#nuanced discourse

So I ended up digging into the Margaret Atwood tweets which led me not only to some badly written scientific american blog posts with 0 actual argument (I will have to dissect those at some point as a piece of ‘scientific-adjacent’ writing) but also lead me to this video by Jamie and Shaaba which Margaret Atwood recommends (I will note that I have seen quite a few of Jamie’s videos over the past years in my attempt to have a better sense of trans experience).

I really do appreciate their efforts to present ‘both points of view’—however, what bothers me is that  they fail to grapple with the most central disagreement between the ‘two sides’, and even fail to acknowledge it.

Basically, right at the beginning of the video, they make a strong claim about “gender identity being a real thing” (while mocking the GC perspective for ‘not hearing this’ and simply continuing to argue that ‘biological sex is a real thing,’ which also signals the fact that they just don’t seem to get the issue here). This then follows:

Shaaba: Trans inclusionists know that biological sex exists. They just also know that gender identity exists as well. For most people in the world, like me, you know you’re a woman, like I do up here, and my biological sex if female. It aligns. 

Jamie: But for a small minority of people, they know they’re a man, like me, but their bodies don’t match, and that’s what makes us trans. Trans men are men. Their assigned biological sex is female, but their gender identity is man. Trans women are women. Their assigned biological sex is male, but their gender identity is woman. And non-binary people are non-binary. Their assigned biological sex could be male or female, but their gender identity doesn’t match. Shaaba...

Shaba: yeah?

Jamie: If your body suddenly disappeared and you were just a floating head, would you still be a woman?

Shaba: Yup.

Jamie: This is gender identity. Forgetting your internal plumbing, it’s what you know you are up here.

What is happening here is that they are taking as a given the central point of disagreement. If you start your argument from the assumption that gender identity is some sort of thing everyone is born with, you’re not really presenting the debate.  Pretty everything else in the video is a corollary of this assumption, including the rebuttals of gender critical concerns about the role gender roles, discrimination, homophobia etc might play in transition, as well as how the trans-narrative can shape people’s own understanding of their struggles and identity. The claim that gender identity is something you just are and know is repeated, the innateness of gender identity is heavily implied and transitioning is framed as a need and not  choice, let alone a simple ‘wish’ (there’s also some pretty absurd semantic games in that move, too).

I think many GC people that I know of are accepting of the fact that there are some people who have a (to others incomprehensible) discomfort with their sexed body, and that no other approach other than medical intervention and a transition can alleviate that discomfort. Still, it is important to ask and understand why that discomfort is there and if it can be alleviated in a different way that might be less risky than life-long hormones and surgeries. (and my sense is, this has been the shared main perspective until not that long ago)

But this isn’t really the subject of the debate—when the trans inclusionists (to go with Shaaba and Jamies term) discuss what being trans is, they don’t discuss extreme discomfort with one’s sexed body, they discuss ‘knowing’ that one is a man or a woman, as somehow separate from the body.

Now GC people have been trying for years to really understand what is meant here, because it makes little sense. 

Let’s take a different case of immutable biological reality, and I know its imperfect but it’s difficult to find a good not-charged comparison. (and hey, height is actually a good old spectrum, while tall people are generally favored over short people, not to mention discrimination against people with dwarfism). 

I am some 5′3″ (160 cm) tall. What would it mean if I said that I just know I am actually a 5′11″ (180 cm) tall person?

My experience of myself and the world around me is shaped by my height—different grocery stores shelves are at my eye level, I look up at people more than I look down at them, and people treat me as weaker and less threatening and maybe even younger than they would if i were taller. I often feel really awful about my height and spent most of my young life desperately wanting and wishing to grow taller, to the point of looking up surgeries that could add a couple of inches to my frame. What would it mean for me to be a ‘tall person’ in a ‘short person’s body? What would it mean for me to just ‘know’ my height even if I was a floating head? And if I went to a professional telling them I am a lot shorter than I really feel, what would it mean if there was a ready made path for me to get surgery and pharmaceuticals to grow taller? And if I could watch video after video of people who followed those paths and are now really happy (tall!) people? 

How do we know that we don’t all have a height-identity and while most people’s actual height and inner sense of their height aligns, it does not for some people? We would then ask ‘what doesn’t it really mean to be a ‘tall person’ (as opposed to somebody whose body is of a certain height) and what does it mean to be a ‘short person’? Does it have to do with how short and tall people are perceived? Like ‘short people’ are more vulnerable and more passive, and ‘tall people’ are more confident and aggressive? But isn’t that just weird stereotypes that people (both short and tall) have been wrestling against? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just find a way to come to terms with and lead a flourishing life with the body that you have?

