You know what I am tired of? The focus being on whether consuming or not makes you a good person. I don’t care if in your heart of hearts you are a good person or not. So often it comes down to people trying to defend their own gods damned image of themselves as “in the right”

What I care about is that the absolute ghouls being propped up by this series stay in the limelight. Their money funds changes to society which have created an uptick in suicides. Did you know trans kids in the UK, the ones who were in gender affirming care that the government changed to be essentially just regular old therapy, has seen a marked increase in suicide? Since the law that JKR paid her blood money to get changed there’s been civil suits filed by workplaces driving trans people out. Trans people are marching in the UK and getting their asses handed to them by police for holding vigils for the dead outside of the government buildings of the health care service nominally charged with their care that sees a waiting list that in some parts of the country at current capacity sees an estimate of 200 years wait for a first consultation. Trans people there are increasingly DIYing their own hormonal transitions sometimes having to go through illegal paths like they are dealing in cocaine just for the willpower to stay alive.

And yet the conversation remains on whether it is right to make someone feel bad about their media consumption or at what point you get an ally sticker. So much of trans advocacy ends at “well boycott the witch”

For the love of God if people only cared a single fraction about trans people the way they did about their own warm fuzzies or the flaw in their neighbour’s soul.

You want to feel like you actually did a thing? Maybe find a charity funding trans rights activism in the UK and pop the money saved by pirating your damn wizard books in there ?

Yeah “gender” is actually a theory of deconstructing the idea of culture - all the stuff lopped on top of sex and the baggage of all the world’s ideas of what it means to be male and female from the pseudoscientific aspects of outmoded or outdated disproven science to the effect of religion to the behaviours mimicked and taught between generations.

Gender is cultural.

Yet “sex” is also on a spectrum.

What modern discourse gets rather fantastically wrong to my mind is for trans people it is about sex characteristics. A trans woman doesn’t just want to be treated as a woman she wants to be a woman. For a lot this means the whole shebang from periods to childbirth. That’s not gender, those are sex characteristics. Her issue is she can’t access those aspects yet or, like other women, maybe she doesn’t want nessisarily everything. She’s also set outside the culture of womanhood, segregated from other women and denied community of her people socially - that IS gender.

From a philosophy standpoint - it is way more complicated than that.

Gender is sort of like a book genre. People made it up. It groups a bunch of ideas around physical sex that don’t really have anything to do with it directly. It’s sort of like stereotypes but it’s also an amalgamation of history and how people express. You can have a culture where gender has hard rules or soft ones. You can have a gender expectation what a culture rewards people of a specific sex for doing or punishes them for not doing. Gender expression where there is a way of culturally displaying gender to others based on a cultural idea of what those sexes represent and how people think they differ : clothes, the way you act and so on.

The thing is these things are all not set in stone. They are all just cultural baggage.

Sex is just the thing gender chooses as it’s centerpoint of creating all this fiction.

Well I believe we are living at a point where we have not really figured things out. We have pieces. Gender theory is being treated as a monolith of ideas that is dominated by a cis veiw of gender as genre.

This is incompatible with trans needs because trans people’s primary focus is physicality and are using the cis language of gender as technology to do something entirely different to change the way other people interact with their own physical nature.

So gender is bullshit made up by humans but to trans people its useful and nessisary bullshit

Not… Really? That’s a very culture and expression forward veiw of gender which as more questions get asked widely is seen as a very cis centric veiw of gender.

Like we haven’t really nailed everything down and a lot of Non-Binary people don’t like this take because a lot of them find it invalidating but the trans and cis aspect of gender are very different. The more we inquest into how the average cis person experiences gender the more we find the majority of cis people are all kind of “Non-Binary” they don’t feel implicitly like their role holds any super deep meaning and feel like if their body flipped to the opposite sex then that isn’t horrifying. The idea that cis people have a built in gender compass that aligns with a single set of sex characteristics is taking a trans lens and assuming that’s how it works for everyone whereas if a big room full of cis people actually talk to each other about whether they have any kind of innate feeling of being male or female aligned you start realizing that premise of actually having any massive non-cultural preference one way or the other just isn’t the norm. Cis people just don’t have to interrogate their gender the way trans people do.

Basically it’s like the brain’s most common configuration is it’s wired to accept whatever outcome of puberty and be flexible enough to adapt.

