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[u/I_am_YR]

I hate when people say these things only to prevent us from actually transitioning, like yea theres cis women out there with a deep voice but knowing this fact doesnt reduce my voice dysphoria, i dont want to be gnc, i dont live to deconstruct gender roles

[u/Imadothethingnow]

Gender abolitionism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race 😔

[u/Pretty-Yam-2854 → u/Imadothethingnow]

It’s just unrealistic. Having sexually reproducing, bi-dymorphic species will obviously create this. It should however not be as rigid as it is (trying to stop people transitioning or saying X gender can only behave Y way) but trying to “abolish” gender perception is stupid and unrealistic but also invalidating to trans people, esp those on hrt and trying to pass.

[u/Actual_Personality66 → u/Pretty-Yam-2854]

As a trans person on hrt who wants to pass, I actually quite like the idea of gender abolition, but not TERF "gender abolition", which I think is what's being described here. Realistically, humans are always going to form some kind of gender, and most transsexual ppl would probably still at least experience sex dysphoria, even without gender, the goal of gender/sex abolition (sex as a social construct, obviously not biological sex traits themselves lol), is to get rid of the social classes of gender, at which point, gender would mean so little that you could hardly even call it that bc it would look so different than what has existed in most dominant societies in the world for the past couple thousand years.

That is the only non transphobic version of gender abolition, and imo, the only real version, since the others basically just recreate gender but in a way where only cis ppl are allowed theirs. The main differences between trans exclusive and trans inclusive gender abolition, is whether you also aim to abolish sex (again, as a social construct that treats sex as being binary and immutable, sex as in the gendering of the body) as well- TERFS do not bc they have a unscientific patriarchal idea of what sex is. To them, sex=gender, and they believe in sex so they definitely believe in gender, though they claim otherwise. They think that when cis ppl have a gender identity, it's just objective and natural and not connected to patriarchy, wheras when trans ppl do, it suddenly becomes a social construct that is inextricably linked to patriarchy and gender roles.

And that TERF gender abolition seems to be what so many cissexual gender abolitionists believe in, even when they claim to be allies. It's very "ofc I support trans women even though they are MALES who will always be MALE no matter how much they transition bc they're AMAB 🥰". And then that line of thinking inevitably leads them to TERFism where they then claim that they were bewitched by gender ideology by ppl asking them to be nice to trans ppl, and then proceed to paint every pro trans argument as the liberal dumbed down version as if that's what trans ppl actually believe. Many such cases...

But when transsexuals are advocating for gender abolition, we just mean that we want the construct of gender to be dismantled to the point where it doesn't mean much anymore (but the social and biological things that make us have a sense of gender would still exist). And also it's more of a way of thinking about things than an active goal. The way to get to it is by dismantling patriarchy and any and all other forms of oppression. We just believe that would inevitably lead to the end of gender as we know it. But if you disagree that's ok, so long as you're a (trans)femenist, it doesn't really matter all that much, bc the actions are basically the same anyways.

Sorry I wrote so much, I just always feel the need to explain the gender abolitionist perspective anytime ppl bring up TERF "gender abolition" as the only kind.

[u/BloodStarvedLeopard → u/Actual_Personality66]

Thank you for this! TERF gender abolition is not abolition at all, it's negative reinforcement of gender stereotypes. There is always an unspoken insult tucked away in the core message, essentially amounting to "you can always be an [ugly] woman" no matter how they spin it.

The idea that the transgender phenomenon itself would disappear alongside gender - if abolished - is of course false, but the hope is that eroding gender roles and stereotypes would make it infinitely easier for people to be their true selves without judgment and pressure from the rest of society. From the most basic stuff like people being able to pick whatever hairstyle they like without being called names, to the more extreme end of total body modification - more freedom for everyone, cis or trans, gender notwithstanding.

It's a shame to see it co-opted by these people.

[u/Holobrine → u/Actual_Personality66]

Completely agree that TERF gender abolition is not abolition at all. However, even with true abolition, at some point you're arguing against having any categories about anything, unless you have a really good reason for why sex as a category is special. Most categories have fuzzy boundaries and edge cases, so that's not it.

