LGBTQA and Ally Safe Space

[SevenofSeven]

I thought I would put this here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/04/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html

Is it going to work? Has there been any follow up on these kids? Are they reaching for a Utopia that may only exist in movies or classic Novels?

[Jett]

I think we pretty much are agreeing and just using different terminology.  What you're calling gender identity, I'm calling personality - the aspects of the self which cause one to negotiate gendered expectations in certain ways throughout one's life.  I don't think that's a part of the self which is innately gendered, though.  When I was rejecting dresses and "girly" behavior as a preschooler, and was pleased whenever strangers referred to me as a boy, it was mostly because I didn't feel comfortable with the associations and expectations placed on me by the social category of "girl."  And I was growing up in the US in the 1980s, when gendered expectations on children were markedly less stringent than they are today.

 

The thing is, I don't know any women who really feel like their adoption of gendered expectations is a part of who they are as people.  I've talked about this with a lot of close friends, women I've dated, and female relatives across multiple generations.  All of us undergo a lot of negotiation with gender in our formative years.  It isn't an easy adoption for any of us.

 

Do we choose the specific challenges that we face with regards to that?  No, of course not.  But does it mean that there's an internal aspect of our being which relates to gender?  Or are we just reflecting the kind of varied, individual responses you'd expect if there was a bizarre, illogical social system thrust on young children en masse?

 

That's why I talk about it being personality rather than innate gendered identity.  It's an internal response to an external set of stimuli and forces, not something that arises from inside one's own being.

 

I'm also leery of people using that to describe gender as being "innate" because then we start getting into the idea that the "spectrum" is intrinsic, or is at least a neutral way to describe people.  But it isn't - it's highly oppressive.  For instance, I hear a lot in the queer community that we shouldn't describe a child's reproductive sex (and I agree, fixating on the potential reproductive role of a prepubescent child is kind of creepy), because we should give the kid a chance to grow up to indicate their own gender.  Assume, hypothetically, that we were able to raise a child in an environment where there was no sexism, and no social roles or behaviors were linked to sex or gender in any way - what makes them think the kid would have a gender at all?  To me, it sounds like saying that children should be able to express their innate jati, when without an oppressive caste system there is no jati (yet people still have things they are good at, or would prefer to do).  See what I mean?

 

Okay, it does seem that we mostly agree, with one difference. I think that "gender" (in a loose sense) is part of someone's personality. But I think I see why talking about it in that way is making you uncomfortable. Let me try putting it another way.

 

I think that part of a person's personality (or soul or whatever you want to call it) includes what their natural interests are, and what actions and self-expressions feel right and natural to them. This, in a huge way, is shaped by the home environment they grow up in and the culture at large in which they participate. However, I do think that there is a certain inner core that is just who we are when we are born. I think this can be seen in how some babies are (relatively) quiet and peaceful, some are loud and giggly, and some scream all the time... even in the same household, raised in more or less the same way by the same parents.

 

As we get older, more and more we become aware of what society expects of us, and we have to react in various ways - as you have said. Certainly, LGBT+ people aren't the only ones to experience this, even to fairly extreme extents. For example, a perfectly straight ciswoman who just hates her society's "female" role and wants to do "masculine" things. However, in the case of trans* people in particular, I think that the natural inner personality wants to express itself in a variety of ways that adhere much more closely to the cultural roles of the "opposite" sex than the one they were born as. Or, their most natural expressions don't really match any extant role, or mixes up the roles in various ways. (I also think that "expression" can include physical appearance, all the way down to the configuration of your body.) Thus, one could say that they were "born with" a gender that doesn't match their external body. One could also say, their natural person-hood is best suited to a body that doesn't match the one they were born with. Either way, it's the same thing with different words.

 

Of course, we've never had a society that was completely gender-neutral, so it's really hard to tell to what point "gender" is in some way innate. I will certainly be curious to see what happens in Sweden. However, I find it uncomfortable to read about how children are being forced to avoid anything that could possibly be considered gendered in any way. Why not let kids do what comes naturally to them? So what if their natural expression turns out to match up with what previous generations said should be the role of people with their biological sex? It's still oppression, to my view, because it's forcing kids away from things that they want to do; preventing them from expressing their inner self. Removing judgement from the environment when a kid doesn't want to follow the traditional roles, that's excellent. Judging them because they happen to want to do something that conforms to the 'old ways'? Ehhh... that's going too far in my opinion.

[Reluctant Amazon]

I realized today that I actually have a plan that leads to transition by summer.

I get to be a girl for reals. :-)

[Latsu Swagneel]

I realized today that I actually have a plan that leads to transition by summer.