The trans aspect of gender (and a minority of cis people) is entirely different. We react to our sex characteristics intrinsically outside our control not as having neutral value but as having either negative or positive value. We are internally reinforced to react either with rewards like joy when our bodies are reflected back to us as matching our pre-settings oe punishes with stress, jealousy and depression when sex doesn’t align. Like a body expectation switch got stuck in one position and anything other is abhorrent.

For trans folk gender expression and cultural reinforcement is just a mirror that causes other people to reflect our bodies back at us. Gender expression becomes a tool like technology to communicate needs. Indeed a lot of trans people have issues with having to overperform gender not because they want to participate in the culture but because we are steering people to avoid seeing our bodies, scanning and verbally reporting back to us their physical assessment of our sex… that hurts us and so we have to perform the most readable cultural expressions of gender to get strangers to understand at a glance how to help avoid our poisons and to treat us in ways that hit the built-in reward trigger.

You can, kind of broadly for ease of understanding, categorize non binary into a few different types.

• Static identities vs fluid

• Absence of gender vs mix of gender

• Trans identifying and cis or ar least non-trans identifying

• Political or aesthetic versus psychological need

To explain absence and mix are basically what it says on the tin. For some people they want freedom from any cultural or physical gender aspects to the best that can be reasonably achieved or they desire a grab bag from both male and female cultural or physical phenotypes. This doesn’t always nessisarily look like or have perfect androgyny as a goal.

Static identities do not change over time. Often these folk either experience a desire for an absence of sex characteristics or see themselves as a simultaneous mix male or female or as a specific other category.

Fluid identities change over time. This could be daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. A fluid person might alternate only between agender (ie no gender) and a binary gender or experience the full spectrum of male to female. Their needs change over time.

Political and Psychological are kind of another slider. For some Non-Binary represents a range of coping mechanisms to deal with gender euphoria or dysphoria. It can be a philosophy that is used to seek a sort of individual path, accepting a middle place ir an extremely nuanced situation where one’s birth gender is a problem… But the solution isn’t leaping to the full other side of rhe spectrum. For others Non-Binary can be a purely cultural third category. Gender abolitionists exist who find the repressive gender expectations they were subjected to did them harm. They might resent cultural gender rather than having any particular strong feelings about their bodies. Genderfuck or Genderpunk are outgrowths of movements that blend or subvert people’s cultural expectations. The establishment of pink and blue boxes is a prison and they want nothing more than to burn it all down.

Transness or “Non-trans Non-Binary” extends from this division. Non-Binary identities fall under the Trans umbrella in the LGBTQIA+ but not every Non-Binary person is comfortable claiming transness as a label. Sometimes it feels to some enbies like they are claiming stolen valor or that they don’t intend to physically transition so it doesn’t apply (though it’s worth mentioning that binary trans people also don’t require an intent to physically transition as a gatekeeping item that prevents one from being trans ) others are functionally more cis identifying because their issue is cultural and not physical.

It’s a very big tent of different people.

Point of order - non-binary people sometimes medically transition. We might not choose all the options to swap to a full binary presentation but target things which cause us duress.

Non-binary is under the trans umbrella though not every Non-binary person identifies as trans. There are political enbies or people who see their ambivalence towards gender and sex characteristics entirely as being an expression of a Non-binary experience while others experience the same euphoria/dysphoria to their natal sex characteristics that binary trans people do but desire more of an absence of all sex characteristics or a mix of male and female phenotypic traits.

Your statement in effect only describes a fraction of Non-binary people.

Your questions are all to the same end “under what circumstances can we unilaterally exclude” not “How do we create compassionate, dynamic rules and boundaries that service more people”?

All of it assumes risk to cis women. In the shelter situation did or would anyone ask if those women would react to trans women in the same way they would a cis man? Do you think a trans woman would not be compassionate and understanding in those circumstances? Trans people are four times more likely to be the victims of intimate violence ALSO predominantly enacted by cis men. Is it really so hard to assume in circumstances of shared space they would not have compassion for a scared cis woman or be want to be placed in that situation where she’ll be reacted to in a way that triggers the trans woman’s gender dysphoria? Why in this circumstances would services NOT be talking to everyone involved and reaching a reasonable concensus? Why are the assumptions of the situation posed from the outset hinging entirely on “biology” alone?

In some circumstances in the past I have been approached by women and children in trouble because I am visibly queer.

These don’t need be “interrogations” they can be questions, asked compassionately with a mind to peace that takes into consideration the needs of everyone involved. But that’s not what is happening here.

Whether trans is an insult depends on how you use it. The way you are using trans changes the implied meaning of trans to something trans people are keyed to implicitly notice - whether it’s being used as a null category.

