#zjemptv

Heroes Of YouTube trading cards by Josh Ryals.

Card #3, first representative of The United States Of America, Zinnia Jones.

Zinnia’s YouTube Channel:

ZJemptv

Official Site

Stereotype threats and glass escalators. Making racist/misogynistic jokes can actually lower women and POC’s scores on tests. They controlled for race and gender and tested it with blonde vs. brunette white people by telling them a bunch of blonde jokes before a test. The blondes all scored lower than they had before.

Hi Zinnia, thanks for your note. Glad you still read my blog from time to time! I apologize that I’ve referred to you rudely on my blog in the past. My goal is to keep things issue-oriented but like most people I sometimes lapse into personal attacks. So again, sorry about that.

I’ve actually been pushing the idea that we can’t divide trans women into good/bad categories depending on whether or not they have autogynephilic motivations for a while now. I would say that this exchange marked a big shift in my thinking about how to talk about AGP, and a wakeup call that it’s not actually productive to refer to all the bad (boundary violating, sexually abusing) trans women as “autogynephiles” and leave it at that. Because there are actually a lot of trans women with autogynephilic motivations that don’t do all those bad things. 

And as far as passabiliity, I’ve been saying all along on my blog that hierarchies among trans women that make some trans women “more legitimate” based on passing are bogus. However, there is a big caveat there. I believe 100% that gender is socially-attributed. We can try to influence that attribution (ie, by taking hormones to feminize our secondary sex characteristics, “dressing like a woman” or otherwise conforming to sex-role stereotypes), but ultimately that attribution by other people is what determines our gender. 

And so, some trans women are women (other people assume they’e female and expect them to behave “like women”), some trans women are trans women (ie either other people recognize that they are male but consider them “inherently like women” in some way, or else are just going along with what they think the trans women want), some trans women are gender-bending men and are treated as such despite their claims to being women, and some trans women are straight-up men - they look, act, think, speak like stereotypical, sex-role conforming men, except maybe with lipstick and breast implants. If you’ve met enough trans women, I’m sure you’ve met some whose experiences fell into all of those categories!

So, I can’t (and will never) get behind the slogan “trans women are women”. I can get on board with “trans women are trans women”, or “trans women are males who aspire to be women”, though I realize neither of those is very catchy.

It feels very unfair that other people’s judgment of our sex determines our gender, and that many (probably most) trans people can’t consistently pass. It also may feel unfair to trans people that their attempts to conform to the sex-role stereotypes of the other sex aren’t working. But, life isn’t fair. Legislating that everyone needs to wear a name tag and “respect” other people’s aspirational gender identities is never going to work, and also never going to happen. We need to focus on abolishing the system of gender, which means specifically: getting rid of sex-role stereotypes for everyone.

u have a v zinnia jones smile in this pic omg

this sounds really nice