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I think a piece of talking abt reproductive issues w trans people (and particularly trans women) that people don’t understand is that if we are talking abt a situation where someone needs to functionally be sterile in order to lower the likelihood of state and or physical violence (ie legal docs), that isn’t simply because they are upset that they don’t have access to their own ability to have children. Although! I think that in and of itself would be sufficient.
But like, given the nature of adoption in our current society, it functionally precludes most trans people (here again, esp trans women) from any method of parenting, barring they had children before. The economics of non adoptive services are excessive, and the social stigma around adoption are likewise major hurdles.
So it’s not even a question of “wanting to impregnate” which honestly is a concerningly antifeminist characterization of parenting I’ve seen written by cis people who claim some sort of feminism, but of like actual access to parenting as a life practice. Of course most people who deny that the former sterilization is an issue don’t want trans women mothering in the first place, but I think it illuminates why it’s an important conversation for many of us who weren’t planning on having our own children pre transition
Not being able to parent causes a whole host of other issues too.
It functionally ensures that trans children will always have cis parents, leading to all the traumas that entails.
Its actively interrupting the transfer of knowledge between generations, further disrupting an already scarce and inconsistent account of trans history and community.
It also ensures that every conception of transness that any child receives comes through cis parents. We live in a world where trans adults can never teach any children about transness (especially with the way our existence is considering R rated, and any interaction trans women have with children is coded as predatory), the ways that affects (slows) the change in societal-level attitudes about trans people is massive.
(via weepingwitch)
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more things should be abstract
direct understandability is a weakness
sometimes a good one :) but yeah, I agree!
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i really want no part of the trans/eating disorder relationship discourse until we have first established the part medico-psychiatric & insurance gatekeeping plays in compelling trans people to use extreme weight loss & other modes of self harm to “diy” transition, because they will pick and choose which trans people are deemed legitimate and deserving and determine who will spend their life in debt for surgery and who will be covered.
not even to mention the machinations of race, ability, transmisogyny, and class that ensure that multiply-marginalized trans people do not receive care.
& then we can be denied access to transition if we are “too crazy” after perpetuating violence against ourselves to cope w dysphoria…. they have infinite ways of saying they want us dead.
(via weepingwitch)
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The idea that mainstream medical approaches to hrt are driven by some.kind of objective rigor or concerns for our safety is such a sick joke.
Mostly it’s doctors who don’t know shit about what they’re doing being super conservative and sticking to established, outdated models because they’re what’s in is and thus it’s unlikely to make them liable.
There’s a world of difference between doctor’s trying to avoid liability and actually caring about risks to their patients.
First of all, obviously, we should be able to take whatever risks we want.
Second, life comes with all sorts of risks and hrt being non-normative means suddenly any risk that applies to most non-medically transitioning cafab folks is suddenly a huge deal for us transexuals and we have to be protected from it.
Third, doctors will regularly use decades old risk models based on premarin, or ignore method of administration when evaluating dvt risk with bioidentical estrodial or otherwise be completely out of touch with the actual risks we’re dealing with
Fourth, it’s gonna take a hell of a lot to convince me that the direct medical risks that higher e levels can come with begin to compare to the costs we pay in terms of our mental health, our safety, our employability, etc due to slow and stalled transitions because most doctors are fucking terrified of us getting e levels as high as the average cis woman. (Or, gods forbid, on the higher end where trans women regularly feel way better and get way more feminization).
The only thing the medical establishment is trying to protect us from is having autonomy over our bodies.
(via weepingwitch)
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the problem with making any posts about theory as a trans woman is that terfs melting down at you and stalking you and acting like the most maladjusted weirdos in the fuckin planet can still be exhausting even when you know these people are pathetic. its like being a level 100 paladin but everywhere you go you get attacked by 500 level 1 mobs that block the camera and dont let you click on npc’s to interact with. annoying as shit.