A lot can be derived from language from relationships. If you have man and trans man you create a non-category. A “not man” a “fake man” if you have cis man and trans man it is an acknowledgement that these are different states of being a man that acknowledges the difference of experience but places the emphasis on manhood and similarity to other men rather than the differences. “Biological man” and “trans man” becomes again man and “disqualified by biology man”. If I am not a “biological man” will you also try and imply I as a trans man am a “biological woman”? Even if I haven’t transitioned at all that’s taking everything I hate about my day to day existence and shoving my face in it.

Also

I wouldn’t worry about men slipping the noose by pretending to be trans women. If you look at penal systems they basically all conform to a similar model at present. Like the US loves to incarcerate people and last I checked, pre Trump, of the places that actually tracked the number of trans women the count of how many trans women were in women’s prisons was 17 compared to the over 500 in mens prisons. These women may be post op meaning they have neither testes or penetrative organs and they may have been on horomones so long that their bone density, nerve structure and muscle to fat ratio is more in common with a cis woman but there’s no actual guideline for trans people about when they are deserving of the same protections as cis women when in prison. Ending up in a mens prison as a trans woman means rape and assault is basically part of the deal. Furthermore when gender affirming medicine is deemed a luxury in such situations and removed these women don’t have any naturally created Horomones anymore so they effectively go through menopause and osteoporosis at a young age because “it’s outrageous that we should pay for gender affirming care!”. You might have committed the same crime as the people around you but if you’re trans you are doing harder time…because people assume you’re a man or at least not woman enough. Hardly seems like justice where I am standing.

Sports have a similar issue. What is sport for exactly? It can’t all be reaching some kind of physical pinnacle based off arbitrary distinctions of body ratios and hormone levels after all -the Paralympic games exist where different but at least kind of similar disabilities are matched together.

There are way more options in sport as a person with a disability than as a trans person these days. If you are looking at sport from the perspective of a social activity with community attached working towards mutual excellence or as access to pastimes that encourage healthy levels of activity then there’s a massive impediment to access because even things where sexual phenotype doesn’t matter , like sport fishing for instance only, allows trans people to compete in their birth sex category if at all. This segregation forces athletes into single sex spaces that are proven to be psychologically damaging to them defeating any benefits from the activity. There isn’t really a society wide call to make categories that are inclusive co-ed spaces… they are only saying “we don’t want you anywhere”. It’s simply not looked at as a civil rights access to the variety of life issue but a matter of who wins. If a trans woman places 5th in a women’s sport category the question isn’t, how well she was integrated in that community and whether her win/loss ratio was within comparable margins of the cis athletes in her cohort - its that trans people don’t belong there ever.

This framework of relegating a group to the trash bucket based on non categories doesn’t look at trans people as individuals with different physicalities and personalities and inclinations. It doesn’t weigh trans people on a case by case basis - it flattens them into these cut outs where they are always outsiders and never deserving of empathy or consideration because they automatically represent the worst potential aspect of their birth sex. Getting smacked with misandry and misogyny in turns depending on whatever seems the most situationally appropriate to exclude them.

It also doesn’t help that transness is still sort of a cultural failure state and is often internalized by ourselves that way. Oftentimes by the time a trans woman comes out for the first time she’s already in a pit. She already bet the farm on trying to be the best man she could be to fix what ails and it did nothing but drain her of her will to live and she has to accept that being a woman is the only conditions under which she can live because she can already seen the finish line where continuing as is will kill her from where she’s standing. She’s often put off the transition as long as she can and is treading water and minutes from giving up and drowning . So yes. She’s a woman from the moment she says in part because that could be the moment of greatest crisis.

Here’s what defending terms like"biological woman" sound like to trans people.

"Oh I wish to be VERY clear. When I say trans -I mean fake. You may call yourself whatever you want but in the end it is presumptuous because at the end of the day you aren’t real. You are your biology , inescapably, until the day you die to me regardless of how society treats you now. No matter what forces of misogyny are enacted upon you daily it is presumptuous to lump yourself in with a group unless you have the innate physical experience fate cheated you of and you mourn the lack of every day. No someone might hunt you down and hurt you for not being man enough. They might rape or traffic you like a woman. You might lose your upper body strength and become vulnerable in the same ways women are and be subject to the institutional inequities they face… But You will always be a man because birth is everything. You can’t have babies after all. You might want them desperately just like any other woman who fate cheated fertility from but in your case it’s different isn’t it?

