"Kathoeys overdo femininity, it is not the natural femininity of a woman."
Hmm, I think this is often true for kathoey, but less so for trans people in the West. Or maybe it's fairer to say that Thai women seem less inclined to "overdo" femininity than western women are (it's also worth pointing out that many Kathoey are sex workers, so t…
"Kathoeys overdo femininity, it is not the natural femininity of a woman."
Hmm, I think this is often true for kathoey, but less so for trans people in the West. Or maybe it's fairer to say that Thai women seem less inclined to "overdo" femininity than western women are (it's also worth pointing out that many Kathoey are sex workers, so the overdoing of femininity kind of comes with the job.).
Hyper-femininity is increasingly common among women in the West, so of course, some trans women mimic that. But many trans women don't seem to to embrace the whole lipstick/makeup/tight dress vision of femininity any more than most women do.
But I think that's a good point about being femininity-attracted. I saw many very beautiful kathoey when I was in Thailand, but the knowledge that they were born male, regardless even of what surgeries they might have had, killed any attraction for me personally. In my mind, womanhood isn't something you can simply "put on". Even if you put it on with hormones and surgery.
It's similar to how I find natural female bodies more attractive than plastic surgery. It's not a criticism of those who choose to have plastic surgery, and certainly not a challenge to their right to do so. I'm 100% supportive of people's rights to live however feels authentic, but I also think it's important that we accommodate everybody's rights and feelings when we figure out how to live together.
This probably has a bit to do with my age and evolution of thought. A little over thirty years ago I was an expat in Saudi Arabia, with my family. We lived on a compound that among other things had a barber/beauty shop. The beautician was a Thai kathoy. He had to tone down the drag there since he didn't want to be thrown off a roof. There were quite a few Asian wives on the project who got together for mahjong. Tong joined in and wanted to be treated like the ladies. My wife and I politely did that though we didn't pretend that we thought he was actually a woman. He told me he was saving money for transition surgery. You may have noticed that I used he, rather than she. In those days I just considered him to be flaming gay, perhaps because I didn't see him in drag and transexual was not a part of the lexicon. On one of our vacations in Thailand we ran across him, also on vacation. He was not in drag accompanied by a super flamer, also not in drag. I mention that because kathoy has some ambiguity in that Tong presented as openly homosexual, even in Thailand where transvestite presentation was common.
All that wordiness points to my confusion which I do not think is a matter of bigotry. People are what they are, there's a place at the table for everyone and you'd be hard pressed to name a representative of a marginalized group that hasn't sat at mine. The word "trans." Trans-what, transexual, transvestite? Does it matter? In most aspects of life a person's gender or sex is irrelevant (cloths on, non-sexual, non-medical patient). I couldn't care less if a health care provider, technical support, cashier in a store, person in a recreational setting, is male, female or androgynous. "You must acknowledge my gender identity." OK, it's important to you, but it isn't to me and likely never will be. I'll be polite and treat you as you wish, which in many cases changes nothing since I'm a fan of gender equality and probably won't be treating you differently if you present as male or female. A bit like race. Some people don't like that, they want to be treated differently.
For a man in his 70s (me), much of the current focus on marginalized groups victim/oppressor is a bit disturbing. Not that the issues don't matter and need to be addressed, but the radical way people promote then seems counter productive. But then that is an issue for you too or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The trans subject is blowing up thanks to Dave Chappelle's latest Netflix. I have a bit to say about that, but not in this comment which has grown too long.
"You must acknowledge my gender identity." OK, it's important to you, but it isn't to me and likely never will be. I'll be polite and treat you as you wish, which in many cases changes nothing since I'm a fan of gender equality and probably won't be treating you differently if you present as male or female. A bit like race. Some people don't like that, they want to be treated differently."
I fear that the ship might have sailed, but I completely agree with you. Dave Chappelle put it brilliantly in one of his other specials:
"To what degree do I need to participate in your identity?"
I'm happy to call you "she" or "he", "sir" or "madam", but when you ask society in general to pretend you're *identical* to the sex you identify as, we inevitably find ourselves in difficulty. "Woman" is a meaningful category. And has certain protections because women *need* them. Eroding those protections because some males want to be considered identical to women is a problem. Pointing that out has nothing to do with bigotry.
I wish we could just normalise the idea that men can wear dresses and makeup if the like and women can brow facial hair if they like and that doesn't *make* them the opposite sex. This is a tricky thing to do as well. But it strikes me as a more progressive way to look at gender and to dismantle the stereotypes associated with it than saying if you want to wear dresses and play with dolls you must be a girl. But as I said, I think that ship has sailed.