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I’m a pacifist. I’m peace-loving. That doesn’t mean I’m strictly non-violent or anti-conflict. You can’t watch a conflict build and do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, then say it’s wrong to act in the final moment even if that action requires violence.
All the earlier stages where you did nothing were the chances to exercise pacifism. The final moment is the wrong place to position analysis of the effectiveness of peace-lovingness.
Of course, it’s also silly to say, axiomatically, that every problem can always be solved without violence. It’s not a natural law, is it?
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Inclusive: Including the experiences of people from various backgrounds and identities in a conversaiont that they are impacted by.
Intersectional: Considering the ways in which multiply marginalized people experience oppression within their social classes, ie. through acknowledging the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and other factors create new, multi-layered forms of oppressions which affect someone’s experience.
Intersectionality is about the material ways in which people are multiply oppressed and acknowledges that oppression cannot be extracted into discrete experiences. A Black woman, for instance, cannot separate her Blackness from her womanhood to look at how she experiences one oppression (misogyny) from another (racism). Her existence as Black and a woman is intersectional and cannot be separated.
It’s really not that hard.
Addition: Intersectionality was never supposed to have anything to do with non-blacks.
It’s specifically supposed to address the experiences of Black women and Crenshaw said in her original essay she intended for it to extend to non-Black women of color where it was appropriate (since NBWOC don’t experience everything Black women experience) and not for tokenization (in the way that white feminism “includes” women of color only in name, not in actual approach).
I believe she explains her reason fully in footnote 8 of her 1991 article.Ive also asked her in person about this and she said that intersectionality can be applied to other forms of nonrace oppression(looking at class and gender for example) as a means to examine and understand the specific interactions but that the framework of it was specifically crafted as a race based and even applying it to other areas, to ignore race would fundamentally misrepresent her work.
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Anonymous asked: why isn't socialization tied to biology? i hope you don't mind if an ftm follows this blog, but i know i have a lot of trouble fitting in with cis men. and sometimes there are classes to help trans women adopt female mannerisms. it's very obvious how i was treated differently before and after transition and i do think feminism accurately describes the childhood i had even if i don't identify as a girl and was very uncomfortable with my body. socialization isn't chosen so i don't disagree with it
Let me post a different question. If gender socialization were rigidly deterministic, how could we account for the variety of social and subjective outcomes produced by it?
I’m not prepared to give a thorough overview of socialization. However, it’s clear that for many feminists, the actual nature of gender socialization is less important than its political use as a boundary marker for womanhood, for feminist authority, and for feminist priority. Any conversation about socialization needs to address this baggage first.
As it is, the concept of gender socialization has been distorted and ossified within radical feminism (especially) to fulfill two functions. First, to explain how people with a female birth assignment are meaningfully “women.” And second, to rationalize why trans women couldn’t be. Both represent the same project IMO, which is to define what and who is the subject of feminism or lesbianism (with all the political and social implications associated with that). Explanations of socialization have been tailored to produce the desired answers to these questions.
Defining “women” as a political or social position (e.g. a class within patriarchy) would bypass the problem of gender/sex essentialism, which many feminists rightly call into question. However, in an effort to limit this class position to “females,” radical feminists have re-linked it to anatomy through the concept of socialization. The result is a new gender/sex essentialism. Womanhood is identified in an essentialized result of “female socialization,” which is said to proceed exclusively and inflexibly from female sex assignment. A natural, rigid, biological distinction between “male” and “female” is uncritically affirmed as a basis for this assignment (and subsequent claims to womanhood).
With “female socialization” named as the maker of womanhood and linked intractably to sex assignment, it can then be used to disqualify trans women from womanhood. The logic goes that trans women are inherently male, therefore are male-socialized, therefore are embodiments of patriarchy and female oppression. Their bodies, presence in women’s or lesbian spaces, and very conceptual existence are framed as a (sexual) violation of “women” and as a reinforcement of patriarchy. If this were true, trans women would necessarily need to be eliminated as part of a feminist program.
