[heterodoxlib]

A slightly different but closely related question for those who are answering: what do you attribute the difference to? Is it biological in basis, spiritual/metaphysical, or cultural?

I keep hearing people say "gender is a social construct" and those same people then go on to emphatically support transgender as a concept. This leads me to wonder: if gender is a social construct, is identifying as transgender the result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like? If so, is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles? Or is being transgender more biological than cultural for you?

[viamiraia]

I want to quickly address your last two coupled questions. Just loosening tight expectations for gender roles is not enough. For many of us there is a physical component. When puberty hit I started plucking out any facial hair, grew out my hair, lamented my deepening voice, and became extremely depressed. At that time I had no idea what the word transgender even meant.

Also, not saying you are asking this, but why do trans people have to be the ones always asked to break gender roles? Trans women are so often pressured to be feminine men instead, but our mental health depends on both seeing ourselves as women and being seen as women (depending on the individual). Passing, which is a difficult but reliable path to relieve dysphoria, requires some degree of conforming. And knowing lots of trans women, there are plenty that don't conform. I feel like trans people are held to an unfair standard here.

[ghushn3]

You are asking a good question (it reads to me like a good faith question that comes from a desire to learn more about how others think).

> Is it biological in basis, spiritual/metaphysical, or cultural?

Personally, I view it as cultural leading to physiological -- what does it mean to be a man? What is "manly"? I think everyone can agree that "manliness" is different globally. Is Bill Gates manly? He's very successful, but is that something that's manly? Is Tom Cruise manly? Or Kid Rock? What about George Takei? Manliness has some multi-axis definition that exists in each culture around the world.

We call that set of vectors "being a man", and we push people who are born with penises into it because it seems to fit most people who are born with XY chromosomes. Personally, I think it's useful to decouple the two ideas -- what my body is, and what the cultural expectations are in how I should behave because I have that body. This is what people mean when they say gender is a social construct -- they are saying, "The piece we call 'manliness' is a separate concept from the piece we define by bodies."

Now, say I experience anxiety, fear, and revulsion about the set of vectors that define "manliness". I have a penis, but absolutely all the vectors for "womanliness" line up with my understanding of how the world works. Clothing, presentation, speech patterns, interests, activities, etc. etc. etc. What do I do in such a case?

I could just live my life in pursuit of the 'wrong' set of vectors -- but socially that's quite dangerous. When people who are "supposed" to maximize one set of vectors try to live with another set, they tend to get bullied (if not violently attacked.) This puts me in a bind -- either live a miserable life pretending to be manly OR push my body to try and match the set of vectors associated with womanliness. (Or, change society to stop caring so much about people who fall outside of the traditional vector space, but that's a lot harder than either of the two other approaches.)

> is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles?

For me, absolutely! That's the exactly the sort of ideal world I'd love to be in -- let people just... pursue what makes them feel happy. If someone with a penis wants to get way into makeup and the color pink, stop beating the shit out of them for it.

[titanomachy]

It sounds like for you personally, the “body dysphoria” is less of an issue than the “social expectations of a man” dysphoria? I wonder how common that is. Maybe a lot of people’s gender dysphoria would be lessened if society can decouple behavioral expectations from physical appearance.

[radicalriddler]

I think about it like this...

Fundamentally, I believe it's how they want to be treated culturally, but in our society, we tie gender and sex so closely together, that to be treated the way you want to be treated culturally in society, you need to change some of the sex based features you have.

In a better society, a medical approach wouldn't be needed. In our society, we _should_ accept that it is.

That's my opinion, and it's a pretty weakly held opinion, someone could dissuade me from it.

[heterodoxlib]

This is basically the conclusion I've come to, which is why I wanted to ask.

If this is accurate (which is a big if, and I'm asking the question to try to figure out if it is) then we could make a lot of progress in trans acceptance very quickly by just reframing the whole thing in these terms.

The woman-in-a-man's-body concept sounds mystical and metaphysical in a way that triggers religious objections from substantial portions of the US population, even those in the middle politically. But arguing that males shouldn't need to live up to an artificial and incredibly outdated standard of masculinity? That would be a much, much easier sell.

So I guess the followup to my question is: if for most trans people it is cultural and not biological, why are we doubling down on gender binaries and talking about switching genders instead of creating a campaign that would both get at the root of the issue and be easier to swallow for a larger portion of the country?

(I say this fully aware that biological intersex is a thing, but from what I understand most trans people are not biologically intersex in any measurable way. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

[gitremote]

> I keep hearing people say "gender is a social construct" and those same people then go on to emphatically support transgender as a concept.

I say that "race is a social construct" but not "gender is a social construct", because gender has both social and biological components.

