competing stances have been adopted for the two main teams in the culture war to use as weapons. A person who enters this battleground with very little knowledge about hormone treatments and innate sexual characteristics and the (lack of) scholarship behind ROGD, etc., but as soon as they lean towards one team or another, the culture warriors who drive that team hand that side's version of reality as answers to those questions to the new recruit who has just become primed to believe whatever they say. In other words, someone who has decided without any prior opinions about your object-level issues but for any other prior reason that they feel really leery about all this trans stuff that suddenly exploded in Anglophone cultures late last decade will then be converted to the anti-trans side of issues like hormone therapy and the innate differences between males and females from the material they consume and the ideologues who they feel most comfortable confiding in. Or, to put it in a more object-level neutral way: someone with prior pro-trans leanings will be inclined to be converted towards the particular concrete beliefs coming from the agenda of that side of the culture war, which is to minimize the relevance of physical differences between male and female (or try to obfuscate those biological categories altogether), minimize possible downsides of gender medicine, play up the psychological danger of not transitioning, etc., while someone with anti-trans leanings will be inclined to be converted towards the beliefs coming from the agenda of the other side, which is to play up the relevant differences between male and female and potential harms of gender medicine (say hormone treatment is irreversible and will make a female person infertile, etc.), play up the idea of social contagion, minimize the danger of not transitioning, etc.

And so your average joe might not have any particular feelings about trans women in bathrooms or locker rooms or on sports teams and might not have had occasion to personally care about teenage girls being surrounded by trans peers and asking to go on hormones, etc., but may encounter the pronoun use theater of the culture war first in a natural everyday-life way, feel deeply hostile towards having to change their use of language from the way it always had been so that it reflects purely someone else's report of their internal feelings rather than what the speaker perceives directly with their own senses, in resisting it begins to feel uncomfortable talking with one set of people about gender identity stuff and inclined towards talking to a different set of people about it instead, and eventually swallows the anti-trans side's beliefs about sex differences, gender medicine, etc. In other words, I can easily see a common scenario where the beliefs you designate as the object-level ones are determined downstream of the language stuff instead of vice versa.

My younger self had thought it epitomized the tiresomeness of repetitive and low-key unpleasant and mean-spirited family sitcoms and had always wondered why it had lasted for so many seasons, but... Everybody Loves Raymond is actually entertaining and really well written.

Oh sure, it's still the case that almost every single episode is about the same family characters fighting with each other about something or other (amusingly, you can scroll down the list of episodes with little blurbs summarizing the premise of each one on Paramount+ and see whole long sequences in a row that begin "[name of regular family character] gets upset when...", "[name of regular family character] is angry at [name of other regular family character] because...", etc.), with relatively few non-regular characters to provide some fresh plot variety. It's still the case that there's a laugh track and laugh tracks are annoying. It's still the case that the main characters (with Robert somewhat of an exception) each follow the tropes/stereotype for their gender and age and that a lot of it is about them conforming to their gender roles, with Debra (the younger-generation housewife) being the least funny and too often the go-to choice for the straight-woman foil to the antics of the others. It's still the case that a lot of the humor -- mainly jibes between the characters given in the dialog, and particularly the constant put-down zingers employed by Frank -- is mean-spirited and undermines my perception of the health of the family relationships.

But I find Everybody Loves Raymond and its humor and the execution of the dialog far fresher and more entertaining and nuanced and representative of actual warm feelings and loving relationships than I had remembered it to be (even if the degree of love within the relationships is undermined by the nastiness of some of the put-downs, as I suggested above). Ray is actually less tiresome and buffoonish and less of a negatively stereotyped sitcom dad than I remembered! And Marie's actress is absolutely masterful, at a level exceeding everyone else in the show, at injecting just the right amount of manipulative malice in even the most innocent-looking-when-written-on-paper lines.

