Happy to read that Caitlyn Jenner is working on a better relationship with older kids:
As usual, ignore the comments. I sometimes wonder how there could possibly be that many people with nothing better to do in their lives than go on every single news story involving LGBT people, Jews, or black people â never mind Muslims! â and say truly abominable things.
Mean people suck.
@DonnaL and itâs always President Obamaâs fault (with some horribly disrespectful play on his name).
Great story in post 376. Read the fbk posterâs follow up comment. Well done.
Agree @DonnaL. My local news outlet finally disabled comments completely for all stories. I have to be out the door by 5:30am and would often wonder who is filled with such vitriol at 4am - particularly about things that they claim they have no interest in.
Yes, they are on our local news message board too, commenting on local stories but ranting about national political (using that loosely) topics.
With all the hate being thrown around, and there is far too much of it, keep in mind that usually people with an axe to grind are going to be a lot more likely to go on places and post the kind of bile you see. If you listened to talk radio, you would figure that the world is mostly full of angry, hateful people who seem to be attila the hun socially or politically, but that isnât true, the answer is the kind of people who spew the angry, hateful stuff on talk radio simply are the kind of people likely to call in and so forth. When you have public comments, the haters are looking for that opportunity to write vile things, it is the nature of the beast. Those who are supportive, those who basically donât know why it is such a big deal, also tend not to be people who will go out of there way to post and so forth (some do, of course, but they arenât generally quite as motivated IMO). It doesnât make the vileness of it any less hurtful, or scary, but it is also wise not to take too much out of it. When same sex marriage first looked like it might actually come to pass, back in the 90âs, You saw a lot of hate, and societal attitudes seemed to back that up,based on how many were against it. Today, when you read comments on same sex marriage, you would think that society hasnât changed,that most people hate gays and so forth, you see pretty much IME the same percentage of people spewing garbage, but they donât reflect society, probably never did in a sense.
Yes, I agree, the amount of hate that transgender people face is mind-boggling and horrific.
On the other hand, I think a lot of people are curious and have legitimate questions that are hard to bring up because there is a risk that they will be perceived as bigoted or backward-thinking.
I have a question that I would like to ask someone but that I would never raise with my transgender friend and acquaintances for fear of insulting them somehow.
Here goes: I wonder whether society could ever get to a place where conceptions of gender will be flexible enough so that the whole concept of transgender will be obsolete.
I guess Iâm wondering to what degree is a transgender personâs drive to change their body driven by external, societal definitions of gender.
Could society ever change enough so particular individuals would not have to change their bodies to be true to their own internal conception of themselves? In other words, is there any way that a pre-transition transgender personâs feeling of being assigned to the wrong gender could in any way be caused by societyâs overly restrictive gender definitions?
I understand this is outmoded thinking, and that the current thinking is that there is something more essential about gender than its simply being a societal construct, etc. But still I wonder about it, not in a challenging, polemically way, but just in a curious way.
I would love to hear the views of transgender people on this topic, but I have the sense that this sort of question has somehow been relegated to the âbadâ or âbackwardâ category, and as being inconsistent with transgender rights. I donât think it is. What do others think?
Iâm from a liberal non-religious background and I feel strongly that everyone should be who they need to be, and other people should be tolerant and let people live their own lives. That being said, I understand that there are people who are truly freaked out and upset by transgender people, whether its for religious reasons, or deeply ingrained ideas about sexuality that arenât âfluid.â Though some of it is, I donât think its all malice. I think some of it is just subscribing deeply to a world-view that doesnât allow gender flexibility. Iâm not sure its completely a choice for those folks either.
Personally, though many of us may want it, I donât think its realistic to think weâll get to a point that everyone will be fully accepting of all sorts of gender variations and preferences. I think we may get to a more peaceful place if we just accept that some people will never like that there are transgender people (and many other types of people) and they donât have to like it. They just have to be tolerant, polite, and not step on anyoneâs rights. I think some people get more hostile when they are asked to celebrate something they just donât like, or they are told they need to see something in a way they donât. I think maybe there needs to be a bit of tolerance on both sides.
You mean like in Samoan culture, which embraces a third gender.
http://theculturetrip.com/pacific/samoa/articles/fa-afafines-the-third-gender/
Notelling, that question gets asked of trans people all the time â if gender roles and stereotypes were eliminated, why couldnât you just live as a feminine male; why couldnât you just live as a masculine female? If âgenderâ were abolished (as in the feminist utopia), and all âgender expressionsâ were available, with none connoting male or female, wouldnât that mean that there would be no more trans people?
The answer is âno.â Of course there would still be trans people. Because questions like that all completely ignore the fact that for many trans people, body dysphoria plays as large â or larger â a role than social dysphoria. Many people can and do live as âfeminine malesâ or âmasculine females,â in circles where they receive little or no disapprobation, and are happy to do so. I would never have been. I tried long enough to live as a man, after all! At a certain point, I realized there was no hope of suppressing who I was. And yes, I began treating the body dysphoria medically more than four years before my social transition, because, at the time, it was the only way of feeling at least a little bit better at a time when I believed social transition was a practical impossibility for me.
