Annabel's page

If there was commercial pressure to include scantily clad women on covers in 2007, that same pressure does not necessarily exist in 2014. In other words, given the way our business has changed in the last 7 years, I no longer think this excuse holds water, and you shouldn't either.

Well, I agree, I don't think the excuse holds water... in fact, I am not sure it ever held water. I mean, of course I get it, Paizo is a publishing company, and like any company you must reap a profit for your efforts. Sexualizing women and articulating it through some of the most disturbing (heterosexual, white) male power fantasies makes money, as can be evinced by glancing at other forms of popular media. There might even be some sort of relationship between how misogynistic an image is, and how quickly said images fly off the shelves. Though in retrospect, talking about the justification with weasel words ("If there was commercial pressure...") makes it seem like maybe it isn't the case that the market forces forced Paizo to exploit images of women. If not this, then what?

If that excuse no longer holds water, and things have change for Paizo or the market, then what is the excuse for covers such as this little bibliothèque à trois for Inner Sea Magic? Is it that the male gaze still persists as a governing force in the selecting of images?

That is all for now. ;)

@xeose4

A few years ago someone went through and looked at gender on the covers of Dragon Magazine (published by Paizo back in the 3.5 days). The first post of their analysis can be found here. Their analysis came to similar conclusions as you did and I think you may find looking at their posts on the issue interesting. In short, they found that there was an overabundance of sexualized women on the covers of Dragon Magazine, with very little in the way of sexualized men.

In the last post of their analysis, they include a response they got from Erik Mona wherein he explains some marketing factors contributing to the trend. I think his comments shed light on the issue and might help explain why it's still happening today in Pathfinder material (cf. MaizyKissed's comment about "Inner Sea Magic").

Here are two facts that shed some light on the issue.

1) According to our not-too-scientific reader surveys, women account for 4-6% of our readership.

2) Issues featuring scantily clad women on the cover, in general, sell better than issues that do not feature scantily clad women.

It should not be a great surprise to anyone that magazine publishing is a business, and one in which we are forced to compete with companies that have budgets orders of magnitude higher than the average non-Wizards of the Coast game company. In fact, magazine publishers like Conde Nast have budgets orders of magnitude higher than even Wizards of the Coast.

In that environment, we've got to do what we've got to do to sell magazines, and sometimes that involves showing some flesh. Since roughly 95% of our audience are men, that scantily clad flesh often belongs to a female.

It's really bothers me that the presence of masculinity on/in trans women is unequivocally read as evidence for (or implication of) illegitimate womanhood. Admittedly, this is the logics that often operate within cissexist, heterosexist, dominant society. But it really ought not be imposed as the normal reading on queer (or even LGBT) speech. Let me explain why:

If masculinity becomes the means by which womanness or womanhood becomes illegitimated, then this has stark implications for masculine women, whether cis or trans. What becomes of the bulldyke, the tribade, or the drag king? Are these women illigitimized because they lay claim to masculinity?

This insistence that masculinity is irreconcilable with being a trans-woman also forecloses the field of trans inclusion. Being a trans woman is being implicitly measured as a negative quality: a lack of masculinity. I am not sure why the norm of a vacant or vacated masculinity is being purposefully enforced on "deviant" masculine trans women. Trans women who are purposefully masculine and women are implicitly rejected by the logics circulating within your rigid prescription:

That in general referring to a trans woman's background as male or masculine aren't cool (even if some specific trans women do decide to use that phrasing, or use that phrasing because they don't have a more personal way of describing it).

I don't see how to understand this sentence other than: experiences of or speech about masculinity from trans women are explicitly erasable or impersonal, they can't represent a legitimate trans woman experience.

Perhaps the purpose of your advice that this is "not cool" wasn't meant to be read this way (maybe you had a more specific context in mind). But as it currently stands, there is a problematic here: that masculinity is articulated with being really a man, and that masculinity illegitimizes being really a woman.

Bulldykes, tribades, and drag kings constitute instances of masculine women (female masculinity), therefor there is no reason discredit the legitimacy of trans women with female masculinity.

Hum, I was trying to be somewhat optimistic about TanothT's equation between transitioning one's body's gender or athletic ability. I guess I don't really think of performance enchancing medication in charged moral terms. But I think I understand the concern about it being problematic, in the way your seeing it.

I wasn't really "throwing around" the term, it was part of a disjunction: "(or having "typically male" anatomy)". Admittedly, these two things (and more generally, experiencing bodily or social gender conflict/uncertainty) don't exhaust the field of experiences in trans life. But they are two ways some trans people experience life. I also am not sure experiencing social forces that conflict with other experiences of gender necessarily remove consideration of an individual's autonomy.

Transgender woman sues CrossFit over competition

I'm torn over how to feel about this. On the one hand, if medical documentation is provided to show that sufficient feminization has occurred to eliminate the athletic advantage of initial high testosterone levels, transwomen should be able to complete. That could be a lot of documentation, though, and it would need to go beyond just the legal gender change recognition criteria to focus on things like baseline hormone levels and the effect of years of high T that give a female athlete the same advantage as if she was using steroids.

This said, female athletes with more complex genetic conditions that would raise testosterone level would probably not be subject to the same stipulations in most sports. And you could holler 'unfair genetic advantage' about pretty much anything, including stuff like high or low calf muscle insertion points. It's a genetic lottery, and some people win it and have the potential to become elite athletes. Some people don't, and will probably never achieve those rarefied heights without those advantages even if they work harder than the athletes who do have the natural advantages.

I do think conceptualizing being a trans woman as analogous to having used performance enhancing drug is certainly different, and maybe even transgressive. Though, I am not sure simply being raised a man (or having "typically male" anatomy) is equivalent to being a "typical" or "ideal" woman on steroids. I don't think the presence growth enhancing drugs is the definitive boundary between what makes a man not a woman.

But even all this "raising" of trans women to the status of athletic paragons, I am not sure it escapes some of the typical pitfalls we encounter when shoring up the categories of "women" and "men" as a means to segregate athletic competitions. If being a trans woman, or any woman, with testosterone levels designated much higher than is considered appropriate for the "ideal woman," is sufficient to call into question that woman's inclusion into athletic competitions, then in what sense have we escaped misogynistic binaries that situate women as inherently less than men?

It is worth noting that we (or at least, I) almost never hear about instances where trans men or male athletes with more complex genetic conditions that would lower testosterone levels have attempted to participate in male athletic competitions to be bared because of insufficient "athletic advantage." I think J. Halberstam talks about this subject in Female Masculinity, but I don't have that book with me.

"Dueling Dualisms," the first chapter of Sexing the Body,Anne Fausto-Sterling relays the story of Marie Patiño, a woman who had "failed her sex test," and was bared from competing in the 1988 summer Olympics. Though I think the change in policy that GentleGiant links to is a step in the right direction, it is worth noting that the Olympics still bars participation of a large number of trans (and not trans) people who don't conform to their narrow (and "tidy") bodily prescriptions. It seems to me very strange that we ought to put so much emphasis on a handful of biomedical markers and proxies for gender when there is obvious (and arguably more genuine) recourse through expressed identity. It seems like any truly fair assessment of gender must ultimately be based on the specific gender a person lays claim to, regardless of whatever "contradictory" evidence medical practitioners or lab technicians try to present.

First, thanks for the reply, Annabel; I think I now see what you mean more clearly. I’ll definitely see if I can find Fausto-Sterling next time I’m at the library, too.

Thank you, I really enjoyed the ideas being unpacked about the binaries. I always think it's a pretty interesting issue: both the immediate project to parse the contents of "sex" and "gender," and the metaproject of investigating how the line between sex and gender is constituted as part of the insisted nature/culture division. I don't have any immediate thoughts, but it is thought provoking.

As to identifying within binaries, I was thinking not so much that people think the binary is necessarily a part of them, but in a more active sense that they might be able to find a more or less comfortable spot for themselves in the range of possibilities afforded by the binary as understood by their culture, and against the limits of which they might also push. I’m thinking of people who might be perfectly happy thinking of themselves as women or men as conventionally understood, but might also be concerned with how those categories are formed, enforced, and with what consequences for whom.

