The Cotton Ceiling is a fuckin' minefield. Bearing that in mind, I want to get a few action items ticked off right away. First and foremost, just so we're 100% clear, NOBODY IS EVER REQUIRED TO DATE OR FUCK ANYONE THEY DON'T WANT TO DATE OR FUCK. MOREOVER, NOBODY SHOULD EVER PRESSURE ANYONE ELSE INTO DATING OR SEX: RELENTING IS NOT CONSENTING. OK, is that good enough? Does anybody not understand that?
A Faceborg friend recently tagged me in a wonderful article on technology's mechanisms for hijacking the human mind. Tristan Harris, the author, provides a lot of valuable in-depth insight at a very accessible level, but seems to miss the forest for the trees (no article can cover everything, though). I wanted to rap a little about the bigger picture elements outside Harris' scope. First, I'll provide some basics on sociotechnical systems, a little history on community informatics, and then I'll be talking about implications for media literacy. As this is my primary area of interest and expertise, I'll mostly be riffing today, rather than providing the usual spray of links.
No, not - ugh, never mind. (Image from... Pak's Wholesale? What?)
The idea that trans folks are irrevocably the sex assigned at birth is a myth, and a transphobic one at that. The fact is, "biological sex" is a social construction; but to understand why this is, we'll need to go beyond high school biology.
There are two ways to demonstrate this: the mosaic theory of biosex in particular, and the social construction of knowledge in general. Wait, three ways: a YouTube video of someone explaining the core concepts! Riley J. Dennis has made two such videos, the latter of which clarifies and expands on the former:
Trans women are not "biologically male," by Riley J. Dennis.
Male and female are binary, but people aren't, by Riley J. Dennis.
But if you're like me, you can read faster than people can talk, and you might be at work and thus unable to listen to a video, and you might want text that's machine-searchable and copypastable. That's why I'm here!
The Mosaic Theory of Biosex
We pretend most of the time in common parlance that biological sex is one objective and easily decidable characteristic of a person, but this is not so. The concept of biological sex, as used by biologists, is actually composed of five completely different things: chromosomes, genitals, gonads, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics. Gender has all these in addition to gender identity, gender role, and erotic preference, but these are subjectively experienced and performed, not objectively measurable - interestingly, it also means that the criteria of biosex are part of gender taxonomy. While the components of biosex are objectively observable facts, lay folks have this annoying habit of pretending A. they all go together (they don't, that's an erroneous oversimplification), B. they're supposed to go together (they aren't, that's bionormativity and it's dumb), and C. they can thus make valid inferences based on a quick glance on the street (they can't, but they rarely get corrected so the misconception persists). Let's take it by the numbers!
Chromosomes are what a lot of people lean on when stating "just the facts": that XX is female and XY is male. The reality is not that simple. In brief, people can be genetically XXX, XXY, X, or even XY and externally female, or XX and externally male. Moreover, while conditions such as infertility can result from such chromosomal arrangements, they don't always: there is a case of one XY female who gave birth to an XY daughter, which shows that the condition of being XY and female is unknowably prevalent without the costly method of at least karyotyping a huge number of people. While all known cases of XX males are linked to infertility, these individuals were only tested as a result of said infertility, which means that any fertile XX males could easily go their whole lives without karyotyping. The bottom line is that you just can't determine someone's genes by external observation, even if those people are cisgendered.
Genitals are externally visible, but sometimes ambiguous. They are also the primary means of assigning a baby's sex at birth: for a long time, doctors decided that an "acceptably long phallus" meant "male," and anything else was "female," because it's easier to give someone a mostly-working vagina than an even partially-working penis. In the 20th century, when such cases arose, doctors would approach the parents with heavily loaded language and say that there was a complication that would result in social difficulties later in life, but there was a medical solution! Let us do surgery on your kid, and they'll be fine. (Source: lecture notes from Sex, Values, and Human Nature, taught by a professor with joint appointments in biology, philosophy, and WGS.) The doctors would then attempt to surgically normalize the infant's genitals, sometimes with follow-up hormone prescriptions without the patient's knowledge or consent. Sometimes this went fine, but sometimes it went horribly wrong, as in the case of David Reimer*: a botched circumcision led to doctors recommending vaginoplasty and hormones, which the parents accepted, and later in life David strongly identified as male and transitioned to reflect his identity; due to a number of issues, however, he ultimately committed suicide. The point is that often such birth determinations need to be later overturned, so genitals are also out as sole determinants of sex. Moreover, due to intersex conditions and surgical procedures, you simply can't tell what someone's genitals are without seeing them naked anyway; you have to guess, and while you'd be correct a large percentage of the time, it's still a guess and you can't tell when you're wrong without further examination that would constitute a huge privacy violation. In other words, you assume and almost never get your assumptions corrected, so you have no idea how often you're wrong.