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Yassssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sent from my phone. Please excuse any errors...

[Reluctant Amazon]

I gotta get my fat down.

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[shaeon]

That's awesome, Amazon! 

[SolitaryOrchid]

I'm not too interested in getting into a huge debate, but there is one thing I would like to add to the conversation on gender. There was a case of a man named David Reimer who had a botched medical procedure on his penis while he was a baby. The doctor decided rather than to fix it it should be turned into a vagina and the baby should be raised as a woman. Growing up the child, despite being raised and socialized and by most everyone being understood solely as a girl still identified as a boy. This, along with other scientific evidence that I'm too lazy to dig up shows that there is an innate sense of gender within us that scientists think forms while we are still in the womb before any social influences are present. The evidence points to the fact that there is something in our brains that tells us what gender we are and that something is a completely separate thing from gender roles, which are indeed social constructs.

[Latsu Swagneel]

I don't want to have to rewrite this whole thing, so here is a link to my Tumblr where I posted it

http://simonizeinabox.tumblr.com/post/135252870885/sometimes-i-want-to-wear-something-cute-for-the

And the follow up:

http://simonizeinabox.tumblr.com/post/135261915715/update-from-last-post

Sent from my phone. Please excuse any errors...

[Jett]

Orchid, I vaguely remembered that case of the guy who was socialized female and never told about what happened at birth, and still identified as male. Thanks for contributing the actual link. This is a subject I really should look at the science for, rather than just arguing from my personal experiences and gut feelings. ;

 

Latsu, I followed you on tumblr! (My blog is super weird, so I'll understand if you don't follow me back. I don't expect that you will.)

 

Sorry your boss is shutting you down on the various non-masculine clothing options. :/ That really sucks, especially since you need the money and the job experience. Maybe it can help you to think of it as a temporary thing. Eventually you'll be well-trained enough that you can find a job as an electrician somewhere else, or start your own business.

[Artinum]

It should be obvious that our physical gender has a major impact on how we see ourselves. The difference in hormonal levels alone makes a huge difference to how we think, to say nothing of major differences such as pregnancy. Research on differences (or lack of them) in male and female brains is pretty irrelevant. We aren't just disembodied brains in vats. A lot of what makes us who we are isn't even part of our bodies - or necessarily even physical. My life would be markedly different if I'd just been given a different name.

 

Whatever gender you identify as, embrace it. Don't pay any attention to these naysayers claiming that there's no difference between the sexes. It's just more of the same homogeneity that seems to pervade society these days. Men and women are different. That's sort of the point.

[SolitaryOrchid]

I don't want to have to rewrite this whole thing, so here is a link to my Tumblr where I posted it

http://simonizeinabox.tumblr.com/post/135252870885/sometimes-i-want-to-wear-something-cute-for-the

And the follow up:

http://simonizeinabox.tumblr.com/post/135261915715/update-from-last-post

Sent from my phone. Please excuse any errors...

 

That's a bummer you're having issues expressing yourself. On the job is kind of one of those places people expect control too, like dress codes and such which can make it difficult to fight what's going on or amass any allies and supporters to help you. Most people probably just assume that kind of thing is part of the job and would tell you to leave it alone rather than see it as what it is, something that needs to change. I'm sorry it's causing you such trouble.

 

Orchid, I vaguely remembered that case of the guy who was socialized female and never told about what happened at birth, and still identified as male. Thanks for contributing the actual link. This is a subject I really should look at the science for, rather than just arguing from my personal experiences and gut feelings. ;

 

It's good stuff to know and have handy when needed in the moment, but at the same time it's easy to feel the need to justify ourselves to people and embarking upon the hunt for knowledge can easily feed into that. I try to balance the two, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

[Kes]

I'm not too interested in getting into a huge debate, but there is one thing I would like to add to the conversation on gender. There was a case of a man named David Reimer who had a botched medical procedure on his penis while he was a baby. The doctor decided rather than to fix it it should be turned into a vagina and the baby should be raised as a woman. Growing up the child, despite being raised and socialized and by most everyone being understood solely as a girl still identified as a boy. This, along with other scientific evidence that I'm too lazy to dig up shows that there is an innate sense of gender within us that scientists think forms while we are still in the womb before any social influences are present. The evidence points to the fact that there is something in our brains that tells us what gender we are and that something is a completely separate thing from gender roles, which are indeed social constructs.

 

Reimer is a terrible example, because he was also subjected to all kinds of messed up child abuse.

