I understand and respect your feelings! How can we differentiate between people's choices and commercializing the most intimate human feelings and bringing them on the market of available identifications?

Well that is why I stay out of the idle talk and average everydayness of Das Man, to use some terms of Heidegger.

In other words, this talk by 'them' about the abstraction of 'transgenderedism' is fundamentally inauthentic, as it does not relate to any specification of personality or existence, but of an objective generalization of what it might be for someone who fits under that category.

There must be, to remain within a sphere or paridigm of authenticity, a separation between what is real, like my trans friend Ryan and me the homosexual, and this talk of trans people and homosexuals.

A curious response. So her argument would carry more weight for you if she shaved her head and wore a suit? Not you, Un.

But there is the point that transgender folk take gender very seriously. So denying the importance of gender in their defence is odd. If that were your point, I'd agree. It would be on a par with telling aboriginal people that their culture does not matter. That is, telling a man who says he feels like a woman that the distinction between man and woman is irrelevant is ignoring the problem, not sorting it. Gender is central for transgender people.

That would be a good discussion point.

...?

The deeper performative contradiction is that no gender/gender is a meaningless is an identity category. Rebecca is getting up to say people have an identity of gender. This puts their position in the same place as anyone claiming to have a gender. Both are asserting a meaning about an individual is true.

In terms of understanding gender, Rebecca's issue is treating like it is a standard which defines something else or a rule someone has to meet. Why would anyone both with gender when any reason for thinking you have to belong to one of the other (i.e. you must be X because you dress/behave/have a body part Y)? Well, for the reason that gender is its own distinction and meaning, given not be the constrictive terms of some other quality meeting a standard to "be a gender", but rather in gender being its own feature of oneself.

Too hard to follow.

One of the issues brought out by this discussion is the conflict between a certain view of feminism, and trans politics.

Feminism points out that the role of acting like a woman is forced on females; that is, the gender role and its consequences are forced onto the individual because of their sex. Feminism seeks to point out discrepancies between the genders that have nothing to do with sex - women having lowed average incomes, women being subject to violence and so on - but instead relate to power. Feminism downplays the importance of gender.

Transsexuality, almost in opposition to this, seeks to emphasise gender over sex. So transexual politics holds for example that I am a female but I want to be treated as a man; my gender is more important to who I am than my sex.

Feminism wishes to downplay gender, transsexuality wishes to emphasis it.

@unenlightened

Rebecca's assertion of "no gender" no less involves a gender-related category than an assertion someone is "male" or "female."

We might ask here the same question she puts to gender: why have no gender? Since gender is meaningless in terms of defining which things are "male" or "female," no gender isn't required to rid us of a gender constriction. There is nothing (e.g. a body, behaviour, etc. ) which makes one a male, female or no gender.

"Gender" is not meaningless. We make much use of the distinction. The question is, is it coherent to talk of gender in terms of feelings when gender is also a set of social constraints?

For clarity I am using sex, male, female; and gender, man, woman.

Yes, I agree gender not meaningless, my point was that "no gender" is on the same level.

I meant "meaningless" in terms a constraint. Just as there is "no what is like to be a man/women," there is no "what is it like to be no gender." Gender or no gender, there is no constraint is placed.

A man may have any combination of body, dress behaviour, etc.
A woman may have any combination of body, dress behaviour, etc.
Someone with no gender may have any combination body, dress behaviour, etc.

The "meaningless" of gender doesn't give us a reason to reject it in favour of no gender. No gender is "meaningless" in exactly the same way. We have no reason to prefer it over a gender in terms of fighting social constraints.

I meant "meaningless" in terms a constraint. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You may have let that utilitarian rubbish have too great an influence on your thinking. If gender is a constraint, it is one that we are able to modify; something calling it a constraint only serves to hide.

Otherwise, your argument appears to be analogous to calling atheism a religion. It doesn't work.

Good my point is exact opposite then. Gender (or no gender) is not a constraint.

In terms of an identity, there is no body, behaviour, dress, etc. that it necessitates. When I say "meaningless," I mean gender offers nothing to the outcome of constraining who someone might be or their position in society. There is no "someone must be this" by gender or no gender.

:meh:

My reference to "social constraint' was referring to the various constraining social practices which are supposedly done because of gender.

Trying to eliminate gender categories isn't a way to prevent such social practices. Categories of no gender can be used equally well in that respect.

A society can form a myth, for example, that person in society must wear dresses because they had no gender. The society might use it in exactly the same way as ours did "women must wear dresses."