Gonads are the sex-cell-producing glands (such as testicles and ovaries) that are needed for reproduction. These are sometimes streak or infertile, though, so they are also not a foolproof guide. Additionally, you cannot tell the presence or state of gonads simply by observing someone on the street, and most people never get their gonads checked in any but the most cursory of ways, unless some issue comes up that requires such a check. The point here is that, while gonads typically develop in certain ways, there's no deriving normativity from these bare statistics (which remain largely unknown due to the cost and non-necessity of diagnostic procedures) without smuggling in a whole pile of values that will predetermine such analysis.
Hormones are molecular messengers in our blood and other fluids that can do all kinds of things. In humans, males typically have high testosterone and females typically have high estrogen. However, these cannot be measured except through bloodwork, which again isn't free or common without a need to investigate**. Women with PCOS report feeling crappy in ways that sound lots like gender dysphoria, and low testosterone predicts depression in men. I've read anecdotes about similar dysphoria-like symptoms in cis people who take hormones for medical reasons unrelated to gender identity, and about rampant self-harm and suicide in female Soviet athletes injected with testosterone in the 70s and 80s, but haven't yet been able to turn up citations on those (will update if/when I do). The point being that, to all indications and the best of our ability to tell so far, it looks like a mismatch between hormones and gender identity can cause problems, and transition is the best and only recognized treatment for resolving this mismatch (at least, according to the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American College of Physicians, National Association of Social Workers, Royal College of Physicians, and National Health Service - among others!).
Secondary sex characteristics are a pile of traits like facial hair, Adam's apple, muscle mass, body odor, and so on. Quite frankly, these are a complicated pile and while they're affected by hormones, everyone's a shuffled mish-mash of 'em. Moreover, on pretty much every single such trait, there is more variation within each group than between both groups: e.g. men on average tend to be taller than women, but most men and women are in the same height range.
The tiny distance between the bell tops is just obviously more important than the massive
overlap between their bases and their overall extent - right? From Perry Street Palace.
The point is that while general trends exist and are measurable, they're not useful in determining individual status.
Putting it all together, if you were to draw a line down the center of a piece of paper, and put male-typical biotraits on one side, and female-typical biotraits on the other side, you would have a whole pile of biotraits that could actually go either way. Any trait a cis woman might have, another cis woman might not have, and a cis male might also have. And vice versa: any trait a cis male might have, another cis male might not have, and a cis female might also have. Some cis women are born with XY chromosomes or ambiguous/atypical genitals; some don't have a uterus, ovaries, or breasts; some have never menstruated and won't give birth; some have thick facial/body hair, large frames, big muscles, or high testosterone & low estrogen; some look androgynous or like cis men; some take hormones or get plastic surgery to improve their quality of life; some are even raised & socialized as boys, or new info comes up to make doctors rethink their birth sex days-to-years later. In other words, none of these traits "go together," it's completely normal for every person to be a shuffled mish-mash of them.
The simple fact is, there is only one thing that all cis women have in common, and that's that they identify as women. Any cis woman might have any number of the above conditions; trans women just have the misfortune of having more of them than average (some cis women have more than some trans women, though!). If you're gonna say trans women are biomales, then you have to say why they are ("they just are" doesn't count); that reason will necessarily bring a lot of cis women into the biomale category (and cis men into the biofemale category) as well; this is an absurdity, so you have to do something to resolve the absurdity. You can reject the idea that trans women are biomales, or you can decide there's a special rule that only applies to trans people, thereby engaging in special pleading just for the purpose of excluding trans women (i.e. textbook transphobia).
The Social Construction of Knowledge
The very idea of biosex is a social construct. Importantly, "social construct" doesn't mean "total BS," it just means that humans decided where to draw dividing lines, and we're not "cutting nature at its joints." Nature doesn't have joints. Also, everything we care about is a social construct as well, so it's not a knock, just a fact: we decided that certain differences were important enough to warrant an ontological distinction (i.e. "this difference makes a different kind of thing, not a different example of the same kind of thing"). These distinctions are very useful all the time, but they are made, not found. In summary: differences are found in nature, but all distinctions & categories are cognitive inventions.
So let's just take the category "human" as primitive ("human" is also a social construct, but we're not gonna worry about that right now). We've got a pile of humans, all the humans who ever have or ever will exist. They have differences, but so what? These differences don't matter to us right now. But then you say, "We should actually make two piles out of this one, and call them Male and Female." Like, why? Why do we need this distinction? Whatever reason you give to motivate the distinction, that makes it motivated reasoning ("Well, this is what it takes for reproduction to occur." OK, so you're reproductively motivated - but why is that important?). We could pick any criterion we wanted to divide people into piles, the list is literally endless. So that's Problem Number One: any distinction is inherently motivated reasoning, and therefore not impartial/objective reasoning.
Moreover, whatever trait(s) you do pick to make the distinction, just aren't gonna line up cleanly with how you want the categories to go (see the mosaic theory of biosex, above). You're going to drag some cis women into the biomale pile as an inevitable consequence of trying to get all the trans women into it. There just isn't a single trait or group of traits that will get all the trans women, and only the trans women, into the biomale pile. You can't pick "transness," because we haven't even made our "male and female" piles yet, so there's no cisness or transness to do that with - in other words, sex comes ontologically before cis or trans, and thus has to be decided without referencing any categories we make later. This is Problem Number Two: our dividing lines can't be made clean, no matter what we do, because everyone's a shuffled-up mish-mash of traits.
Finally, we can draw up these distinctions however we want (and quite frankly, we're going to get arbitrary if we're gonna decide all cases; picking which cases to decide or not is also arbitrary; and ultimately, even deciding to make any decision at all is also arbitrary). So let's be trans-inclusive, because trans folks are people too. Oh, you don't want to be trans-inclusive? OK, that's transphobia. If you say, "Well, women are supposed to be this way," stop right there - says who? There is no "supposed to," that's imposing normativity on nature; we're just talking about what is, there is no "should." Here we find Problem Number Three: there's just no Platonic standard to appeal to, we have to decide and monitor our motivations in doing so, without appealing to normativity in the process.
The bottom line here is that any way of deciding what kinds of things exist and how to group them (i.e. "ontology") is going to be necessarily motivated at root, so we have to decide what we let motivate our decisions. We can go with permissive and inclusive ontologies if we want to be permissive and inclusive; saying No We Have To Go With THIS Ontology And It Excludes Transes Sorry I Don't Make The Rules It's Just A Fact, is plainly and obviously transphobic, because you're making a choice and then insisting that everyone has to make the same choice as you, and it's perfectly clear that you're making the choice that way because you don't want trans women to count as "real women."
* - I am reluctant to use Reimer as a political football, however the case is simply too instructive and concrete to ignore. As Reimer's case was used in his lifetime to validate the malleability of gender, I feel that undoing that damage by working against those misconceptions is a worthy purpose to which his legacy may legitimately be put. Thus, Reimer joins the uncomfortable list of Inherently Problematic Yet Socially Invaluable Knowledge, alongside the likes of Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the Milgram obedience experiments.
**I, however, did need to get bloodwork done when I got my hormone consultation, and as it turns out my testosterone was way lower, and my estrogen way higher, than a typical male's. While I was hormonally closer to a male than a female, I wasn't really clearly either; and as my dysphoria significantly reduced on starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and then went into remission after 18 months, as well as significant reduction in my already mild bipolar tendencies that multiple regimens of antidepressants and mood stabilizers exacerbated, I call that a winning outcome. Hormones are part of biology, and so hormonally I am more female-typical, and in this respect I am biologically female.
Being a good Social Justice Warrior, I occasionally wade out into the trenches of the intertubes to do battle with small minds and big, uhh, bigots alike. I mostly try to fight my own battles (women, LGBT, atheism, etc.), though I do occasionally call-in those I know for problematic statements out of my field, and recently I did a whole bunch of Arguing on the Internet over a transgender greeting card.