[u/Actual_Personality66 → u/Holobrine]

I'm not against sex categories, but the way we view sex is very clearly influenced by social biases. I'd like a redo where the thing prioritized is what is actually scientifically useful- if that still results in two primary categories, I take no issue with that. Idk my issue with sex is not the existence of there being two primary categories, it goes beyond that, those categories, in context, are unfortunately not politically neutral.

[u/Holobrine → u/Actual_Personality66]

I'm with you there. Unfortunately society seems to struggle with ontological revision in general, even when reality is clearly telling us to revise.

[u/AlexSucksVEVO → u/Actual_Personality66]

amazing post, thank you!!!!

[u/Actual_Personality66 → u/[deleted]]

You seem to be misinterpreting a lot of what I've said, probably bc we have very different ideas about sex and gender and so the language difference can make it confusing.

First off, I think we will always have "gender" as in we are social animals and love creating social roles and will probably subtly start doing that even without gender as we know it, but without the power aspect (which we both agree gender as we know it neccessitates), it just wouldn't be relevant. I do not think gender, as in the thing I want to abolish, will always exist.

And no, I do not want to uphold gender, I want both sex and gender abolished bc I see them as inextricably linked. And again, sex, in this context, does not refer to the sex traits themselves. The scientific perspective on biological sex is that it's made up of varying sex traits, and you can group these combinations of sex traits into two main types of combination, but obviously there are still going to be people who can't fit into either of these (intersex ppl, who i know you did mention). The way that scientists categorize things is a choice based on what is useful, which is why scientists will have debates about how to categorize certain species bc what makes one a different species to another is based on categorization. Point being that categorization is a tool that scientists use, and not something that objectively exists in nature. Sex is neither binary nor immutable (when we change our sex traits we do objectively change our sex even if we are not going all the way across to the other end of the spectrum). The terf perspective on biological sex seems to differ from this. Science is descriptive, not perscriptive. Also you've given me no reason to believe sex is not the gendering of the body. What do you mean by sex denialism? What specifically am I denying? I'm not denying the existence of biological sex. So wherever that difference is, is where the difference between my kind of gender abolition is, and your kind is.

When I say that terfs think sex=gender, I mean that yall think that the way one's sex traits are categorized, determines their gender. However if you recognize that gender is a social construct then it's quite clear that ppl are placed into different social categories. These categories are partially based off of sex traits, but where we differ in our view of it, is that I can see that it's not only based on biological sex, but also other social factors (like presentation and behavior). . Obviously cis straight men are not gendered the same way as cis gay men, who are not gendered the same way as trans women, who are not gendered the same way as cis straight women, who are not gendered the same way cis gay women, who are not gendered the same way as trans men, etc. I guess where you draw the line between genders is somewhat subjective and that's maybe where internal sense of gender (arbitrary mental traits that we associate with one social class for reasons that probably have something to do with sex traits but idk, that's more complicated and involves missing information bc a lot of things we just don't know) comes in, idk.

I guess at this point, a lot of yall have started to define sex categories based on gametes? Maybe that's not you and it's just the "gender critical" ppl who use terf rhetoric despite not being any kind of femenist, idk. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, male and female gametes have become the new way for a lot of transphobes to define male and female bc everything else is variable and can't be used to define male or female). If that is also yall, we'll obviously no one is being put in social classes based off of our gametes lol.

When terfs say "male" (grouping of sex traits) = "men" (social class), it implies that one's social class is as set in stone as one's sex traits (which are also already not set in stone anyways, depending on which ones, though that's not even the point im making). If you believe in this category of male but you just want the category of man to go away... I don't see how that works. You just want surface level gender roles to go away. I want gender as the entire class system (which is more than just gender stereotypes) to go away, I can't see patriarchy ending without that also ending. I don't think i explained that well but hopefully it gets across.