SO what?

It means Rebecca's attack on gender is a performative contradiction. To have "no gender" isn't a way of escaping a category which enables such myth based social constraint. "No gender" is an identity just as capable of being misrepresented in such myth.

Eliminating gender identity (or trying to) wouldn't give us a world protected from those myth based social constraints.

You appear to think this cogent. To my eye it is incoherent.

I'm just saying "no gender" is just as much a category as "gender." Rebecca is not escaping the use of categories which may be used by myth in social constraint. She's using the very thing she is trying to escape.

And atheists are being religious in claiming not to have a religion. Twaddle.

It's not the same. Calling atheist religious is an error because the former excludes the latter. To be equivalent, I would have to be saying claiming someone had no gender (atheist) was claiming someone had gender (religious).

I am not doing so. To suggest someone has no gender is never the claim someone has gender.

We can draw an analogy the atheist and the religious here. A society might have a myth: "An atheist must be X." or a myth: "A religious person must be X." Despite being entirely different, both atheist and religious are categories which a myth might form around.

Gender and no gender are both categories in this way.

I'm just saying "no gender" is just as much a category as "gender." — TheWillowOfDarkness

How does a human not have gender? My computer does not have gender and a door knob lacks gender (even if it's LA poignée de porte). You know, it's a knob -- its range of behaviors is extremely limited, unless it is very inventive. But door knobs are morons.

I took Rebecca to be pointing out the incoherency and other issues in the prevalent narrative, not as an attack, per se, on transgender people, but rather for 1.)to avoid the incoherent narrative negatively affecting the basis of gay rights(we're born this way), and 2.)to at least begin a discussion about a better defense for transgenders...

The same way anything lack a particular feature: an absence of that feature.

A cars lack a wheel by the absence of a wheel. I lack the name "Bitter Crank" because it's absent from the name meanings which refer to me. For a human to have no gender, it's just a matter of the meaning "no gender" being true about them.

Much like how a doors without gender don't have a gender, actually.

Behaviours simply aren't relevant because being a gender (or not being a gender) isn't an account of behaviour. Nor does the presence of a certain behaviour define a gender (hence the absurdity and falsification of claims like "only men/women can do that" ).

@TheWillowOfDarkness@creativesoul@Bitter Crank@Banno

Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness.

The Second Sex argues against the either/or frame of the woman question (either women and men are equal or they are different). It argues for women’s equality, while insisting on the reality of the sexual difference. Beauvoir finds it unjust and immoral to use the sexual difference as an argument for women’s subordination. She finds it un-phenomenological, however, to ignore it. As a phenomenologist she is obliged to examine women’s unique experiences of their bodies and to determine how these experiences are co-determined by what phenomenology calls the everyday attitude (the common-sense assumptions that we unreflectively bring to our experience). As a feminist phenomenologist assessing the meanings of the lived female body, Beauvoir explores the ways that cultural assumptions frame women’s experience of their bodies and alienate them from their body’s possibilities. For example, it is assumed that women are the weaker sex. What, she directs us to ask, is the ground of this assumption? What criteria of strength are used? Upper body power? Average body size? Is there a reason not to consider longevity a sign of strength? Using this criterion, would women still be considered the weaker sex? A bit of reflection exposes the biases of the criteria used to support the supposedly obvious fact of women’s weakness and transforms it from an unassailable reality to an unreliable assumption. Once we begin this questioning, it is not long before other so-called facts fall to the side of “common sense” in the phenomenological sense.