[Cont.] So, even in the feminist utopia, yes, I would still have wanted to change my body. I had âbody dysphoriaâ (including all aspects thereof), since earliest childhood, at least back to the age of 3. (I know it was there well before I read Baumâs âLand of Ozâ at the age of 6 - the one about Tip becoming Ozma! My most memorable childhood book, I think: of course I knew it was just a story and involved magic, but it was the first thing I had ever read that suggested that I might not be the only person in the world who thought about such things.) As far as I can remember, in fact, my âbody mapâ felt wrong in certain respects even when I didnât really know what the physical difference was supposed to be between boys and girls.
And people like me have been around forever; the treatment of âtranssexualismâ is not something invented by the medical and/or surgical professon out of wholecloth, but was developed to meet an existing demand and help a lot of very unhappy people. If one reads some of the case histories gathered by people like Magnus Hirschfield and Havelock Ellis in the late 19th and early 20th century, the desire to change not simply gender expression and/or social gender, but bodies as well â at a time when hormone treatments were not yet available, let alone surgery beyond âcastrationâ â itâs heartbreaking.
Jazzymom; some people are happy with the idea of a âthird genderâ option, and consider themselves non-binary or agender or gender-fluid or gender-nonforming or genderqueer. And itâs fine with me if itâs only an option, rather than being compulsory. Because I donât identify as a âthird genderâ; I identify as a woman. As a child, I wanted to be a girl, not a âtranssexualâ person. I am always concerned when âthird genderâ or âgender-neutralâ becomes an option â whether in bathrooms or legal documentation â that the inevitable result is to (subtly or not) push trans people into that category, whether they identify with it or not, and to classify them as ânot menâ or ânot womenâ even if they think of themselves as men or women. I think of trans women as a subcategory of women, not a separate category. So when forms â as they now sometimes do â give the gender boxes "male, âfemale,â and âotherâ or âtransgender,â I never hesitate to check âfemale.â
I find it much easier to understand how a trans person thinks than the âthird genderâ people. Even though Iâm kind of tomboyish, and not much attracted to a very feminine presentation, I have never had any doubt that Iâm female. So I imagine that if someone were like me, but born in a male body, theyâd have a tough time, because it feels to me like I would have had a tough time if Iâd been born in a male body. I would think I was female, but my body would be male, and that does not sound comfortable.
But the third gender people are more confusing. I donât know what a third gender is. More power to third gender people, but I canât quite grok what a third gender is supposed to be.
I havenât hear that usage in a long time - it takes me back
Which usage â grok? That word does make me think of the 1960s!
What Makes a Woman?
There is a collision course between feminists and transgender activists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html
^ Interesting- and, of course, those of us at a certain age do remember the struggles to be accepted as people with minds, ambitions, and qualities beyond our boobs. We had real drive for âself-determination,â a lust to go further and the goods to do so. But even at the time, I found the advice to wear sensible blue suits, to go for some unisex mentality, to be repressive. I felt you never get freedoms by trading one canned expectation for other, equally restricting ones.
I have thought that one nice evolution, in the intervening years, was that we took a breath and realized being a woman has many expressions. We got maternity leaves, we no longer wince, self-defensively, at women who spend some mommy years. We stopped trying to âbeâ those old men in the workforce- or be invisible- and discovered ourselves, our own potential and contributions. Women did back off on judging other women (and I really donât care about how the path to womanhood was traveled, as much as the present-day qualities and contributions.)
Caitlyn Jenner is a stranger to me. I donât count her as particularly bright, Iâm not into athlete worship. I did once meet Bruce, spend a few hours across the table at a bar concert- and no big impression at all. Jenner is no brain researcher. Heâs going to jumble concepts like the rest of us.
He does NOT define me. And guess what? I feel zero need to define Caitlyn. She is no threat to me. I can allow her to have some sexy shots in a magazine. How I respond further will depend on what sort of human she is. And isnât that what we fought for?
I donât want to get into judging all transgender people or the idea of the public transition based on what kind of a human Bruce was or Caitlyn is. She doesnât represent the psyche of the transgender community any more than I represent the psyche of the cis-female community.
I also think itâs easier for cis-women to say âmy looks donât define me as a womanâ or âI donât have to dress up like that to feel feminine and beautifulâ because no matter how regular or even homely or frumpy we look people treat us and interact with us a women. The worst make up job and outfit will never make me look like, as Donna said in talking about what makes Caitlyn different, a man in a dress. I could also wear menâs suiting and would still be treated like a woman in a suit. What I wear and how I groom myself does not impact at all how people perceive my gender and interact with me. Yes, they might interact differently on issues of power or sexiness or interest but not on the core of who I am.
As an athletic man with a tall frame, Caitlyn has to do more to read as a woman to others and thus be treated as a woman.
To me that larger fight over who is more oppressed is distasteful. I am not going to get into resenting Bruce for being able to make money as a athlete in a time that women couldnât or for not having to worry about being raped. I think it also discounts all the difficulty that a trans person goes through. That NYT piece has a tone that trans people want to have their cake and eat it too. âHe got all the benefit of male privilege and now that heâs 65 he wants to be hot and have perky boobs and painted nails?!â That implies that itâs been all just a walk in the park and bed of roses up until now.