Let's Say You're An Owl
Figuring out what “side” people are on is hard. There are all these pesky matters of nuance and perspective and critical thinking. So, instead, we’ve learned to ask a few simple questions.
“Was the election stolen?” “Do ‘All Lives Matter’” “What is a woman?” It doesn’t matter if you believe your answer to these questions, it just matters that you give the correct one. Your answer declares your allegiance, not the truth.
In my article, What Happens If Trans Women Aren’t Women?, I highlighted the importance of being able to say what a woman is, and that simply acknowledging what a woman is, isn’t transphobic.
I pointed to the numerous other cultures that recognised “gender non-conforming” people thousands of years before we did, who nonetheless acknowledge that their existence doesn’t render the categories of man and woman meaningless. And certainly not the categories of male and female.
I asked who is harmed if we acknowledge that trans women are, in fact, trans women? Rex tried to clarify.
Rex:
I'm not sure you're fully accounting for gender dysphoria here. If you are an anything--let's say you're an owl--and it feels deeply important to you to be a (human) woman, then what happens if owl-women aren't women, in at least most contexts, is that this deep need isn't met. At least not as well as it would be if trans-species women were human women. The principle is that the dysphoria is largely dysphoria about not fitting into a category.
Now, that said, the other concerns you mention don't just go away. For instance, if an owl has murine-directed species dysphoria, and wants to be considered a mouse, but still looks like an owl, the mice are understandably going to be really freaked out. Even if the mice in the know eventually come to learn that this owl really "is a mouse", every interaction between strangers (trans-species mouse + cis-species mouse) is likely to engender real and deep distress.
Of course, I've deliberately chosen an extreme, and therefore unrepresentative, example to illustrate the point. The reality is not so stark.
But the issue remains: you can't balance the value of feelings of safety on the one hand with feelings of dysphoria on the other hand if you don't fully acknowledge the latter.
(Then another issue arises, which is whether there can be degrees of strength of gender dysphoria, and what to do in those cases.)
Steve QJ:
you can't balance the value of feelings of safety on the one hand with feelings of dysphoria on the other hand if you don't fully acknowledge the latter.
Yes, you absolutely can. I'm not dismissing gender dysphoria. There are many remedies for gender dysphoria, chief among them at the moment being transition. I'm not opposing that at all.
Give trans people safe, effective healthcare, respect their pronouns and chosen names, challenge stereotypes that control how people are able to present and behave, combat the workplace and other forms of discrimination that affect trans people. All of these are genuine attempts to help people with dysphoria and I support them fully.
But it's insane to suggest that matters of material physical safety shouldn't take precedence over possibly not 100% validating somebody's feelings. Women in society, for a number of reasons, need us to understand the difference between somebody's gender identity and their biological sex. It is the same way in cultures throughout history and from all over the world. Including cultures that were centuries quicker in recognising and accepting gender "non-conformity." As I mention in the article, these cultures don't claim that those identities are identical to women and men.
If the price of maintaining spaces that offer women physical safety and sporting opportunity, is that the very small percentage of males who simply say "I'm a woman and want access to all female-only spaces," aren't 100% validated in every conceivable way, I think that's a fair price to pay.
Rex:
Yes, you absolutely can. I'm not dismissing gender dysphoria.
What I was pointing out is that the recognition that you've given in this answer was (to my eyes at least) hard to find in the original story, thereby making it harder to understand the nature of the tradeoffs.
But now you've done so, which I think better positions the reader to think about the complexity of the situation. There is a tradeoff being made, and any account that says "100% my way all the time" is likely to be wrong...but it's good to grasp the nature of the competing issues.
I agree that having a more effusive acceptance of a neither-100%-masculine-and-male-nor-feminine-and-female category might be a very much better way to handle things. It would be interesting to study. I can also imagine it making things worse (in that the more ideals you have, the more opportunities you have to feel like you're being pushed by society towards the wrong ideal).
Finally, I'd just like to point out that although physical safety in general does and should have a higher priority than emotional validation, the stress of rejection is not completely negligible even from a health-and-safety standpoint (depression, suicide, higher risks of cardiovascular problems, higher risk of cancer, etc.). So this too is a real tradeoff: you can't just decide it 100% in one direction and come up with the best balance. (I'm not saying that you claimed this...just pointing out for readers that this too is an area where things are not as simple as it might initially seem.) Neither extreme is correct, as I think you were pointing out (but hard to tell, as you only talked about one extreme as being incorrect).
Steve QJ:
I agree that having a more effusive acceptance of a neither-100%-masculine-and-male-nor-feminine-and-female category
No, I'm not quite arguing for this. I'm saying that we're all neither 100% masculine or 100% feminine (not male nor female). So I think greater acceptance of feminine males and masculine females is not only healthy, but important.
Indeed, I suspect this would help do away with a lot of the angst of gender dysphoria immediately.
But this wouldn't have anything to do with the realities of sex-based (male and female) violence. And the need to recognise that the immutable reality of sex has to be taken seriously when talking about female safety. Being able to say what a woman is, is obviously an essential step in figuring out how to protect women's rights and safety.