What is perhaps the most famous line of The Second Sex, translated in 1952 as “One is not born but becomes a woman” and in 2010 as “One is not born but becomes woman”, is credited by many as alerting us to the sex-gender distinction. Whether or not Beauvoir understood herself to be inaugurating this distinction, whether or not she followed this distinction to its logical/radical conclusions, or whether or not radical conclusions are justified are currently matters of feminist debate. What is not a matter of dispute is that The Second Sex gave us the vocabulary for analyzing the social constructions of femininity and a method for critiquing these constructions. By not accepting the common sense idea that to be born with female genitalia is to be born a woman this most famous line of The Second Sex pursues the first rule of phenomenology: identify your assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside; do not bring them back into play until and unless they have been validated by experience.
The situation of women is comparable to the condition of the Hegelian Other in that men, like the Hegelian Master, identify themselves as the Subject, the absolute human type, and, measuring women by this standard of the human, identify them as inferior. Women’s so-called inadequacies are then used as justification for seeing them as the Other and for treating them accordingly. Unlike the Hegelian Other, however, women are unable to identify the origin of their otherness. They cannot call on the bond of a shared history to reestablish their lost status as Subjects. Further, dispersed among the world of men, they identify themselves in terms of the differences of their oppressors (e.g., as white or black women, as working-class or middle-class women, as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu women) rather than with each other. They lack the solidarity and resources of the Hegelian Other for organizing themselves into a “we” that demands recognition. Finally, their conflict with men is ambiguous. According to Beauvoir, women and men exist in a “primordial Mitsein”: there is a unique bond between this Subject and its Other. In contesting their status as inessential, women must discover their “we” and take account of the Mitsein. Beauvoir uses the category of the Inessential Other to designate the unique situation of women as the ambiguous Other of men. Unlike the Other of the master-slave dialectic, women are not positioned to rebel. As Inessential Others, women’s routes to subjectivity and recognition cannot follow the Hegelian script (The Second Sex, xix–xxii).

The last chapters of The Second Sex, “The Independent Woman” and the “Conclusion”, speak of the current (1947) status of women’s situation—what has changed and what remains to be done. Without ignoring the importance of women’s gaining the right to vote and without dismissing the necessity of women attaining economic independence, Beauvoir finds these liberal and Marxist solutions to women’s situation inadequate. They ignore the effects of women’s socialization (the subject of volume two of The Second Sex) and they are inattentive to the ways that the norm of masculinity remains the standard of the human. The liberated woman must free herself from two shackles: first, the idea that to be independent she must be like men, and second, the socialization through which she becomes feminized. The first alienates her from her sexuality. The second makes her adverse to risking herself for her ideas/ideals. Attentive to this current state of affairs, and to the phenomenology of the body, Beauvoir sets two prerequisites for liberation. First, women must be socialized to engage the world. Second, they must be allowed to discover the unique ways that their embodiment engages the world. In short, the myth of woman must be dismantled. So long as it prevails, economic and political advances will fall short of the goal of liberation. Speaking in reference to sexual difference, Beauvoir notes that disabling the myth of woman is not a recipe for an androgynous future. Given the realities of embodiment, there will be sexual differences. Unlike today, however, these differences will not be used to justify the difference between a Subject and his inessential Other.

The goal of liberation, according to Beauvoir, is our mutual recognition of each other as free and as other. She finds one situation in which this mutual recognition (sometimes) exists today, the intimate heterosexual erotic encounter. Speaking of this intimacy she writes, “The dimension of the relation of the other still exists; but the fact is that alterity has no longer a hostile implication” (The Second Sex, 448). Why? Because lovers experience themselves and each other ambiguously, that is as both subjects and objects of erotic desire rather than as delineated according to institutionalized positions of man and woman. In Beauvoir’s words, “The erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of the condition; in it they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as the subject” (The Second Sex, 449). The concept of ambiguity, developed abstractly in The Ethics of Ambiguity, is erotically embodied in The Second Sex and is identified as a crucial piece of the prescription for transcending the oppressions of patriarchy. This description of the liberating possibilities of the erotic encounter is also one of those places where Beauvoir reworks Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. For in drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the ways that we are world-making and world-embedded subject-objects, she reveals the ways that it is as subject-objects “for the world”, “to the world”, and “in the world” that we are passionately drawn to each other

I agree with you about the absurdity of "only men/women can do 'that.'"

The reason this is the case is because being a certain gender does not imply any capacity of capability with regard to doing something, and neither does it necessitate any conclusion about capacity or potentiality at all. This is non-sequitur: what necessitates a conclusion about capacity, potentiality or capability is that which would be directly causally related, as opposed to some sort metaphorically based relation. Being a woman has nothing to do with being able to give birth or ejaculate. This refers to anatomy, not gender. There are those who want to draw correlations, but these correlations are at base with regard to some sort of ulterior motive or other ideological framework the impetus of a will to the domination of woman.

This is an interesting idea... "I am born this way."

1. Do not immediately take this statement at face value or, in other words, as an assertion that would be true analytically; by virtue of the meaning of the words. Instead, understand this sentence with regard to its context, as you would understand a singular word by both denotation and connotation. The reason this is the case is due to this: often those who say "I am born this way" do not mean that they are determined to be this way and because of this are authentic by virtue of it being 'natural' or something. They often mean something different and metaphorical. They often mean that they themselves ARE this and want to establish this truth meaningfully; they metaphorically posit (metaphor does contain a certain power) their existence, their birth, their whole life and authenticity of being as a pillar of truth atop which their homosexuality is supported.