I think that makes sense. I have no doubt that there are many trans and cis people who find themselves very comfortable in social and psychological positions that are typically described as typically gendered. I don't think that these people are obligated to place themselves in distress just so that we can live a fantasy that no one fits into typically typified binary genders. I just want to make sure that we are proactively making room for the comfort of those who aren't so lucky to fall into the acceptable range and binaries of gender.

I’m not sure that this necessarily results in opposition in a very strict sense. I’ve seen an attempt at two-track systems in which, for example, gender is viewed as a combination of “woman-ness” and “man-ness” such that non-gendered identities wouldn’t feel much of either, while genderfluid identities, say, could feel high levels of both “woman-ness” and “man-ness.” I also wonder whether attempts at translating ideas of “third-gender”-s might be similar, since how would one think more genders than one is used to short of some form of analogy? For that matter, what are the implications of terms like “two-spirit?”

Um, maybe I am not quite understanding correctly. But as far as I see it, "translating" these not-binary genders into a binary gender systems necessarily renders bodies composite but incomplete. If the specific systems necessarily insists on one gender or the other, then bodies that enter into those systems will be disciplined until they conform (or the third option being figurative or literal death). I don't want to be completely bleak, but I just am skeptical of the outcome of translation where the binary remains intact (i.e. term “woman-ness” and “man-ness” remain stable).

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler talks about the concept of "cultural translation:"

The point is not to assimilate foreign or unfamiliar notions of gender or humanness into our own as if it is simply a matter of incorporation alienness into an established lexicon. Cultural translation is also a process of yielding our most fundamental categories, that is, seeing how and why they break up, require resignification when they encounter the limits of an available episteme: what is unknown or not yet known. It is crucial to recognize that the notion of the human will only be built over time in and by the process of cultural translation, where it is not a translation between two languages that stay enclosed, distinct, unified. But rather, translation will compel each language to change in order to apprehend the other, and this apprehension, at the limit of what is familiar, parochial, and already known, will be the occasion for both an ethical and social transformation. It will constitute a loss, a disorientation, but one in which the human stands a chance of coming into being anew.

My thought is: if these things outside of the gender binary can be rendered plainly, then no culture translation has taken place. What we recognize as human will remain stunted, and the opportunity for life narrowed. Cultural translation will happen when we yeild our binary to its inherent instability, to watch it "break up." When we reach down to pick up the pieces, our goal will not to put them back together as they were, but to transform them for the better.

P.S. Fausto-Sterling is very good. I actually just picked up a copy of Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. It's gotten to the point where I've read too many authors reference her to not be obligated to read Haraway herself.

Thanks for answering my question, Annabel. Foucalt sounds like he was a very interesting guy. :)

He certainly is pretty interesting.

Regarding the question about scientific realism, I want to reiterate my apprehension about pursuing this subject. This is mostly because I don't think it necessarily adds anything to the discussion. Two scientific realists can hold views that are in contradiction with each other. Conversely, two antirealists can be at odds too. Even strangely, and antirealist and a realist can find themselves in agreement about broad range of things, so broad in fact that the disagreement is almost unremarkable.

At it's core, the concern about scientific realism is centered on a concern about the meanings of words like "fact," "real," and "true." When left alone, these words are almost meaningless. The philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls these "elevator words" because they work to "elevate" whatever thought they're applied to. Let me give a kind of clumsy example: If I were to say, "ghosts are scary," I don't think much would be thought. But if I say "ghosts are real," now everyone has to contend with a different kind of claim. People have to parse what I mean by real. Did I see a ghost? Do I have proof of a ghost? Do I have scientific proof of a ghost? Am I talking about people dressed up as ghosts?

By introducing the word "fact," "real," and "true" people have to begin parsing in what sense I mean "fact," "real," and "true." So, when I say I am an antirealist, I mostly mean that I am very interested in investigating under what conditions are we "elevating" certain statements to the status of "fact," "real," and "true." How those conditions work to shape, create, or precondition the things that are worthy of elevation? And what things are necessarily foreclosed as "unreal" or "false" as part of privileging those certain worthy things?

I hope this provides some clarification. But I want to repeat that I don't think that being a realist or antirealist necessarily important in the context of the ongoing conversation.

Out of curiosity, who/what is Foucalt? I am completely not familiar, so when you talked about something being a Foucaltian term I was curious what that actually meant.

Michel Foucault was a 20th century french historian who wrote a number of hugely influential books. His work has changed (and continues to change) the fields of history, psychiatry, biology, medicine, philosophy of science... I should stop here.

It is worth noting that his writing is very well known for being difficult to parse, in part because his writing tried to talk about things that were completely novel for his time. He is also very well known for explaining things through elegant extended metaphor. For example, the first chapter of Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), he uses Las meninas to explain the concept of episteme, or "way of thinking," by demonstrating that Las meninas stood at a profound transition in "thinking about" European art. The extended metaphor also had a double meaning (Foucault was supremely clever like that), where the actual details of the painting were used to describe what Foucault identified as the characteristics of the modern epistem of the human sciences (psychology, sociology, and biology). It is a beautifully written chapter.

It is not uncommon that people are unaware of him (I've had lots of friends and family ask me "Michel Fou-Who?"). Though he was supremely well known when he was alive, having been involved in social activism throughout Europe, having taught at a number of prestigious French, Tunisia, and American universities, and even engaged in public, televised discussions and debates with Noam Chomsky! Sadly, he died in 1984 in France of complications related to an HIV infection.

Suffice it to say, I greatly admire his work and will attempt to talk about him at any possible opportunity :P

I was somewhat surprised yesterday when the objection of jargon arose. Despite the claims otherwise, my writing was partially organized around vetting obscure phrases and terms. For example, I deliberately avoid the term "socially constructed" (and its derivatives) because the phrase always trips people up. I broke when Bob_Loblaw elected to use it, so as to share a common term. However, the rapid derailment (and spectacular crash!) of the topic gave me reason to take a step back and think on what happened.

I suppose the most obvious thing to address is the subject of jargon itself. Many people have brought this up, and sadly I am somewhat at a loss of what exactly is the problem. Maybe others mean something different when they say "jargon," but I've always thought of it as a "highly specific term or phrase, with special limits on meaning, that is used exclusively within a particular discipline."

So, I revisited my previous posts, and read them for what I saw as clear instances of jargon. I found five, four of which I only used once (surveillance was used twice), and one that was immediately followed up with an explanation of what it means ("not being a scientific realist"). I think that these words are important, and as such made a list below that I think, taken together, make sense of why they were used and why they matter.

Scientific Realism I think I explained this, but this particular phrase has a deep and complex meaning which certainly goes beyond the needs of this register. But because I am sensing some confusion about my particular position regarding science, I didn't place this in spoiler tags.

Suffice it to say, someone (me, specifically) can be a scientific arealist (or some people call "anti-realist") while still holding that science creates useful knowledge. In fact, I am willing to go so far to say that disciplined scientific knowledge has the capacity to generate very good things. I look at my own personal contributions to scientific knowledge proudly. Not being a scientific realist doesn't make me anti-science.

Looking back on these terms, I think it was a good idea to choose them (even though I regret the confusion they may have caused). For each of these, I ended up using them because (as evinced in this register), they encapsulate some very large concepts that seemed too big to explain on their own. I don't really think they can be easily explained on their own, and was afraid they'd "run away with me" from the subject at hand (that is, opening up the possibility for expanding queer life). But many of these ideas required an understanding of the other terms in this register, and so explaining them in sequence (and using Qunnessaa's spoiler trick) I think made it easier.

If these terms are jargon, then maybe it's good that they're jargon. I mean, if medical practice or biological science requires jargon to get their important work done, then I think it follows that the LGBT and queer community requires terms to get our work done.

Vivianne Laflamme wrote:

Annabel wrote:

Bob_Loblaw wrote:

So some medications, like isotretinoin, can cause serious birth defects....

Sigh... the conflation of being a woman and being (potentially) pregnant all rolled into strict barriers placed on medical access for women. And all for clear skin! sigh what's a girl to do?