I’m sure you’re aware of this loaded nature of “socialization.” What I’m hearing is that you want recognition for the way socialization has shaped you and dictated your childhood experiences, and you sense that a shift in the understanding of socialization could compromise your interpretation of your experience.
To be clear, interpreting FTM/trans men’s socialization isn’t a primary concern of this blog. But if we want to understand the process of socialization, we first need to think about what socialization is.
Just grabbing some sociological definitions from google, socialization is “the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society;” it’s “a learning process, one that involves development or changes in the individual’s sense of self.” What’s important here is that socialization is: 1) a learning process; and 2) related to subjectivity (an individual’s sense of self).
The learning process by which we internalize the values and worldviews of our society–and form a subjective location within the social matrix–is complex. Social learning in general is complex. It can involve both direct and indirect messages about gender. A parent encouraging a child to behave in some ways while scolding them for behaving in others, on the basis of whether the behavior is appropriate for boys or girls, sends a direct message about what boys and girls are supposed to be like. The parent is also sending the message that the child is/should be a boy or a girl, but that’s just one part of the lesson, and won’t automatically determine a person’s sense of self just because it is repeated.
Children (and adults) are also inundated with indirect messages about gender. We constantly witness gendered behaviors and interactions, and the responses they elicit. A child might witness how their mother interacts with their father and vice versa. They’ll see how adults interact with other adults and children of different genders, and how other children interact with each other. Gender and gendered interactions are depicted in media, in marketing, through divisions of labor, and in other areas. These interactions do not just broadcast messages about gender in isolation, but also signal how gender is constructed through race and class, etc.
The result is a complex system of gendered meanings, which we all encounter, learn, and (re)produce throughout our lifetimes.
How a gendered subjectivity and social location is developed in an individual must also be complex, and it’s a process that’s poorly understood. There is not a universal “female subjectivity” or “female experience of socialization.” Not only are our experiences informed by factors such as culture, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, religion, and class, but they are also personalized in terms of our immediate social and family environment. The structure of our family; the beliefs and values of our family members, mentors, and friends; idiosyncrasies in the way people interact with us–not to mention sheer random events in our lives–all influence our social experience and subjective development.
Furthermore, our own individuality must be taken into account. Our personality, neurotype, interests, beliefs, affinities, and mode of presentation (etc) can also affect what we are exposed to, who or what we identify with, how people interact with us, and what subjective effect our experiences have on us.
For example, I’m the oldest of three sisters. As pre-teens and teenagers, my sisters began to express an interest in makeup and clothes, and cultivated more typically feminine aesthetics, often with each other or with their friends. I’ve never been interested in makeup; it wasn’t pushed on us by my parents and it wasn’t a big deal among my friends. Consequently, I never learned much about it. Many of the other trappings of femininity are also a mystery to me, and I don’t relate to many images of feminine womanhood. Why did this aspect of socialization pass over me and not them?
Given the complexity of the learning process and the variability in individual subjective outcomes, I can’t conclude that socialization is tied deterministically to a single factor like biology or sex assignment.
That’s all I have to say about socialization for now. I hope it gives an idea of what my approach to gender will be on this blog.
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I know this is super complicated, cis people, and you don’t want to get your heads around it. But:
sometimes baddies lie. sometimes they say they aren’t baddies!
It’s wild huh? But this is the kind of profoundly complex political thinking you’re going to need to do if you want to be effective allies to trans folks. I know it’s hard but you can do it, ok?
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facepuncher is a slur. nobody ever has anything nice to say about facepunchers. it’s all criticism and abuse. “that facepuncher punched my face. i hate it when people do that”. what a slur.
my picks for the hot new slurs of summer 2018 include
“oh fuck im falling off this cliff”
and
“i hate this fucking migraine”
(This would not be complete without a quick #notallfacepunchers. For example, this hero of the people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzwfqUlwMNU )
