I'm transgender. I transitioned 17 years ago. Sometimes I call myself a t-word or tranma (because I transitioned a long time ago I'm only in my early 30's so I guess I have a few years before I'm a literal granny :'[). Should I get canceled because I said the t-word in a gay bar with my besties or when I joke around with my husband and say things like "this is what you get for marrying a t-word"? No. But it's also used as a slur against people in real life by haters who have no business saying it and I don't want them pointing at me saying it and think that they have a right to because I did. So I don't use it outside of private company.
I have met trans women, especially those who came out of the gay community like me, who use the t-word with vicious intent because of hate they have for themselves and others. They're disgusted with being trans and they're disgusted by other trans people and they throw the slur the same way a non-trans person would and in doing so give moral cover to non-trans people who hate us. "See they even hate each other and they use that word the same as we do!" If you call these self-haters out they'll claim it's fine for them to behave the way they do because they're trans too, but, no.... The reason you shouldn't use slurs has nothing to do with the slur itself, it's about the impact of it and the impact doesn't change just because you're trans yourself.
So anyway, imo, normalizing the use of slurs by publicly broadcasting them is a bad idea in general outside of very specific contexts because slurs are not just words, they are symbols for an entire series of related negative stereotypes so when we normalize those words we also normalize the ideas associated with them. AI doesn't get an n-word pass. /rant
I've never heard tranma before and it's fantastic!
Thanks for articulating this; it's helpful. My only question is: words that are labels don't create hatred, although they might signify it. Will stopping words being used do anything to reduce any hate people feel and/or increase understanding, and conversely will allowing it add any hate to people and/or decrease understanding?
Stopping the words won't stop hate but it can deescalate things and help communication take place. When someone calls me a t-word they're signaling an aggressively negative stance toward me right out of the gate. It raises the tension too high to be able to have meaningful conversation. We all know intuitively that there are things that should be left unsaid in life so that we can get along with others.... Slurs belong to that class of things.
It's not theoretical for me. My FIL doesn't know I'm trans and he loves Fox News and called some person getting covered by Fox a t-word in a really hateful way about two years ago and it's made me feel less comfortable around him. He could have just said "I don't know about this trans stuff" which I get totally but by jumping to a slur he put a barrier up. I've begged my husband to "out" me to his family at some point ... imagine how that would go now. Even assuming he can overcome the fact that his DIL who he's known for the better part of a decade is actually some sort of demon creature from a Tucker Carlson segment, don't you think he's going to think back on all the nasty stuff he said and feel awkward as heck??? Even if he moved on from it, I could never forget or trust him like I would have if he'd only revealed a more measured mistrust of trans people instead of jumping straight to calling us the most hateful thing he could think of.
It would be the same with a stranger. If you call me a slur or use the slur around me without knowing that I AM ONE OF THOSE "SLUR WORDS" it would prevent me from being able to form a relationship with you on equal footing and would make me want to hide who I am from you which just amplifies the level of misunderstanding in the world.
When lots of people are throwing slurs and stuff around in general that feeling of alienation becomes a suffocating amorphous cloud that covers you up and makes you want to retreat from society. I guess that's a feature and not a bug for the people using the slurs. They want us to stay in the gay bars and away from them and their kind but.... that's not healthy. We should all be able to participate in public life on as near to equal footing as possible.
Some people might say it's my fault because I take slurs personally but... I'm just human here. I don't wanna spend my life placating people who use slurs to describe me. I'll bet it's the same for members of other groups who have slurs that people use against them. Once somebody uses those slurs against you it's hard to build a bridge with them which is sad.
See how the situation is turning ridiculous ? Of course an AI should be able to say any word as long as the context makes it clear that it’s not actually insulting anyone. Racism, phobia of all sorts, insults, offensive discourses, hate is all part of human nature, and human history.
You can’t live without the bad sides of humanity, and you most certainly won’t erase them by simply banning words. It just doesn’t work like this. You’ll just turn the world into an horrible authoritarian regime, where it’s all rosy on the surface, just for the sake on not being sent to jail, and where the bad thoughts, being repressed and taboo, will only grow stronger.
Nobody saw an end to the good times in sight. I've hopped jobs about 5 times in my career and saw a 20-30% pay raise each time. What incentive existed to unionize in that environment? Unionization only makes sense if you think the good times won't last.
> I've hopped jobs about 5 times in my career and saw a 20-30% pay raise each time
> What incentive existed to unionize in that environment?
These situations are not incompatible.
> Unionization only makes sense if you think the good times won't last.
"Good times" is a soft term that translates to "when the employer's short term goals line up with your specific employee goals"...ostensibly to keep getting paid those big numbers.
Sure. I was just sharing my POV as someone who never cared about unionization and works in the industry. I associated unions with manufacturing and filmmaking. It didn't occur to me that they would be a good thing for software engineers since we seemed to be treated extremely well already. I also never trusted people who spoke about unions because I figured they may have ulterior motives, like placing themselves in a position of power by acting as a middleman between myself and the companies that pay me so that they could take a cut.
I'm not saying what I felt was true. It was just my instinct and because I was already richer than my wildest dreams (I come from a lower middle class background) so I didn't care to overthink it. An "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this way and since unions require popular support it's a data point toward understanding why software engineering unions aren't widespread.
> The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
> In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
> If I made my purchasing decisions according to the personal failings of the corporate executive teams of all of consumer and durable goods, I might as well live in a tent in the woods.
Elon Musk's involvement with the companies he is associated with is not the usual involvement that an executive team would have. His personal brand is intermingled with the products he sells and cars are a way of signaling social status whether we like it or not. There are certainly people for whom buying a new Tesla would decrease their social capital which could have negative impacts in other areas of their life (relevant to HN, social capital converts to actual capital in many cases by opening up business opportunities).
We're in a grace period right now when it comes to driving a Tesla, where people who already owned one can't really be blamed for supporting Musk, but the day has already arrived when buying a new one will signal poor taste and lack of social acumen to much of the white collar class.
Vulgarity is relative so if your crowd isn't this crowd, fine. But you can't blame people for wanting to avoid putting stigma on themselves when there are other EVs on the market nearly as good as Teslas which don't have the same toxicity.
> Saying something like that in real life would get you laughed at.
All you've told me here is that the people you personally associate would laugh at the idea that Tesla is a toxic brand. The world is not made up of a single social group with a single set of norms. In the groups I associate with, and no we are not blue haired SJWs I am married with a family in the suburbs and work a boring corporate job, Tesla is toxic.
Some things I try to keep in mind as much as possible:
- We are all operating from different frames of reference.
- Social networks are fundamental to our survival: people will go to great lengths to stay in the good graces of their families, friends and associates.
- "Society" is a huge tapestry of interlocking social networks, each with its own internal logic and reward systems.
- The logic and reward systems of the most powerful networks tend to leak into all the others over time to some degree.
Oh no, signaling poor taste. The travesty. Let others live their life according to the whims of “the white collar class.” I’m going to enjoy what I enjoy, and I’d like to associate with like minded folks.
I said that if you don't associate with the crowds I'm talking about it doesn't matter.
Ironically pretending that we don't play social signaling games and critiquing others for playing them is itself a sort of social signaling game. These games can't be avoided because they are a fundamental part of human interaction, so much so that when we aren't good at playing those games for whatever reason we are unable to function properly in society and are pathologized as a result.
A car specifically might not be important to you as a signaller but if you do want to associate with like minded folks you are going to seek to emulate and fit in with those groups. That's kind of how society and humans work.
Sure, you do you. Plenty of people fly confederate flags, and they have every right to do so. Just as other people have every right to judge them. This is the way.
Sounds like some stuff bored 1800s European aristocrats would care about, busy living their now pointless performative lives while revolutions are brewing and the industrial revolution is about to put the petite bourgeoisie in control of everything.
I understand what you are implying. Elon Musk has aligned himself with what appears to be a power structure that aims to replace the current dominant social order. If a social revolution comes due to war, economic restructuring or some other black swan event and The Daily Wire becomes the new CNN and Saturday Night Live skits come straight from The Babylon Bee, yes, the crowd that sees Teslas as toxic will be marginalized.
We'll see if that comes to pass. I'm guessing it won't, but if it does I'll adjust accordingly to the new reality as will we all.
I visited the Moog museum this summer with a friend while visiting Asheville, NC. I asked if they had any Wendy Carlos related memorabilia and they didn't seem to. I think may be there was a Switched on Bach vinyl up on a wall in the back.... It made me feel a little sad. I think living with gender dysphoria hurts people's self-esteem tremendously. She also lived in a time when April Ashley, who was the image of feminine beauty and grace, was accosted by old ladies in parks to shame her for "pretending" to be a woman once she was outed by UK tabloids just as her career began to take off. It's understandable why she'd want to avoid embracing fame. Even today trans people, and especially women, are an acceptable punching bag for both the public at large and public figures to take out their frustrations on....
