- cross-posted to:
- onehundredninetysix
- 196
- femboy
- cross-posted to:
- onehundredninetysix
- 196
- femboy
How to get out of an uncomfortable egg culture situation with this one simple trick.
Real talk: Calling people eggs is a violation of the egg prime directive, and is considered invalidating as you are trying to say that a person is not the gender they identify as, that their identity is invalid. Don’t call people eggs, like ever, it’s extremely uncool.
part 2 of my comment:
I tend to think of genderfluid as more a way someone is describing their experience of their gender rather than a genuine gender identity. We don’t really have any scientific evidence that gender identity can change or be fluid, and in fact we have plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary, that unconscious sex / gender identity is fixed and biological. This is part of why conversion therapy doesn’t work, you can’t make a trans person cis or a cis person trans - it just doesn’t work. It also means a trans person isn’t choosing to be trans, it is part of their nature and won’t come and go.
That said, in the interest of respecting someone’s experience, I try to reconcile the evidence against people’s self-conceptions, and it’s not really surprising to me that a person who insisted they were 100% a cis man first would use a label like genderfluid.
My own experiences could be labeled as genderfluid, I certainly have days where I think of myself more or less as a man or a woman, etc. - but careful observation has made it clear to me that my gendered self conception which seems so fluid is truly separate from my gender identity or unconscious sex, that there is something that will always be there deep down that causes me to be bothered by body hair no matter how I think of myself. I can’t actually observe or know my gender identity, I have to infer it. I don’t think most people are so introspective or careful about their self-understanding, so it does not surprise me when people create new labels and concepts to try to capture something about their experience and it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. I tend to think this is OK, and that it’s healthy and good to try to describe your experiences. The problem I see is only when people get extremely rigid about these labels being taken as inerrant objective reality, which I think naturally happens as our subversive gender experiences smash up against the wall of cis-normativity. Again defensiveness seems to lead to rigidity and black and white thinking.
Either way, you don’t have to characterize the egg crowd as thinking “Finnster was a girl all along”, you can simply say the egg crowd will say “Finnster was not a cis man all along” - that is true regardless of where Finnster lands ultimately.
Not to side with “intolerance,” but I do want to at least present some of the empirical evidence we have about gender actually being biological and “set in stone” (not that this means our self-understanding of gender is set in stone, or that the way we might identify can’t change). I still agree with respecting the way people identify in the moment and being respectful even when their self-conception seems dubious or contradicts evidence.
Reading Swaab’s work in particular was eye-opening, since trans women whose brains were autopsied were found to have structures in their brain that were like cis women and not like cis men, even without ever undergoing hormone therapy. While the picture that emerges with later research did not point to something as simple as “male” and “female” brains, it is particularly grounding to me to have empirical evidence like this that lends credibility to our experiences. It really is more accurate to say trans women have a “female brain” than to say trans women have a “mental illness” as though the gender identity were due to delusions or psychosis.
If reading scientific literature is challenging, the famous neuroendocrinologist, Robert Sapolsky, has some talks that summarize the situation:
This science isn’t some kind of inerrant rigid belief system either, by the way - but that’s not to say it doesn’t provide solid evidence that has consequences in legal and political contexts. Ultimately I think it is important for policy makers, scientists, medical doctors, etc. to engage in inference to best explanation and lean on the body of evidence we have to do that. I think it is important to recognize that the evidence we have about gender identity (by which I mean the generally immutable unconscious sex that we are born with, likely due to the way our brains develop) is that it cannot be changed, that conversion therapy does not work, and that trans people cannot be made cis and vice versa. These are essentially “facts”.
None of these facts require that we invalidate others’ self-identity even when they contradict those facts, we can still hold the principle that we should respect others’ self-identity for pragmatic reasons even when there are reasons to doubt a person’s self-understanding or the way they have theorized or come to think about their gender. It is a matter of politeness and respect.