I found myself trotting out the same handful of arguments against the same handful of misconceptions, so I thought it would be useful for future arguments to have a series of posts I can link instead of boiling copypasta from previous comments. Handily, I also ran into the following comic at about the same time.
been updated (see link), but this is what I shared and what I'm arguing, so there.
I shared it to the Faceborg and found myself arguing all over again, so I'm going to tackle the following transphobic tropes in a short series of posts:
Links to follow as the posts are complete. Wish me luck!
EDIT: We are wrapped up and all done! Links are updated, and if you're reading this in the next hour, the final post will drop just before midnight. I may or may not update this later with new installments in the event of other trans-related controversies, we'll see. Cheers!
Hello again, The Internet! You, uh, may have noticed some changes around here.
First & foremost, I'm out now. I wasn't for a while, and it was kind of a mess. I had to be real cagey about keeping my online and real life identities separate, because... well, long story. I'm sure you understand.
But that's (mostly) over now. So! Hit me up on them social medias! You can find me on Twitter @Theremin_Dee (and this is the most-liked thing I've ever done there). I'm also on the Faceborg, but email me for that - my profile is fully private, and if we're not already friends then we probably have no mutuals. I'm also on reddit and Tumblr, but my presence there is almost entirely NSFW; I'm not that hard to find, but let me know if you wanna be sure, and we can get our wires crossed.
Yes, yes, long time, no write. I have been as busy as the King of Couches - that is, Sofa King busy. In fact, I should be sleeping right now, because I have to be awake in about five hours and if I don't get my happy ass outta bed then I won't get to do all the super cool things I need to do tomorrow. Anyway, in bed, I was reflecting on a conversation I'd had earlier about emotional intimacy. I said at some point that it was "souls touching," and my interlocutor asked, "But aren't you an atheist?"
"Well, yeah."
"So you don't believe in souls, right?"
"Of course not. But that's still what I mean. That's still what it feels like."
One of the first readings for my survey class was a review of James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. It's a fun read and I highly recommend it, touching as it does on a lot of the main points in the history of information theory, putting everything from Claude Shannon to Wikipedia into context. What's more, it does what any good book review ought to do: it makes me want to read the book.
But then the reviewer went and said a dumb thing:
The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. Life has for billions of years been evolving with organisms and ecosystems embodying increasing amounts of information. The evolution of life is a part of the evolution of the universe, which also evolves with increasing amounts of information embodied in ordered structures, galaxies and stars and planetary systems. In the living and the nonliving world, we see a growth of order, starting from the featureless and uniform gas of the early universe and producing the magnificent diversity of weird objects that we see in the sky and in the rain forest. Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannon's discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information.
I swear I didn't mean to fall off the face of the internet! I just... well, hit a little bit of a wall, fell off the ball, then kinda just laid there on the ground. Staring. The ball rolled off into the sunset. I went to visit my folks for a while, went up to Canada for a bit, had a lot of fun times.
At some point along the way, I just got way too embarrassed to say anything, and I rationalized my continued absence by saying, "Oh, screw it, I'm gonna start grad school soon anyway."
So I started grad school and things are going great... but then... well, Freeman Dyson of all people went and said something dumb. Well, maybe not "dumb" so much as "inaccurate." But... look, I'm gonna work up a post on it, because I can't not write about this. But somehow, picking a fight with an astrophysicist on the finer points of astrophysics just seems a little bit beyond the scope of the library science classroom. Then I thought, "Oh, that can just go here on my own little internet soapbox." And then I remembered that I kinda just left things hanging...
So I'm at least fixing that. I have a couple ideas. Don't know what else is gonna come up. But at least now, I'm actually saying that things may be a bit sporadic for the foreseeable future. And sooner or later I'm going to hit a point where I'm just going to feel compelled to write more Tooth and Claw. This is hiatus, not quitting.
Jones
Kelly awakens to the sound of her phone buzzing. It’s a text message from headquarters,
instructing her to check her email. She rolls
blearily out of bed and stumbles across the hotel room to where her laptop sits
open on the table. Jiggling the tiny
mouse to rouse the machine from its own slumber, she enters her password and
brings up her inbox. Sure enough, one
new message awaits:
Agent
Kelly,
Excellent
work. Postpone follow-up until
resolution of next case.