So while I agree in principle that taking a 100% all or nothing view on anything is a bad idea, objective reality tends to be fairly absolutist. It's very difficult (and arguably dangerous) to build working policy around people's subjective feelings.
I mean, for example, if a guy sees a woman and thinks she's the most beautiful person he's ever seen and falls deeply in love with her, he will be hurt if she rejects him. But we don't say that she should safeguard his feelings to her own detriment. He has no right to touch her, even non-sexually, without her consent. Because we recognise that we should rule 100% in her direction when it comes to her autonomy and comfort.
We're adults here. Sometimes the world doesn't work the way we want. If we can't handle that, frankly, we're dangerous.
Rex:
Makes sense--thanks for the clarification!
This debate has become so fraught for a couple of reasons.
First, because the language we use is so imprecise that it’s easy to talk past each other. Male and female, masculine and feminine, man and woman, sex and gender, for years it’s been safe to use some combination of these words interchangeably. But however this turns out, those days are over. The existence of trans people means we can’t talk accurately if we don’t learn to tease apart the meaning of these terms.
And secondly, because there are lots of decent people who desperately want to be kind. And in their rush to be kind to one group, they overlook how callous they’re being to the other. This is true of some of the people arguing for trans rights and for women’s rights.
The people who need help aren’t helped by this bickering.
Whether or not we believe trans women are women, trans women and women face discrimination and abuse and violence. There are even areas where these problems overlap. Let’s figure out how to address these issues in a way that works for the maximum number of people. We can figure out what to call each other after that.
As I've written before, I have known several transsexuals and dated two of them, in the full sense of the word. Just to reiterate, I support fair and just treatment to gender dysphoric people and would approve raising my taxes to provide for their needs.
But two points are being lost here.
1) Gender dysphoria is not part of "normal human variation" like left-handedness and homosexuality, both of which appear at about 5% across time and culture. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and not just because it has an entry in the big book (as homosexuality did until 1974). This is not a dodge into definitions; the dysphoric are suffering with a pain of feeling incongruous with their biology, suffering that is only relieved by medical intervention. Genuine dysphoria is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births. It is not at a level that demands changes to language and law, aside from prohibitions on discrimination.
2) At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers, demanding privileged treatment, demanding an extra ration of special attention from everyone. Online they are the angriest and most unbalanced people I have ever seen, unable to change the subject. And they demand to be under the "trans" umbrella, which they do not deserve. Gender is not a continuum; gender is binary. And no I am not talking about pink vs. blue or football vs. dolls, I am talking about identity.
There are a few people in the world who have two heads. We don't need to specify "monocephalous" when talking about everyone else, why do we need to refer to the overwhelming majority who are gender-congruent as "cis?"
>" in their rush to be kind to one group, they overlook how callous they’re being to the other. "
I used to be all in for "empathy", believing it's largely what makes humans worthwhile as a species (to offset some of their other tendencies). I encouraged all forms of empathy.
But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy".
In tribal empathy, there are in groups and out groups; professing empathy for the ingroups is mandatory and lack thereof can be sinful; but professing empathy for anybody in an out group is socially punished as disloyalty to the tribe. People are trained to numb out any human empathy for members of "the other side". This kind of empathy is endemic and goes back to our prehistoric roots. (Perhaps, in less complex form, to pre-human roots; male chimpanzees groom and stroke other males who will fight with them against other bands).
By contrast, there is a flavor of empathy which arises spontaneously (not by command) and which can cross tribal boundaries to find a fragment of understandable humanity even in some in another tribe. This can be transcendant and transformative, and is closer to the inspiration for my original respect for empathy (which I still have, albeit in more nuanced form).
The former kind of empathy (tribal empathy) is just the "us" subset of an overall "us vs them" proclivity in humans. It can sometimes feel like a weaponized mutation of universal empathy but it's probably more primeval that the latter.
So nowadays when I see somebody advocating compassion for X, I ask myself whether the empathy energies are inherently tied to prescribed numbing of human empathy for a different group - or whether it's more universal (or individual).
In the present case, trans activism is definitely deep into tribal empathy - using mandatory (not emergent and inspired, but required) empathy for the feelings of trans folks, but inherently also prescribing a numbing of empathy for anybody else who may feel harmed. And the other side can do the same thing. People caring about both sides, and trying to find a nuanced compromise as respectful as feasible for everybody's needs - tend to be a small subset. For others, compromise is a dirty word, because it implies that other humans might have legitimate needs to be balanced against their own desires. Hence the prescribed numbing of empathy.
I want to note that a number of the trans folks I've known DO have empathy for the needs of cis women, and act accordingly. For every trans athlete entering women's sports, there are others who (mostly silently) abstain because it doesn't feel fair to them. But most of the personality type which is differentially attracted to trans activism seems to be amazingly unempathetic towards cis women's feelings and needs and highly entitled to have their own feelings and needs centered. This gives a distorted perspective to those who only encounter the louder activists and think them typical of all trans folks.