This is actually a really good example of a case where saying what we mean, instead of just collapsing everything into sex, would be good. Rather than saying that women should jump through hoops for this specific acne medicine, we should say that it's not appropriate for people who are or may become pregnant. This doesn't cut off the possibility of someone classified as a man being pregnant. It also doesn't equate woman with potentially pregnant person. Focusing on what we mean, rather than collapsing everything to sex, would benefit cis women here. Cis women who don't want and don't intend to get pregnant wouldn't be forced to jump through these hoops due to some paternalistic concern about their reproductive capacity.

This isn't something that's just for the benefit of trans and intersex people. Not collapsing many disparate things into the single category of sex benefits everyone.

It sounds great and might even work on some theoretical level, but not with human beings. We're pattern making creatures and we are going to sort people into categories no matter what anyone tries to do....

...We collapse disparate things into categories because it lets us process the universe. As long as we're open to exceptions and to changing those categories with the evidence, that's not a bad things.

I guess I just don't think that argument is convincing: human beings "[a]re pattern making creatures," therefor the patterned categories (gender) we've settled on are necessary/real/here-to-stay. Relegating Vivinane (and my, if I may be so generous) proposition to an unrealizable "theoretical level" does not necessarily follow from pattern making ability or tendency.

The very fact we can (and do) change these categories (and in very profound and incommensurable ways) shows that not only are these categories unstable, but that our ability to "pattern-make" the world doesn't exhaust the abilities we have to make sense of the world.

Annabel wrote:

You'll forgive me for being incredulous at the vague claim that some medications work differently based on the gender of the patient.

o.O Are you being serious?

...medications directed at sexed organs in the body don't necessarily correspond with gendered bodies taking the drugs. From this perspective, the necessity of gender assignment to patients falls apart: gender doesn't match up with specific organ composition, and thus requires a more detailed investigation that necessarily desexes prostates, ovaries, uteri, etc. Medical professionals are shamelessly clinging to gender as a diagnoses while simultaneously destabilizing the category: the modern shift in focus to treating prostates and ovaries emerges as a consequence of the irreducibly of gender. (And all this without even mentioning the kind of disciplinary power generated through the shoring up biomedical classifications of day-to-day life).

So some medications, like isotretinoin, can cause serious birth defects....

Sigh... the conflation of being a woman and being (potentially) pregnant all rolled into strict barriers placed on medical access for women. And all for clear skin! sigh what's a girl to do?

Otherwise, that was a very informative list of medical practices organized around gender/sex and race.

I want to reiterate something I mentioned before: sex is a scientific/biological term. Gender is a social construct. Medicine does not care about your gender. It can care about your sex. Too often we interchange the terms but they really are separate terms.

I want to make plain something I have been implying and explicitly stating: scientific/biological terms are open to contestation because they are created through social practice (they are, if you will, social constructs). Medicine clearly does care about our genders/sex, otherwise psychiatrists wouldn't be interceding every time a person wishs to transition. They are not "really" separate terms, they are clearly articulated together and are only separated on provisional grounds for specific purposes. In this particular case, they're being separated as a means to safeguard biomedical authority: gender is being ousted because it clouds the clinical gaze, destabilizing the categories that medicine insists it represents unproblematically. The obvious rejoinder to medicine, after it has delicately circumscribed the sex categories to only include some sparse snippets of the body (the "bathing suit areas"), is to point out that said circumscription is a social process. In turn, this process fails to account for a number of bodies that fall outside the circumscription, and in the case of intersexed infants, inflicts serious medical violence on their bodies.

Gender Dysphoria is not listed as a mental disorder in the DSM-5....

The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You really don't get much more "mental disorder-y" than being included in the book of mental disorders.

I guess I’m most interested in your thoughts on what the ideal solution might be to the cultural muddle of sex and gender, particularly for people who might strongly identify within binaries. That is, if we can decouple gender from sex entirely, what sorts of work can ideas about sex do? Would we want to try to argue whether sex is a matter of gross anatomy, chromosomes, or hormones? I’m thinking in particular of the implications for how we might understand the range of trans* people’s desires, especially those who transition. What does it mean that some people pursue hormone treatment and surgery even though they are not strictly necessary for the experience of being trans or of transition? Is that just the result of the cultural mix-up of sex and gender, or are people onto something when they postulate differences between average neural structures and epigenetic influences? Is there a responsible and meaningful way to acknowledge our embeddedness in discourse when trying to do neuroscience, say, like a more sophisticated version of, “We’re trying to be objective but what we’re looking for and what we can conceive of are limited by the preconceptions we haven’t been able to shake off?”

Perhaps the most concrete example would be how we might think about transgender people who, in MagusJanus’ words, “want to transition to the sex they feel most comfortable as” (emphasis added), or trans people who distinguish more or less sharply between transsexual and transgender.

I guess my first thought is what exactly does it mean to say "identify within binaries." Admittedly, the way psychiatric diagnoses operates is based off a polarization of genders. For example, the DSM-V marks that distress at one's assigned gender is a characteristic of gender dysphoria. In this case, a patient is ushered into medical surveillance for gender dysphoria as a consequence of the insisted binary, not because the binary exists within them.

Now, maybe there are trans and cis people that depend on opposition identity ("I'm not a man") within a binary to assert a claim over their gender identity ("therefor, I am a woman"). If this is the case, I do think it produces a rather significant problem for what I generally supposed as circumstantial solutions (the open-ending of the gender question). If some trans and cis people need the closed question of gender to end with male/female, then two things happen. First, the closed question necessarily forecloses possibility for those who don't identify within the binary, those who don't concretely identify within the binary, and all those unspeakable case that can't be enumerated because of the closed landscape of this binary gender. Second (as a consequence of the first), trans and cis people who need the closed question must necessarily stabilize the binary and it's respective categories. The need for a closed question requires the removal of bodies that upset the social stability of sex/gender binaries.

Now, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't think that either trans or cis people need opposition identity to assert a claim over their gender identity. I think cultivating a gender ought to be a positive process, where we appropriate the elements of our gender and accumulate our identity. I think that our current system places a great deal of emphasis of elements of gender that have been inaugurated into biomedical discourse, and as a consequence creates impossible situations for trans and cis people. The DSM-V outlines that to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria one must experience significant distress or impairment with their assigned sex. It isn't enough that people want or need to be the gender that they are, medical discourse makes gender a negative process, one where suffering is the "critical element of gender dysphoria."

Also, Annabel, could you go into what you meant about being “willing to entertain the materiality of gender articulated through sex” in a bit more detail? I’m feeling a bit dense that I’m not feeling sure that I know what that entails.

Sometimes we need to assert certain rights to treatment or justice through recognizing how sexed bodies are differentially treated. Because sex is articulated through gender, the materiality of sex is caught up in the oppressive, sexist social forces. Sometimes we need to assert rights based on sex (or the configuration of our bodies), and under those circumstances I am interested in entertaining those political projects.

Ann Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) and Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (2012) are two really good texts to read. Fausto-Sterling is a brilliant biologist and her grasp feminist and queer theory translates into two very elegantly put together texts.

you have a highly convoluted way of making your point, and as such I cannot easily follow it, I am sorry for making a mistake in trying to understand what you are trying to say. So, you think that there is not, in fact, any person who is "Biologically a woman" who has a prostate, if I understand, because you, in fact, think there is no such thing as "biologically a woman" but only used that statement to make a point about its adsurdity?

I suppose because I'm not a scientific realist, I can safely say I don't think "biologically a woman" means anything until an outline of qualifications are made. This process of outlining is a kind of social practice where the characteristics that designate "biologically" a gender are negotiated. These characteristics are open to question, just like any other social practice. Further, the grounds on which we assert certain "true" categories of gender change as the discussion continues: are we talking about chromosomes, prostates, uteri, brains, hormones, or what?

So we can talk about "biologically a woman," but the term "biological" is only serving to obscure whatever material reality that's being articulated as gender.

I think I understand, however, Annabel, your statement,

Annabel wrote:

There are people who are "biologically" women, and look like women, and have prostates.

I feel complicates the discussion unnecessarily. Because what do you mean by, "Biologically" Women? Do you mean they identify as women, or do you mean they have ovaries and/or a uterus? Isn’t the whole discussion about the nuances of what it means to say someone is a “woman” or is a “man”?

Making a statement such as “…are biologically women…” implies there is no ambiguity.