I haven’t seen the Dave Chapelle thing, but I admit that this comment is making me cringe a little. Being trans is an extraordinarily difficult experience, so I am not really worried that people are going to put themselves through that in order to benefit from whatever advantages society offers me to make up for all of the disadvantages I face. I agree though that elite sports has/needs special rules and is a separate discussion entirely.
I also agree with others that the alphabet soup of labels is not useful. Encouraging kids to choose a label and fixate on that limits their freedom to move naturally through gender and sexuality as they grow. At the same time, I know trans people who suffered from lack of affirmation when they were young. It seems like our approach needs to adjust depending on the degree of dysphoria. Taking the nuances of a situation into account and adjusting fluidly and rationally is not exactly our forte right now as a society.
"Being trans is an extraordinarily difficult experience, so I am not really worried that people are going to put themselves through that in order to benefit from whatever advantages society offers me to make up for all of the disadvantages I face"
I agree. Or at least I agree that being trans *can* be a difficult experience. But being a woman in prison is also a difficult experience, being a woman in a battered women's shelter is a difficult experience, being a survivor of sexual abuse is a difficult experience.
So all I'm advocating for is that when we think about how to accommodate trans women, we also consider how to accommodate *these* women. I occasionally hear women say that they aren't personally concerned about trans women in female-only spaces. And that's great. But I think there are many women who are concerned, and concerned for reasons other than bigotry. It's important to consider all women in this.
We also have to consider the fact there's a significant push to make being trans as *easy* as possible. The positives of this are obvious, but there are obvious negatives too. If we affirm everybody who declares themselves a woman, we have no way to prevent situations like the one that happened in Wi Spa in LA, where a male sex offender, was able to gain access to the female changing rooms simply by declaring himself trans (to be clear, as I understand it he wasn't trans, but the staff had no means of distinguishing this and were instructed to unquestioningly allow people to use the changing rooms of whatever gender they claimed). He then went on to expose himself to the women and young girls inside.
There have also been cases of trans women gaining access to women's only spaces and attacking women. I'm not pretending that there's an epidemic of these cases at the moment, nor am I indifferent to the fact that trans women also live with the threat of violence, but I care about both sides of this equation.
I wish I had a genius solution that would satisfy all parties, but I don't. This is a difficult problem. But the current dogma of "either you affirm trans women at all costs or you hate them," is, in my opinion, pushing people to take harder line positions than they otherwise would.
I think you’re right and that if we made room to explore folks’ genuine fears, we could identify some solutions. I hear you that dismissing people’s fears as transphobia alone makes it impossible for us to even have that conversation.
"Kathoeys overdo femininity, it is not the natural femininity of a woman."
Hmm, I think this is often true for kathoey, but less so for trans people in the West. Or maybe it's fairer to say that Thai women seem less inclined to "overdo" femininity than western women are (it's also worth pointing out that many Kathoey are sex workers, so the overdoing of femininity kind of comes with the job.).
Hyper-femininity is increasingly common among women in the West, so of course, some trans women mimic that. But many trans women don't seem to to embrace the whole lipstick/makeup/tight dress vision of femininity any more than most women do.
But I think that's a good point about being femininity-attracted. I saw many very beautiful kathoey when I was in Thailand, but the knowledge that they were born male, regardless even of what surgeries they might have had, killed any attraction for me personally. In my mind, womanhood isn't something you can simply "put on". Even if you put it on with hormones and surgery.
It's similar to how I find natural female bodies more attractive than plastic surgery. It's not a criticism of those who choose to have plastic surgery, and certainly not a challenge to their right to do so. I'm 100% supportive of people's rights to live however feels authentic, but I also think it's important that we accommodate everybody's rights and feelings when we figure out how to live together.
This probably has a bit to do with my age and evolution of thought. A little over thirty years ago I was an expat in Saudi Arabia, with my family. We lived on a compound that among other things had a barber/beauty shop. The beautician was a Thai kathoy. He had to tone down the drag there since he didn't want to be thrown off a roof. There were quite a few Asian wives on the project who got together for mahjong. Tong joined in and wanted to be treated like the ladies. My wife and I politely did that though we didn't pretend that we thought he was actually a woman. He told me he was saving money for transition surgery. You may have noticed that I used he, rather than she. In those days I just considered him to be flaming gay, perhaps because I didn't see him in drag and transexual was not a part of the lexicon. On one of our vacations in Thailand we ran across him, also on vacation. He was not in drag accompanied by a super flamer, also not in drag. I mention that because kathoy has some ambiguity in that Tong presented as openly homosexual, even in Thailand where transvestite presentation was common.