She didn't become world famous like she may have if she'd been lucky enough to be born cisgender, but the thing that matters most is whether she found happiness in her private life. I hope she did.
The final paragraph of the article is interesting though:
> Her self-imposed seclusion is a cautionary tale for us today, something that she admitted in the 1979 People interview. “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,” she said. “There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
While that kind of tolerance/indifference wasn't available to everyone -- it probably helped to be wealthy enough to do what you want, and to be already established as a respected musician (Carlos actually was and still is world-famous!), and I'm sure it wasn't even as universal for Carlos as she was feeling it to be when she gave that quote in 1979 -- the quote makes me wonder if things have gotten worse over the past few years.
While there's more public acceptance in some quarters, it's also become a much bigger controversy in fact. It's hard to imagine a public figure feeling the kind of "indifference" Carlos described, where it didn't actually effect her career much, it wasn't a big deal to it. It was seen as an oddity, yes, but trans was perhaps not the cultural flashpoint like it is now.
Rather than "even today", I wonder and suspect that some things may actually have gotten much worse than they were in 1979 -- for all kinds of things, actually.
> It was an oddity, but trans was perhaps not the cultural flashpoint like it is now.
That's a wonderful wish, but I don't think it holds up to the evidence.
Off the top of my head:
1. If you watch HBO's Lady and the Dale, you'll see that in the mid 1970s a local reporter was hounding the company not because he suspected fraud. (Apparently the entire company was fradulent.) Nope, he wanted to reveal that Carmichael was really a man who was dressed as a woman. (If someone told me that Eugene Levy's character from Splash was based on this reporter, I'd believe them. :)
That documentary had later commentary from the same reporter (in the 80s/90s, I think)-- still proud that he outed a trans person.
2. Check out Gloria Steinem's mid 70s musings on transgenderism. Her thoughts in a 1977 essay on the subject would be right at home today on the alt-right podcasting space, and there are probably also many HN'ers lurking here who agree whole-heartedly with her anti-trans surgery statements.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to the relevant article ATM, but I'm pretty sure this quote was written in the context of the same anti-trans-surgery chapter-- "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
The point is-- we're talking about Gloria fucking Steinem! And her non-apology apology to the trans community didn't appear until 2014 or so[1].
The fact that Amazon sells trinkets with the "shoe doesn't fit" phrase tells me that there's probably a lot more anti-trans history that's been swept completely down the memory hole.
> in the mid 1970s a local reporter was hounding the company not because he suspected fraud. (Apparently the entire company was fradulent.) Nope, he wanted to reveal that Carmichael was really a man who was dressed as a woman.
That local reporter was Tucker Carlson's father, Dick Carlson.[0] Let's just say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
"In a way, transsexuals themselves are also making a positive contribution by proving that chromosomes aren't everything. By ignoring this internal structure they cannot change, and focusing on external body appearances and socialization, they are demonstrating that both biological women and men may have within them the qualities of the opposite gender and thus the full range of human possibilities. Unfortunately, this point isn't made in the popular press. On the contrary, transsexualism is used mostly as a testimony to the importance of sex roles as dictated by a society obsessed with body image, genitals, and 'masculine' or 'feminine' behavior. But the main question is whether some individuals are being forced into self-mutilation by the biases around them, and whether their self-mutilation is then used and publicized to prove that those biases are true.
"Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism. Even while we protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision, and to be identified as he or she wishes, we have to make clear that this is not a long-term feminist goal. The point is to transform society so that a female can 'go out for basketball' and a male doesn't have to be 'the strong one'. Better to turn anger outward toward changing the world than inward toward mutilating our bodies into conformity. In the meantime, we shouldn't be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals. Sex-role traditionalists know a political tribute when they see one.
"But the question remains: If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
This point of view doesn't seem typical of your average alt-right enthusiast to me, she's considering transsexualism within the context of radical feminism, specifically the abolition of gender.
I'm trans myself, and my general belief is that Steinem's position is far more defensible if we didn't have our personal lived experiences with gender dysphoria, or the evidence for things like regret rates for gender-affirming surgeries being very low. Second-wave feminism on trans issues was largely incorrect and harmful, but that is mostly a contingent fact rather than a necessary one.
This is as opposed to second-wave feminism on, for example, sex work issues, which is necessarily bad because it is more interested in moralizing than in caring about freedom or materiality.