 

I know somebody who also had a botched medical procedure on her penis shortly after birth, was raised as a girl, and didn't realize she wasn't female until she failed to begin menstruating during puberty.  She identifies as a woman and a lesbian.  People with AIS who are raised as girls/women pretty much stick with the gender into which they're socialized.

 

There really is no "scientific evidence" of gender identity.

[Reluctant Amazon]

Can we tone down the debate over the scientific validity of my very real experience? The inexplicable feeling, divorced from my personality, that I'm supposed to be female? It's kinda disconcerting. I'm a big fat ugly male bodied person. I've spent 40 years trying to alter and suppress the feeling, separate and opposed to my personality that I'm supposed to be female.

I'm dealing with trying to get healthy physically and mentally while rebuilding every relationship I have. It's hard. I have so much shame,fear and guilt over this.

Just can we move on?

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[Kes]

I didn't think anybody was debating the validity of your experience, Amazon.  I think what we're talking about is whether it means that there's an innate thing called "gender" which is divorced from cultural context.  Your experience is your experience, and nobody's disputing what you feel.  It's the reason that people might feel these ways which are being discussed.  What's also being discussed are the broader ramifications if people say that gender is an innate attribute which people have.  For instance, when you say you are supposed to be female, what do you mean by that? If "female" is a self-ascribed identity, without reference to anything, then your identity disappears into nothing but a self-referential descriptor. By treating gender identity in this way, we would be destroying people's ability to talk about their identities or feelings in any meaningful sense.

[zeroh13]

This affects me on a very real, personal level as well. And I agree, this debate suddenly got a bit heated.

I hadn't had time to sit down and properly reply yet so I'm going to throw my two cents in (under spoilers) and leave it at that.

I'll preface this by saying where I'm coming from up front. I don't identify as trans, but I am by no stretch of the imagination cisgender. The closest umbrella term that I feel comfortable with is non-binary. I'm a bigender (male/neutrois) individual, which means I fluctuate between male and neutrois, usually a mix of the two. I've lived as a woman and as a man, and I've experienced both physical and social dysphoria. I was also on hormones for a few years. Personality wise, I'm rather androgynous and always have been. It took me years of questioning and navigating before I actually understood this part of myself. Part of what took so long was pressure from both cis and trans people to identify with either male or female, and reading comments/posts saying, in a nut shell, that what I am doesn't exist. (For the record, I'll be 29 in a few months.)

Kes, it sounds like when you talk about gender, what you are really talking about is gender roles. And I do agree that gender roles are a social/cultural construct. However, that is only one aspect of gender. Gender is more than a collection of masculine & feminine traits. There is an innate element that goes deeper than those traits, whether we want to call it gender identity or something else. For some people, they never think about it, for others it's this nagging thing in your ear that just won't shut up until you do something about it. I wouldn't call this innate part personality either. Is sexual orientation just personality? I say it affects a person's personality, but is deeper than that. This innate sense, that I and many others call "gender identity", is on the same level.

Intersexed people can be any gender regardless of what was done to their body and how they were raised.

Lastly, having "no 'scientific evidence' of gender identity" is not the same thing as having evidence that proves it does not exist. But saying it as if it does, IMO, comes across (whether you meant it to or not) as really invalidating and runs counter to the principles of a safe space.

[Jett]

Sorry, RA (and others!). It was certainly not my intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable about the validity of their experiences!

 

From my perspective, the debate is about whether the gender we each feel is something we were born with (on some level) or whether it is purely the result of many different cultural and environmental influences (including the environment of your own body, with hormones and the way your body looks and causes others to treat you, etc). At this point, there really isn't a sufficient body of evidence to conclusively prove it one way or another. That social experiment in Sweden may eventually produce some interesting cases that we can learn from, but we're not at that point yet. Therefore, I agree that we should just drop it in this thread. It's just a matter of faith and personal experiences, which are unique to everyone and can't be proven.

 

Wherever your sense of gender comes from, IT IS REAL. It doesn't matter where that sense came from, it's part of you are and not something you made up! You ARE the gender that you feel you are; don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

[Ahyar Dreamspark]

Nature vs. nurture and all that. It's probably both. There is some scientific evidence for the "nature" part. I don't have it bookmarked on the work computer, but can post the link once I get home. If I remember.

 

And by "post the link" I mean just that, because I can't argue, use words, or string sentences together to save my life.

 

 

EDIT: Aaaand it looks like the discussion is already over. Did it take me three hours of alt+tabbing to write the three lines above? Absolutely.

[shaeon]

Can we tone down the debate over the scientific validity of my very real experience? The inexplicable feeling, divorced from my personality, that I'm supposed to be female? It's kinda disconcerting. I'm a big fat ugly male bodied person. I've spent 40 years trying to alter and suppress the feeling, separate and opposed to my personality that I'm supposed to be female.