2. If the statement, "I was born gay," is asserted as if to be analytically true... This is obviously impossible. It is impossible because a person is not born any sexuality. Sexuality regards (and I hope this isn't too metaphorical) the libido, a psychical energy. Freud says that the libido becomes manifest in different ways, and becomes an impetus of expression for the individual. This libido thus does not depend on genitalia and actually has nothing to do with it, for it is more-so an activity of the brain, not any other organ. According to experience, a person changes and their outlets of expression, identification and the manifestations of their desires become conditioned and mirror their experiences, according to what that particular person wants, which cannot ever be described adequately in theory but is at base irreducibly personal. One is not born any sexuality but becomes who they are and wills with their freedom their interactions, relations and intimacy.

3. I am gay. I am gay because I choose to be gay. I choose to be gay because that is what I feel. I feel what is closest and proximal to me. I realize the manifestations of my desires and my impulses and I direct my attention towards that. I have perhaps an inclination to be this way but I also have past experiences that have changed not my conception of what I desire in other people but what I desire for myself and what I want my existence to consist of. I was not born to be determined. I was born free. I have always been free. I choose everything that I am. It is bad faith to live a life of trying to conform with what you are, as if what you are is absolute and separate and you, the innocent bystander, are relative to these inescapable conditions. You are the totality of your experience, regardless of its origins--the origin of something is meaningless with regard to the apprehension of its meaning.

The only truly meaningful thing about a sexuality, which is defined by the romantic interest in another, is love.

The word creates the limitation, the boundary. And a mind that is not functioning in words, has no limitation; it has no frontiers; it is not bound... Take the word love and see what it awakens in you, watch yourself; the moment I mention that word, you are beginning to smile and you sit up, you feel. So the word love awakens all kinds of ideas, all kinds of divisions such as carnal, spiritual, profane, infinite, and all the rest of it. But find out what love is. Surely, Sir, to find out what love is, the mind must be free of that word and the significance of that word. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

Behaviours simply aren't relevant because being a gender (or not being a gender) isn't an account of behaviour. Nor does the presence of a certain behaviour define a gender (hence the absurdity and falsification of claims like "only men/women can do that" ). — TheWillowOfDarkness

Nonsense. Only women can have be pregnant and have babies. That is a result of their physical features and how those physical features give rise to certain behaviors only allowed by those physical features. No matter how hard you try, you can't fly without wings. You can't use your nose as a hand unless you have a trunk. You can't manipulate nature unless you have opposable thumbs, etc. Your capacity for any behavior is governed by not just the size and shape of your body, but also the processes that go on inside it, like the level of certain hormones and chemicals flooding your brain at any given moment.

A man who transitions into a woman doesn't have a real vagina. They have an open wound that they have to keep open with stents to prevent the body from doing what it naturally does - heal itself. That is what women don't need to do. It is what men with a delusional disorder have to do after having a doctor cut off their penis and makes a hole and calls it a "vagina" - a miscategorization of the Nth degree.

Isn't the body telling you that you are a man by trying to revert back to it's old form? Having the notion that you are really a woman and that your body is wrong, just begs the question: "How do you really know that the body is wrong and your mind is right? Could it not be possible that it is the other way around?"

Generally speaking, I don't like computer analogies, applied to humans. But in this case, a computer-related vocabulary makes explanation much easier. :up:

First, humans have hardware, even if it is called wetware in this context. :smile: The part of the software that engages directly with the wetware is usually called firmware. If you consider that men and women have a few different appendages, you will realise that their firmware must be a little bit different. Different drivers for male and female genitalia, if you will. But not just that. Women live their lives more 'saturated' with active biochemicals than men, and this also requires differences in the firmware. And there are other differences too that must be accounted-for by the firmware. The end result is that we have wetware differences between men and women, and corresponding firmware differences too.

If a human with a penis has firmware that is usually found in someone with other fitments, there is a mismatch. I do not submit this as an explanation, but as an analogy or metaphor, as a help to understand how a human could be a man (say) in the body of a woman. I.e. female wetware + male firmware. In the context of my computer-based analogy, this explanation makes perfect sense. I can't guarantee the sense transfers to human men and women, but it feels like it could; maybe it does. :chin: