JLH
Trans folk in Italy are on to something here. Let’s replicate this strategy every where in the U.S. where “biological gender” is being used to discriminate against trans people. Pass the word‼️ #Transphobia #Fascism
Trans Women Can't Compete for Miss Italy Pageant So 100 Trans Men Signed up
JLH
@morecowbell —-> 🧵1. I think it’s wrong to get hung up on the word “transition” when discussing trans issues. A trans person feels female or male despite biological circumstances that suggest otherwise. They do not go through a transition to arrive at those feelings. They’re born with them. The only transitions required are those that will bring the person’s body and their legal and social status into alignment to the extent possible with their feelings.
2. It’s also wrong to think that the male / female binary is anything other than an arbitrary social construct that is unjustifiably treated as a law of nature just because it happens to be embedded in laws and social norms. Many, many societies have been poly-gendered and have reflected it in their legal systems and social norms. The fact that modern western societies are organized around the male / female binary is an accident of history and is not the only or the best way to deal with gender.
3. Since western societies are not poly-gendered like other current and previous societies, trans people in the western world have difficulty attaining the legal and social freedom to be who they are without shoehorning themselves into one side or the other of the male / female binary. This forced “choice” is far from ideal since gender identity is far more nuanced than rigid and artificial legal and social definitions of male and female can accommodate.
4. That is why cis people also suffer from the male / female binary and the stereotypes organized around it. Strong, confident women with leadership capacities are denigrated as “mannish,” “aggressive,” and “scary.” Men who are gentle, loving and nurturing are lampooned as “sissies,” “wimps” and something less than “real men.” Lives and livelihoods are impaired and even destroyed by these stupid social norms. The LGBTQ+ community has done everyone a service by highlighting the issue.
5. As for the male / female binary in most of the sports world, that’s another arbitrary and unnecessary social construct. There is no reason why handicapping systems can’t be developed to allow men and women, cis as well as trans, to compete fairly against each other. Golf has been using a handicapping system forever so that men and women and players of all ages and capabilities can compete with each other. The fact that handicapping isn’t in use in other sports is just the scandalous triumph of intellectual laziness over human creativity. END
JLH
@morecowbell ——> I can’t know for sure since I’m a straight cis female but it seems to me that a person can have a unique conception of their femininity that may align with or diverge from socially-approved standards in whole or in part. So, a claim made by a biological male to be a “girl” or a “woman” — and vice versa — isn’t an automatic endorsement of social conceptions of those terms. The question of whether such a person has “bought into” gender stereotypes requires a deeper conversation usually lacking in public discourse on trans issues and other LGBTQ+ subjects.
Similarly, a trans person’s effort to obtain the same legal rights as biological males or biological females isn’t an automatic endorsement of legally or socially determined gender stereotypes. It is simply an effort to bring their legal existence into alignment with their conception of themselves as much as possible. The same can be said for their effort to align their social existence with their conception of themselves by being addressed with the names and pronouns they have chosen for themselves, by participating in sports and other activities with the gender group they most closely identify with and so on.
morecowbell
In order to have meaning “femininity” must have some sort of agreed upon definition - it may vary from culture to culture but in practice it doesn’t and even if it varied widely that specific culture would have a certain standard that would meet the definition.
These definitions have to exist in order to be a viable goal of transition.
Absent agreed upon gender markers/stereotypes/roles there is no transition.
Sports is a hard one. There is reason we have women’s sports.
morecowbell
@JLHarwell @morecowbell The notion of transition implies a something to transition to. In this case, the crime is not being recognized as legitimate member of a class (feminine women), not that the existence of a contest judging that class may be the result of a backward culture.
morecowbell
@JLHarwell This might be an example of a specific area where feminism and trans-activism are incompatible.
JLH
@morecowbell ——> why would that be?
JLH
@morecowbell ——> I agree. Beauty pageants are just one of many long running methods of mentally and physically programming girls and women for lives of abject subservience to men along the lines depicted in the Stepford Wives movie and the Total Woman ideology of the 1970s. Among the 21st century versions we have the oxymoronic “Bimbo Feminism,” the new Barbie movie, a Supreme Court justice straight out of the Handmaiden’s Tale (Coney-Barrett), bans on abortion and birth control, etc. The people ramming this stuff down our throats are obviously terrified of the changes that have occurred or will emerge in the future when girls and women free themselves of legal and social determinants of femininity.
morecowbell
@JLHarwell Why would anyone, anywhere participate in a beauty contest?
The whole concept is fucked up.
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