termidin

The following is something I wrote to comment on a reddit post defending the use of the term “sex” to mean “reproductive sex”, under which saying “trans women are biologically male” would mean “trans women can only reproduce with cis women”. I think my points are valid. But I wrote them to clarify my own thought process. If I post them in response to the poster pedant, there would be a long angsty discussion that would drain me at a time when I have to be 100% at capacity. I need to let it go. So my response instead goes here.

The main weakness is that in practice, when it comes to animals, we often do use a “master construct” of “biological sex” which means all the different subcomponents being aligned and pointing in either direction. In humans, retaining that use is highly problematic. The thought of myself as “biologically male” is abhorrent even if it was entirely uncoupled from role and position and. It is furthermore important to me that I am like other women in regard to all those other biological sex characteristics. Reproduction is the least meaningful of the biological sex continua, really. So I work to be “female” in all biological regards I can.

As long as you use the terms “male” and “female” to denote reproductive compatibility in some two-sex reproduction systems, what you say is true in the sense that we could describe the same reality and your statements would not be inconsistent under your language framework. However it is not the only way we could choose to define those words.

To me as a (somewhat established, now moving in to work on sex hormones and how they impact systemic disease) biologist, there are no formal terms that just state unqualified “male” or “female”. There are terms of karyotypic, specific genetic, endocrine, transcriptional, anatomic etc. “male” and “female” and they each describe concepts that almost always are continua, often have bimodal distributions, often have overlaps in those distributions, and often are correlated with each other, correlations which break down under intersex and under transition. I do not refer to someone as just “male” or “female” without qualifying which regard I mean. As a trans woman, I am presently e.g. karyotypically male, endocrinologically closer to female, anatomically closer to male (which likely will change), etc. E.g. my anatomic and endocrine sexes are not the same, and I don’t recognize as useful any master contruct of biological sex above the individual properties, if I want to talk about the correlation structure I can just do that directly.

When I do use unqualified “male” or “female” about humans in everyday speech it is not as a scientific term, it is intended to be understood as shorthand for the constructs of “man” and “woman” and carry the same opt-out, opt-in clauses as those do for me. More and more people are using language in this way, inside and outside of science and medicine, and I think it is good that we do. For lab animals in order to be quickly understood I will still use “female mice” e.g. as a short-hand for XX mice, e.g. in the sense of “ovarectomized female mice were supplemented with E2, then assessed for tumor growth”. But sex so used is a short-hand I neither need nor want for humans, and the animal use case is also an area where scientific terminology well may come to shift over the next decades.

If I wanted to address specifically what you talk of, I would talk of “reproductive sex” (leaving aside complexities that vary within and across species). I don’t think any practical utility is lost, whereas some is gained, by having that specified.

How do I start being consistent? Well, where space allows, and where I have enough clout (I don’t always), I might start specifying “genetically male mice” (implying endocrinology and anatomy following, even where we might alter both of these). Probably just using “genetically male/female” per default. It feels like a cop-out because then I am still using the ghost of the master construct, assuming typical development as it were, but if the alternative is full descriptive: “genetically, anatomically and endocrinologically male mice” which is too long, or unqualified, I’ll try to push this alternate term. Let’s see if it ends up in a paper sooner of later.

Looking back into thread, OP is providing amazing responses to this that are better than mine and I want to meet her and buy her drinks. That aside, the insight with regards to the animals is important and I should get to work on that.

Another comment in the thread makes the claim that someone’s womanhood is about whether others treat them so. As with sex and gender both, I want them at least implicitly qualified to who it is that assigns. And my sex, and my gender, if the two are not symbolic links to each other, is about how I label myself. Others inform that label. But stating I am not a woman in Texas because the Texans would not see me so does not match my use of the term. I am one equally there, in the sense that my own labeling of my own sexed body remains there.

Need to regain focus and grasp hold on that science so it can get to where I need it.

contrapunctus

I slept but am still somewhat affected. These spirals used to be frequent before I transitioned. Now they only really happen if something targets that directly. This wasn’t even new thoughts or good thoughts, I just came onto them when weakened from stress and tiredness and did not expect to. This day I must deal with a million things, so I need to clear this out and get back to a peaceful mode.

