Re: [minor patch] Amend CoC

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Hi,

Am Sonntag, dem 20.02.2022 um 23:45 +0100 schrieb Taylan Kammer:
> On 20.02.2022 22:02, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> > 
> > "Sex is distinct from gender" is a common transphobic talking point. 
> > 
> 
> Like I said I don't actually want to argue, but I really feel the need
> to point out that what you seem to consider a transphobic talking point
> is seen as a fundamental principle of feminism by many others, and that
> long predates the contemporary transgender movement.
Note that the existence of transgender people predates 20th century
feminism by millennia.  Your appeal to tradition is weaker than you
might think it is.

>   "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological,
>   psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human
>   female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that
>   elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the
>   eunuch that is called feminine."
>     -- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), 2010 translation
> 
> This is one of the most iconic passages from the book (especially the
> first sentence on its own), and the book is considered to be pretty
> much one of the most important works in feminist history.
You would have to take 70 year old books within the context of their
time, but even then de Beauvoir clearly states that there is no
biological essence of womanhood, that it is (as we understand today) a
social construct.  I'd also like to point out how (ironically) de
Beauvoir mocks women as being somehow lesser or inferior to men within
this paragraph, which itself serves to depict how women are treated in
a patriarchal world.

> Given that, I find it somewhat baffling that distinguishing between
> sex and gender is now apparently considered transphobic.  (This isn't
> the first time I'm hearing that claim, but I was under the impression
> that it's a very fringe position.)
> 
> Actually, I could swear that only about 5 years ago, "sex and gender
> are *not* the same" was a very common thing transgender activists
> would say.
> I might actually have learned that principle from trans activists
> before reading up on feminist literature.
I think you are making some simplifications here that are not useful
for understanding.  What transgender activists have been claiming for
years is that their gender can not be defined by whatever markers
biologists use to ("correctly" or otherwise) assign sex to humans or
animals, be it chromosomes, gonads, hormones, hair length, voice, or
whatever.  However, science has progressed since five years ago and we
are now at a level of understanding that even sex itself is not as
easily defined as some would like it to be.

As a society, we have already progressed (in most parts of Europe and
the US at least) to a point where men can wear long hair and women can
wear short hair without needing to question their own gender identity
too much.  This might sound completely revolutionary if you were born
50 or 100 years ago, but several peoples from 2000 years ago (or
sometimes a little more than 200 years ago) would be laughing at us for
having achieved less than nothing – consider for example the way heels
are now gendered and men's shoes try really well to hide them so as to
not threaten the wearer's masculinity.  With that much out of the way,
let's look at some other ways of defining sex, shall we?

First of all, hormones: Let's say female athletes would in order to
gain a competitive edge in the olympics be taking testosterone en
masse.  Regardless of the efficacy of such a doping method, would these
athletes now be male or should they be forced to compete in the men's
olympics regardless?  If so, what about male athletes taking estrogen
in order to bend their legs better?  Should they be forced to compete
against women?  Are the olympics even separated by sex or by gender and
which matters in sports?

Next, gonads.  Monkey brain can easily match penis = male and
boobs/vagina = female, but what if penis and boobs or even penis and
vagina or just vagina but no boobs.  Monkey brain confused.

Finally, chromosomes.  The last straw that transphobes can hold onto
because we haven't yet found a way of transferring our brains into the
bodies we want to have and are also still uncertain about what the
ethics of doing so would be.  Still, using them as an arbiter would
still not hold against the simplest of thought experiments.  Let's say
I was a mad scientist and I changed half/all of your sex chromosomes to
be XX instead of XY or vice versa (for the purpose of simplicity I'm
ignoring other combinations at the moment) without this change
affecting anything else about your body.  Would you now have a
different sex?  Would there even be a point in determining that?  Could
anyone discriminate against you based on that fact if they had barely
any method of observing that there indeed has been a change?

As you will hopefully be able to see after honestly entertaining the
questions raised above, sex itself is a social construct vaguely based
in biological factoids, most of which are irrelevant most of the time.
In particular, when considering trans people in a medical context –
where a distinction between sex and gender makes the most sense – you
have to treat them differently from people who you would through a
naïve view box into the same category otherwise, or if you really want
to use the term as though they had their own sex.  
However, for most parts of our daily lives, in particular participation
within an online community in which thanks to a global pandemic chances
are exceedingly rare that you will ever meet another person, this
distinction matters not and claiming it does in order to support a
change of the CoC behind the author's back is at the very least bad
optics.

> Anyhow, all that is only tangential to the topic at hand.  In context
> of this topic, I want to mainly highlight one thing, which is that
> regardless of what one thinks about gender as a social construct,
> gender identity and expression, transgender identities, and so on,
> there is undeniably a number of ways in which people born with female
> anatomy have been and continue to be mistreated throughout history
> and around the planet.  To acknowledge that has very little to do with
> transgender identities, and at no point did I or will I argue that the
> CoC should for instance exclude "gender identity" from the list.
> 
> Is it possible that we would meet in the middle on this topic and
> acknowledge both perspectives?
Note that you've dug your own grave here by accusing the authors of the
CoC of being devoid of reason and holding "a peculiar world-view where
they don't acknowledge that humans actually have a sex".  A general tip
in this regard would be – when you find yourself twisting the words of
others to fit your own narrative – whether you might be the one holding
reactionary views here.

In short, sex is not an innate quality of human people, it is an act
that none of us are performing while arguing on the mailing list.