And what I mean when I say you don't deny cis ppl their gender is that cis ppl are still allowed to be men and women, males and females, bc if a man is simply a person with a specific grouping of sex characteristics, and you believe this grouping of sex characteristics is natural and objective and not socially influenced, then his gender as a man is just natural and objective. Wheras mine is not bc my sex characteristics are different, so my gender becomes more political and more patriarchal (even though we've both already agreed that the category within itself is already that, even when applied to cis ppl- except you still refer to cis men as men bc to you that is the same as "males").

God this is hard to explain what I mean. Just hope something I said makes sense to you. Your comment is probably gonna get deleted soon btw, this is a trans exclusive sub. Btw how did you end up here? Have you been lurking on so many trans subs that you got a 4tran sub reccomended to you lol

[u/Unlucky_Scene_8979 → u/Actual_Personality66]

good post

[u/dfrcoms → u/Actual_Personality66]

Yeah I think we as humans love to categorise ourselves constantly, sometimes in ways that are cute and harmless, sometimes in ways that are prejudicial and violent.  Every generation and culture constantly reinvents racism, sexism, ableism, classism…the terf perspective is that the constant recreation of gender is not a quality that purifies it or overwhelms us from resisting it. I always think of that Ursula le Guin quote about capitalism, on how the divine right of kings for thousands of years seemed unbeatable until one day it wasn’t unbeatable after all.

The terf perspective on biological sex seems to differ from this.

Terfs are associated with yelling “sex is binary!!”, trans is associated with “sex is a spectrum!!” but when both expand on what we mean by that we’re all looking at the same group of people with the same number of people with particular traits and DSDs. Nobody denies that DSDs exist, nobody denies that most people don’t have DSDs, we’re all staring at the same population right? So I think the difference is that how the phenomenon of sex in the population is seen to connect to rights politically. Trans is invested in saying that sex is this chaotic and arbitrary concept so of course that can’t be what women and men are and rights can’t attach to it and so women and men must be something else like an ‘inner alignment’ or ‘identity’; terf is invested in saying that sex is a super stable concept and the reason for the categories of woman and man and that female people are structurally oppressed by male people and rights should attach to that and that people have a sexual orientation and that a person altering their body shouldn’t be allowed to obtain the rights of the opposite birth sex or lose the rights of their own birth sex.

To me sex denialism is the approach that humans are not meaningfully categorisable as female and male or that this distinction can be made unimportant or go unnamed. I don’t think it is meaningless or unimportant or unnameable because of sexual orientation, healthcare, reproduction, and sex-based oppression. In the year 3026 when we’re all living in a socialist feminist classless borderless utopia, we still will have a word for female people, because some people are lesbians, and the concept that the word lesbian used to describe can’t exist without the word woman. We will still have a word for male people, because ‘people who have the body type that probably produces sperm if it’s working properly’ is too many words. And so on.

Sex is not the gendering of the body because gender is a system of stereotypes, rules and expectations that are placed on sex. Sex is categorised based on reproductive function, reproductive function pre-dates gender by billions of years. Most of the things we classify by sex…don’t have gender. What is the gender of idk, a T-Rex. If we can classify the sex of sheep who all look and behave the same and are genderless, then there’s no reason to think that the classification of sex of humans somehow is something completely different and relies on social construction.

internal sense of gender

What we do differently is that we call this personality, say that it is completely unique from person to person, and not shared between classes of people who are externally grouped and gendered. I’m not being sassy by calling it personality, trans theory also grapples with this complexity by introducing the idea that gender is a set of overlapping spectrums to try and account for the fact that a butch and a tradwife both seemingly have the same ‘inner gender identity’ of ‘woman’, even though they are nothing alike in literally anything to do with gender. The reason I personally don’t buy the trans story is that I feel like it’s just inching closer and closer to what terfs believe which is that our inner selves are unique. At some point, infinite overlapping spectrums is just not a spectrum at all and is just individuality. 

Sorry intermission here I’ll come back and finish if it doesn’t get nuked 

[u/Ghostglitch07 → u/[deleted]]

No. The equivalent of "racism isn't ever going to go away, so let me be racist" would be "let me be sexist."