The argumentation threw around the usual claim that gender both “is not real” and is a social construct created by patriarchy, mixing also gender and gender stereotypes and gender identity wildly. This always boggles, why would not social constructs be real? They exist within material substrates and like all other such things can sometimes be easily altered, sometimes with more difficulty. This reasoning was paired with the likewise usual claim that “biology” is real and not malleable.

The counterpoints here then, just to reiterate: biology is no more cleanly defined than mathematics. Human sexual biology can mean any number of things – anatomy, endocrinology, behaviour descriptions, reproductive descriptions, physiology, genetics. These are each more or less fuzzy and just as physics is a social construct in that descriptions of time and space refers to reference measurements for length and duration, so does sexual biology reference a body of knowledge generation, even where the boundaries are easy to draw, someone still needs to draw them. This is not controversial. Presently, for example, I retain an XY karyotype (unlike most seen as women or seeing themselves as women) in most or all of my cells. I may or may not still have any gamete production to speak of, so reproductively I may have had but now lost the capacity of fathering? Hormonally my system is in female ranges, neurally is all mosaic but apparently changing statistically towards a female reference population (and may or may not have central parts which already was there underlying my gender identity, who knows?); same with regards to most of my anatomy. All of which emerges unto: definition of “biological sex” depends on what properties one involves and where one draws the line.

Gender as I define it, and this is a definition I wish to propagate, is the way that sexual biology (under an opt-out & opt-in framework, for we are not barbarians) is reflected in human relating, cognition, emotion and action. Thus the above _activity of_ science of sexual biology is an example of (making) gender, it is a recognition and relating to observations of these aspects of the material world. Talking of men and women, males and females, thinking of it, feeling with regards to it, classifying and making decisions or holding ideation regards to it, these are all activities that are part of the phenomenon of gender, the social construct. Gender roles and stereotypes (where gender categories are statistically accompanied by other properties in some population) are part of it. Like the physics referenced above, all is defined relative to an observer, a speaker, an actor – we can think of how a person is gendered in some context by themselves or by another.

It is important then to realize how alien it would seem to us with a world where we did not gender. It would not merely be an absence of gender stereotypes or segregation with regards to secondary properties. Since gender is the very act of recognizing and having any form of action or cognition or emotion in response to sexual biology, no world where we were aware of or ever considered for any purpose any aspect of sexual biology, would be a world “free” from gender as such. Realistically, a world without gendering would be a world without sexes. That is not to say that we cannot (or that we should not) eliminate gender roles and stereotypes, of course, and as a transhumanist, I would also welcome that world without sex distinctions. But that is for the future. Since most people instead refer (often fuzzily) to gender roles when speaking of gender, they will not think of this.

What then is gender identity? In this use of the terms, gender identity are our inclinations – learned and/or instinctual – to function more or less happily under different options for our gendering. It is whether if given a choice it is better in some regard for us to gender ourselves one way or the other, to have others gender ourselves one way or the other. In the forum thread I came onto yesterday, the claim was made that this either does not exist, or that it is a recent development. The presence of gender violating shamans in early cultures (including the gallae) would gainsay the latter, and as I have outlined elsewhere, a good case can be made from various scattered sources of observations of usual and perturbed child development and evopsych just-so stories (dirty though that field often is) that this is something humanity got from our earlier ancestors still already. I have claimed and remain doing so that gender identity is a mechanism behind homosocial processes – specifically identification – that makes the memetic transmission of gender roles more likely. Unlike mice or monkeys, our species learns gender roles, they are not hard-coded, but the tendency to look for them to learn them, under this hypothesis, is hard-coded. This is why, if we wish to eliminate them (and I for one do!), that we must ensure the next generation has role models for all useful traits with all apparent sexes/genders well-represented.