Wait, where are we going with this? The question was about prostate. How did the question of ovaries and/or uteri come into the question about medical practice directed at prostates. It's completely possible for someone to have ovaries and a prostate. I mean, this is exactly what I mean when I say that medicalized sex/gender is unstable.

I am exactly questioning (troubling?) the assertion that the concept of a "biological woman" is without ambiguity.

So, in other words, people who are transgender that want to transition are wrong for wanting to transition to the sex they feel most comfortable as, doctors are wrong for wanting to help them, and the hormone therapies that help people transition are wrong?

I never made this claim. In fact, the structure I laid out with the open-ended question of gender quite obviously opens up the possibility for trans men and women to seek medical care and technologies for the purpose of embodying their gender. Because the "fact" of their bodies isn't prewritten by medical professionals, the opportunity to transition ot the sex they feel most comfortable as isn't foreclosed by a history of (sometimes violent) medically predetermined gender.

And this particular field of science, which has always been based on the assumption that sex does not play a part in how drugs are metabolized by the body, is wrong when it finds out that may not necessarily be true and that it adjusts recommendations on some medications (not even the majority by a long shot) to reflect that?

As I said, sex isn't a stable category. If the question is about the presence or characteristic of COX when aspirin is to be used to treat cardiovascular health, then talk about the presence or characteristic of COX. Sex is being used as an unstable proxy for the actual mechanism of ASA that varies between people (sometimes men and women, though not always).

So, do you have any evidence to support this stance? Because I think the people who have already transitioned would love to hear it. And I certainly would love to learn how an entire field of science is wrong on this issue. And I mean scientific evidence; not just conjectures and wild accusations. I want studies.

Edit: If anyone is curious, read the part about hormones and the part about biomedically disciplined erasure of bodily difference in Annabel's post again; those are the entire medical basis for gender reassignment surgery.

I am not exactly sure what you're specifically talking about, you clipped a rather large and dense quote of mine. While writing this I had in mind people who are intersexed as experiencing medically prescribed violence, though there are many trans men and women who experience this effect too. Ann Fausto-Sterling (Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, 2000 and Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World, 2012) and Suzanne Kessler ("The Medical Construction of Gender" from Lessons from the Intersexed, 1998), are the two researchers that come immediately to mind when I think about these issues, they'd be excellent sources to seek out if you're interested.

I mean, it's worthwhile to note that some trans men and women don't want to undergo all or any forms of medical reassignment. The medical authority that leverages this form bodily desire as the only "legitimate" end goal of transitioning enacts violence against trans people who don't want to seek certain surgical or hormonal treatments.

Yes, there are trans people who seek out medical practices to bring their bodies into closer alignment to their gender, and this is completely fine (and especially fine when they can achieve these goals without disciplining medical surveillance). But the fact that you seem to think this is the only way to embody a particular gender belies a fundamental misunderstanding.

I'm not sure it makes sense in the case presented directly above to place the burden on doctors and pharmacists. This pharmacist was trying to make sure that her patient was not inappropriately prescribed medicine. Mistakes do happen.

It makes more sense that if you know you are biologically a man but look like a woman you tell your pharmacist. The pharmacist is not a mind reader and as has been pointed out sometimes things are not obvious.

There are people who are "biologically" women, and look like women, and have prostates.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but the "biologically/medically" classified categories of gender are unstable, and thus open to challenge. This is made apparent by the fact that there are plenty of people who lay claim to various categories of gender (men and women being two very popular options) while simultaneously not embodying the tidy package of sexed characteristics ascribed as "biological" genders.

I don't think I understand, so I will bow out before I make a fool of myself, or insult someone unintentionally.

I think Vivianne's explanation captures what I was saying pretty well.

I agree with a lot of what you are writing, Annabel, but I am curious.

A person is either born with a prostrate, or not. Now, regardless of if that individual is "male" or "not-male" by any social standards, isn't it still medically describable as a person, "Born with a prostrate?" And if this is important to the bodies overall health, the treatment of the body that has a prostrate versus the treatment of the body that does not have a prostrate, wouldn’t this ultimately ensure a division in the practice of medicine among individuals based upon the organs they have, or do not have?

Yes, I think that the presences and character of prostates is a medical description that can be useful for medical practice. The presence or absence of a prostates will divide medical practice, but I don't think that it ought be any difference than how the presence or absence of a pancreas, gallbladder, or wisdom teeth divide medical practice.

According to the FDA, Ambien has different dosages at which it is safe, depending on biological sex.

Actually, the FDA had requested that the drug manufactures to set both men and women's dosages to the same low level. But the drug makers elected to only change women's dosages. All this despite the fact that there were both men and women were found to have residual Zolpidem/Abien in their systems on the mornings following taking the drug. Whatever the justification the FDA had for requesting lower doses for both, but only enforcing it for men, it commutes between the scientific facts and the socially organized constellations of gender.

I entertained Bob_Loblaw claim about the medical necessity of binary gender categories, in part because I wanted to flush out the details of the claim (am always excited to learn about new instances where medical science has laid claim to some "truth" about gender), and in part because it was an entertaining red harring. Vague references to specific drug interactions aren't convincing, and they implicitly rest on a claim of biomedical authority over the materiality of gender. Medicine takes up certain physical characteristics of the body (sexed organs, sexed hormones, etc) and articulates them through gender. It is only after we've convinced ourselves that ovaries, prostates, and hormones "make the wo/man," that medical practice organized around gender can proceed. To put another way, these categories aren't vindicated by biomedical science's ability to deferentially prescribe treatments based on gender. Rather, biomedical science depends on stabilizing these categories---sometimes through violent means---before it can deploy gendered technologies.

And like I said earlier, I totally already understand that modern medical practice is already organized around the patient as an essentially gendered subject. This produces the necessity of the closed question of gender and the insisted binary thereof. In fact, this very organization is what makes doctors believe that violent reconstructive surgeries on perfectly healthy intersexed babies is part of their job: in a social world where gender is rendered biologically essential, we see gender enforced through biomedically disciplined erasure of bodily difference.

I guess that's why I really liked Malachi Silverclaw idea: it destablized gender as a category in medical/scientific practice. If the question is left open, then there is no "easy" way to ascribe a gender to a newborn. The contemporary binary enables violent medical practices, but if there is no obvious binary, who is the doctor to go about measuring up infant gentiles for the purposes of (sometimes violent) gender assignment? An open question can be left to the future, and in the future always be revisited for a rewrite.

I believe Bi-Dil is one of the big race sensitive medicines out there (and was reference on a House episode as well from memory).

A close inspection of BiDil’s history, however, shows that the drug is ethnic in name only.... [N]o firm evidence exists that BiDil actually works better or differently in African-Americans than in anyone else. The FDA’s approval of BiDil was based primarily on a clinical trial that enrolled only self-identified African-Americans and did not compare their health outcomes with those of other ethnic or racial groups.

So how did BiDil become tagged as an ethnic drug and the harbinger of a new age of medicine? The story of the drug’s development is a tangled tale of inconclusive studies, regulatory hurdles and commercial motives....

Annabel wrote:

I have to admit, I always give the gender question a uncomfortable side-glance when filling out forms: as if there *must* be a category in which I can provide a definitive, objective answer. Even at the doctor's office it seems unnecessarily obligatory: as if the health prescriptions my doctor will proved are contingent on me laying claim to maleness or femaleness.

Actually there are medications that work differently in men and women. While they are not the norm, they do exist. Just like there are medications that work differently for different races. I'm not making this up. There are medications that work better or worse for Asians, blacks, etc. There is enough of a difference between people that this is very important information. To make it even more challenging, there are medications that a man can take that can affect a woman if he exchanges bodily fluids. Again, they aren't the norm but they certainly exist.

You'll forgive me for being incredulous at the vague claim that some medications work differently based on the gender of the patient. I'm not ignorant of medical technology (though this dangerous bodily fluid drug transfer is novel to me, pray tell?). I understand how medical procedures often change depending on the sex classification applied to patients: for example, under the ostensible "do no harm" obligation, doctors alter procedures to preserve the functionality of childbirth/care organs in cis woman (even in cases where it is against her wishes). But this comes out of the collapse of the constellation of gender into womanhood that is implicitly defined as the capacity to give birth. The fact that some women don't want children, or can't give birth to children, makes treatment decisions based off which gendere box is ticked seem premature.