All that wordiness points to my confusion which I do not think is a matter of bigotry. People are what they are, there's a place at the table for everyone and you'd be hard pressed to name a representative of a marginalized group that hasn't sat at mine. The word "trans." Trans-what, transexual, transvestite? Does it matter? In most aspects of life a person's gender or sex is irrelevant (cloths on, non-sexual, non-medical patient). I couldn't care less if a health care provider, technical support, cashier in a store, person in a recreational setting, is male, female or androgynous. "You must acknowledge my gender identity." OK, it's important to you, but it isn't to me and likely never will be. I'll be polite and treat you as you wish, which in many cases changes nothing since I'm a fan of gender equality and probably won't be treating you differently if you present as male or female. A bit like race. Some people don't like that, they want to be treated differently.
For a man in his 70s (me), much of the current focus on marginalized groups victim/oppressor is a bit disturbing. Not that the issues don't matter and need to be addressed, but the radical way people promote then seems counter productive. But then that is an issue for you too or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The trans subject is blowing up thanks to Dave Chappelle's latest Netflix. I have a bit to say about that, but not in this comment which has grown too long.
"You must acknowledge my gender identity." OK, it's important to you, but it isn't to me and likely never will be. I'll be polite and treat you as you wish, which in many cases changes nothing since I'm a fan of gender equality and probably won't be treating you differently if you present as male or female. A bit like race. Some people don't like that, they want to be treated differently."
I fear that the ship might have sailed, but I completely agree with you. Dave Chappelle put it brilliantly in one of his other specials:
"To what degree do I need to participate in your identity?"
I'm happy to call you "she" or "he", "sir" or "madam", but when you ask society in general to pretend you're *identical* to the sex you identify as, we inevitably find ourselves in difficulty. "Woman" is a meaningful category. And has certain protections because women *need* them. Eroding those protections because some males want to be considered identical to women is a problem. Pointing that out has nothing to do with bigotry.
I wish we could just normalise the idea that men can wear dresses and makeup if the like and women can brow facial hair if they like and that doesn't *make* them the opposite sex. This is a tricky thing to do as well. But it strikes me as a more progressive way to look at gender and to dismantle the stereotypes associated with it than saying if you want to wear dresses and play with dolls you must be a girl. But as I said, I think that ship has sailed.
I haven’t seen the Dave Chapelle thing, but I admit that this comment is making me cringe a little. Being trans is an extraordinarily difficult experience, so I am not really worried that people are going to put themselves through that in order to benefit from whatever advantages society offers me to make up for all of the disadvantages I face. I agree though that elite sports has/needs special rules and is a separate discussion entirely.
I also agree with others that the alphabet soup of labels is not useful. Encouraging kids to choose a label and fixate on that limits their freedom to move naturally through gender and sexuality as they grow. At the same time, I know trans people who suffered from lack of affirmation when they were young. It seems like our approach needs to adjust depending on the degree of dysphoria. Taking the nuances of a situation into account and adjusting fluidly and rationally is not exactly our forte right now as a society.
"Being trans is an extraordinarily difficult experience, so I am not really worried that people are going to put themselves through that in order to benefit from whatever advantages society offers me to make up for all of the disadvantages I face"
I agree. Or at least I agree that being trans *can* be a difficult experience. But being a woman in prison is also a difficult experience, being a woman in a battered women's shelter is a difficult experience, being a survivor of sexual abuse is a difficult experience.
So all I'm advocating for is that when we think about how to accommodate trans women, we also consider how to accommodate *these* women. I occasionally hear women say that they aren't personally concerned about trans women in female-only spaces. And that's great. But I think there are many women who are concerned, and concerned for reasons other than bigotry. It's important to consider all women in this.
We also have to consider the fact there's a significant push to make being trans as *easy* as possible. The positives of this are obvious, but there are obvious negatives too. If we affirm everybody who declares themselves a woman, we have no way to prevent situations like the one that happened in Wi Spa in LA, where a male sex offender, was able to gain access to the female changing rooms simply by declaring himself trans (to be clear, as I understand it he wasn't trans, but the staff had no means of distinguishing this and were instructed to unquestioningly allow people to use the changing rooms of whatever gender they claimed). He then went on to expose himself to the women and young girls inside.
There have also been cases of trans women gaining access to women's only spaces and attacking women. I'm not pretending that there's an epidemic of these cases at the moment, nor am I indifferent to the fact that trans women also live with the threat of violence, but I care about both sides of this equation.
I wish I had a genius solution that would satisfy all parties, but I don't. This is a difficult problem. But the current dogma of "either you affirm trans women at all costs or you hate them," is, in my opinion, pushing people to take harder line positions than they otherwise would.
Thanks, Steve, for clarifying.
I think you’re right and that if we made room to explore folks’ genuine fears, we could identify some solutions. I hear you that dismissing people’s fears as transphobia alone makes it impossible for us to even have that conversation.