mic wrote:Thank you for these. ContraPoints has answered questions I didn’t even know I had and, although I couldn’t access that journal, the abstract told me everything I needed to know. To be sure, it presented a very positive image of transition success rates... ...it was mostly derivations of the 85% figure Karl mentioned (although I didn’t get it from Twitter, or Mums.net). A website he also linked above, Genderanalysis.net, has thoroughly disproved that figure, as well as rubbishing SexChangeRegret.com. I’m sure that anything else I’ve seen will equally be written by a bigot or be badly done research. In fact, ALL of my research was overwhelmingly negative.
Hey, fair play to you here. It's big of you to admit your sources weren't what you thought they were.
I feel it is a cause of much difficulty for the trans community that a layperson on Google can so readily find, and then parrot, what amounts to hate speech. It's particularly bad in the UK, which is something of an international leader in "academic" transphobia and transphobic "feminism" (terf-ism).
Hell, transphobic opinion pieces make it into even The Guardian. It sucks, and sometimes it feels like we're going backwards.
(If you want to read that journal article, you can paste the DOI code I mentioned into "sci-hub.tw", assuming you don't have a moral problem with pirating it. I wouldn't worry -- scientists invariably want their articles to be read, and we don't make any royalties from subscriptions to journals we publish in.)
mic wrote:...I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just trying to learn, which I do by asking questions...
Okay, okay. I'm not looking to stick a boot in here, genuinely, but maybe re-reading the above paragraph I quoted - you contextualised the research you did a bit, concluding you'd essentially been taken in by bigots - you can now see why people were quite hostile to the implied views behind your questions? A question always reveals something about the person's current understanding, after all. It can be really uncomfortable to have to debate someone down from their "misinformed" views, even if they're engaging in good faith, and online one can never be sure of even that. (The phrase Just Asking Questions has become something of an in-joke in the queer community because of how often it's a mask for bigotry!)
I find it fairly easy to move past this kind of thing if someone changes their mind - I'm a scientist, where being wrong is a good thing (and an everyday occurrence!) - but others might even be thinking: "fine, he
says he just did bad research, but
why was he willing to believe that stuff in the first place? Why did we need to
convince him to treat us like any other person?" I'm sure you will have a philosophical objection to that (something like "how should I learn then?", right?), but at the same time I think you might go along with the idea of someone's views/opinions being a reflection of their inner values, so you can perhaps sympathise with it being difficult to tell whether someone who says
"can't they just used the disabled loos?" is grossly misinformed or has some deep-seated malice.
mic wrote:Certainly, but why must my limited insight prevent discussion, especially when I’ve already learned so much? Which gives me an idea – why not just invite Lineham here? You lot would show him the error of his ways in no time!
Ha, well, you've answered your own question there (perhaps deliberately?). I don't think anyone will ever convince Linehan of anything, because his questions aren't posed in good faith. Ignorance is one thing, but once hatred has entered a person's heart it takes much more than an Internet argument to heal that.
mic wrote:GRCade isn’t a safe space?! I got shot down in flames for expressing an opinion which I thought (at the time!) was fairly liberal. Which raises another interesting question: presumably everywhere would ideally be a safe space, but what does that mean? Being free from oppositional thinking? Again with the de rigeur comparison, but I’d rather engage with racist viewpoints than barricade myself away from them. Perhaps its not at all the same thing.
Sure, but it wasn't
actually liberal (it was - let's not gloss over this - appalling!), and you still weren't banned or thread-banned.
I don't think most spaces online need to be thought-crucibles where the very hottest takes are forged into the most
controversial and brave opinions. My personal priority - if I were in a position to enforce it, which I emphasise I'm not - would be for this videogames forum to be a place where anyone can log in and chat about videogames without finding any hate directed at them or at who they are (be they trans, black, female, gay, or whatever else -- to paraphrase the excellent YouTuber Shaun [see video on The Guardian above], "there are all sorts of different folks out there..."). I think that's important.
I worry a lot about the paradox of tolerance - how tolerating intolerance leads to the collapse of tolerance - and I think excluding people with problematic views from a community is usually a valid way to protect minorities and avoid tolerating intolerance.
mic wrote:Sigh. You assume the worst.
Well, I haven't forgotten how hot your takes were a few pages ago, and how bad-faith your questions previously seemed, but I'm giving you benefit of the doubt with this post.
mic wrote:A big part of the problem some feminists have with transwomen is that they reinforce the stereotypes those women disdain.
Nah. This one ain't really your fault, but you're making the mistake of taking fascists at their word. You wouldn't pay much mind to a racist's contorted explanation of their racism. Terfs hate trans women because they are bigots and view them as "men in dresses", and that's that.
Trans women who are gender non-conforming - who dress androgynously, or retain some stereotypically masculine features or hobbies - are called out for "not even trying!" by the same terfs that say "womanhood is just short skirts and lipstick to you!" to those who pass.
mic wrote:Are social constructions just stereotypes or not? If women can do everything that men can and vice versa, then what difference is there? As Ms Wynn pointed out in the ContraPoints video linked above, sexual attraction is based upon those (negative) stereotypes, but if those stereotypes are bad… then doesn’t that either make sexual attraction to those stereotypes also bad, or validate the stereotypes?
Well, we live in a world where the concepts of femininity and masculinity exist, and where women are socioculturally associated with femininity, and men are socioculturally associated with masculinity. You can't blame a trans woman for yearning for femininity, because her inner truth is that she is a woman, and the way to express that so that people see it and you start to live that truth socially is by taking on an outwardly feminine appearance. If someone very outwardly masc and hunky and beardy told me she was a woman I would respect that, but it essentially never happens - well, once out of the closet, anyway - because being misgendered is painful, and that woman would realise she "looked like a man" to the rest of society and would typically want to correct that to the extent that she was able to.
There is an ongoing debate in the trans community as to what extent passing should be a goal of a trans person. I think it's totally natural that many trans people place a lot of importance on their passing, but obviously people who can't pass or don't care about passing should be wholly accepted too. My understanding is that the vast majority of trans people do attempt to be as identifiable as their chosen gender as possible. I don't think that presents any problems from the perspective of feminism, at the end of the day it's a woman's personal choice which clothes or how much make-up she wears.
This isn't just a trans issue. Sadly, all women risk being told they "aren't real women" (etc.) if they present masc, and of course men get similar comments if they present in a more femme way. I guess the patriarchal act is in enforcing the gendered associations of styles of presentation, rather than in any individual who happens to present in either way.
Re: romantic attraction, people can't really help what they're attracted to, so whatever. I think making a big deal out of your desired sexual traits can be sexist, but that's something different.
mic wrote:...but does transgenderism (and gender fluidity) generally want unisexism, or just to participate as their chosen gender (or lack thereof)?
A trans person just wants to be treated as the gender they know they are on the inside. They want to see that gender in the mirror, and they want other people to see that gender. So even if you destroyed all social stereotypes of gender, you definitely still wouldn't destroy HRT or plastic surgery or voice training or learning to walk a bit differently (or so on).
Trans communities on the whole absolutely do support things like unisex bathrooms, often out of ideology (arbitrary segregation
is bad), but if not then definitely because it makes living day-to-day much easier if no-one can tell you you're using the "wrong" toilet.
In our society as it is I think some gendered spaces and policies are still necessary -- it's good there are women's shelters and female-oriented hiring practices, for instance. Those things are a big help to the women who need them. Obviously in some far-futuristic utopia they might no longer be necessary.