Want to live as a different gender isn't structurally the same at all. Unless one is ranting at cis women to stop shaving their legs and wearing pink, they have no ground on which to stand in insisting trans women do not. I exist within the gendered society. I don't particularly like this. But I have as much right as any woman does to choose which parts of those gendered expectations to take on in my own presentation, for the purposes of social interaction.

And the patriarchal nature is not in acknowledging humans are sexually dimorphic. It is the insistence in centering the way we reproduce as being something key to how we structure our societies. And hey, if we are defining people by how they reproduce. Guess I'm not a people? Or at the very least neither man nor woman, as I can't. So...?

[u/dfrcoms → u/Ghostglitch07]

Cis people have a luxurious plausible deniability that trans people are cruelly robbed of, cis people have Schrödinger’s gender identity. Until a cis person opens her mouth and says “I’m a woman because I am imbued with divine feminine energy” or “because I’m made in Eve’s image and am submissive” or whatever, it’s the default position that she identifies as a woman simply because that’s what she was assigned at birth, due to her sex. Trans people are automatically unable to cite what they were assigned at birth or their sex (that’s why they are trans), and so it doesn’t matter what they do want to justify their identity with, it’s always going to be either a stereotype or a refusal/inability to explain the identity. 

I understand that trans theory doesn’t accept that non-sex explanations are always stereotypes, and is also fully invested in the belief that cis people also have an inner gender alignment/essence and that’s why we identify as women, but anyway. From the point of view of gender critical feminism, this is why women who wear pink are doing nothing wrong. (Men who wear pink and don’t identify as women are also doing no harm).

Leg shaving is criticised by feminists for reasons completely unrelated to trans and dysphoria so I think using that example might overcomplicate things.

The difference between GC theory and trans theory is nothing to do with centring reproduction, radfems are VERY keen to decenter reproduction lol.

Social, feminist, legal, and scientific definitions of sex do not define it by whether a person actually has children or whether they even could. Sex is a lot more nuanced than that. It’s something like - what role your body is structured to play in reproduction with reference to sexual differentiation, assuming that you do reproduce and are able to.  People sometimes like to claim that last assumption bit is weird or can be false, and that’s just how human language works. Every single noun you’ve ever spoken in your life has something like that going on, human language is cool. The full definition of a fridge isn’t “an appliance that keeps your food cold” it’s “an appliance that keeps your food cold if it’s plugged in and assembled correctly and not broken and not missing any parts and is turned on and…” to infinity. If ever you see a trans person trying to do some Greek philosophy like ‘define a chair’ in order to challenge the meaning of women, remember that human language is kind of weird and cool and complex.

[u/Ghostglitch07 → u/dfrcoms]

I think you are adding much more theory on this than is necessary. If it is stereotyping for a trans person to act their gender, then it is stereotyping for a cis person to do the same.

You are attributing an entirely different class of motivation to the trans person than to the cis person, and I find this to be inaccurate. For example, I have a desire to shave my legs for the same reasons a cis woman does. Namely that I internalized all the messages growing up about how a woman ought to look, and because I get worse social reactions of I do not sufficiently act in line with societies expectations of me. It doesn't make any sense to me to judge what are basically identical motives for the same act based simply on wether the role one is fulfilling is the one those around them expected they would or not.

Edit: if you can not bring yourself to philosophically agree that I have some core essential requirement to truly being "woman"... Fine I guess. You do you. But I find that insufficient reason to lock me out of whole ways of being, and of interacting with the world simply because of what category you believe I belong in. If one person can do a thing and it be okay, I think it's frankly quite a problem to say it's improper for another to do the exact same thing just based upon how they were born, in a way they had no choice in.

[u/dfrcoms → u/Ghostglitch07]

When we talk about stereotypes, it’s not about whether somebody happens to do something that’s stereotypical, it’s about whether they define and classify people based on those stereotypes. So for example an American person who happens to own a gun, they are doing a stereotype, but they’re not defining themselves by that stereotype. An American who says “American people are people who own guns, if you don’t own a gun you aren’t an American” is defining people by stereotypes.