My thesis about Shrinking was that, despite some amazing acting, not least by an octogenarian Harrison Ford (who was my primary reason for being interested in watching it), and despite having a lot of heart and wisdom behind it and having some good moments, especially towards the end of S3, basically every one of the most tiresome characteristics of modern sitcoms is pretty much epitomized in this one to the point that I find it low-key grating throughout. I'm not a good enough media critic to precisely put my finger on what these characteristics are, as a lot of it is just somewhat of a vibe that comes from the style of snappy dialog (I'm beginning to realize that, as much as I hate laugh tracks on principle, there is something beneficial that they seem to do to pacing without which the rapid-fireness of witty sitcom dialog begins to seem over-the-top unrealistic). But among tropes that I personally find annoying which seem to have been embraced to the max by the writers of Shrinking, I would include Everyone Is Super Witty, (Almost) Everyone Is Single, Everyone Is Super Hot, Everyone (Regardless Of Generation) Shares The Same Basic Set Of Social Predispositions Regarding Drugs, Sex, Progressive Values, Etc., (relatedly) Everyone (Regardless Of Age) Effortlessly Has An Entertainingly Active Sex Life (yeah except for Jimmy through most of it, for which he's constantly criticized by everyone else for not putting himself out there), and most of all, Everyone Is Constantly Up In Each Other's Business With Pretty Much No Filters (Including Regarding Their Sex Lives).

(Like, if Everyone Loves Raymond were like this, a lot more of the plots to the episodes would revolve around what Ray and Debra are doing in bed, what's going on with Robert's sexual conquests, what Frank and Marie are doing in bed -- yes, they would have an active and interesting sex life too -- and all of them would be openly talking about it in Ray and Debra's living room pretty much every episode.)

Outside of the realm of sitcoms, I've noted over the past ten years or so that the webcomic Questionable Content also eagerly embraces pretty much every one of these tropes to an extent I find irritating, and which I relate to something I called sex-casual culture and tried to express my difficulties with back in 2017. In the case of a sitcom, I think this embrace reflects going along with a long-running trend which is part of a formula that guarantees good ratings: having characters banter wittily about sex all the time and always be interfering with each other's personal business is entertaining, and, for many of us, escapism in one way or another, even if we'd be horrified if such social norms materialized in our own professional lives! In the case of the webcomic QC, I think the cartoonist writes that way out of a genuine desire for those social norms in his own life (or perhaps a reflection of the existing ones in his life, which I suspect is very queer-adjacent but anyway I have no way of knowing): I think I've mentioned before that the QC universe strikes me as a sort of utopia, not in terms of broader systemic societal issues of which plenty are indicated, but in terms of social micro-culture.

Recently came across this article, written in response to the "dump the puppygirl" blog post: https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/defining-white-woman-victimization

And what strikes me is the writers' desire, both in this article and in the original post, to root puppygirl's behavior in some kind of privilege, even if it's a covert privilege.

The original post likens it to male patterns of behavior which are disguised by puppygirl's very soft, girlish aesthetic, which is what (quite understandably) caused a lot of people to read the original post as transphobic. Though Tara Knight doesn't go as far as to say that puppygirl is a man, she does suggest that by dodging certain types of labor she is not truly being a woman.

The linked article, on the other hand, diagnoses puppygirl's behavior as a symptom of whiteness and specifically white womanhood. Of course, they acknowledge that non-white, non-woman people can still partake in this behavior, but also suggest that this places them adjacent to white womanhood and that the closer they are to white womanhood the more they can get away with it.

Both of these moral diagnoses feel like a stretch to me; both feel like the writer's contorted attempts to criticize the behavior but avoid criticizing anything about progressive ideology or suggesting that certain progressive values held by the participants might have enabled or worsened the situation.

But it is significant that puppygirl's behavior exists in the environment of a trans Marxist polycule...and the way it's described in the post, what makes the enablers feel so helpless in this situation, what keeps them enabling for so long, is specifically puppygirl's marginalized status, the sense that ever saying no to her or asserting a boundary or asking her to do the dishes would be ableist (even though all polycule members have diagnoses, puppygirl's issues are perceived as more severe and therefore are given priority). And as the writer observes, because of this and because of her womanhood and transness, she gets away with stuff that her partners would never have accepted from a man.

The idea that puppygirl is specifically leveraging whiteness also strikes me as a stretch. Again, this is a trans Marxist polycule. I don't think the original post specifies the races of the polycule members but let's just assume puppygirl is white. Given the polycule's values, I can only imagine that puppygirl being nonwhite would make her partners feel even more obligated to give her the benefit of the doubt and more squeamish about ever making demands of her or saying no to her. (In the real life situation I observed which came closest to this dynamic, the "puppygirl" was not white and her enablers were white, and a lot of their enabling did seem to be motivated by a kind of white liberal guilt.)