Of course, anyone spreading the same propaganda now will not be part of the global struggle against fascism, as Judith Butler put it.
> Second-wave feminism on trans issues was largely incorrect and harmful, but that is mostly a contingent fact rather than a necessary one.
Not sure I understand what that means.
Just to clarify: I don't have the research in front of me, but I'd be willing to bet that by 1977 there were at least two or three decades of research on trans issues relevant to Steinem's words about trans people. E.g., more than enough to persuade any good faith writer on the topic (or even a writer who knew and talked to a friend in that field of research) that the "shoe doesn't fit" quote is at best wildly misleading.
In other words, I'm claiming Steinem was wrong by 2022 standards, wrong by 1977 standards, and non-apologetic by any standard.
> Of course, anyone spreading the same propaganda now will not be part of the global struggle against fascism, as Judith Butler put it.
I agree.
For some reason, Steinem's words on this topic irk me, it's my day off, and I want to keep writing this post. :)
I get that Steinem was writing a political essay. And I can even imagine a line of thinking that says, hey, good for trans people, but that's a medical intervention for a specific condition (that turns out to apply to both sexes, btw), and I think it's a distraction from the specific feminist battle against oppression I'm trying to describe.
Then all she would have had to do in 2014 is say, "Sorry trans people, your battle should have been part of my battle all along. Accept my apology, and let's work together!"
But nooooo, she had to concoct her own artisanal justification to exclude trans people, using only wit and first principles, and add a little zinger for book sales. Then, when called out, shift the conversation away from her previous lack of knowledge, and claim a lack of understanding on the part of her opposition.
Well, the issue is that a lot of the trans research that had been conducted by then got burned by the Nazis. The modern idea of gender identity which is now widely recognized as the best possible explanation for the empirical outcomes we see was just being formed, and the dominant players in the field were still "sexologists" who decided whether someone was trans based on how attracted they personally were to their patient.
(John Money, who created the idea of gender identity in the 50s, was wildly off base about the specifics, which resulted in the tragic human rights violation of David Reimer, a cisgender man forced to live as a girl with crippling gender dysphoria. He also lied about the success of his forced gender reassignments, which resulted in routine intersex genital mutilation -- the one procedure that every single right-wing US bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors carefully excludes!)
Or at least that's my read of the situation! I could be wrong.
I actually had an endocrinologist who interned with John Money and was horrified by his actions.
Money's main failure was his belief that gender is more or less exclusively a social constuct. Gender roles certainly are, but one's innate sense of their own gender is not.
> This is as opposed to second-wave feminism on, for example, sex work issues, which is necessarily bad because it is more interested in moralizing than in caring about freedom or materiality.
The radical feminist position on prostitution is about reducing harm to women as a class. That a minority choose to willingly engage in sex work doesn't negate the structural issues at play here. Most women in prostitution are from marginalized backgrounds and many are trafficked. Where is their freedom?
Fundamentally this is about men holding physical, sexual, and economic power over women, enforced by violence or the threat of it. Treating women as a product to be consumed and profited off, rather than co-equal individuals. What is so bad about wanting an end to this?
I'm specifically talking about people like Andrea Dworkin, who said:
"Prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman's body. [...] In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after"
This doesn't distinguish between survival sex work and people who are doing it more by choice, nor does it seek to improve the material conditions behind the lives of those forced into sex work, so that they have other choices and survival sex work can organically disappear. Nor does it connect survival sex work to other sorts of difficult jobs with great bodily risks.
Instead, politically, second-wave feminism has sought to orient the full weight of the carceral state against sex workers (i.e. the Nordic model), with all the expected consequences.
> If anyone was sympathetic to the struggle, it was Dworkin. She just acknowledged that it was also harmful and contributing to oppression.
Lemmy read the quote again:
> "In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after"
That's a strident statement that leaves no room for interpretation. It's clear that it's the stated opinion of the author that no woman who was fully informed of the nature of the work beforehand but prostitutes herself, could ever do it by choice, ever enjoy it, or ever have it be a meaningful, beneficial part of her life.
That right there is my problem with Dworkin's statements and other statements like them. At best, they entirely ignore (and at worst, they seek to silence so as to make the discussion "focused and un-muddled") people who enjoy fucking, and also enjoy fucking for money.