Terse
and to the point, with a congratulatory flourish. Some dozen attachments lurk beneath – she clicks
“Download All” and heads for the shower.
The
hot jets both relax and invigorate. She
breathes deep of the steamy air and works the stiffness out of her joints. Yesterday had been her recovery day, her time
to rest and eat while composing and filing her report. Her grafts were marvelous things, improving
her performance in nearly every area – but damn if they didn’t work up an
appetite. Whether running, healing, or
simply perceiving beyond the bounds of her mundane senses, everything had a
calorie count attached, and the price was steep. Yesterday’s dull ache had faded to a languorous
stiffness by the time she bedded down, belly full at last. As always, the stiffness seemed to have
tightened its grip on her overnight, but it would be gone in a couple hours as
long as she stretched.
She
turns off the shower, dries off, brushes her teeth, and performs her stretching
ritual to work out the last few kinks.
She then dresses and heads to the lobby for coffee – whatever it is, it
can wait until she’s fully awake. She checks
the time as she heads down the hallway:
a quarter past noon. At least she’d
been able to sleep in.
Two
cups of decent-for-free coffee later, a third in hand, Jones is back in her
room and perusing the attachments: dossiers
on five hunters in Las Vegas, just like she’d received for her current case, as
well as some intercepted network chatter and a load of photos. She sets up a new case file and starts
working her way through the mass of information.
Whew! Finally finished this part. For whatever reason, Blogger is giving all my text this white background. Not quite sure what I have to do to fix it, but for now, you get "slightly off-color text background that was as close as I could match it to how it's supposed to look." Of course, if I ever change my background, it'll be totally screwed up... but that's something I'm willing to ignore for now. Sunday, July 8th, 2012
“All right,” Samantha says as
they close the last dozen yards, “here we are.
This could be anywhere, but it’s where the Sandstorm Hourglass was first
made. Well, and between two doors, and at night. Probably more low-key than our last few
dealings. But pay attention, and you
might learn a thing or two.” She smiles
and pushes at the handle – the door budges, but does not open. Sam looks to the door’s edge at her left and
sees hinges, then pulls, and it opens as she chuckles at herself.
On the other side, a man in a
black robe sits at a large desk, writing with a quill pen upon a broad sheet of
parchment. He pays no mind to the women
entering his quarters. On a simple table
to her right, Della spots the Sandstorm Hourglass: its wood is a little brighter, its glass is a
little clearer, but it looks otherwise identical to the magical timepiece she
remembers.
The door shuts behind them, and Della
sees another to her right, past the hourglass.
They are in a corner room of some apparently circular building, perhaps
a large tower, the wall to Della’s left curving around to join the straight
wall to her right with the straight wall at her back. A floor-to-ceiling window gives a view of the
night sky, resplendent with stars in the dim candlelight from the man’s desk,
clouds billowing just beneath them and a gibbous moon shining brightly above.
“Whew,” Samantha says, pausing
to calm her nerves. Della is more
overcome by confusion than anything else, but the fear is visible on the
bramblekin’s face.
“The Hell was that about,” Della
asks.
“Those were gods,” Samantha
says. “Or at least extremely powerful fae.
Either way, bad news.”
“Why’s that,” Della asks as they
forge on down the path.
“Gods,” Samantha begins, “or fae
in general, are really only interested in two things: their domain, which is the part of the world
they have power over, and garnering worship from mortals, which is how they get
power aside from the influence their domain has in the world.”
“Is that why the seven seals are
there,” Della asks.
Samantha looks sidelong at Della
and says, “My, you have been doing
your homework. In a word, yes. The gods, from what I understand, proved to
be more trouble than they were worth. So
they were banished to another side of the Coil behind seven seals. And yeah, from the looks of things, I’m gonna
go out on a limb and guess that la
mujerta succeeds in breaking them.
So now we just have to figure out how she does it.”
“So we talk to whoever made it,”
Della says, “and see if they can shed any light on how it’s done.”
“That’s the plan,” Samantha
confirms. “I’m not quite sure what good
it will do, though. Que será, será, or whatever.”
