Rishi Sunak says 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman'

**Marie Monday** · 10-28-2023, 11:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jadis

No Marie, that's precisely what this statement does not say or imply. It is not an endorsement of gender norms. A definition of the female experience as synonymous with or confined to that of gender-confirming or "feminine" women is the precise opposite of what this is about.

This is what Allison Bailey looks like:

What it entails is that we should embrace the real diversity of our world, that women who look like her should be accepted as nature made them. The experience of a future weightlifting champion growing up and the experience of an effeminate boy who you know is going to be gay at age 4 are male experiences, because both were born men.

I'll be the first to admit that how we think of our bodies is mediated through the classificatory networks of meaning residing in our language and culture. And where you have classification you also have norms and normalization. Developing an awareness (sometimes heightened and sophisticated, as with Judith Butler) of this leads different people to different conclusions and strategies.

The radical position (let's call it "gender ideology") is to conclude that we should fight and subvert the norm. But its proponents' hyperfocus on our semantic and cultural networks of classification runs the risk of making them oblivious to the actual, real diversity that already exists in the world prior to our normalizing and repressive classifications. To acknowledge that diversity we do not need to invent new pronouns or "correct" bodies through medical intervention. Being born as a man or a woman need not and does not pigeonhole you as one culturally determined version of either.

Shaving bone off your brows and jaw to look more like what you imagine women should look like is not freedom from stereotypes. It means you operate wholly in the realm of stereotypes.

[Part of the problem is that so much of gender theory's verbiage comes from the humanities. Natural scientists know that norms are amenable to expansion, shift, transformation in ways have nothing to do with our crude sloganeering about "subversion"]

you have not understood my point. None of these thoughts are new to me.

jadis · 10-30-2023, 06:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Synthgirl

Hi! I'm back from my two weeks of having this site blocked.

It's pretty funny that you seem to think trans people are just playing into stereotypes. Like yeah, I do play into performative stereotypes sometimes. Because I don't want to get misgendered! Do I actually think woman = dresses/makeup/femme stereotypes? Of course not. But I'm gonna get more people calling me "sir" if I don't wear a bit of eye makeup or paint my nails or wear a skirt or something. Not the most ideal way to say "hey I'm a woman", but I don't have that by default so those femme stereotypes are a quick and easy way of signifying that. It's society that directly associates all that with being a woman. It's their world, I'm just living in it, y'know?

I thought you had trans friends? This is pretty basic trans stuff lol.

You're saying that you need the more stereotypical paraphernalia of femininity to signal to other people that you're a woman, cause otherwise they would take you for a man. I agree that it's very basic trans stuff and don't think one needs to have trans friends to understand this. We know. But I don't see how this addresses the emphasis in the Allison Bailey quote, which is not placed on playing up stereotypes but on something more basic and ontological: to those not born women, the experience of being a woman is only accessible from the outside. Meaning, inevitably, through stereotypes. She says nothing about any particular MTF's motives for self-expression through stereotypes, merely that it's the only path open to them.

jadis · 10-30-2023, 07:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marie Monday

you have not understood my point. None of these thoughts are new to me.

Could you pls explain it?

**Marie Monday** · 10-30-2023, 03:11 PM

I'm a lazy and sloppy debater but I'll try to articulate it better. What we think of as 'feminine' encapsulates a lot more than one's sex, and of course we all agree that letting your sex dictate that you should be any of those things is hateful. So you can peel back what femininity means until you're left with anything to do with genitals etc. If we could just do that (which would be ideal) there would be no gender dysphoria, in fact there would be no 'gender' at all.

But in practice, gender does exist and we can't wish it away. A lot of what we consider aspects of female experience are not bound to sex and a cis woman does not nexessarily need to have them, but we do identify them as feminine because, inevitably, the word does mean more to us than things that come with a vagina. As it is, I don't think you can limit the female frame of reference to those few things that cis women necessarily have in common; it's just not that simple, it doesn't reflect femininity as we understand it, and the differences in perspective between people of female sex are great enough that I think the frame of reference would be scant and incoherent.