And as you've already pointed out, medications directed at sexed organs in the body don't necessarily correspond with gendered bodies taking the drugs. From this perspective, the necessity of gender assignment to patients falls apart: gender doesn't match up with specific organ composition, and thus requires a more detailed investigation that necessarily desexes prostates, ovaries, uteri, etc. Medical professionals are shamelessly clinging to gender as a diagnoses while simultaneously destabilizing the category: the modern shift in focus to treating prostates and ovaries emerges as a consequence of the irreducibly of gender. (And all this without even mentioning the kind of disciplinary power generated through the shoring up biomedical classifications of day-to-day life).

And what are these racially specific drugs? Though I am willing to entertain the materiality of gender articulated through sex, but I usually have a real hard time buying the grounds for the medicalization of racial categories. Seriously: what are these drugs that work deferentially based on the socially circumscribed racial categories?

So would the law be better if it required that the child be on hormone treatment? Are their trans folk that don't take hormone treatment?...

Yes, there are trans folk that don't take hormones. For some people, hormone treatment isn't a necessary or desirable part of transitioning or experiencing oneself as a particular gender.

I'm no expert in the field of gender jargon, but it seems obvious to me that when filling in a form (or character sheet), 'gender' should not be followed with:

• male/female

nor

• male/female/other

nor

• male/female/(long-and ever growing-list of other terms)

it should simply say:

• Gender:__________

and let you fill in the blank.

That way, anyone who feels that the choice should be limited to male/female (for some reason) can write 'male' or 'female', and this will in no way prevent anyone else from filling in whichever term they prefer.

Would there be any problem with that?

I think this is a great idea. What you've outlined is how the question of gender which closes with an ostensibly exhaustive list of options forecloses possibility. The process which stabilizes gender categories (whether binary or not) depends, in part, on curbing destabilizing alternatives. Requiring people choose girl or boy, female or male, or woman or man insists that these categories constitute an exhausted, essential human disposition.

I have to admit, I always give the gender question a uncomfortable side-glance when filling out forms: as if there *must* be a category in which I can provide a definitive, objective answer. Even at the doctor's office it seems unnecessarily obligatory: as if the health prescriptions my doctor will proved are contingent on me laying claim to maleness or femaleness.

By leaving the question open, the possibility for "new" gender is made and the previous structure of gender is shown to be destabilized. And any attempt to draft up an exhaustive register of genders becomes immediately threatened by the next "boi," "tomboy," "andro," "Θ," etc inscribed into the blank following Gender.

I don't know if the rest of these girls* feel the same way, but I think making divorces more accessible would do more for solving marriage issues than making marriages more difficult to obtain.

*I use the term gender neutrally just as I do in real life.

Annabel wrote:

You're mistaken, biology is my preferred field.

If you say so.

If you're going to accuse me of lying, then I am not really interested in continuing this conversation.

Annabel wrote:

First, neuroscientists imaged the brains of cis men and women. They take these brains, and by interrogating only the differences between the two genders, they established the "true gender*" in the brain.

I very seriously doubt the term "true" was used or considered, especially in the way you are thinking. That would be very bad science.

Whether they use the term "true" or not doesn't determine the scientificity of neuroscience. But it is indisputable that neuroscience of gender proceeds on the premise that there is the essence of gender in the brain (gender essentialism).

Annabel wrote:

So, part of the disagreement here is epistimological: nueroscience began its project by constructing "true gender*" as a quality of cis brains.

You do have to run a baseline in order to observe what changes. That isn't a value judgment on either the baseline or the changes.

I wasn't disputing that this is what they do: I was troubling and making visible the assumption that gender comes from cisgender brains. And, of course they're making the value judgment: the judgment was made before they even began image cis brains for evidence of gender. Calling it "the baseline" doesn't change the fact that legitimate gender was first established in cis brains.

Annabel wrote:

How did they know which brain differences they tabulated were the "cause" of gender? They made reference to the already social identification of gender as a quality of sex.

With respect, I get the feeling that biology in general and neuroscience in particular is not your preferred field. You aren't going to get any good results trying to read a neuroscience paper while substituting the contextual meanings, referents and definitions from sociology. That really isn't what they mean by that.

You're mistaken, biology is my preferred field. I both study biology and study scientific thought. Don't take my irreverent speech about science and scientific practice as evidence of some sort of ignorance.

Though I do have significant problems with how science is conducted within neuro"science." When Todd made claim to a broad scientific consensus brought about by neuroscience, I kind of giggled. In the biology circles I move through, neuroscience is taken with a grain of salt.

As a trans person, I certainly do very much want science to better understand transgendered neural architecture. For starters, it's likely to be crucial to substantially improving our future medical care and our ability to more fully transition with parts that feel and work right in the brain as well as the body, especially for us FTM folks.

I have no doubt that neuroscience can find a way to contribute to the welbeing of trans men and women, and I honestly hope neuroscience achieves this. But if we're asking the question "what kind of science do we need to make bodily transitions that better fit how we experience ourselves," that question doesn't rest on ensuring that the "truth" of gender as an essentialized characteristic of the brain.

Science isn't there yet, but it isn't ever going to get there if people attack the scientists with pitchforks and burn down the labs instead of respecting what they're doing for our future.

Biomedical science isn't an apolitical project, and I see no pitchforks in my speech. I was being critical of the speech of Todd and neuroscientists that reduce gender to a characteristic of the brain. What I saw was the construction of two new classes of trans people: the legitimized gender-neurotypified trans people and the deligitimized non-gender-neurotypified trans people. The former are those who have the "correct" brain configuration to legitimize their claim to trans status, and the latter do not. I want to avoid a future where genderqueer (and many unnamed "others") are marginalized because we found it politically expedient today to anchor gender in the brains of cis people and a handful of trans people with "correct" brain configurations.

Back up here, because that statement really seems to suggest that you're saying that any scientific attempt to determine the origins of internal gender identity which includes being able to measure and quantify it is somehow cissexist?

Given that it appears to be an emergent property within the brain with a measurable biological origin, whose causes are increasingly subject to scientific inquiry, you might be facing a headlong collision between ideology and biology.

Unless you meant something less horribly broad (such as condemning as cissexist attempts to solely define gender by XX and XY, which clearly isn't the case as science has shown rather definitively).

Because it's absolutely in the body, just not absolutely defined by the chromosomes (though the genes therein, methylation of said genes therein, and the effect of the uterine environment in the presence of that web of complexity do in face play a role).

Even look at the neuroscience and how it has moved forward in its project on gender.

First, neuroscientists imaged the brains of cis men and women. They take these brains, and by interrogating only the differences between the two genders, they established the "true gender*" in the brain. Next, they imaged a sample of trans men and women's brains. Gathering them together, they surveyed these brains for their similarities to the "true gender*" that was established in the bodies of cis men and women.

So, part of the disagreement here is epistimological: nueroscience began its project by constructing "true gender*" as a quality of cis brains. How did they know which brain differences they tabulated were the "cause" of gender? They made reference to the already social identification of gender as a quality of sex. There are constellations of gender which each brain's body comfortably fit in: they have "typically" sexed bodies and they dress, act, speak, and move in ways that are sufficient to admit them into a "matching" gender. Statistical inference is used to identify brain differences which line up along categories that were already socially constituted. Science didn't "discover" gender in the brain: science discovered brain differences that correlated with the constellations of gender.

These facts actually brings into light the inherent cissexism of neuroscientific approaches to constructing gender as inherent to the body: they begin from the assumption that cisgender people physically constitute "true gender*." Thus, neuroscience casts trans men and women as derivations of cisgender people, only matching their gender identity so long as sufficient neurological evidence can be martialed to justify their claim to the status unquestionably afforded to cisgender people.

As mentioned above, science discovers differences that correlated with the constellations of gender. An interesting thing to take away from here is that the science of gender is both socially constituted (dependent on these constellations), and at the same time the science of gender is socially constituting gender. By bringing brains into question, certain brain configurations become taken up into gender, as an element in their constellations. The science of gender is a social practice that helps produce gender, and authoritative scientific discourse helps produce a narrow categories of ligitimized gender. This is what made the questions I posed at the close of this post apropos. Brains are certainly part of what constitutes gender (neuroscientists have seen to that), but authorizing neuroscience (or any biomedical science) as the authority over what constitutes gender (gender essentialization) is very dangerous.

