a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"
then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric
you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them
in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"
"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions
but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery
so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!
a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance
see also "why can't you just be a femboy/feminine man/etc"
furthermore, some trans people experience social dysphoria but not bodily dysphoria, and vice versa. but bodily dysphoria in particular has gained some stigma in the last few years
because we use the word "gender" to discuss both "intrinsic gender" as I termed it above, and subconscious sex, there's been a certain strain of argument from some trans people that says that medical transition reaffirms societal gender norms about bodies, and that bodily dysphoria must only result from externally imposed norms about what kind of body corresponds to what gender, and thus it would just go away if the gendered associations were unlearned
I'm strongly of the opinion, though, that our bodies are not like clothes! gender dysphoria related to clothing would generally have to do with one's intrinsic gender clashing with the gendered norms of their culture surrounding clothes, but I believe "gender" dysphoria related to the body itself is really, in large part, subconscious sex dysphoria, and this component cannot be alleviated by changing norms or associations. I strongly believe I would still seek HRT and bottom surgery if I lived my whole life in a cultureless vacuum
you cannot sidestep my dysphoria by regendering parts of my body I'm trying to change, and frankly it causes me a lot of strife that fellow trans people who flirt with me think they can talk about my body however they like as long as they gender it correctly. the word "girlcock" is not a magic dysphoria repellent, because the dysphoria doesn't just come from the gendering
I think it is incredibly interesting how much Butler had to push back on gender as consumer good - and how perfectly this aligns with Serano. Dare I be cynical, I'd say liberal feminism took what it could sell from Butler, and we see the consequences of this in Serano's indictment.
“Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.” - Kotz, Liz;Butler, Judith, “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler”, in: Artforum 31/3, 1992, p. 82 - 89, p. 84.
"They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided that you’re not a trans woman who lacks the means to change her legal sex to female, and who thus runs the very real risk of being locked up in an all-male jail cell. [...] It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you are not fully in touch with all of the ways in which you are privileged by it. Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake. [...] Because I’m transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am simply being myself. So it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further." - Serano, Julia, Excluded. Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, California: Seal Press 2013, p. 106f.
