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This redundancy has been seized to validate the trans ideology of "Actually I am a real woman because biological sex is irrelevant, womanhood is all about your gender." in complete disregard to popular and historical usage and without anyone ever actually bothering to explain what gender is.
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The disregard for popular and historical usage is basically a means to try to break away from that popular and historical usage, as the current models of gender differ from them in significant ways. After all, if you’re of the mindset that the historic usage is outdated and incorrect, why continue to use it?
People do try to explain what gender is, but it’s not so easy to define when we disentangle it from sex, and especially when the existing idea of it is so well-entrenched in society and so thoroughly entangled in human identity.
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The narrative used to be "I have a woman's brain trapped in a mans body" but it turns out the idea of a "woman's brain" has some ridiculously sexist implications. So now what they go with is the paradoxical "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman", no further questions asked.
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There is so much tied up in gender identity that if we start to unpack it all and try to categorize everyone neatly, it would be impossible to keep track of.
Large parts of society associate physical attributes (sexual characteristics, body shape, body hair etc) with gender. Then there’s physical presentation (voice, body language, mannerisms, clothing, hair color, makeup etc), hobbies and tastes, career and skills, personality, and many other invisible things we consider when addressing another person – many of which can vary by culture. And let’s not forget
chromosomes, which are not as black-and-white as often thought; and yes, even brain structure.
So how do we categorize gender? Genetics aren’t a certain identifier, brain activity isn’t a certain identifier, neither are personality, presentation of appearance, body shape, or sexual organs (as you’ve already pointed out, there’s a separation of sex and gender).
In practice, man and woman, male and female are pretty blurred categories, and there should be room for people to identify freely as one or the other or something else.
So rather than try to formalize gender categories from a huge quantity of nebulous and unreliable personal attributes, does it not make more sense to listen to how someone asks you to identify them?
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Oh and despite the assertion that womanhood has nothing to do with biology, the universal route for a transwoman is to undergo HRT for some reason. Anyone who complains about doctors assigning sex at birth and then alters their body to look somewhat like the sex they magically identify with is a hypocrite.
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What you’re describing isn’t quite true, though – not every trans person seeks hormones, or to modify their body.
Most do, but not all. And I think it’s understandable that someone who wants to be recognized as female would choose to undergo treatments that would make that happen.
I don’t see the hypocrisy you assert here. Let’s consider these two issues: the criticism of assigning sex at birth, and undertaking changes to the body to be perceived as the correct gender.
Critics of assigning sex at birth argue that doing so is a conflation of sex and gender – once a baby’s sex is known, its gender is also presumed from that point on. This perpetuates the current attitude of conflating sex with gender, and sets up the situation where someone who feels their gender
doesn’t match the way society perceives and categorizes them might feel they have the ‘wrong’ body.
Some people who work to alter their body to match their perceived gender do so out of a need for their body to match what society tells them it should, and others feel the need to do this because of a biological mismatch of brain and body. Either way, this mismatch of sex and gender will massively contribute to dysphoria for a lot of trans people.
Gender is one of the social constructs that people use to identify one another. It is built up from many different attributes of a person and society’s views of those attributes, and one significant attribute that society judges is the body. Even if we accept that sex and gender are different, we can also recognize that society still strongly associates the two; so someone wishing to make a change to better fit how society identifies them and relieve their own dysphoria is not a hypocrite.
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So with these layers of contradictions its only natural that sometimes someone like MA falls afoul of the cognitive-dissonoance-supressing party line. The usual response when someone, out of ignorance, says something unorthodox on trans issues is to imply that they're some sort of awful bigot. Recently their was some drama in The States concerning transwomen's right to use women's facilities such as change rooms and toilets. Apparently it's some sort of hate crime to think that women's opinions on the matter should be considered, after all these facilities are segregated on the basis of sex (not magical brain identity) to give women safety from physical and sexual violence.
EDIT
I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I acknowledge gender dysphoria as a serious mental health issue and acknowledge the psychiatric consensus that the best way to alleviate such is to let the sufferer present as a woman. I of course used preferred pronouns out of common courtesy. Within reasonable limits I think transwomen should be treated like like an otherwise real women. What I lament is the the ideology being pushed by some.
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So, this is the part where I try to respectfully point out some of the latent bigotry in what you’ve written here without trying to make it sound like an attack on you.
A lot of the language you’re using here (e.g. “magical brain identity”, “let the sufferer present as a woman”, “otherwise real women”) strongly implies that you have a problem with trans people. For example, “otherwise real women” implies that you perceive a trans woman as fake; a man pretending to be a woman. That’s a misunderstanding of what a trans person is striving for – they’re not trying to
fake, they are trying to
be. For someone who does not consider themselves to be a man and does not wish to be perceived as a man, the implication that they’re fake is little better than explicitly denying their gender identity.
This may not at all be what you meant, but this is how it can come across – and this is why people will often leap to correct problematic language, even if that comes across as annoying or pedantic.
All that being said, I do take on board your point about condescension – I think a big pitfall of progressive movements is the assumption of knowledgeability in who they talk to, and an assumption of bigotry if someone doesn’t immediately agree on presenting ideas to them. I try to avoid that, and I hope you don’t feel that’s how I’ve come across in this post.
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I'm not implying that. I'm not even saying they should be barred. I just found it disturbing that from the onset women's opinions on the matter were completely disregarded.
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To my knowledge, opinions on the matter were never assessed based on gender. There was a big stink about the laws “protecting women” by stopping “men entering women’s bathrooms”, but that narrative was pushed by men and women.
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Fucking. This.
People like Anita Sarkeesian need that statement printed on their fucking head. Going after how females are represented in video games; The smallest non-issue in the first world and making out it's the biggest crisis facing woman everywhere. All the while, Ignoring actual problems woman face in other countries that DO actually need help.
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To my knowledge, people like Anita Sarkeesian don’t present their chosen issue as the biggest crisis – it’s an important issue to them, but not necessarily to everyone. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with choosing to focus on one issue over another.
The other problem, as Sybil has already pointed out, is that feminists don’t have a lot of influence on problems in other countries. Consider how well recent Western interventions in the Middle East have gone – if Westerners simply tried to impose gender equality on those countries, how well do you think it would work?