Dworkin had to prostitute herself in order to survive in the 1970s. I think you're barking up the wrong tree. If anyone was sympathetic to the struggle, it was Dworkin. She just acknowledged that it was also harmful and contributing to oppression.
That seems sensible too. What then do you make of Carlos' quote there from 1979? Maybe not even true for her as she was saying it? (why might she have said it then?) Or she somehow had very unusual experience? (for unclear reasons?) Other? Who knows, but you don't think it was an accurate or representative thing to say?
Look back in the article at what she was sacrificing in order to avoid potential problems. She had Stevie Wonder and George Harrison in her house and couldn't make herself walk down the stairs to meet them. When she did meet face to face with people, she pasted on sideburns and dressed in a suit to appear as a man.
I mean, think about that last part for a moment. Gender dysphoria caused distress in Carlos. Transitioning eased that distress for her. Then she was dressing in drag to present publicly for her career-- dressing in the exact way which previously caused her so much distress that she decided to transition in the first place!
Those practices are almost certainly the "monstrous waste of years of my life" she's talking about.
Anyhow, both things are true. First, the public was vastly more tolerant/indifferent than what she was protecting herself against (and, therefore, the precautions she had taken turned out to have been too extreme). Second, transphobia was so common during the time that even well-known feminists could spew forth with literally no repercussions for decades (and even then, no discernible repercussions AFAICT).
In short, Stevie Wonder and George Harrison are pretty cool guys. :)
Makes sense. Do you think a public musician today might have the experience of "“The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent", though?
It still seems to me that something has changed here, for the worse. That it's very unlikely that such a public figure today could discover that despite their fears"the public" was largely indifferent and unconcerned about it. sassyonsunday below, who I was replying to, seems to agree at least in part too. Which doesn't necessarily conflict with anything you said.
Anyway, either it is or not, we can have different takes, and we're not going to work out the answer here!
> I actually wonder if things have gotten worse over the past few years.
They've gotten consistently worse since about 2015.
I started transitioning in 2009 when I was 18. I come from a very conservative environment and growing up I'd even tried to come out as gay a few times only to be "shot down" more or less but in college I used my own money and I found doctors to help me look how I wanted and I started dating men openly and as awful as it is to say, because I looked and acted the part people got over it pretty fast and begrudgingly accepted that I - at least - wasn't a man. My parents even got upset with me a long while ago when I insinuated that I was a part of the gay community because they said it was disrespectful to my then boyfriend who is now my husband (he had only dated cis girls before me and is straight to anyone who hasn't run a DNA test on me ha).
These days I can feel a change even from people who were kind to me before. All the coverage on conservative media outlets, the JK Rowling "trans women are a threat to women" and the Matt Walsh "trans women are mentally ill perverts" talking points have eroded goodwill so much that more religious and conservative members of my own family avoid me now as where they didn't before and I feel that I'm only able to have a good life because I'm in the fortunate position of being "passable" and attracted to men.
In 2012 when I came out to someone they'd usually just be curious about my experiences. Even conservative Christians and Republicans. In 2022 almost nobody is curious except about which surgeries you've had because they've already made their mind up about how they feel about you. For about 50% of the population that means you're a piece of scum who deserves ridicule and punishment (if it looks like you could still pass as male physically) or excommunication (if it looks like you're so feminine and far gone that you couldn't fit in as a man), for about 40% of the population that means indifference akin to what you'd get back in the good old days and for about 10% it means an outpouring of support and love in an attempt to make up for the 50% who are openly hostile.
I think more and more trans people are taking the Wendy Carlos approach these days because of this. Much of the community wants to avoid attention and get along with their lives. There's a growing trend of people "boy moding" or "man moding" which is where they take hormone replacement therapies but dress in drag to try to fit in as their gender assigned at birth in public the same way that Wendy did. As an amusing sidenote, many of these people begin "male failing" which is where the hormone replacement therapies make it impossible for them to pass as their gender assigned at birth and so they are read as being trans still but coming from the other direction.... It's so sad that it has to be this way.
Being trans myself, I start to feel that the tolereance upward trend I noticed while growing up has stopped and even coming down in some cases/niches. I started transitioning in 2020, live in a relatively tolerant country like Argentina but feel that it's not like 5-10 years ago. IMO it has to do with the global economic downturn and political polarization, I think there is a correlation between tolerance and wealthiness
I am happy if gender therapy helped you I think it is fine for society to be critical however. I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets.
Sadly any discussion is immediately considered a personal attack so we two camps.