So we have two options. Either we impose that femininity is just about sex, in which case the flexibility of identifying as trans would disappear, but the associations we have with femininity would remain because you can't force people to just think differently, and trans people would be confined in a role that doesn't correspond to who they are, so we would be back in the old, reactionary situation. Or we can (as long as gender still means something to us) make it more flexible and give people at least the space to navigate these ideas of masculinity and femininity as they wish, while breaking them down naturally and gradually.

Of course I see the problems you see. I've been worried about them since I was 16. I just think that it's still the better option, for the reasons stated above.

jadis · 10-30-2023, 06:57 PM

I kinda follow your train of thought but not quite, and it's okay. I suspect this is in part because a word like "gender" is used to mean many different things and it can take some effort to figure out what it means in each given instance. I'd recommend (not to try to change your mind or bring you over to my position or anything like that, but because it's great at clarifying the terms we're stuck with) Kathleen Stock's book, written with the express purpose of thinking through these issues (esp that of language) in the most lucid, rigorous and accessible way possible. For instance she lists four distinct meanings of the word "gender" in current usage.

Her discussion of why we want to preserve the word "woman" for natal women and the word "man" for natal men seems to me very compelling but I'd love to hear it challenged (if only because that's how we develop better understanding of complex ideas).

**Marie Monday** · 10-31-2023, 03:35 AM

Simply put to me, gender just means any identity to do with being male/female etc. that's not about ones sex. In reality that's a bit more complicated of course, because sometimes what is sex and what is gender is not entirely clear

jadis · 10-31-2023, 07:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marie Monday

Simply put to me, gender just means any identity to do with being male/female etc. that's not about ones sex. In reality that's a bit more complicated of course, because sometimes what is sex and what is gender is not entirely clear

Beautifully put.

Yet what makes this indeterminacy possible is that sex is one of the two poles here.

Once you "make it more flexible by including trans," you're by necessity discarding sex and are left with gender alone, which happens to be the exact goal of trans activism. My views on why this is ill-advised are known. It's not about flexibility but about power.

WWWP · 11-01-2023, 04:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Synthgirl

It's pretty funny that you seem to think trans people are just playing into stereotypes. Like yeah, I do play into performative stereotypes sometimes.

Lol

Synthgirl · 11-01-2023, 09:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by WWWP

Lol

I mean that particular phrasing looks funny yeah. But I think I explained it well enough in the rest of the post.

jadis · 11-01-2023, 12:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jadis

Beautifully put.

Yet what makes this indeterminacy possible is that sex is one of the two poles here.

Once you "make it more flexible by including trans," you're by necessity discarding sex and are left with gender alone, which happens to be the exact goal of trans activism. My views on why this is ill-advised are known. It's not about flexibility but about power.

Once the view expressed in the quote below found its way out of grad seminars (where I was exposed to it and found it fascinating, esp as I've dealt a lot with Butler's critique of Foucault and French thought in general, which is very smart and original) and into societal institutions,

Quote:

The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms.
—Judith Butler (1989, p. 1)

this is where it leads

Quote:

Her penis was erect and sticking out of the top of her trousers.
—Charlotte Dangerfield prosecuting Karen White (Evans, McCann, and Rudgard 2018)

Btw there's been a lot of talk about Butler in Israel recently after this pearl of wisdom went viral. In her writings about gender there's the same unwillingness to consider the real world applications of Theory.

10-30-2023, 06:57 PM	#25 (permalink)
jadis Music Addict Join Date: Jun 2021 Location: dont ask Posts: 1,359	I kinda follow your train of thought but not quite, and it's okay. I suspect this is in part because a word like "gender" is used to mean many different things and it can take some effort to figure out what it means in each given instance. I'd recommend (not to try to change your mind or bring you over to my position or anything like that, but because it's great at clarifying the terms we're stuck with) Kathleen Stock's book, written with the express purpose of thinking through these issues (esp that of language) in the most lucid, rigorous and accessible way possible. For instance she lists four distinct meanings of the word "gender" in current usage. Her discussion of why we want to preserve the word "woman" for natal women and the word "man" for natal men seems to me very compelling but I'd love to hear it challenged (if only because that's how we develop better understanding of complex ideas).