Quote from: Rachel Richenda on November 07, 2016, 10:03:36 PM
Ah so now the female identifier is all about skeletal frame and voice 
I've worked with cis women with huuuuuge skeletal frames and veeeeery deep voices.
I was married to a woman who was in every respect very pretty. But she had a beard. I'm really not kidding: she did. It's a phenomenon I've also seen in some African ethnic groups. I've also worked with cis men who cannot produce facial hair and, indeed, have seen some men in parts of the world who don't produce beards.
If you stop and think about what you're writing I hope you might agree it's not a strong argument. You're chasing an illusory holy grail of gender identifier in this or that part of the body. Gender is soooooo much more than body parts. They are an aspect of it, and for we who transition they may be an important part, but they do not solely constitute what makes male and female. As I mentioned before a far stronger case can be made for blood levels and, indeed, chromosomes. But even they have limitations.
I'm
not trying to define the gender binary in physiological terms. Like you, I'll accede to anyone else's interiority. After all, I had to accede to my own interiority, didn't I?
What I'm trying to do is describe how most people in the world automatically assign "male" and "female" to other people automatically, subconsciously, instantly -- without the benefit of narrative. And this is most definitely a matter of what "prototype" anyone's embodiment most closely adheres to (a "prototype" is the image in one's brain associated with a category). The prototypes of "male" and "female" are based those clusters of features that differ between the primary sexes within a social milieu -- which will differ as
bodies differ from culture to culture.
Obviously, there is great variation. Some women have deep voices, some men don't grow facial hair, some women are tall and some men are short, and so on. But in prototype theory, how the human brain creates categories from sense impressions in the first place, it isn't a matter of whether a person checks every box or not. Rather, do they check
most of the boxes of one prototype or the other. Is there a "family resemblance." If it's 50/50, then you have ambiguity. But the vast majority of the people in this world check 95%+ of the boxes (a completely unscientific estimate) if not all of them.
QuoteIf we're really going to define human beings by whether they fit categories of 'male' or 'female' then I'd rather leave it to every individual to say what they are: not conform to the oppression of others.
99.9% of the people in the world don't
need to say what they are, because it's already obvious to everyone around them, and it's never questioned. This is how the vast majority of the world experiences being gendered, and will continue to experience as such for the indefinite future.
So if one wants to be gendered correctly by other people, before any benefit of narrative (which includes social history -- if our community has always known Annie since she was born and assigned female because of her vagina, it's not going to matter much whether she's big and hirsute when she's fully grown as far as how we're going to gender her, because there's a social history involved, though it still goes back to initial embodiment), it's going to take embodiment and voice, because that's what the brain will pick up on immediately. It behooves one, then, assuming one's gender dysphoria crosses both vectors of personal embodiment and social perception, to check as many boxes as possible, knowing that several boxes aren't ever going to be checked because of the unfortunate congenital and hormonal developments.
What's going to matter the most, as Andrea James described nearly twenty years ago, is voice and face (including facial hair and bone structure), to which I'd also add overall body shape, which is why breasts are so important to counteract a large build -- and why they're so important not to have if your build is small and you want to be gendered male. What's going to matter in bed is one's genitalia... if you're not relying on an accepted narrative. What's going to matter in long-term relationships -- be it work relationships, friendships, romance, whatever -- is the socialization expected of you, which of course differs wildly from culture to culture, even between generations. And coming back to one's self, I'd even go so far as to say that memories (which can also be altered) and the stories that come from them can also matter to one's own dysphoria management.
And, I'm sorry to say, it matters whether one's narrative is open or closed. If one lives with an open narrative, it opens up all kinds of opportunities to be misgendered, especially in Western culture. Because some people (not all, certainly) will take that narrative as "proof" that you aren't what you say you are.
Some transitioners don't have a choice in this matter -- the body has a way of speaking, regardless of any stories told. And likewise, sometimes a presentation is so overwhelming that even an open narrative won't keep one from getting properly gendered. Back in the day, they were called "unicorns" -- those who could pass even with a knowing hostile audience.
QuoteI do agree though about altering society's attitudes. I'm lucky enough to have a bit of a public profile and have been attempting just that, and will certainly re-double efforts, whilst supporting all of us who transition.
This, then, is the rub. It takes open narratives to make society more understanding of the narrative implications of gender, such that kindness and understanding can be exercised whether one has a choice to live openly or not. But there's a cost -- of not being gendered in the way that other people can take for granted. Which, I dunno, can be a contraindication for someone with gender dysphoria. It kind of depends on the extent of one's dysphoria -- obviously if one doesn't get very dysphoric being socially misgendered on occasion, the open narrative is much less daunting.
Again, I'm not saying that anyone "is" or "is not" who they say they are based on embodiment. Only that embodiment is the actual foundation of how people
construct gender in the first place, without even thinking of it.
Categories do not have an independent existence, and that includes the categories of male and female. But that doesn't mean that "anything goes" when it comes to how human brains construct and maintain the categories they've created to make sense of the world.