And this brings us to where the disagreement is ontological: when you say "gender is rooted in the body" you seem to have stripped gender of everything except that which can be rendered through biomedical technology. Gender has been reduced to a quality of our nucleotide sequences, gene expression profiles, cellular physiology, or brain morphology. Of course, this kind of reductionism makes images like this unintelligible. What are the genders of the two characters in this image, and in what ways to we come to know their genders? This can even be scientifically investigated, by showing this image to children and adults alike. There will be a significant number of people who will identify the character on the left as a man or male and the character on the right as a woman or female. I am not being glib: there is a significant loss that occurs when rendering gender down to biological facts about the body that make "true gender*" incommensurable with gender.

Since moving back to NH, all of my players have been straight, white and cis.

When I was in Boston, I played more with gay and non-white ethnicity players.

Females players have always been represented. I have trans comrades, but I've never had a trans player at my home table. Played with some at cons, however.

But, blah blah blah. I only put that in there so I can get to what I'm really interested in:

My favorite article about privilege theory thus far that wasn't written by an at least semi-orthodox Marxist.

"In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the years, I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their gender/race/sexuality/class/etc. privilege. These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: 'I am so and so, and I have x privilege.' It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions were. It was not as if other participants did not know the confessor in question had her/his proclaimed privilege. It did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project themselves."

I still have my copy of Smith's Conquest from a freshman sociology course. Conquest makes some seriously radical arguments for social change that bridge gaps between marxism, feminism, and critical race theory. Growing up in the pacific northwest, her words helped me coalesce a lot of things I experienced growing up. She's brilliant.

@DeathQuaker

Serano is amazing, her poetry gives me goosebumps! :3

Annabel wrote:

I think it is also worth noting how within nueroscience (and other speculative fields),

When you start referring to a branch of science as a "speculative field" I think we're at something approaching a complete impasse here.

There is a lot of discussion both within science and without as to the validity of neuroscience. I understand the reluctance to discuss it, so I regret positing its speculative nature. But the important part of my post followed that and doesn't depend on the questionable nature of neuroscience:

But there is another dimension to this problem that I failed to recognize earlier: some people feel empowered and reassured when biomedical authority lays claim to their identities and bodies. Biomedicince is a powerful mover, and is a gateway to social (and legal) legitimization of a broad range of experience. The debate over the DSM classification of GID centers on problem. To remove it would rob many trans people of access to affordable medical interventions, but to keep it in the DSM patholizes gender deviance and endangers queer lives.

Todd, maybe you might find these kinds of scientific authority reassuring, but there is a distinct difference from saying that these explanations match your experiences, and making authoritative statements about the lives of all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. The things you've said about gay men and lesbians are no explanations for my experiences as a queer person (or for that matter, as a cis person). Bridging the gap between speculative(?) neuroscience and the lived experiences of queer people isn't something to do blithely, because it just stinks to hear someone explain my identity as the result of "hormone flux in-utero."

So, where does that leave the queer community: some want to subject themselves to biomedical surveillance as a means to legitimize gender and sexuality, while other don't want to further subject queer life to marginalization at the hands of authoritative, normalizing discourses (which, with all this "feminization/masculinization" talk, this is clearly a normalizing discourse that excludes genderqueer folks). Because, keep in mind that if we relegate gender to the auspices of BSTc volume (or whatever else is the fashionable cause of gender), what happens to the trans women who are informed that their brains don't match the typical neurological profiles for women and thus aren't eligible for medical treatment? Do they suddenly stop being trans because everyone else tells them their brains are "normal" for a man? At what point in time are we going to realize that handing our identities over to the authority of doctors, psychiatrists, and scientists doesn't ensure our protection and welfare?

Annabel wrote:

I swear it was only like 5 years ago we were on the cusp of digit length and clockwise hair whorl research.

But seriously, I am asking about the evidence for a "staged feminization/masculinization" of queer brains that has driven the scientific community into broad consensus. Like, where these stages break down along development (are they different trimesters?). This whole thing just seems like a rather large mass of scientific work would be hard to miss. I'm just not finding it.

It's not hard to find.

But it’s also like asking for an explanation of the evidence regarding drug metabolism and clearance, why some people have reactions to some drugs while others don’t, polymorphisms in p450 enzymes, hepatic transporters, etc and doing that all in a message board post. For the topic at hand I can point out some highlights, but you’ll need to risk those PubMed papercuts if you want to follow the field.

I'd start with the '95 paper by Swaab et al...

Okay, it's seems to be what I already knew: the claim of scientific consensus was overstated. I have no doubt that some people believe that gay men and trans woman have feminized brains, and lesbians and trans men have masculinized brains. Swaab makes no mention of this feminization/masculinization creates sexuality and gender identity.

I think it is also worth noting how within nueroscience (and other speculative fields), the foundations for causal arguments are generally weak. It is the premise of the research that there masculine brains and feminine brains. Only after this "fact" is asserted, do scientists begin parsing differences between these brains and making arguments that these differences produce gender. Gender is "made up" as a biological characteristic of the brain before the brain is investigated for evidence of gender.

But there is another dimension to this problem that I failed to recognize earlier when probing this bit of speculation: some people feel empowered and reassured when biomedical authority lays claim to their identities and bodies. Biomedicince is a powerful mover, and is the gateway to social (and legal) legitimization of a broad range of experience. The debate over the DSM classification of GID centers on problem. To remove it would rob many trans people of access to affordable medical interventions, but to keep it in the DSM patholizes gender deviance and endangers queer lives.

Todd, maybe you might find these kinds of scientific authority reassuring, but there is a distinct difference from saying that these explanations match your experiences, and making authoritative statements about the lives of all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. The things you've said about gay men and lesbians are no explanations for my experiences as a queer person (or for that matter, as a cis person). Bridging the gap between speculative neuroscience and the lived experiences of queer people isn't something to do blithely, because it just stinks to hear someone explain my identity as the result of "hormone flux in-utero."

So, where does that leave the queer community: some want to subject themselves to biomedical surveillance as a means to legitimize gender and sexuality, while other don't want to further subject queer life to marginalization at the hands of authoritative, normalizing discourses (which, with all this "feminization/masculinization" talk, this is clearly a normalizing discourse that excludes genderqueer folks). Because, keep in mind that if we relegate gender to the auspices of BSTc volume (or whatever else is the fashionable cause of gender), what happens to the trans women who are informed that their brains don't match the typical neurological profiles for women and thus aren't eligible for medical treatment? Do they suddenly stop being trans because everyone else tells them their brains are "normal" for a man? At what point in time are we going to realize that handing our identities over to the authority of doctors, psychiatrists, and scientists doesn't ensure our protection and welfare?

@Lissa my response about bullies was directed at the the black raven's post. I should have made that more explicit.

Annabel, I agree that removing gendered pronouns from language is definitely possible, but I doubt that it would result in a reduction of gender roles.

Japanese, for example, doesn't really have gendered pronouns, but gender roles are still very strong in Japanese culture. Farsi is also grammatically genderless, but gender roles are extremely strong in Iran.

In entertaining the line of conversation about gendered pronouns, I wasn't asserting that gendered pronouns are the fulcrum on which gender and sexuality turn. I was discussing it specifically mostly because it was an easy concept for others here to grasp, so I went with it. I recognize that whatever makes up the broader system of cissexism, heterosexism, and sexism, it is more than just pronouns.

Annabel wrote:

Take for instance biological essentialist views of sexuality: the claim that people are born "attracted to women" or "attracted to men" may work to legitimize the experiences of gay men and lesbians. But it does two things that marginalize other queer people. First, the essentialist view makes bisexuality an impossibility, because their existence would undermine the necessary dichotomy used to legitimize non-heterosexual's non-heterosexual behavior. Second, the essentialization of sexuality rests on an already presupposed essentialization of gender—necessarily marginalizing trans life.

I think we've gone around on this before, but this explanation gives me a better idea where you're coming from.

