this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people's understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.
It's all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.
Like "There are trans rapists in women's prisons"... Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.
Or
"Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men"... When hysterectomy isn't even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.
But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won't.
it's mostly that it is social wedge issue that drives up ratings, outrage, and politicians can grandstand about it. And make up crazy bullshit about kids being forced to transition by evil doctors or something.
and therefore we can ignore real issues in the country while the media/pols rant on about total nonsense that affects hardly anyone and mostly isn't real or relevant to trans people or any people at all.
Oh man, I'd never even considered the fact that all these supposed "male rapists in female prisons" have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That's so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex... But in talking with cis people I actually think it's something else. I think the vast majority of cis people's experience of gender only comes from external influences... I have met cis people who recognize what we're talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it's actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who's entire experience of gender is performance based... So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand... But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don't think it's that they don't have an internal gender identity, I think it's just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she's a woman and she'll probably say something like "because I have a woman's body", but I don't think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she's spent to get to that than it takes to go "boobs, check, vulva, check, I'm good". She doesn't have a disconnect, so she's never had to really consider it, doesn't mean she doesn't have it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think research indicates we aren't special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
I don't know who (Abigail Thorn? Contrapoints? ...Vihart?) but someone was talking about how sometimes that's the case, that they really don't have a sense of their own gender. That they're "really" something like agender, but that it's just too much of a bother to worry about correcting people. But there are also plenty of cis people deeply invested in their own gender, who really do have toes to it and identify as that gender, but when you ask them how they know, they put it all on external things rather than internal.
That's not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we're talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people's. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don't really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don't fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people... But otherwise on their own those things don't make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don't seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don't tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don't actually mean anything to them on their own.
Change the question slightly and they think about it differently. Ask them how they'd feel if they lost some of those features. A cis man with hairy arms and chest probably doesn't say he feels a great joy when he thinks about them, but would probably feel some real discomfort if he couldn't grow body hair any more. They assign a neutral value to them because they consider it "default". And of course not everyone feels the same way about these things, cis or trans, but I think most cis people really do value their genders and sexed bodies because those things match, even if they wouldn't say so.
Either way, I think we're both speaking anecdotally and I don't plan to go look for the research on gender identity right now.
That's the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it's root in other people's perceptions. There's a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project "manliness" as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces...but doesn't well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It's a difficult knot to dig down to it's source but I think it's a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it's so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn't really happening because cis people don't really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don't really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can't just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate... And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
I don't know about that. I think the reasons they give would sound external like that, but they can sound that way from a trans person too. And ask about something more significant, like
A cis man would be pretty affected by that, and he wouldn't attribute that to societal pressure. I contend that at the very least there is some misattribution when most cis people put the entirety of their gender identity on external factors.
Either way, I fully agree that it's something that research can answer in a way discussion never will. Whether and to what degree that research has happened, is happening, or ever will happen I can't say.
what are the requirements?
Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery... But whether or not you "fit the requirements" won't be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There's documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn't a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.
It's also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women's prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to "expectedly matter of course" .
So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally "at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all"
Part of the problem with arguments like that is if you say 'trans women are not widely represented in women's jails' they can say 'yeah but the left want to change that with self ID and all the other things they push for' so really the only point you've made in their mind is that its good the people pushing these things aren't in power.
Surely no one can deny that the lefts messaging has been that a trans person should be able to enter any gendered space without question? You never see trans advocates say 'yes creepy men pretending to be women to gain access to female spaces is a legitimate problem which we intend to protect against by...' they say 'its not a problem, will never be a problem and anyone who says it might be is evil and stupid and bad'
Everyone knows a lot of men are creepy, everyone knows that there are rapists who if able to get put into a woman's jail would jump at the chance - if one side is going to pretend these aren't true simply because it makes the rest of their belief on the issue difficult to explain then that's not on the normies who don't accept it without question.
Up until the run up to the election the UK labour party for example pledged self ID legislation would be made law and there was huge outcry from trans advocacy groups when they changed their mind - you can't argue that something you're trying to make happen isn't a problem because it doesn't yet happen.
You see but here's where how you're putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is "we aren't supposed to exist."
The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their "problems" because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.
So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a "ruining your fun" problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.
It doesn't matter that prisons don't change their design to fit us because as long as we're the ones getting raped the system is fine.
It doesn't matter that public toilets don't change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.
It doesn't matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it's just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we're interpreted by the system as an 'undue medical burden' we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they've saved resources.
It doesn't matter that we have kids of our own because us "not being safe to be around children" means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them "safely" .
The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren't actually happening. This effect is called creating a "Moral exclusion" and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.
There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women's bathrooms. Because it's bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn't mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that's not a problem because you aren't supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.