I suppose the claim that gender identity exists can still be challenged. I make much of Hines’ experiment (referenced elsewhere on this blog) where artifical gender roles were preferentially learned by children, but the full constructivist response may be that on a meta-level, the inclination to learn easier from same-sex models is in itself taught from experience. I doubt this, actually, but the claim can be made. The other side of Hines’ experiment was how a population with perturbed prenatal hormones (known to be enriched for trans men) showed less inclination for this preferential learning, they recognized gendered patterns around them but were less inclined to apply expectations on their assigned sex/gender to themselves. I suppose this too could be indirect and complex. I cannot know at this point for certain if my belief that gender identity has an evolutionarily adapted, prenatally encoded, neural substrate or not. Future science will tell us more.

All I can know is that in me and in others, it appears to be present. I really can only relate to myself fully when knowing myself as being aligned to those I think of as women, rather than those I think of as men. It has vast emotional weight behind it – certainly compounding my lived history’s impact, but still there and reflecting inclinations. Acting on this to change how I see myself and am seen causes immense and persistent improvements to my social, embodied physical, cognitive and emotional health, and as this episode shows, the dysphoria which is the negative of that improvement is still going strong. The transgender experience is probably heterogeneous much as other semi-complex neuropsychiatric states, but that does not make it just a hypersphere randomly drawn in a high-dimensional space, it is phenotype for whatever reason, and most importantly, it is one for me, whether it is something I was born with or developed into. I must be gendered female if I am gendered at all, otherwise I cannot function emotionally. So for me, gender identity evidentially does exist, and this is what most matters.

Returning to the statements made; the commenter highlighted beyond “biology” also for their definition of womanhood the shared experiences (presumably statistically) of growing up with such biology. I had not considered the placement of experiences in the above scheme; if these experiences come from outside, then they can be seen in that framework as analogous to sexual biology as something which we relate to. In other words, recognition of and action in response to and cognition and emotion around either (observation of) sexual biology of some kind, or of other experiences directly or indirectly resulting from such (including from the actions of others, which in turn also can be considered to be part of gender as social construct), these are all components and aspects of gendering. This actually becomes relevant, because under that framework we must also take into account how others treat us when they have labelled us by sex/gender, our own gendering involves our relating and cognition and emotion and action in response to others gendering us and the content of that gendering.

This is not really new either, I suppose. Though it highlights how the basis for our gendering also varies. A woman not seen as such, or grown under very isolated circumstances, will lack many of those experiences; this includes most trans women – along with lacking menstruation we lack e.g. an expectation from our surroundings to get pregnant. The sexual biology and externally imposed experience substrate of our gendering is weaker (which is why we need that opt-in, opt-out aspect in a modern, civilized variant of gender as social construct). This is also why we change these things as much as we can, dare, are able to – we try to shift our biologies, and we seek out shared experiences with other women – I loathe the touch of patriarchy but part of me craves it for validation, for I need all the help I can get to be able to be gendered female.

There is however here an interesting and principally testable hypothesis. A young trans woman, not yet out to herself or to others, an egg as it were, might it be that she is more likely than boys her age to be aware of the expectations placed on girls, with respect to control of sexuality, beauty standards, future motherhood? That is to say, will she have learned these things through model observation more readily than someone with a male gender identity will, even if she as yet cannot conceive of them applying to herself (perhaps feeling sometimes sad and jealous of this)? If we had longitudinal cohorts large enough, we could test this – understanding of and especially empathy with the lived experiences of boys and girls, in apparent boys and girls, tested as functions of later trans status. I predict there would be a difference. And to some extent, I attribute the fact that feminism always felt personal to teenage me to something like this – I did not consciously feel the experiences of girls and women applied to me personally, but I always related to them. Perhaps cis men do this to the same degree, but perhaps not. This was tangential however.