And don’t be presumptuous to think you understand their experiences!

I am real and I am just fine in my gender. I am implying subtly that you should be too. Being a man is fine I have never had a problem with it and I think you do probably as some kind of weird sexual kink and we do not change our opinions for weird sexual kinks.

No I won’t use your terms but I will do the bare minimum play pretend for you to your face, poor darling, in a way that makes ME comfortable. But the reality is you don’t belong in the same spaces as women. No you are woMAN and I am going to use terms that remind you of that, that signal that I support you being treated as a fake woman. Oh, you want me to adopt a term that acknowledges both you and women as being more similar than different? Well I didn’t chose it or vote for it at council! Never mind nobody asked you if “trans” was the brush you wanted to be tarred with no I am a man and trans men are fake men thats what trans means after all. Why should I allow myself to be called anything? It’s my birthright to be treated as the default! God or chance put you in the position both of us are in and there really isn’t anything anyone can do about takingthe bite out of that is there? Sorry friend Deus vult!"

The only real difference is tone.

Periods, period products, period pains, impacts on histamine sensitivies, getting pregnant, ecotopic prenancies, miscarriages, endometriosis, an “incompetant” cervix, still birth, premature birth, full term birth, breast feeding… The list goes on. For sure, these things don’t wholly define what it is to be a woman, but it sure as hell helps shape the bodies and minds of the only group of people who make all of us. To forget or ignore that is disrespectful to women, in my opinion.

What you are describing here is actually the holy grail of attainment for trans women. They don’t want to just be culturally a woman- The lack of these physical experience, even the bad stuff, hurts them. They want for it so badly. Phrasing it this way is a bit like flaunting riches before the poor. The number of trans women I know who would sell their soul for periods and just the potential opportunity for childbirth…

The future is a indertminate place but full functional fertility is the ultimate goal of trans healthcare and the odds are if science keeps on keeping on someone will eventually crack the code in the future.

You are of course entitled to your opinion or to care about as much or as little as you like.Your framework, as is, would be barely acceptable for a being a casual acquaintance of a trans person. For myself if I heard you air these thoughts aloud in a place of work I as a trans man would still try and avoid being around you whenever possible for my health. It would be a hurtful were I a trans person with any kind of close personal relationship to you, but I am not. I would just find you vaguely unpleasant as is my prerogative and avoid you the same way I would someone who spouts more widely culturally understood negativity in my direction.

This is, unfortunately, a very unkind way to interface with the mental situation of transness.

You are looking at this from the perspective that wants to categorize based on your distinct values. You want to determine effectively whether a trans person is effectively really “entitled” to being called what they want to be called. The tagline “a trans woman is a woman” is unfortunate because it is a slogan that doesn’t give the full account of why it is important and the whole situation is muddied by the fact that the wider concept of gender performativty actually has almost nothing to do with what trans people are actually experiencing.

Logical fallacy wise stating that something was determined by historical precedent is also a fallacy. It’s called an “appeal to tradition”.

What is happening culturally with trans people is an attempt based off the findings of years of intensive psychological research to create sociological tools to ease the burdens of a minority population. It might be effective to conceptualize this as language being a technology and that technology effectively being applied as medicine. The people who value the comfort, and quite frankly an expanded lifespan, of trans people adopt this framework but, because to be successful it requires participation. Ideally they teach other people the reasons why it’s important to the point they will happily adopt it but that isn’t wholly nessisary. As long as someone is treating say, a trans man by using his name and pronouns and not assuming his behaviour to conform to feminine restrictions then effectively the “medicine” works. Hence “trans men are men” ie treat a trans man - as you would a man. An expectation squished into a narrow confine with all nuance removed.

The reason “biological woman” expressly doesn’t work is what trans people are responding to is almost completely their own biology. The cultural stuff about gender is kind of just layered on top. What they are responding to when someone uses pronouns is their own physical state. Say you kept calling a trans woman “he/him” what that is doing isn’t impacting some attempt at manifesting some spiritual form of womanhood - you are demonstrating you are veiwing her body, seeing phenotypic masculine characteristics and reporting them back to her. Her brain is wired to pair that with a stress reaction. To her those parts of her body are things she desperately wishes doesn’t exist because veiwing them, interfacing them sometimes touching them - is abhorrent. What you are doing when you use people’s pronouns is effectivly creating a mirror of words. The only question is whether that mirror of words is kind to the viewer. Does it reflect the things that soothe or does it reflect the things that cause strain? That’s something the speaker of those words controls because the trans person is powerless in this regard which mirror the speaker will offer them.

