So if I look at a transvestite "transsexual" who has changed his name to Susan, whose friends all refer to him as "she" and who identifies himself as female and immediately think: "that's a guy," who is right, me or him?
In my mind, his appearance and behavior is full of cues that he (or she, as he would have it) is male. In his mind, he's a girl and I am supposed to accept his declaration of gender identity as such. Your position demands that he is a woman the way Schroedinger's cat is alive (or dead). It's a matter of the probability that he will be socially identified as a woman.
My position is that he's a man who has made it clear that he wants to be indentified as a woman and although it may be clear to me that he's not, I accept that it's important to him and so I acceed. In general I'm in favor of probabilistic models but I think gender is something that is knowable quantitatively. I also think it's important to realize that (barring genetic abnormality) any man or woman has gone through a uniquely male or female biological development path which will have had strong, indelible effects on his or her brain and, therefore, mind. It will also affect his adult behavior, particularly in the area of sexuality.
boddi
On 11/17/05, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Arash wrote:
>
> > I think the
> > tendency of leftist literature on gender to deny biological reality
> > undermines how relevantly it describes gender relations between actual human
> > beings, but I don't think this makes the study of gender itself meaningless.
>
> No one in this gender thread has written anything that "denies biological
> reality". This is a gross misrepresentation of the point I'm trying
> to make. I'll try one more time: regardless of any catalog of biological
> distinctions a person could propose to finally and "scientifically"
> distinguish men from women, in practice, the identification of gender
> in self and others is a social process, not a biological one. Like Kel
> joked, we don't need to give somebody a DNA test to find out if
> they are men or women; we learn how to identify men and women via
> socialization. The practical, everyday cues to identify
> gender are social conventions (dress, walk, nonverbal behavior).
> Put simply, I don't need to look in somebody's pants to know if
> they are a man or a woman; I use social criteria that are products of
> social relations. Any biological differences that you could point
> out between the groups socially identified as men and women are
> irrelevant to this social process, unless the social standard becomes--
> DNA testing!
>
> Is this argument really that complicated?
>
> Miles
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