I can see what you're saying, but I don't think it's the biological essentialism part in itself, but the dualist dichotomy used. Phrasing it as something like "Sexual orientation is innate, but may include exclusive attraction to men, exclusive attraction to women or anywhere on the spectrum between", would easily include bisexuals while leaving the essentialism intact. In fact, that's how I've always understood it.

Including trans concepts in the explanation would complicate it, just because there are more variables, but doesn't change the basic biological essentialist view of sexuality: That both your physical sex (the genitalia, if you will), the gender of your self image and your sexual orientation are biologically determined. It's just that they're not simple binary either/or conditions.

(Apologies if I've used inappropriate terms. No offense is intended.)

This is basically taking the epicycle approach to understanding sex, gender, and sexuality. I have no doubt that biological essentialism can be adapted to capture a broader range of deviancies from the gender and sexuality norms.

Both the situating of the norm, and the construction of deviance are social processes that aren't reducible to scientific knowledge about human biology. These things are "set up" well before the scientific method is applied to test hypotheses. In a sense, you've already determined biological essentialism by seizing on socially assigned and highlighted differences as biological fact. At the end of the day, I see scientific practice as just another form of social practice, and subject to the same kinds of critiques we can subject any social practice.

Arssanguinus wrote:

Annabel wrote:

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Annabel wrote:

I think the assumption that gender is inevitable is a sign of a starved imagination.

And I think the need to launch vague, unwarranted and almost random insults is a sign that someone is out of good points to make.

That's fine. I made my post: you were wrong about the inevitability of gender in language, and I was right. There isn't really anywhere else to go from here, so this is a good place to stop.

Now for bonus points ... Show one example, ever, where something like that has been changed intentionally and artificially and it has ever stuck?

The transition from using "stewards/stewardesses" to using the gender neutral "flight attendant."

If your point is to say "no one has ever changed common usage gendered pronouns to gender nutral pronouns, therefor it can't be done," then my response is "that doesn't follow." Just because something hasn't been done, doesn't mean it can't be done.

In 1968, no one had been to the moon. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to go to the moon. In 2014 it may seem impossible to do away gendered pronouns, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to do away them.

Annabel wrote:

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Annabel wrote:

I think the assumption that gender is inevitable is a sign of a starved imagination.

And I think the need to launch vague, unwarranted and almost random insults is a sign that someone is out of good points to make.

That's fine. I made my post: you were wrong about the inevitability of gender in language, and I was right. There isn't really anywhere else to go from here, so this is a good place to stop.

Now for bonus points ... Show one example, ever, where something like that has been changed intentionally and artificially and it has ever stuck?

The transition from using "stewards/stewardesses" to using the gender neutral "flight attendant."

Lissa Guillet wrote:

Crystal Frasier wrote:

Once in a while, GLBT organizations like GLAAD will do some trans outreach or lobbying for trans protections, but HRC (the people who make the ubiquitous blue and yellow equality stickers) have been horrible to trans people over the past thirty years, so take anything they post about their track record or their take on trans issues with a huge grain of salt.

Yeah, it's weird. There is a lot of misinformation out there and not just among heteronormative cis people but also within the GLBT community. There was a huge fluff up 10 years ago with the Lambda Literary award for instance. They give out awards for outstanding GLBT literature and the book they wanted to give the award to a horrible book that won't bother advertising here; suffice to say that it was a terrible and transphobic book. There were petitions and letters and they were adamant on their stand for awhile. Official letters came in and they were just cruelly dismissive. Eventually they did the right thing but it was disturbing.

It is not that weird, really. Just usual human behaviour.

We would like to think that people who have been victims of discrimination will never commit discrimination themselves. That victims will NEVER become bullies. Basically, that victims are always innocent and will always remain so.

It is an idea so deeply engrained that we keep on believing it, even though the real world gives us many many examples to the contrary, time and again.

I think you might be getting the wrong idea.

First, the author of the text Guillet mentions is not a member (or even a friend, IMHO) of the LGBT community. Essentially, he's a menace to the transgender and bisexual members of the queer community, and that this was an instance where the dominance of gay men and lesbians within the LGBT community becomes salient. The inclusion of a transphobic text just makes it clear that the LGBT community is made of Ls, Gs, Bs, and Ts—of which the Gs, Ls, and Bs can be just as ignorant of the Ts as cisgender heterosexual people.

Second, the defense of the text's inclusion is more complex than "some victims become bullies" (no doubt there were many bullies among the defenders). LGBT folks already face a great deal of social obstacles in living, and it isn't uncommon for individuals and groups to negotiate their inclusion in such a way that marginalizes other members of the LGBT community.

Take for instance biological essentialist views of sexuality: the claim that people are born "attracted to women" or "attracted to men" may work to legitimize the experiences of gay men and lesbians. But it does two things that marginalize other queer people. First, the essentialist view makes bisexuality an impossibility, because their existence would undermine the necessary dichotomy used to legitimize non-heterosexual's non-heterosexual behavior. Second, the essentialization of sexuality rests on an already presupposed essentialization of gender—necessarily marginalizing trans life.

These consequences stem from a particular social configuration which privileges biomedical authority over all others in regards to questions of the body, sexuality, and gender. The heterosexism of a systems that makes reproduction the center of gender and sexual discourse depends on cissexist systems to justify reducing it (body, sexuality, and gender) all down to innate genetic or hormonal characteristics. It is a broader issue than just "bullies," and requires significant (and often radical) consideration on that part of queer people as to how cisgender, heterosexual dominated society organizes our speech and action.

Annabel wrote:

I think the assumption that gender is inevitable is a sign of a starved imagination.

And I think the need to launch vague, unwarranted and almost random insults is a sign that someone is out of good points to make.

That's fine. I made my post: you were wrong about the inevitability of gender in language, and I was right. There isn't really anywhere else to go from here, so this is a good place to stop.

Annabel wrote:

But to take you example of "him her he she etc." These words aren't timeless inevitabilities foisted on humanity by the laws of the universe. Gendered pronouns came about through some sort of process that is larger than any individual action

The process started a few billion years ago with sexual differentiation. Societies aren't making something up out of whole cloth when they describe gender, they're describing something real. While the universe isn't forcing the term on us, it definitely is giving us something to work with.

The inevitability of gendered pronouns (if we're going to stay on this narrow example) is just factually incorrect. There are plenty of languages that don't have gendered pronouns, Persian being just one of them.

There also have been plenty of incidences where English speakers have developed and used gender neural pronouns (see Spivak pronouns). They may be rare, but it proves that we can do it.

Quote:

but it does not follow that "him her he she etc" can't be undone or subverted somehow. I disagree that these things can't be changed.

It seems incredibly difficult to do and I'm not entirely sure what the gain is.

For some queer people, it gains quite a lot.

But if we wanted to talk about potential gains in roleplay: I've run a game where using gender neutral pronouns enabled a character to go without gender. It was pretty cool, and the PC was loved by all.

I think the assumption that gender is inevitable is a sign of a starved imagination.

Annabel wrote:

Do you mean "can't you talk about [queer life in heterosexists, cissexist society] by appealing to the heterosexist, cissexist language"?

Because the answer is an obvious: No. Not if I intend to destabilize the heterosexist, cissexist "normal" for the betterment of queer life.

From some of your other posts I'm not exactly sure what your plan of action is here or how it relates to your goals.

Words like him her he she etc. aren't going anywhere. They are by and large accurate enough to be useful and no matter how accepting society gets are still going to be the majority (as our genes which we're unfortunately stuck with for a while have a vested interest in "normal") . I don't think i've heard the term cisgendered outside of these forums.

There are a lot of different things that can be done, more than I am able to list here.

But to take you example of "him her he she etc." These words aren't timeless inevitabilities foisted on humanity by the laws of the universe. Gendered pronouns came about through some sort of process that is larger than any individual action: but it does not follow that "him her he she etc" can't be undone or subverted somehow. I disagree that these things can't be changed.

It always astounds me at how people use our genetics as a symbol of immemorial fatality while scientists have already developed technology to rewrite DNA, and are on the cusp of being able to rewrite our own. Somehow scientists are able to undo the very fabric of "normal" biology, yet you're skeptical over whether queer folk can undo the fabric of normative society.