I'm dealing with trying to get healthy physically and mentally while rebuilding every relationship I have. It's hard. I have so much shame,fear and guilt over this.

Just can we move on?

Sent from my LG-D321 using Tapatalk

 

During my formative years as a lesbian, there was a tremendous amount of debate over the science of being gay. Is it natural or unnatural? Can gays be found in the animal world? Etc.

I came to really resent the debate, because when you're queer, this conversation comes down to "is it ok for me to treat you badly? Because if this is a disorder I can treat you like you're sick, and if it's a choice, I can treat you like you're evil." By "treat you badly", I mean everything from bullying to losing a job to marriage rights. Making your life hell on every level. Added to that, there's the tricky situation that if science can prove that some gene or whatever makes you queer, then we can alter that gene and "fix" you. Science isn't a force for good; it's neutral. Whether it is good or evil depends completely on who is wielding its power.

And anyway, what if science could not prove that being queer was completely natural? What if dating women WERE a choice? Would it then be completely alright to shun me, or fire me, or attempt to fix me? Why should it even matter? Why should science have to prove anything about me? Me being queer doesn't hurt anyone. It's insulting to suggest that I'm not allowed to live and thrive in the world unless science can prove that I was just born this way. I basically realized at that point that the most radical queer activism is, in fact, "we're here, we're queer, get used to it." I won't debate you about the details of why it's acceptable for me to have rights. If you're an ally and a friend and you start in on "well, according to science...", even if it's being said in support of gay rights, I will politely shut you down. I deserve rights and the ability to just live my life and thrive because I'm a human being who isn't infringing upon other human beings. I deserve rights because I simply do. End of conversation. 

Long story short - I totally get where Amazon and zeroh13 are coming from. The science conversation - even from a well-meaning, pro-trans point of view - is still a conversation that is heavy with the suggestion that people who are doing no harm to anyone must justify themselves before they can have equality and acceptance. Let people be themselves. Stop engaging in the debate that assumes that proof is required before we can move on to acceptance.

[Artinum]

Rather like gender, science is generally considered pretty binary (this is scientific, this is not) when it's really more of a spectrum. Things are pretty solidly true or false in disciplines like chemistry or engineering. Other sciences get a little fuzzier - biology, for instance, is far too complex to be entirely predictable. On a truly rationalist level, gender doesn't exist - we are just collections of molecules, and they have no gender.

 

Then there's a whole bunch of "soft sciences", including psychology and sociology, where truth is a fairly malleable commodity. Lie detectors fall into this category as well. Further along the scale still we have "science" that really is nothing of the kind - homeopathy, anything by Deepak Chopra, parapsychology, any form of religious science - it just uses the same words to lend itself authority, and those without a scientific background often cannot tell the difference. Anti-vaxxers use scientific terminology, some of it even correctly, and it's hard to persuade them otherwise because they don't understand why that research is nonsense. Many homeopaths honestly don't understand why their medicine doesn't actually do anything, or why pointing to a single study that shows a positive effect doesn't outweigh twenty studies that show no effect.

 

I group these together because both types have the same problem - it's easy for the wrong idea to gain traction and become popular. A study that shows male and female brains engage the same regions during various activities is interesting to neuroscientists. It doesn't appeal to the newspapers, who dumb it down to "men and women are the same" and completely miss the point. Those same papers completely ignore the fact they ran a story just a month or two ago about "scientific" proof that women can't park or men are allergic to shoe shopping.

 

I would say the best thing to do is just ignore all this codswallop, but unfortunately this isn't really an option. Stories like these have a real effect, because scientists don't rule the world. Marketing dictates which products sell, not their effectiveness. Politicians decide that lie detectors should be allowed in court trials, despite their unreliability. Is being gay natural? All research seems to say yes. Theories on why this happens are varied and none of them can be proven. Others think homosexuality is a product of nurture, not nature, and point to environmental factors. None of this makes any difference to the religious rhetoric that states being gay is an abomination and orders homosexuals to be murdered in cold blood. In some areas, those people have a stronger sales pitch.

 

I'm open to suggestions on how to fix this. Short of killing off the human race and starting again, I've got nothing.

[shaeon]

My biggest suggestion on how to fix this is if someone is discussing human rights of any kind and gets into a nature v. nurture, science v. choice conversation, respond with "dude, does it even matter?"

Put the idea out there that needing to justify whether or not people get rights, empathy, and kindness is pretty messed up to begin with. 