Some would say, then, ‘this is conversion therapy, it is bad!’ But these comparisons to sexual orientation conversion therapy are misplaced. In terms of homosexuality, there is the contrast between changing the person (conversion therapy, ) and changing society in order to let the person be as they are without any intervention. A separate thing would be having supportive therapy to minimize distress while society is changing. So I would argue that  changing my height is more akin to conversion therapy as it is intervening on me as a person, as opposed to trying to understanding why I might be ‘feeling tall’ and, if necessary, changing society so I can lead a ‘tall person life’(whatever that might be) in my short body.

Now if this whole example sounds absurd, it’s because it is. And that is how a lot of discussions of gender identity sound to gender critical feminists. And what makes it even worse in terms of gender is that stakes are much higher (no pun intended) and stereotypes much more powerful.

If we want to  find some common ground, and if we want to envision a kind of future that will be better for everyone, we need to debate and understand the basic assumptions, and their corollaries.

We cannot simply make a claim that ‘gender identity’ is an innate thing everyone has  pretty much without empirical data as that makes it an ideological, not a factual claim. It’s clear that we will need to grapple with this so we need to determine

what is ‘gender identity’? 

is it innate?

how many people have it?

why do some people’s gender identities align with their bodies and others’ do not.

It is unclear how we could really study any of these, especially if ‘gender identity’ is simply a contemporary idiom for speaking about parts of our selves  that have to do with sex and gender (that is identification with one’s social ascribed gender role). As such, it would be highly susceptible to environmental influences and might simply be a ‘transient construct’ filling a particular cultural niche (c. Ian Hacking’s transient mental illness).  But we need to seriously address these questions, and we need to be able to do so without accusations of invalidating people or perpetrating violence against them.

How we talk about things, how we name things makes a difference, which is of central concern to critical feminists. Often when we see people talking about ‘gender identity’ it sounds more like they’re talking about a sense of self/personality that aligns more with one set of stereotypes than the other, which to us is obviously problematic. And if the main cultural narrative about gender-non conformity (societally produce issue) is that of being trans (a matter of individual) than people who are gender non-conforming will be more likely to understand themselves as trans (I would argue that ’trans’ is a human, not a natural category, and it does not exists outside or without our narratives about it. this is yet another very basic things on which there seems to be disagreement. I will highlight that ‘human’ categories are no less real, but they behave differently from natural categories)

This all matters if we are to imagine some sort of a future we can all agree on, because I think we can  all agree on the fact that we want the world to be a different place, and who knows, maybe we actually share a vision and we do not even know because we don’t talk about it.

As a thought experiment, let’s assume that most people are agender, in that most people do not have a deep innate sense of their gender—I know I don’t, so maybe I am just projecting, but let’s just roll with it for the thought experiment’s sake. It might also make the most sense in terms of ‘gender is a’ spectrum, maybe not a bell curve but, you have ‘trans’ on one tail and ‘gender identity aligned with the same sex’ on the other tail and the majority of people in the more undefined middle with some cis skew? Or maybe it’s a man-woman normal distribution. I don’t think it’s that far-fetched because I think most ‘cis’ people (based on my conversations with cis people in my life) would say, for example ‘I am a man because I am male’ and if you told them ‘well being male doesn’t mean you are a man’ than they would say ‘I am not sure what being ‘man’ is then, but I guess it would mean I am not necessarily a man’. I don’t have any data on this because I cannot find any, and I’ve tried really hard.

I would be an agender female, for example, and part of my struggle would be that the world keeps reading me as a ‘woman’ because of my female-looking body. I just want to be a person and have nothing with whatever ‘woman’ might entail. What I really want is for people to stop assuming things about me based on my sex. This is exactly what GC feminists want. 

We push this further, maybe we end up with a whole slew of people identifying as ‘agender’ and maybe even using they pronouns to communicate that. And you would then end up with smaller numbers of people on the ends of the spectrum, strongly identifying with their sex or the opposite sex, and maybe using their preferred sex pronouns to indicate that. People who feel a strong discomfort with their sexed bodies despite less intrusive interventions physically transition to a body they feel more comfortable with.  Some of them are maybe also agender, others have a strong sense of their gender. In most contexts their transition doesn’t matter, and in those in which it does they clearly acknowledge that they’ve undergone sex transition because it matters in those contexts.

But then things have to change again. It makes less sense to discuss men and women anymore, especially when majority of the population are agender males or females, though we still use ‘male’ and ‘female’ in matters when biological differences matter (health, menstrual products, pregnancy, sports). ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ might likely take on more and more extreme meanings as they are detached from biological sex, and fewer and fewer people opt to identify as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ because their sense of self does not necessarily align with the sense of those words. Ultimately everyone is they, everyone is agender, we are constantly talking about ‘males’ and ‘females’ to discuss different parts of the population with different needs. We are kind of back at square one, though hopefully with less gender stereotyping. 

Notice how this is the future that GC feminists are working towards, but we got there through the notion of gender identity ( with a bit of a detour?)