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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I truly don’t understand why the leap to changing pronouns is so important. There always used to be women who dressed and presented masculine. In the past it was frowned upon for men to dress in an effeminate way, and I think it’s a good thing that that perception has improved over time. But I don’t see why the big announcement about pronouns.[/quote]

If you prefer to be referred to as she, would it bother you if people kept calling you he, or vice versa?[/quote]

If you truly believe in equality across all people, why should it matter?  Should there even be he/she?

Upthread someone brought up the changing thoughts biologists have about sex.  (Although, I would add that insulting people for not being familiar with current research in this area is sh*tty and smug.  I guarantee I can find plenty of areas of modern research that PP knows nothing about and they would not appreciate being denigrated for it.)  If sex is fluid, what does this mean on so many levels?  So much emphasis on including women in health in research?  If sex is so fluid and influenced by so many factors, than is there really male and female?  Does it matter on any level, for health or anything else?  Is it really fluid or is our understanding of what we perceive as variation really just a reflection of inadequate study?  What is the true percentage of variation? Who knows?

But if you are going to argue that sex is fluid and gender is fluid, then why even have someone designate as male or female?  And who gets to decide what those things mean? Why get hung up on a pronoun?  Why would you be insulted by being identified by one or the other?

[/quote]

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not an academic or a particularly smart person who claims to have any of the answers, I just think about this topic a lot and find it super complex and interesting.

I pretty much agree with what you’re saying. That’s what I meant upthread when I said that gender is a social construct and isn’t “real.” But it creates real material effects on the world. One of those effects is that I am most comfortable being referred to as “she” and calling myself a woman, performing feminity, wearing dresses, etc. So who am I to begrudge someone else participating in the construct in similar or overlapping ways that I do just because their chromosomes are different than mine?

On the other hand, I feel defensive of my womanhood because the social construct of gender as well as some biological realities of being female have given women the short end of the stick since the dawn of time. So I have complicated feelings about people, especially adults, who have been socialized as male then deciding to participate and present in the world as a woman. Different but also complicated feelings about the opposite situation. It’s all really complicated and there’s no one good answer.[/quote]

Yes, I’m the PP you are responding to and I agree with your last paragraph.  I’ve always considered myself to be a compassionate person. I’ve always supported gay rights without question.   I don’t want to cause someone pain or treat them unkindly, yet inside my own head I’ve always had some complicated feelings regarding transexualism and I think you’ve articulated part of it.  But a big part for me was articulated by another PP:

[quote=Anonymous]I guess overall to me it seems that frequently it actually pigeonholes gender stereotypes more when people feel that because they don’t represent a mainstream expression of gender they must somehow be transgender. I’m not trying to be trans exclusionary. I don’t actually GAF what anyone wants to identify as, I’ll call you what you want, but [b]I just can’t get past the irony of how much of this actually perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes while trying to be free of them. [/b][/quote]

I think some of it kicks up some resistance from me because I’m left thinking, WTF do people think being a woman means exactly.

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