alienboyinblue reblogged your post: if you believe in biological brain gender then...
Dysphoria is a mental illness btw, so yes gender is in the brain. Fight me. People shouldn’t need to give you scientific...
I don’t wanna derail that whole post so I’m bringing this to the side here-- I feel like maybe you’re misunderstanding?
The argument of OP (and myself) is that people don’t need to give scientific proof to be respected (or to be entitled to basic human rights like health care, housing, etc which trans folks are frequently denied).
My point I was attempting to articulate (perhaps poorly) was that “proving” transness biologically is something deemed necessary by a culture that promotes eugenics. In a culture that values all people- it literally would not matter the cause of difference, what would matter is just providing care for folks across the board. But our culture is a capitalist nightmare and promotes eugenics, and that undercurrent to our culture’s understanding of society demands biological distinction between people to define who is worthy of care and who is disposable.
So you have people arguing that race, intelligence, sex, gender, etc. represent discrete and natural categories of people. With regard to trans folks, that manifests as the right wing and reactionaries more broadly trying to argue that there are only two sexes (“male” and “female”) and trying to draw biological lines between those categories and simultaneously liberals trying to argue that there are a finite number of innate genders ( “woman” “man” “nonbinary” etc.) and trying to draw clear-cut biological lines between them. Both of these arguments rely on the notion that we must find evidence for biological lines between social categories of people.
But why? Why is there this visceral need to prove that sex and/or gender are not social constructs and instead are innate biological reality? Whether people consciously realize it or not, it’s because we can see that trans and gender nonconforming people are treated like shit (denied work, housing, health care, community, and frequently murdered) and if we can’t rationalize that inside of our just world fallacy, then we’re forced to confront the violent fascistic ideology that underlies the entirety of capitalism and requires a “disposable” population.
And so our emancipatory politics must require a recognition of trans people’s lives and identities and worth outside of biological justification. Anti-capitalism requires unapologetic trans inclusion, or else we slip back into trying to appeal to a system of eugenics ideology that exists to exterminate people on the basis of gender nonconformity.