Saying “biological woman” aloud in front of a trans woman is effectively indistinguishable from the mental reaction you would create by calling her a man. You are reminding her that both to you and probably to herself that her body is a compromise she has to live with. She’s effectively doing everything she can but it will never be enough not just for you… But for her.

When the compromise of living in an imperfect situation becomes too burdensome not living becomes a more viable solution. It won’t kill every trans person on it’s own but paired with other factors it tips the scale an outsized amount. The reason the historical definition of man and woman is the way it is is because as a population trans people were veiwed as deviant, weird, lead by devils into perversion and a public nuisance and them being miserable was culturally a perfectly fine outcome. Them being miserable in private until they were overwhelmed and killed themselves or being treated as circus freaks- not really a problem.

In modern day we generally hope for better.

Lot you are covering here but quick fire.

1. No it is not correct. Sex is a multifaceted thing split between chromosomal, phenotypic and hormonal aspects. Horomonal transition changes phenotypic (physical structural aspects of sex) structures and changes the way the body chemically responds to fit a physical presentation more in line with the group the person is transitioning to more than the group they transition from. If you wanted to be very pedantic about it in a way that is somewhat unkind post medical transition trans people are functionally intersex but for medical purposes like determining dosages of medications and how they respond to medical procedures they are consistent with membership of their post transition group. A trans woman treated as a man by a pharmacologist would be getting the wrong dosage. In this case they need to be medically treated as a woman to receive adequate care.

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2. The assumption that there is inherent biological factors that do not change create logistical problems and errors in medical care. There is a widespread lack in the medical system of doctors who understand these principles which mean trans people can receive varying quality of care from people like EMTs or Emergency services based on the political whims of the place they are in. It also throws gasoline on bigoted rhetoric that trans people aren’t “real” but are frauds “just pretending” as though their needs to be treated as their sex are just skin deep and not a complex mix of complex and fundamental biologic changes and a series of mental and social challenges of interfacing with a society that is unprepared to do the work to understand these differences.

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3. Calling a trans woman “biologically male” is just calling her a man under a different format. That’s really all it is. It affects a trans person mentally the same because it causes them to have their physical characteristics reported back to them the exact same way. It tells them “we don’t care about your psychological needs” The term “biological” being used isn’t scientifically consistent with what is actually going on. The terms are “trans” and “cis” women/men because that registers the difference of experience in a way that doesn’t take one’s greatest challenges of existing and shove their nose in it. It acknowledges that they have crossed a boundary and are what they say they are. “Biological male” is bigotry disguised behind a pseudo scientific veneer.

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4. It contradicts. “Biologically male” places the EMPHASIS on MALE. When looking at any gender inclusive or gendered language the noun is key, the adjective is supplement. A femBOY is a man who is comfortable in his manhood with the gender expression that is feminine. A tomGIRL is the opposite. A trans WOMAN and a cis WOMAN are both in language affirmed as culturally feminine. A “Biological MALE” is medicalizing that persons experience and placing the emphasis not on their cultural experience or on their psychological needs, it’s fronting the speakers desire to comment on that person’s body and categorize the subject as a man with a masculine experience.

The history of someone’s experience isn’t captured by the term “biological” it is in the terms “trans” and “cis”.

“Biological sex” is broken down into different categories. Chromosomal, Horomonal and Phenotypic. Chromosomes hardly need an introduction, it’s the DNA programming that under most common conditions creates the blueprints for the other two forms. However this isn’t always how it happens.

Phenotypic sex is all the physical structures that conform to different expressions of sex. Genetailia, internal organs, differences in physical structure between male/female.

Hormonal sex characteristics is the group of chemicals the body releases to change the body and support adult maturation of Phenotypic sex characteristics. It also changes the biochemical makeup of the body, including the brain, so the body allocates resources differently and responds to things like stress and medications differently.

When a trans person goes on hormones or receives surgeries their Phenotypic structures change to conform to their new gender which mean in a real rubber to road kind of way they stop having as much medically in common with their birth sex as the sex they transitioned to. If you give a trans woman the “biologically male recommended” medication dosages of something like sleeping pills they are going to be taking way too much because that medication interacts differently with the Phenotypic and hormonal tissues of women which her body now conforms to.

The concept of “biological woman/man” is actually a fairly dangerous concept in the medical world because the assumption created by that framework often create errors of medical care expectations which put trans people in actual danger of poor dosages or completely wrong expectations of navigating their personal biology.