> How can you consolidate the facts that "man" and "woman" mean absolutely nothing, they don't describe how you act, express or present, but at the same time you can feel like a "man"
We could have a long conversation about this, but the actual useful short answer here is, I don't. I don't call it. Anything.
Because it's not my job to decide for you your gender.
I want to keep on circling back to this point. You are still trying to come up with the rules about who is and isn't a man; what the criteria is that they have to meet. I reject those rules. If, as you are saying, gender impacts nothing and you have no concept of it, then there is no reason not to treat transgender people with respect, to gender them correctly.
If you're arguing that the word "man" and "woman" means nothing, then why are you out here saying that someone is mistakenly calling themselves a man or a woman? (note that if you are arguing that the words man and woman mean genitals or chromosomes and everything else must extend from there, I am going to call that out as biological essentialism, literally hundreds if not thousands of years of feminism exist that talk about the problems with that kind of reduction of male and female experience).
I do have theories about what gender is and how it works and what its limitations as a concept are. They might be right, they might be wrong. But what I really reject is the sexist notion that it is my job to determine for everyone else the limitations and rules of gender, pronouns, presentation, and especially identity.
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> My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.
And I want to keep hammering this point -- then why are you misgendering people? You have no concept of gender... but you're calling men women against their wishes.
I reject the notion that gender needs to be a prescriptive, socially-assigned identity. Not because I don't have my own opinions, but because I reject the sexist notion that this is my decision to make for other people.
I think that wrapped up in the need to understand why a transgender man or a transgender woman knows they are a man or a woman, is this instinct that has been hammered into all of us by society that people have to prove their gender to you. But they don't. It can be really interesting to talk about the why, and if you go into trans spaces where people feel really safe, they do talk about the why.
But the "why" is academic. The practical side is, "I don't have to prove to you that I am who I am. You are not in charge of my identity."
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> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you
To expand on the above, the entire point of the trans movement is social and legal rights. The point of the trans movement is equality for trans people.
Trans people themselves are not a movement, they're simply people who exist who have a gender identity (like many cis people who also have a gender identity and will also be very offended if you misgender them). The transgender movement is a response to oppression of transgender people, that's all that it is. It is not a demand that you think about gender in a certain way, it is a demand that groups like the GOP stop trying to oppress transgender people, drive them out of public society, and remove their bodily and social autonomy.
It is a small thing, but people respecting you enough to use the gender that you identify as when they refer to you is, I think, a pretty straightforward ask. People act like this is really weird, but try misgendering cisgender people for a day and see how mad they get. In this comment section you're seeing people get mad about the term cisgender. So let's not act like the transgender community has all of the fragile people here.
Again, this respect boils down to: do you feel like you're in charge of everyone's gender? Do you feel like their identity is your decision to make? Do you feel like their pronouns, their appearance, how they go through social spaces is your decision based on your criteria, or do you respect their understanding of their own identity?
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> So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.
Right here you're kind of close to vocalizing something very important. I would not say that gender means nothing, but I would say that (I personally believe) it is a social construct. And the question I ask is: if gender doesn't ultimately physically mean anything, if it is a set of categories that are socially defined, then why not play with it? What natural law or moral code is being violated by playing in that space, changing it up, exploring it, bending it, even rejecting it? The space is a social construct, we can do with it what we want.
And so there are transgender people who identify as agender and who are totally neutral on the concept. Some who are nonbinary. We have transgender people who are nongender who reject the notion of gender entirely (and not in the weak 'gender-critical' way where terfs are still very much embracing gender, just tying it harder to biology).
There are transgender people who go by "it". There are transgender people who use meta-pronouns. There are gender-fluid people.
And you might think that's silly, but it does have a really cool effect: if you're a self-conscious girl or boy who feels weird about gender norms and feels like society is constantly telling you that you need to act a certain way because you do or don't have a penis -- suddenly there's this community that could not give a darn about that. They aren't going to tell you that you have to act a certain way to be a man, they aren't going to tell you that you can't wear a dress, they aren't even going to tell you that you have to call yourself a man or a woman.
The cool thing about stripping away both the social rules and all of the "no, you don't understand yourself, you're just confused, let us tell you what you are" talk -- the cool thing is that when you strip that away, what you're left with is authentic, unburdened, honest expression. The kind of authenticity that doesn't require you to constantly prove your identity or perform for other people. You end up with a community that just... accepts you.
And I think that's a wildly positive thing if we're actually trying to push past gender stereotypes and to question the toxic patriarchal norms that society drills into our heads day after day about what manhood and womanhood mean. Maybe you think that agender people are silly. Or if you don't have an internal concept of gender, maybe it's the opposite and you think that agender or nongender people are the only non-silly ones! But it doesn't matter where you fall on that, these spaces are really positive grounds for people to question gender and to question their relationship with gender. Not only do I not see the harm, I see the benefits.
And then I look over at the gender-critical and the terf side and I see... bathroom bills, and people snorting about how they can "always tell", and book bannings, and denial of bodily agency even for transgender adults, and concern-trolling about fertility, and all of this toxic stuff that is so weirdly common in terf circles -- all bundled up into this general prescriptivism around manhood and womanhood that is so clearly not helping people or moving forward any kind of serious conversation about how a social construct impacts our lives and how we should react to it.
It doesn't mean anything to say that you're rejecting gender if you don't have the actions to back it up -- but the transgender community actually has the actions to back it up.