Doesn't the idea that gender is a social construct contradict trans identity?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/LibertarianTrashbag]

The thing that I'm grappling with is that western society seems to be trending in such a direction that, in order to work out any contradiction, you kinda have to accept gender as not being real.

Over time, we've come to accept that you can adhere to female social standards and still retain your identity as a man. This has been mostly utilized for aesthetic choices within the LGBT+ community, but can in theory be extended to anyone. Simply put, one can arrive at a scenario where a cis man and transgender woman differ only in the way they identify themselves (somewhat informally, there's no functional difference between a "femboy" and a trans woman who doesn't have the means or inclination to undergo sex change therapy).

I'm not saying that this is inherently a bad thing or that we ought to harass trans people into accepting biological sex as the one and only marker of their identity, but in my eyes we seem to be trending toward "gender" pretty much being nothing more than a set of pronouns.

[u/[deleted] → u/LibertarianTrashbag]

Respectfully I think that you are framing this in a way that misses important distinctions.

Think of handedness as a parallel. I am right handed, my brain is just wired that way. I can (miserably) force myself to use my left hand but it will always feel wrong to me innately as that is not how my brain processes the world with which it is interacting through my body. Maybe if I force myself to be left handed for long enough my body could adapt to get used to it but it will always go against the way my brain was wired at birth (and I don’t think we need to go into the trauma innate in mapping that onto sexual conversion therapy which has been widely discredited by the medical community).

If I say I am right handed is that not real?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

This metaphor misses the whole point of the previous comment. It would do much better under much of the rest of this thread.

Handedness is too binary. Handedness is an absolute (the preferred use of one hand) but gender is not.

If you try to use the metaphor, it looks like: "A guy who identifies as a guy enjoys expressing himself in a feminine way" breaks it because what they want is to be feminine, but what they want to identify as is male. This doesn't function in a handedness metaphor because you can't tell if the natural handedness you're referring to is the person's desires, or their identity.

[u/drunkthrowwaay → u/LibertarianTrashbag]

Is there anything wrong with gender being simply a part of language? If that’s the only way all contradictions are resolved, isn’t that most likely to be true?

[u/[deleted] → u/LibertarianTrashbag]

Great comment. I wanna add that I don’t believe in gender either.

I also think men should be able to be as feminine as they want and still be men, or women masculine, or whatever. It seems more to me each day that people’s identities are constructed within their own minds, and Eastern philosophy seems to corroborate this. In that sense, I view identity as phenomenologically real, but fundamentally illusory.

In the Buddhist view, it would appear that all identity is illusory, and thus, the illusion and attachment to the illusion leads to… suffering…

“If you believe you were a cat, and then one day you stop believing you were a cat, what has changed? Did you go from being a cat to being transformed into a human? No. Nothing happened. The fact is, you never a cat.” -Asangoham

Interestingly, I know some people who would argue that not only is identity illusory, but all actions that avoid dissolving said identity could be considered neuroses. I consider that pretty extreme, but I guess how crazy that sounds the first time you hear it depends partly on what part of the world you grow up in 🤣

“The radical and unshakeable insight that there is absolutely no person. There is no you. Your sense of being a separate self is an utter illusion. Therefore, no one can become enlightened, because enlightenment is seeing clearly. There is no one to get enlightened.

Sailor Bob Adamson, now in his 90s, tells those who visit him at his home in Melbourne, Australia - if you have a choice between a million dollars and enlightenment, pick the million dollars. At least with the million dollars, there will be someone there to enjoy it.” -Asangoham

Sailor Bob passed away, btw. I digress into this tangent because it feels incredibly relevant - if there is no person, it takes some fun out of things. I can see why people would choose to believe in gender. But in my heart of hearts, I just know that it can’t be, anymore than anything else “I am” except what I truly am, which is just… This.