I did worry upon reading, what if I misunderstand how the feeling of sameness works? I parse it as though there exists a very basic recognition of the sex of others and of ourselves, and that this has a dimension of same-as-me, different-from-me. This is something I feel, and which I believe others do too. But what if I am wrong, and for others same-sex recognition really only is the cognitive and emotionless recognition of genital configuration and shared experiences? I suppose this would mean two things: one, that there would no be emotional or social consequences of that recognition, and two, that the recognition would not involve an opt-in/opt-out option. Honestly, I don’t believe from observation of others this is the case. No-one is fully neutral to sex classification. TERFs and bros certainly are not neutral, for them it has clear emotional and social consequences. But more to the point, I have experienced plenty of contexts where I really do feel I am genuinely accepted as a woman, by women, who are aware of my trans state and my until-recently unaltered biology. I conclude that for a lot of us in this world, we really do relate to gender (regardless of content) in this more complex manner, I honestly think there are many people who gender (even present) me correctly, because that is how their gendering is done. Might this be wrong? I suppose though I don’t think so. And if so, ultimately what matters most is how I gender myself, how others gender me feeds into this but is not the same as it. And we’ll see how far I can go, how much I’ll be able to make it easier for other people to casually gender me correctly.

Wrapping up the aspect of experiences, those indeed are there and form part of the substrate used for gendering, and those indeed are not something we as trans people have the same access to as cis people; I have no problems accepting that fact as well as its implications (in a debate about pregnancy, listen to the person who was or who might become so before the person who might not). At the same time, my need to be grouped not with men but with women remains, and the feeling from yesternight stays with me, I really will do what I can and what I must to make the world recognize that. Unlike what the commenter claims, biology is not without the potential to be reshaped, and I myself am in a line of work that aims to open up more and more of it to our reshaping. This is why I do not think my transition ever is finished – I will always hold out for the possibility to become even more like the cis woman version of myself. If gene therapy allowed the silencing of any remaining Y chromosome activity, and the adjustment of my X-inactivation patterns to match expression levels I would have had with an XX karyotype, I would go for it. One day perhaps it will. If I could have the reproductive capacities of a cis woman, side effects and all, I would acquire it (and then perhaps sterilize again, which would be my reproductive choice to make as a woman). In this regard the world is flawed, but knowing I have done all I currently can still helps me see myself as I must.

Last the commenter implied something along the lines of, the fact that those women who are not cis (because, as usual, trans men are not even considered – the same really holds even for this text, which is extremely trans woman centric, but at least I warned about that already in the blog disclaimer) have to shout at the top of their lungs to be included, implies… something. Not spelled out. Presumably that we are somehow not valid? But the fact that most women are cis is not surprising – conditions of transness, alarmists aside, are rare. Most people are cis. And as for being accepted, I am not sure if this holds. Those who meet me for the first time after beginning transition may not understand, but they are less likely at least to misgender and they cannot deadname. Habit plays an important part. That said, of course it is challenging. Gender as a social construct is not independent of sexual biology or derived experience, opt-in mechanisms notwithstanding. To increase the chance of proper gendering, I need to try my best to become a person who, besides being fundamentally me, can be understood as a woman by others, bodily and socially. To this end I may even have to wear some of the stereotypes, and thus face even more ridicule and scorn from the TERFs. But the fact of these challenges, and that they reflect the interaction between sex, sex-associated experiences and gender, that does not invalidate gender as something that can be modified, hacked, adapted, nor does it invalidate the fact that I, for whatever inborn or acquired reason, need to do that to be happy.

So there. TLDR? Yes, gender is the response not only to biology but imposed experiences. Yes, gender identity likely is inborn and ancient, and in either case, crucial to adapt to for the well-being of us where it is in trans alignment. No, I cannot be certain that it has the role I believe in creating homosocial role learning, but I expect future research will continue to indicate it has. Yes, I believe that as others perform gender in practice, that will not make it impossible for them to honestly and genuinely gender me correctly, even knowing I am trans, but even if it did, then my own correct self-gendering is possible and necessary. No, the terms biology and gender does not mean what people with limited understanding of either think they do. Yes, my experiences of sexual biology or its correlates in patriarchy are different from those of a cis woman. No, that does not change my need to be gendered correctly. Yes, that indirectly informs my drive to transition in more ways, to go as far as I can. No, it is not unrealistic that we will be accepted as who we are. We are slowly winning this culture war and I will do my part.

cuts

Got surprisingly hard hit by unexpected TERF rhetorics somewhere. Will probably truncate thoughts and sleep.