Every single person on the planet will have regrets in 20 years. A significant portion will have large regrets about things they cannot undo. This is human. It is not your job to make trans people miserable today because of your worry some of them might hypothetically have regrets in the future.
It is actually not fine for society to be "critical", when it means discarding the metaethics of reducing suffering in favor of the metaethics that flows out of believing that their interpretation of a 2000-year-old book is the absolute truth.
What percentage of detransitioners have been taken in by anti-trans panic and social contagion? What percentage will regret detransitioning? There are already quite a few examples: Elisa Shupe and Ky Schevers, who were both politically active in anti-trans movements, later retransitioned (and/or found a gender identity that works better for them) and regret the time they spent organizing against trans people.
That's a narrowly individualistic view of the role of medicine in society.
Medicine has a social context as well. This relatively recent idea that someone can become more female or more male through drugs and surgery is one that has repercussions on how we as a society view the two sexes, what constitutes a woman or a man, and what is an acceptable expression of one's masculinity or femininity.
Maybe it's the right idea. But we should all reserve the right to be critical and consider alternatives, for this and any other idea with broad societal implications.
> This relatively recent idea that someone can become more female or more male through drugs and surgery
The Hijra community (Indian trans/non-binary) has been around for thousands of years, and surgical castration has been one traditional way for them to achieve their identity during that period. It's not relatively recent.
In any event, I think in a free society we must start with the premise that all things are permitted and only with valid reason restrict that freedom. There are many valid reasons, but merely being critical of someone else's means of existence is not what I would regard as sufficient reason to restrict their personal freedom. At a minimum, potentially cognizable harm should be shown. And to be clear, I don't think there's any potentially cognizable harm to be found in someone conforming to their own gender identity.
A castration cult that abducts young boys, chops their balls off, and sells them into the sex trade is not really a great example of this. It baffles me why people who support Western transgenderism liken it to the hijra, as it's hardly a flattering comparison.
Correct, the hijra community is an abusive set of cults with strict hierarchies. It is, however, what appears to be the least bad option for a lot of Indian trans people facing ostracism. This reflects incredibly poorly on Indian society at large.
Many trans people that join the hijra community leave it due to the abuse. The ex-hijra community is one of trans women that has been around for roughly as long as the hijra community has been.
Here's a project from former members of the hijra community that left because of the abuse they faced in it: https://aravaniartproject.com
In any case, trans people have been around for as long as people have been around.
Trans is a Western cultural import applied to the hijra, this isn't how they traditionally see themselves, nor wider Indian society, e.g. if we look at misogynist cultural practices such as sati, with widows immolated on their husband's funeral pyre, these never applied to hijra as they aren't considered to be women, or men. If the idea of hijra was imported back to the West and applied to transwomen here there would be an uproar.
Not everyone, but plenty of people in the community and outside of it see themselves as trans women.
The western idea of transness is better (more freedom, less suffering) so of course it is seeing adoption worldwide. I'm the exact opposite of a cultural relativist. I think it is morally
good for the best cultural ideas to win.
In any case it still doesn't change the fact that something resembling trans people have been around in every single culture for a very long time. It is because transness is universal, a part of the human condition.
I don't have a right to determine how you use and/or modify your body and you don't have that right over me. That's called bodily autonomy, and is about as clear cut a human right as you'll be able to articulate.
The social context has nothing to do with it, that's just a way to say that if enough people say that you can't do to yourself what you want to that that makes them right, which has historically led to all kinds of wrongs. See also: the right to euthanasia, abortion, being gay and so on and so on. It's always the sanctimonious groups that are hell bent on telling others how to live, but it never was any of their business.
How 'we as society' view this has no bearing on something that is ultimately the domain of a single individual, the person affected.
In the United States this is codified by "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" though of course there is plenty of hairsplitting going on about what that actually means, even though the simplest reading is to take it for what it says.
The implications of this are far reaching (for instance: I'm on the one side against a vaccine mandate because it would infringe on that right, on the other I think that a lot of people have allowed themselves to be pushed towards this on a pretext).
That is your opinion, but consider another topic: elective disablement. Some people are very insistent on having their spinal cord surgically severed or getting their arms and legs chopped off or being permanently blinded, or similar.