And I personally have also left off of consuming any sensational media whatsoever. The media bias these days is neither liberal nor conservative; it's ratings. Therefore, they do not get positive ratings from me. I only get my news from sources that are committed to accuracy and lack sensationalism (mainly public radio). 

[ColoQ]

It does matter to a certain extent. Unfortunately "biological imperative, incapable of being influenced by anything." has more political traction than "psychological imperative" inferring that someone could "choose" to not be _____ (Trans, Pan, Gay etc...).  And for very stupid  reasons there are real political battles  that are being waged on Trans folks. So.. if scientists can say that "Trans feelings are a valid expression of genetics because SCIENCE" it helps bolster the equality fight.

 

Is it Stupid?  Yeah. Totally. I don't understand why letting people live their lives requires a giant political / legal struggle. but that is the world we live in.

The science should be pursued. I'm on the fence as to whether the results should be discussed or shared in a "safe space," though.

[Reluctant Amazon]

Being a woman is a every weird thing for me. I built my personality around the

education of "you are a boy, no one can suspect you are a girl" while rejecting guy stuff. If had a way to happily survive as a guy, with no knowledge of being trans, id take it. That doesn't exist. But just making the leap of it being okay to be a woman is so good.

Now I just have to work on being a hot babe. :-D

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[Kes]

I was going to just not respond on this topic any longer, but....

 

Do some of you realize that you're advocating that we avoid discussing the negative ramifications and failures of how something is politically or socially framed ("innate gender"! "feminine essence"! "male and female brains"!), including negative ramifications for the people who are supposedly helped by such framing, because saying those things out loud helps bigots? Did I really just read that if there's scientific evidence (even putting aside the sociological evidence that gender isn't innate, scientific evidence) that it shouldn't be brought up in a safe space? That even having these discussions is harming the cause? That there are some things which, even if supportable or backed up, are politically unsayable?

 

If something is caused through psycho-social conditioning that doesn't mean it's "unnatural," let alone a "choice."  In all honesty, arguing that gender is "innate" from birth or before is fundamentally a conservative approach, as is arguing that some people are just born gay and everyone else is straight.  Sure, it's framed as if it's normalizing being trans or being gay, but what it really is doing is continuing to posit being cis or straight as the "norm" and suggesting that something is odd about those who don't fit in to the expected modes.

 

If we instead were willing to discuss what leads us  to develop the way we do, it would end up requiring a more radical analysis, one which demands "normal" people who are gender conforming or straight or cis or what-have-you examine the forces which led them to develop in the way they did.  Being gender conforming or cis are no more "normal" than being trans except in the numbers game, but when you say there's just some indescribable, unexplainable, unstated, unproven force akin to a soul which makes some people become trans, you're setting up being "cis" as the same default standard that heteronormative culture already treats it as, and turning trans into some sort of New Agey identity game. There is no burden on anyone to actually examine the social structures which make it a pain in the butt for trans people or gay people to begin with.  Not to mention that the entire reason gender (by which I mean, the distinction of people into classes based on assumed reproductive sex) exists culturally in the first place is because of sexism, to distinguish socially between "people who can probably make babies" from "people who can probably impregnate people who can make babies."  That's why gender is so closely tied to a reproductive sex binary - that link isn't some sort of weird coincidence which happened to occur in almost every contemporary culture on the planet.

 

This entire way of looking at it - "innate" qualities - is buying (assumed) short-term gain at the price of a long term loss.  The entire reason that the social structures are so accepting of the "born this way" idea is that it is fundamentally non-threatening, because it continues to say, "Yes, of course most people are straight (and not because of compulsive heteronormativity or brainwashing into heteronormative systems from childhood), and of course most people are cis (and not because of gender conditioning which begins from birth)."

 

If you read queer theorists like Judith Butler, for example, she actually talks about gendered identities in the way I am and not in the "innate gender" way being bandied about on the internet.  So in all honesty, if this conversation is dangerous to the LGBTQ movement, maybe we shouldn't be teaching our own theories in colleges anymore; they're too politically dangerous.

 

Sorry for the snark, but geez.

[Kes]

.

[fleaball]

Kes, that's entirely uncalled for. There's no need to come in here and insult people because you don't agree with them.

 

My understanding of a "safe space" is that it's somewhere we can all come to be ourselves without being made to feel uncomfortable. If you want to have your discussion, feel free to make a new thread and people may follow you. The fact that RA (and maybe others who didn't speak up) was negatively affected and asked for the conversation to be dropped doesn't mean it's too "politcally dangerous," just that this isn't the most appropriate place to have it.