@MagusJanus

Yeah... I can't get anywhere with the consistent reduction of everything down to individual people. Yes, individual people matter, but so does the larger social context which shapes what life is like for people. I use the words other than people because there are social objects worth discussing. We're coming from completely different places on this, and I am not that interesting in coaxing you to think about society as more than just individual people. Fundamentally, this is an ontological disagreement, and I don't think we share the same repertoire of intellectual tools to full explore this disagreement.

Annabel wrote:

What society is is not reducible down to simply "people." People interact with institutions, knowledge, power (power/knowledge), etc which taken all together makes up society. I was identifing a broad range of cissexist, heterosexist attitudes, institutions, media, knowledges, values, and meanings that coalesce into our society.

But can you talk about a group of people like that and say anything without writing a medication disclaimer parody and without sending everyone else googling your terminology?

Normal might be, by implications, insulting by implying there's something wrong with people not nestled firmly into the depths of a bell curve but ignoring the trend can be just as erroneous as ignoring the exceptions.

Do you mean "can't you talk about [queer life in heterosexists, cissexist society] by appealing to the heterosexist, cissexist language"?

Because the answer is an obvious: No. Not if I intend to destabilize the heterosexist, cissexist "normal" for the betterment of queer life.

So you get to decide the terms used for yourself AND everyone else? Interesting.

Redefining how you yourself are called, I can see. Redefining other people's identity for them ... isn't that at least part of what you object to in the first place?

Well, that isn't what I'm arguing. Highlighting where privilege exists and who experiences it isn't the same as "redefining" people identity for them.

Except that a society is its people. Without the latter banding together and determining the standards, the former cannot exist. So in order for a society to be cissexist, heterosexist... then those who make up enough of it to determine the standards must also be the same way.

What society is is not reducible down to simply "people." People interact with institutions, knowledge, power (power/knowledge), etc which taken all together makes up society. I was identifing a broad range of cissexist, heterosexist attitudes, institutions, media, knowledges, values, and meanings that coalesce into our society. That is why I explicitly stated "the problem I am pointing to is structural, and is deeply embedded in the dominant language of a cissexist, heterosexist society."

I draw deep from modern sociological understandings of society (which is arguably the only way to understand society), and thus I tend to reject solutions and explanations that reduce human life to the lonely, sole person. I am not saying persons don't exist, just that people don't exhaust the field of social objects worth talking about.

I agree with Jessica Price 100% on this. People on Paizo Forums are way way polite when pointing out someone is speaking from a position of privilege. In fact, it initially struck me as odd how people with marginalized identities didn't use the word privilege to make explicit the problems with privileged speech. But the fact is, people here usually circumnavigate this useful term to try to identify privilege without making the term explicit.

It seems clear to me that a lot of people go out of their way to not use the language that can feel insulting to cisgender heterosexuals: Jessica Price even going so far to write a tumblr post that works to take the sting out of the word privilege.

Honestly, the issue seems to be that some people (myself one of them) aren't as gentle with our language as others. I've made it explicit when I believe privilege is creating problems in our discussions, and as a consequence I think some people get "turned off" or feel insulted. I honestly think it's a difference in at what point some people say, "enough is enough, time to highlight some privileged speech."

At the end of the day, it comes down to this for me: Am I willing to let privileged speech continue to marginalize myself and the queer people I identify with, or am I going to risk hurting the feelings of a few cisgender heterosexual that don't like having their privilege highlighted. Suffice it to say, I almost always choose the former.

@MagusJanus

The "dominant language of cissexist, heterosexist society" is not the same as cisgender people.

Arssanguinus wrote:

My problem is with constantly moving goalposts of acceptability for every single subgroup or minority. In order to keep up with them, you have to go into fulltime study - and then the one that was ok last year … won't be the next. My general preference is "Don't be a jerk'. And 'Don't presume the other guy is trying to offend you. Most of the time, they aren't"

Even better- don't use labels. People are not the sort of thing you can put a label on anyway.

My point, is- some people object to certain labels, and other use that label in a derogatory manner (and "cis" is certainly commonly used that way). So, at the very least- let's not use those labels, except perhaps when referring to ones self.

Or... we can recognize that the use of the term "labels" is meant to diminish the importance of queer language.

And here is an apropos article I wrote last week (and published yesterday) addressing this problem: Queer "Labels," Queer Lexicon, and Queer Life

MagusJanus, eh... I think you're getting the exact opposite out of what I've been saying. To put it plainly: I am not bothered by differences, I am bothered by the social structures that place differences in a hierarchy where cisgender heterosexuality is at the apex of social meaning and value. I want to work towards a queer world where differences aren't defined by their deviation from cisgender heterosexuality: where cisgender heterosexuality is no longer privileged over other gender and sexuality configurations.

Because, honestly, I don't want to eat the vanilla normative cake pre-packaged by CisHetCo™: I want to sample the cheese pies, fruit cobbler, crème brûlée from Queer à la carte.

....That is the ultimate flaw in what Annabel has said when complaining about the terminology differences; eliminating those terms would do far worse damage than leaving them in place and convincing people to think of them in a positive manner.

But that's not what I argued for at all: I was arguing for an expanding queer language that resists placing heterosexuality as the center of everything, and queer life as a mere deviance from it. When I explained the problems with terms like "gay marriage," the focus was on how "marriage" itself is implicitly heterosexual. Part of the political significance of "gay marriage" is due to the assumption that all queer people ought to aspire to enter an implicitly heterosexual union to gain social recognition. This is part of a broader problem where queer people are only broadly recognized as having legitimate relations so long as it is couched in the values and meaning of cisgender heteroseuxality.

The problem I am pointing to is structural, and is deeply embedded in the dominant language of a cissexist, heterosexist society. Though important for the day-to-day life of queer people, I am still cautious of the promises that gay marriage carries for queer people. It seems to me that even with gay marriage there are still queer people omitted from the legal and social benefits of government sanctioned unions. I recognize the unmarked and unremarked dominance of cisgender heterosexuality as a source of this marginalization. So, that's what I'm "complaining" about.

P.S. @KSF, I think we are both on the same page. We're in sync... so to speak. Thanks! :D

...If we are to the state where we cannot discuss things as they are using language most people can easily understand, then your cause is already lost... simply because most people will not understand what you are saying, and thus you cannot affect the lingual changes you wish for because the lingual shifts will simply be sidelined as too alien to bother with....

...Though, it would have helped if you had asked what I meant by "on the spectrum" instead of assuming a meaning.

Even with your explanation (which seems "far afield" the typical meaning of the word spectrum), it isn't something I think you have grounds to assert an understanding of me. In fact, if other people believe genderqueer suits you, but you don't feel that way, then it calls into question the validity to asserting that other queer people "suit" the terms they are called. It undermines your basic judgment that I am "on the spectrum," or your feeling that you're not "on the spectrum." I am going going to go with the former.

For letting it rule over you: Well, aside from the fact I could point out one of the terms you are using ("queer") is actually a term intended to marginalize and isolate those who are outside the norm... All I have to do is point to your own words. You speak of language being such of an issue, of queer folk relying upon it to live... You speak of constant struggles you have just because of language, all the while using language that is part of the social structures that define you as separate. You speak of life as a queer; have you tried life as being, simply, a human who happens to be different? Labels create definition, categorization, and separation; they exist to allow the human mind to stick everything in its own little box, and by using such, especially identifying with a label that was originally applied to keep you as separate, you fall into the trap of identifying yourself within the same social structures that define you as not being the norm. After all, how many heteronormative people do you see talking about life as a heteronormative?

Okay... maybe you're right... you do need to be invited to the queer conversation: Queer Reappropriation.

You speak of language like it is a flimsy thing, like it doesn't really matter. You treat the category of "human" as if it is not already deeply embedded with cissexist, heterosexist social norms, which implicitly marginalize queer people. You speak of your ambivalence of it like it is some sort of strength queer people are lacking. Here is conversation invite number two: Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, Chapter 1: Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy.

As for those who rely on queer language to live? I've never met one. I've met plenty of people who thought they did, though. And met plenty of people who were queer, but didn't live by the language at all and were just themselves. The second group was always the happier one. The second group also did not lack for social interaction, whether with those similar to them or others.

Well, I've known a few, but they're not really around anymore. Their unhappiness and eventual death wasn't something they inflicted on themselves, and simply "not letting it bother" them wasn't an option.