Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and other anti-trans influencers personally benefited from a right-wing academic social group backed by infamous human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, sometimes meeting at his island.

Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and other anti-trans influencers personally benefited from a right-wing academic social group backed by infamous human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, sometimes meeting at his island.

  • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    23·
    1 day ago

    I think you run into problems with this when we know now that gender identity is biological and genetic - there is at least a biological and fixed component to gender, such that you can’t just take a cis man and make them into a woman (as David Reimer’s case proved: after a botched circumcision he was surgically made into a girl and then raised from birth as a girl, but despite that he had a persistent male gender identity and eventually transitioned to male as a teenager). This is why conversion therapy doesn’t work, you can’t change someone’s gender identity (or their “subconscious sex”).

    When you start to think of someone’s gender based primarily on gender identity, we can see a way of viewing someone as a woman who doesn’t appear enough as a woman to be accepted socially as a woman - i.e. who appears to be a man and lives socially as a man, but who “on the inside” is a woman.

    This is the case with trans people, where their gender identity conflicts with biological and social components of their sex and gender. (This is also the case with some intersex individuals, who for various reasons might similarly struggle; a large percentage of intersex people are also trans.)

    Medical transition might lead to that person having a body more aligned with their gender identity, and might lead them to be accepted socially as their gender, but when we are talking about personal identity and questions of whether someone is innately a woman, the science is pretty clear that the identity is more about their brain than the rest of their body, and ever since there were autopsies of the brains of trans women that found they have structures correlated with gender identity that match cis female brains and not cis male brains, the evidence has pointed to accepting that trans women are a kind of woman (at least on the inside) even if they don’t transition medically or socially.

    When we say trans women are women, we mean they have a female gender identity, and in that sense they are women regardless of the body or social role they inhabit.

    Furthermore, these anti-trans individuals promote debunked pseudo-science theories about trans people, they are not just evil but they also hold little regard for truth or science.

    Steven Pinker even wrote a blurb for Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen which promotes the debunked theory of autogynephilia (the false belief that trans women are just men who transition to live as women for erotic pleasure).

    Here are a list of articles that go into the details of why this theory is wrong:

    https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/autogynephilia-junk-science-and-pseudoscience

    If you’ve never heard of autogynephilia or are unfamiliar with the debates, a good starting place is here.

    Here are some decent overviews on the science of sex & gender in video format:

    If you feel like reading actual studies and technical documentation on this topic, here are some relevant citations:

    citations here
      • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        11·
        1 day ago

        Just to raise awareness, “transgenderism” is generally considered a phrase to avoid, it’s a term cultivated and used by the anti-trans movement to try to present transness as a political ideology (and to deny the kind of biological reality of gender dysphoria).

        (I know the term does have a longer history than just the anti-trans use, I would google Julia Serano’s 2015 article “Regarding Trans* and Transgenderism” for more about the history, but at this point the trans community has abandoned the term and now the term is considered anti-trans.)

        My point is very fine: to claim “I am transgender” is not the proximate cause of transgenderism. “I am transgender/I am a woman” is an observation of a fact that, as you pointed out, has been scientifically shown to be genetic.

        We started with your claim that saying “I am a woman” doesn’t make you a woman (because your definition of a woman was as someone who lives and is accepted as a woman by social consensus).

        We don’t have to think that identity claims are the cause of someone’s gender identity to accept someone’s identity claim given our evidence about gender identity. Ultimately we don’t have any independent way to verify someone’s gender identity, so our only knowledge is through how someone self-identifies. In a real sense we accept someone’s gender identity is what it is because they say it is so. I don’t think the distinction you are making is the point of anti-trans people like Dawkins, who insist trans people are palpably not who they say they are - instead these people insist that the body (not the brain) is the source of someone’s gender, and when there is a conflict between their “brain sex” (gender identity) and the body, they seem to think the person’s gender and sex is “really” their body’s sex, not their brain’s sex. I think this view only makes sense if you don’t think about the evidence we have about personal identity and the brain, and so it relies on staying ignorant about brain sex and only considering superficial aspects like someone’s body to determine gender.

        I think the way you define woman, as a female gender identity regardless of body or social role, is more narrow and sophisticated than mine or the common person’s definition. We need a seperate word for this to avoid confusion.

        I don’t think we need a separate word, if anything it benefits the acceptance of trans & intersex people to root gender in gender identity rather than in perceived bodies or adherence to social norms. That is to say, trans women really are women, and there is no real problem to solve here.

        We already seem capable of distinguishing between “kinds of women” - i.e. women as a socially recognized role vs women as an innate gender identity, and being able to get people to understand this aspect of biology better will hopefully reduce unnecessary stigma that is motivated by ignorance and bigotry.

        That said, I am sympathetic to the intuition that there is some tension when we see someone who says they are a woman but who appears as a man in every way - I’m not sure what to do about this, in some sense that tension is the result of that woman being denied proper access to care that would resulted in her appearing more as a woman (e.g. puberty blockers and HRT to avoid going through the wrong puberty). So in some sense, I think better access to care and providing means of social and medical transition is the best way to solve this - usually women want to be women in their bodies and social role as well, and we should facilitate that by increasing awareness of transness and ensuring people who are trans realize they are and then get access to care before puberty.

        Even in that ideal world, this approach doesn’t really address people who have gender identities that fall outside the binary (and thus their gender is not going to be male or female), or people whose bodies are so altered for various reasons (like non-consensual surgeries performed on intersex babies) that even with transition they struggle to “fit” in a binary identity - but I tend to think acceptance is a better alternative to coming up with a different word to exclude them from being accepted as their gender identity.

          • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            12·
            1 day ago

            I’m not sure what your question is … are you saying how credible should we take a 60 year old man claiming to be a 7 year old girl?

            I hope you can see how divorced this is from the context of discussing trans identity, since the man doesn’t claim to be a 60 year old woman, but instead believes himself to be a 7 year old girl (assuming he wasn’t just joking because he’s wearing the outfit for a different reason, like a birthday party).

            If he really believes this, it is more likely a result of psychosis than something like gender identity, so it’s unrelated to the present topic.

            Trans people are not psychotic, their gender identity is not a delusion or the result of a psychiatric condition, it is a developmental neuro-endocrine disorder that results in incongruence between the way the brain develops and the way the rest of the body develops.