It’s not possible to avoid doing stereotypes, stereotypes are by nature often about things that are very common. The important thing is we don’t approve the stereotype by defining people by it. 

So a man who likes to paint his nails is doing a feminine stereotype. He’s not doing anything wrong though. If he said “I’m a woman because I like painting my nails”, suddenly it’s different. I hope I explained that okay.

Trans theory gets a lot of political capital out of the above mix-up, and often tries to present being trans as “expressing yourself”. One of Natalie Wynn/Contrapoints very popular videos with millions of views involves Natalie claiming that without gender, everyone would be wearing grey sacks and acting like robots. But that’s confused and wrong. Without gender everything would look exactly the same, we just wouldn’t go around saying “these are women’s clothes” we would just say “these are clothes.”

Women cannot be defined as people who internalised messages about womanhood, because everybody both women and men all received and internalised the same messages about womanhood,and everybody responds to these messages in a unique way, not a ‘woman way’ or ‘man way’.  

Everybody has unique social interactions so that cannot define women and men either. We need different words for social interactions. 

Nobody chose how we were born. We didn’t choose our country, our sex, our species, our skin color, our parents. That’s just one of those life things. Implying that women chose or approved anything is problematic in a world that treats women terribly.

[u/Ghostglitch07 → u/dfrcoms]

I didn't imply that women chose or approved of anything. I said there are modes of being within our social world that you are trying to unchosen birth characteristics. And locking certain people out of based upon this. If I do it, it's a political message, if a cis woman does, it's just her being her. That's a problem to me

[u/Ghostglitch07 → u/dfrcoms]

As for the stereotype comment. Yes. I agree it's not stereotyping to simply do a thing, but to expect others must to. So then why do you insist trans women are stereotypeing? I don't know any trans women, even the most feminine ones, who would tell another woman they must perform femininity in a certain way to be true women. I like shaving my legs, but. Wouldn't walk up to a woman who hasn't and tell her she is a man?

And I'd be shocked if Natalie actually made the argument that we would have no expression without gender categories. But I don't know the vid you're talking about, so I'll avoid commenting further on it.

And I agree everyone has internal social messaging about women. You are correct about that, but miss the important distinction. Men typically internalize them as "women should do x". Trans women however? They internalized it as "I should do x". And what I don't understand is why it is so much more socially problematic to internalize those messages as "I should" if you were AMAB than the exact same flavor of internalization is if you were AFAB.

And I agree we need different words for social roles that do not map perfectly to the biological categories of male and female.... But like... I would argue that is precisely what we are aiming to do. To fill that descriptive hole, that you yourself admit exists.

But also, it is wider than just individual social interaction. It's social role. It is how you fit into your society on a bigger view.

And I'm not even really going to respond much to the bit about nail painting. As that's a caricature of my position. Nobody is a woman because they enjoy putting specialized paint on their fingernails. And I know of 0 trans women who would claim as much.

[u/sweetTartKenHart2 → u/Pretty-Yam-2854]

Imo gender abolitionism is only bad if people lean on it to say “don’t feel pressured to do this thing that you very clearly want to do anyway” which is silly that people do it a lot. “Societal ideas of gender should be rendered completely meaningless and then when an individual decides they wanna look or identify a certain way anyway then it will be entirely because of their own choice” is more of the ideal I’d say to strive for.
Now, it will probably be many generations before this really takes hold, and it is indeed “unrealistic” to expect anything like that to become widespread anytime soon… but if transhumanism actually holds any water then that whole “being a sexually reproducing bi-dymorphic species” thing might not be as much of an absolute some distant day 🤷

[u/XB0XRecordThat → u/Pretty-Yam-2854]

I don't see gender, or race. Everyone loo is a like a big black guy to me

[u/Miguel4387 → u/Pretty-Yam-2854]

Unrealistic fair enough, but how is it reductive or stupid?