Gender having a biological component does mean that gender stereotypes that the average person learns are based on biology. The concept that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is social and cultural, not biological. Gender having a biological component is more complicated. A good book that explains this is Whipping Girl by biologist and trans woman Julia Serano:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Girl

The first tenet of this model, the model's core that everything that follows is built upon, is the fact that "subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independent of one another."

Just like cisgender women, not all trans women are "girly".

The fourth and final tenet of this model states that "each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern (i.e., two overlapping bell curves) similar to that seen for other gender differences, such as height." This idea is what allows for the natural exceptions to gender expression to exist within the system without attempting to claim that they exist in as high of numbers as typical gender expression.

[seec]

Yes, I think there is a lot of social pressure that is driving all of this. I doubt it's only about body dysphoria, because after all you may alter it a bit but still you cannot deviate that much from what you were given in the first place. Extensives surgery procedure seems to be really hit or miss and it is largely impossible to fully rework the features that you were given at birth (especially facial or the pelvis). Some are luckier than others in these matters because they are "in the middle" but still, physically passing for one sex doesn't really alleviate the need to conform to that gender expectation.

I think it's a losing battle because you cannot make people change their minds about who/what others are. The real solution is true acceptance of differences but that seems very hard to create culturally, people are still tribal no matter what.

I am somewhat pissed off by all this gender culture ward around LGBTQ, trans and feminism because people constantly assume I am gay from my physical appearance and demeanor when I am definitely not.

I am dumbfounded around the trans issue because they make it look like they are the only one being socially pressured into conforming to one cookie cutter identity or another. I believe that most people feel that pressure, just to differing levels and only the outlier at the extreme are considered a "true" man or woman.

The political discourse obliviate the fact that we cannot all be that close to what is deemed the "ideal" in the current culture and everyone is worse off for it.

[antonfire]

Kind of a tangent, but I think the cultural/social side is bigger and messier than your questions suggest, and I think boiling this down to "biological vs cultural" misses that.

> If gender is a social construct, is identifying as transgender the result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like?

I suspect "identifying as" cisgender is the outcome of this kind of cookie-cutter pressure to much the same degree, if not more. This tends to go unnoticed even in conversations where people are directly engaging with the ideas. (Even though that's part of what "gender is a social construct" is meant to suggest.)

A rhetorical question for cis people: to what degree do you feel your cisgenderness is a result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like? I suspect there's more meat to genuinely unpacking this than you might think. Trans people's answers to this might not be that different from cis people's.

"It's a social construct" is an invitation to peek behind (or at least recognize) an abstraction; but it's just a peek into a quite complex story.

"Social construct" doesn't necessarily mean something to rise above, or to dismantle, or to deny. Money is a social construct. Human rights are a social construct. Friendship is a social construct. Sure, one can usefully imagine oneself "above" those things at times, but it's unclear whether aspiring to that is a good idea, and realistically most people won't attain it even if they do. Culturally we must find some relationship to those things anyway, we cannot ignore them.

As I see it, gender is an aspect of a messy evolving cultural system. Yes, the concept of "transgender" is part of that system, though it certainly doesn't fit into that system in quite the same way as "man" and "woman". Trans people tend to challenge or pressure many aspects of this system in some ways that cis people tend not to, but that's not the same thing as denying the system in whole. (Some people do see "gender abolition" as an aspirational ideal; many don't.)

Broadly, I think "is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles" vastly underestimates the scope and scale of this cultural system, the degree to which it's tangled up in our lives, and the difficulty of untangling it.

[heterodoxlib]

> Broadly, I think "being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles" vastly underestimates the scope and scale of this cultural system, the degree to which it's tangled up in our lives, and the difficulty of untangling it.

This makes sense, but I guess my question is rooted in my sense that the front that we've chosen to engage to push for re-evaluating gender is the absolute most controversial front we could have chosen. A subtler approach at re-evaluating rigid gender stereotypes—taken decades ago when we instead began to push for reassignment surgery and pronouns—could have already paid off in spades by now.

As is, the rhetoric surrounding transgender issues essentially demands that we accept that there are boxes—male and female—which people ought to be sorting themselves into, and it terrifies social conservatives because it actively encourages people to sort themselves into the boxes rather than accepting the lot they were handed. A subtler approach that started with "why shouldn't boys wear pink?" and progressed from there would have already finished the job by now, instead of creating the polarized warzone we have today. As a bonus we'd have been making life more comfortable for everyone in the middle, people who don't feel the brokenness of rigid gender norms strongly enough to want to switch entirely but still suffer from feeling the need to live up to them.

If most transgender people experience a strong biological component that demands reassignment for biological reasons, I can understand why our chosen approach was necessary. But if sufficiently changing and making flexible our expectations for what it means to be male and female would have been sufficient to make most transgender people comfortable, why did we choose the much harder sell instead?