At the same time, feeling increased need to be recognized. Need to take voice further. Thinking I will start correcting people until I am spoken of correctly, whether or not they are irritated. And continuing from earlier, feeling unhappy about my anatomy, for my own view of it, and because it seems like it affects how others read me. Feeling perhaps for the first time an actual longing for the end state of successful Thai-style SRS, rather than a curious interest. That is interesting but also notable as then it is not only positive but inverse negative motivation.

I’ll set aside a personal fund for this, to have the option. And perhaps some three years from now, there will be a time when my PhD students are in writeup phase and don’t need me holding their hands, and when my post-docs are experienced enough that they can hold down the fort, so that me disappearing for a month of hospitalization in Asia, then being reduced in energy and time for 3-5 months of dilation and healing, won’t make or break my research programme.

I’d still fear an unsuccessful outcome, fear failure to heal right (am I too old to heal easily?), fear the pain, fear that nerves would not reconnect, fear that I still would have a deep voice and facial features that make people think I am male, so that I somehow would have gone through all that pain and sacrifice and still not have been understood right. Fear of the sadness and pain and worry in the eyes of my parents from them knowing I was doing it, though that fear is dulled now they know I really am transitioning. Fear of being weak and alone and helpless during recovery. (To my friends and lovers and family and all who reads this: If you come to conclude you would be willing come with me and keep me company during that first month, if I made that possible for you, please let me know. Knowing I would not have to be alone would help this fear.)

Lots of fear. That said, right now that feels like the fear of something planned and anticipated. Right this moment, when I still have that TERF-fuelled dysphoria (for it is that, it is that feeling as though the world freezes and dies), then the thought of fears and physical pain and awkwardness is still not as bad. Right now my feelings of dysphoria are worse than my fear of SRS recovery. Tomorrow it might not be. But this is in some sense a first, and I find it meaningful, find it telling.

chaos dump

Some significant energies were eaten because of some semi-known feminist profile in my home country came out as TERF. I have not read her thinkpiece, nor do I think I shall, but I saw commentaries and could not let go of the concern. When something attacks my basis like this, then it’s like a throwback to those greater angsts, the OCD-like response to existential threats. They used to be there with me all the time, now they are thankfully rare – only these things cause them, and that makes sense to me. I will dump some thoughts in response and let it go.

Several others have made the claim that a gender definition that is not strictly referencing chromosomes or assigned-at-birth anatomy will make it harder to describe and combat gendered oppression. This is clearly nonsense, as it is easy to simply read “women are at risk of death in childbirth/from intimate partner violence/etc” as “most/many women are at risk of death in in childbirth/from intimate partner violence/etc” and leave it as implicit that there may be statistical exceptions enriched for among trans women, woman-loving-women etc. It’s a non-issue.

More to the point, the person seems to claim that a definition allowing for experienced identity to play a part in the definition, will lead somehow to a discourse where the general public becomes more likely to come to embrace and propagate separate gender roles. I am not quite sure of the logic – that noting “gender is in the brain” would be commonly misunderstood to mean “gender roles are inborn and characteristic of birth-assigned sex by essential reasons”? I don’t think this is so likely to be a misunderstandng that will be widespread, and if it were, then we as activists could go out and try to counter it, making clear how gender identity and role are interrelated but fundamentally different concepts, just as gender and sex in some sense are. Do I risk thus doing memetic damage by transitioning? I don’t really think so, but if I do, I will do my part to counter it in turn.

This actually gives me a new life goal component – to effectively be a role model also for gender non-conformative cis women. I will do my best.

Some other worries creeping up as I slowly moved through the day, low blood sugar, tired, maybe hungover, en route, etc. Have I somehow misunderstood my own motivations, are the reasons for why transitioning makes me happier different than I believe them to be? Probably not. But if they are, the fact remains it makes me happier, even when playing on hard mode like this.