Do you mean it's important to acknowledge that people do make a distinction between sex and gender, and that society does in a very incoherent way? Or are you saying that we need to maintain seeing a distinction--that there's a usefulness in maintaining this vision? Or something else I'm not getting.
The first, sort of. Because society insists on this distinction, it's important to acknowledge that it exists and deconstruct the ways it's used oppressively.
It doesn't accord with my pretty constructivist worldview which is based in how I experience sex/gender, but I don't see this kind of essentialized thinking as ridiculous, nor applied in one way only. I've heard some trans women talk about their experiences of their body as the wrong one as having brain chemistry out of accord with the rest of her sexed body--which is also an essentialist view, like a cisgender woman viewing herself as a woman-born-woman. I struggle with respecting that view, and not thinking, "if you only read Judi Butler you'd see things my way!" because why the hell does anyone else need to see it this way anyway--it works for me and I think you pretty much hold the same view, but it's OK if it doesn't work for everyone. Making the unwilling read Judi Butler and some other of the gender theorists perhaps *should* be considered a war crime. ;-P j/k
I think "woman born woman" is ridiculous because "woman" is a social construct of what a female person is supposed to be like as an adult, and no one is born with a lifetime of socialization. I also think that "woman born woman" has been deliberately constructed as a "gender identity" in an appropriative way intended to cancel out the experiences and lives of trans women, both in terms of how we grow up and are socialized, and how we live on a daily basis. I don't want to deny that women who are assigned female at birth have experiences growing up and being perceived as a girl and a woman because of that assignment, but I think that line's going to blur a lot as more and more trans girls are allowed to transition before puberty.
And yes on forcing people to read Judith Butler being cruel. :) I have read her, but I'm not sure how good my retention was.
Do you mean sex as the exalted and policing tool? Because I think regarding "sex" as always already "gender" helps take away some of that policing power. (Despite that, I'm still uneasy about how much I want to stand on mountaintops yelling to get people with essentialized experiences of sex to listen.)
Sex is an exalted and policing tool, but once it's used to assign a gender, of course there's the whole "men are like this and women are like that" thing, but the core of it is "You were assigned male or female at birth, and this defines who and what you are socially."
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Date: 2009-07-28 04:57 am (UTC)The first, sort of. Because society insists on this distinction, it's important to acknowledge that it exists and deconstruct the ways it's used oppressively.
It doesn't accord with my pretty constructivist worldview which is based in how I experience sex/gender, but I don't see this kind of essentialized thinking as ridiculous, nor applied in one way only. I've heard some trans women talk about their experiences of their body as the wrong one as having brain chemistry out of accord with the rest of her sexed body--which is also an essentialist view, like a cisgender woman viewing herself as a woman-born-woman. I struggle with respecting that view, and not thinking, "if you only read Judi Butler you'd see things my way!" because why the hell does anyone else need to see it this way anyway--it works for me and I think you pretty much hold the same view, but it's OK if it doesn't work for everyone. Making the unwilling read Judi Butler and some other of the gender theorists perhaps *should* be considered a war crime. ;-P j/k
I think "woman born woman" is ridiculous because "woman" is a social construct of what a female person is supposed to be like as an adult, and no one is born with a lifetime of socialization. I also think that "woman born woman" has been deliberately constructed as a "gender identity" in an appropriative way intended to cancel out the experiences and lives of trans women, both in terms of how we grow up and are socialized, and how we live on a daily basis. I don't want to deny that women who are assigned female at birth have experiences growing up and being perceived as a girl and a woman because of that assignment, but I think that line's going to blur a lot as more and more trans girls are allowed to transition before puberty.
And yes on forcing people to read Judith Butler being cruel. :) I have read her, but I'm not sure how good my retention was.
Do you mean sex as the exalted and policing tool? Because I think regarding "sex" as always already "gender" helps take away some of that policing power. (Despite that, I'm still uneasy about how much I want to stand on mountaintops yelling to get people with essentialized experiences of sex to listen.)
Sex is an exalted and policing tool, but once it's used to assign a gender, of course there's the whole "men are like this and women are like that" thing, but the core of it is "You were assigned male or female at birth, and this defines who and what you are socially."