okay time to drop my middleschooler reflection assignment thoughts about The Third Sex, i’m gonna try and keep it short and simple for my own sake:
Okay so basically like — have you ever had a conversation or seen a tweet that’s like “well trans women should have their OWN spaces :) their OWN bathrooms teehee :)” I’m recalling a particular conversation I had years ago when a social circle of mine found out that one of the girlies was a terf (yes we kicked her out. lol. lmao even), and I remember seeing her posts about how trans women deserve “their own spaces, separate from biological women.” as if this exclusion is somehow benevolent and charitable or even feminist.
yeah so basically it seems like the casting of the hijras as some kind of third gender/sex by academia is basically That, and then western academics using “well why can’t you just happy being gnc af third gender, uwu” to try and make the transsexual look like a conservative loser for trying to get medical care.
I think I’ve personally been enamored with the idea of nonbinary / third genders having some kind of “historical precedence,” but as it stands based on this article, treating the hijra (or other groups with similar characteristics) as some kind of “third gender / sex” is actually reinforcing enbyphobia more than doing anything to dismantle it, on top of obviously reinforcing transmisogyny.
like. the shackling of ‘immutable’ ‘biological’ manhood to someone who is identifying with womanhood and is attempting to live her life as such, and calling that a “third gender,” is like …. reifying (is that the word?) the concept of gender having some immutable biological essence / of sex being this ultimate determiner/factor in one’s True Gender, and this is actually way worse for anyone who actually genuinely seeks to identify outside of the gender binary. So this framework imo that talia is building is actually inclusive of nonbinary people (not that nonbinary people and women or transfems are, like, exclusive categories. lol.) because you cannot escape the horrors of the gender binary if you attempt to purport that one’s sex assigned at birth actually has any say at all on whether one can or cannot be a woman (or a man or whatever but the focus is on women here).
like. it is more of a colonization to go into a community of women, extract their testimonies, study how they live, and then write up some shit that is going to be used to clown on trans people in the west for daring to ask for gender affirming medical care. you are literally poaching someone else’s experience and twisting it into a tool of oppression by trying to rely on like, false wokeism historical precedent.
and it’s like. the thing is is that people are able to reverse engineer that a person was, say, trans, on the way someone lived their life and how they were buried. and that’s a dead person. the hijras are alive. you (general) can just ask the hijras what they want and it seems like they want to be considered women and not some secret third thing. and even if like. one refuses to use the english term “transgender woman,” because the thought of using english terminology is colonial (…..but english terminology is used tor everything else….?) then at the very least, you can acknowledge that functionally, the hijras occupy the same space that the transsexual woman in the west does (with the added caveat that like talia said, the term ‘hijra’ is a ‘dumping ground’ for those deemed to not fit one of two categories neatly).
like. it’s actually less enbyphobic to treat the hijras as trans women than to prop up the third gender shit because based off what I just read, the justification for calling these ladies “third gender” is entirely dependent on shackling them to being ‘male’. not their own testimony. not their own practices of how they interact with gender. not their own use of pronouns or mixing of signifiers or whatever. just. “well you’ve gotta be a secret third thing because you can’t be a wombyn….”
and I just. the framing by transphobic academics of trans people in the west as like relying on stereotypes is like … a projection? an obvious projection. what do you do when you can’t conceive of — and don’t want to conceive of — someone being able to be a different gender than the one assigned based of birth sex (and in intersex cases, that birth sex sometimes being altered to fit the binary)? you assume that they can only embody/experience womanhood in societal stereotypes. which overlooks the way that all women — but especially trans women for the sake of their own healthcare — are forced into this gendered performance situation, even if they will a much more individual/complex/personal relationship with womanhood on an interior level, because society expects A Woman to behave in certain (and sometimes contradictory) ways, and again for trans women this means performing a certain type of person who always new from the second she reached sentience that she was a girl because she liked pink and played with dolls. or whatever. (and I mean. we see a version of this in the way nanda denies the hijras’ womanhood because they curse. because women don’t curse. and they never poop. and they always embody societal expectations perfectly. of course.)
and it does make you wonder like. why would these academics or whatever attempt to glorify being “third gender” or “gnc af” because in practice, if you are actually genuinely identifying outside the binary or indeed are gnc as fuck, society treats you like absolute shit. and to this end i’ve once again come to the conclusion it’s because the choice to earnestly transition — and this includes living as a nonbinary person who actually sees yourself that way — and kick your sex to the curb is seen as, like, the ultimate transgression. like even more so than being a masc woman or feminine man even though neither of those things are treated exactly well. But it’s this idea that you HAVE to stay your assigned sex. which actually does dovetail well into the argument about heterosexuality being the regime here, because as long as you preserve your sex and are forced to stay a man / woman, you can be further coerced into perpetuating the whole “man” and “woman” get married and have babies thing. egads, girl.
and again i say this as like — someone who genuinely believes that like, you should be able to identify however the fuck you want and your medical choices are your own. but this article isn’t at all about condemning personal choice. like. the transphobic academics being “welcoming” of being “gnc af” or “third gender” are tricking you. because it’s easier to try and coerce a trans person away from transition if you can just frame it to them as them being masculine/feminine/whatever but not Actually Trans, and it seems like putting someone in a third gender category is a handy dandy tool to completely toss away anyone who doesn’t conform to being cis, without being forced to acknowledge that that is a human being who would like to live as themself — in this case, a woman trying to live as herself. trying to advocate for the care she needs to do that. trying to get society to reckon with her existence. [insert the “address me.png” elephant here]
it’s literally the thing i said earlier about forcibly evicting someone from genderville and then asking why the fuck they aren’t happy living on the streets because you have decided to forcibly assign them “being houseless” as their true state.