If you naively consider the topic only from a bodily autonomy perspective, then the answer is deceptively simple: get the blades out and start slicing. But this ignores the wider medical ethics concerns over whether it's the right thing to do for the patient, if the surgeon is causing harm by doing so, if gratifying the patient's short-term desires genuinely helps them in the long-term over their entire life, if it's reasonable to expect a surgeon to perform such a procedure and how they may feel in the aftermath, if there are any other interventions that would be more effective. And societal questions over whether it's ethical to deliberately add new members to a population who already find it difficult to find the support they need, how this will affect others who may now be situational obliged to assist with this person's new disability, and so on.
It makes no sense to focus solely on the individual and ignore the wider context, when there are so many other factors to consider.
My existence hasn't been a burden on anyone. I worked hard to make sure that I put as little stress on my parents and grandparents that I could through everything and took out loans to pay for everything and paid the loans off. I've had surgeries but I'm not disabled. I work and pay taxes and have friends and a husband and participate in a large social circle. Forcing me to live as a gay man with gender dysphoria would have limited the possibilities in my life with no discernible benefit to society.
The only joy I found in life before I transitioned fully was in doing drugs and hooking up with guys. I could have maybe started a career and settled down with a man while living as a gay man but I doubt it. My misery was all consuming. My goodness, when I was 5 or 6 I remember bargaining with God to make me a girl and vowing to hold my breath until he would. I passed out many nights doing that in bed when I was alone with my thoughts and my sadness about not being a girl hit the hardest.
As a teenager I could barely function and nearly died from an eating disorder. I hated every masculine thing about my body and with testosterone pumping through me the only thing I could do to feel less masculine was starve myself, to try to be smaller.... In short I wasn't functional and I was physically withering away to the point where pneumonia nearly killed me because my body was so weak.
After I transitioned I stopped living in survival mode and started building an actual life.... I also gained a few pounds and got fit instead of being a shambling skeleton. I doubt my story is unique among gender dysphorics.
So whatever. You can debate the ethics of whether or not society was better off with me being a starving depressed twink versus a trans woman I guess but if you think it's bad for society that I was able to look how I want and start a family and feel happy I think you've got weird ideas about how the world works.
This is apples and oranges. Let's agree for the sake of argument that people do not have the right to turn themselves into burdens on society. Mutilatory spinal cord surgery falls under that category, but gender corrective surgery does not.
Well here's the thing, this has already been a hotly debated topic by medical ethicists and philosophers, who have indeed considered many factors other than the individualistic bodily autonomy viewpoint.
That's a mis-representation of what bodily autonomy stands for in the context of elective surgery. The ethics of medicine are a complex and very well established domain that extremely cautiously moves forward to ensure they get it right. And when they do not the damage is incalculable, for instance gay conversion therapy and other such niceties.
So before you go off on a tangent about what is and is not accepted practice and which things doctors are required to do and which things they abstain from on ethical grounds I will have to bow out because we are at the limits of my knowledge on the subject and that's not for want of reading material. Let me close with: I know where the line lies in simple cases, but if you start dragging in things that I have not spent enough time on/read about/have knowledge about then I simply will not be able to hold that conversation. If you have this knowledge then more power to you, but so far you have not convinced me of it and you come across as an ideologue.
Of course. Critical in the sense of skeptical. However a lot of "critics" of trans people act much more like schoolyard bullies or people worried that rock 'n roll music will make the children worship satan than people with fair concerns about the wellbeing of others.
> I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets
There isn't any decision that people can make that will leave 100% of people satisfied. Gender therapy has existed in its modern form for about 100 years now and in that time study after study shows that people who go through with it are happy with the results 90%-98% of the time. This is higher than most treatments of any kind.
You'll find that almost every commentator who talks about detransitioners or trots some out for a political show has the end objective of ending all gender affirming care for all people and replacing it with conversion therapy due to their ideology. In the case of someone like Janice Raymond that reason is radical feminism. For someone like Matt Walsh it is traditional Catholicism. In both cases they are misleading the public by insinuating that gender therapy is some sort of factory process where hapless victims are swept onto a conveyor belt and mutilated haphazardly.
People who transition and then regret it will always exist. Just like people will regret getting any sort of elective surgery. Just like people will come out as gay and then later regret it and then later regret that they regretted it and so on.... It's a story as old as time.
This study tracked people over a 50 year period and found a regret rate of 2%.
> The FM:MF sex ratio fluctuated but was 1:1.66 for the whole study period. There were 15 (5 MF and 10 MF) regret applications corresponding to a 2.2 % regret rate for both sexes. There was a significant decline of regrets over the time period.
The worrying thing is not that 2% regretted their decision, the worrying thing is that the people who are against trans people would be LESS happy if the figure were to be 0%. They want 100% of trans people to regret transition and repress because that would make reality conform better to their ideological leanings where "men are men" and "women are women" because God made them that way.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the source of regret is... people being jerks. Upon transition, transgender people often lose the support of their friends and family, and endure abuse by the public at large. The anti-trans community is abusive and repressive, and they (if indirectly) point to the results of those efforts as a reason not to transition.
This reminds me of Henry Rollins' song, "Icon" from his Weight album. It's about the trappings of fame/being a rock star. I feel like he wrote it as a reminder to himself, just as much as he wrote it for others.
The lyrics[1] to the song are great, but one line in particular:
I have to imagine living in New York in the late 60s through 70s also contributed to the acceptance/indifference that might not be afforded to others at that time (or even today).
In retrospect this was sort of mean of you to say:
> It doesn't help either when males who opt-in to this beauty standard
Do you go around telling girls they have to try to look less pleasing to men and more pleasing to your own sensibilities? Aren't you just taking the place of the "male gaze" at that point and replacing it with your own gaze and your own demands to be satisfied? I like looking a certain way. I also like when it gets me attention from men. I have the same motivations as the majority of heterosexual women and I'm trying to live a fulfilling life. You don't need to make it all about you.
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I only felt the need to point it out to drive home the point that there is/was no winning move as a trans person. I feel the need to do this because I've met many people in my life who've tried to tell me things like that it 's obvious that I was "born to be a woman" so I shouldn't worry about transphobia because they think transphobia is only directed at people who look masculine but wear feminine clothes or sex pests who change their pronouns to try to seem less creepy. It's led me to believe that this might be a common position among people who are anti-trans. They think: "these bathroom policies will only hurt the bad ones who don't pass, the passable ones will be fine" as a way of soothing their conscience.
> Aren't you just taking the place of the "male gaze" at that point and replacing it with your own gaze and your own demands to be satisfied?
No, women should be free to present however they please, that's my point. We shouldn't feel pressure to conform to imposed ideals of femininity, to be praised for it or knocked for not complying.
> No, women should be free to present however they please, that's my point. We shouldn't feel pressure to conform to imposed ideals of femininity, to be praised for it or knocked for not complying.
I agree with you 100%. When I was in middle school I wanted to look very neat and proper and it caused me problems with boys. I can remember getting picked on for looking too... well groomed? I feel like the opposite pressure exists for people assigned female. I was born with the default option of not needing to look "pretty" in the sense of enhancing my feminine features with clothes and makeup but I enjoy life a lot more when I'm allowed to. I feel for people who have the same problem but from another direction.
> This is unfortunately yet another gendered imposition, with women feeling like they have to adhere to a beauty standard that comes from the male gaze.
Women who are trans feel this pressure enforced against them with public humiliation, overt misogyny, and violence.
> It doesn't help either when males who opt-in to this beauty standard for their own pleasure get praised as if they are being good women.
Trans women aren't males and don't opt-in to the male gaze. Are you referring to drag queens? There's a more nuanced conversation to be had there, but not in the current climate of terroristic acts against transgender people. Drag is often a critique of gender roles.
There is nothing grotesque about femininity or a trans woman expressing it.
> This is unfortunately yet another gendered imposition, with women feeling like they have to adhere to a beauty standard that comes from the male gaze.
Beauty standards are set and enforced by both men and women. A lot of women dress up to impress other women, not just men.
My family. I never thought I would be able to have a family when I was growing up but now I have a husband and we have a baby so I'll spend my life making sure our family is happy and healthy as best I can.
I have met trans women, especially those who came out of the gay community like me, who use the t-word with vicious intent because of hate they have for themselves and others. They're disgusted with being trans and they're disgusted by other trans people and they throw the slur the same way a non-trans person would and in doing so give moral cover to non-trans people who hate us. "See they even hate each other and they use that word the same as we do!" If you call these self-haters out they'll claim it's fine for them to behave the way they do because they're trans too, but, no.... The reason you shouldn't use slurs has nothing to do with the slur itself, it's about the impact of it and the impact doesn't change just because you're trans yourself.
So anyway, imo, normalizing the use of slurs by publicly broadcasting them is a bad idea in general outside of very specific contexts because slurs are not just words, they are symbols for an entire series of related negative stereotypes so when we normalize those words we also normalize the ideas associated with them. AI doesn't get an n-word pass. /rant