sigmaleph | Entries tagged with lgbtqiafhtagn

The basic problem with naming people is that you're supposed to do it when they're babies.

Like, we want names to be meaningful, which is why there's so many websites about name meanings, but of course nobody knows if their child will grow up to be brave or wise or joyful or whatever when they are a baby. Naming your child something that translates to "great warrior" in some language you don't speak will neither make them a great warrior nor make anyone else more likely to think they are a great warrior.

The only actual meaning names have, as in the thing you communicate to someone else when you tell them your name, is gender and culture of origin (obviously with some failure rate for both of those). Under some circumstances also "my parents were really into this movie/book/tv show around the time I was born" and such, but those are exceptional cases and ultimately not really facts about you.

Aside from meaning, though, we also want names that sound good. This is deeply subjective! And, unfortunately, the person whose subjective opinion matters most, i.e. the person whose name it is, has not figured out their aesthetics yet and even if they did they'd be in no position to communicate them. Because, baby.

This is, of course, why by any reasonable standard trans people just have better names than cis people. This is frankly cisphobic and should be fixed, making it more socially acceptable to change your name as an adult even if, through no fault of your own, you happen to have a gender that matches your asab.

[this is my sincerely held opinion, minus the use of the word 'cisphobic']

I have by now seen multiple Spanish-language articles on Elliot Page using he/they pronouns that translate 'they' as 'éllos'. Which, in case you don't know any Spanish, does not in the least capture the use of gender-neutral they and is just literally translating it as a third person plural (masculine) pronoun.

Dear the media: this is a problem. We have a solution. You could probably have patched that particular instance of the mistake without it, but there is a larger pattern of your failures with talking about trans people, especially but not exclusively nonbinary trans people, that you need to fix and aren't. We've been telling you about the problem and the solutions we've come up for it for years now. Some of you listened; good for you! Others said things like "it's an aberration" and "we don't need gender-neutral grammar, Spanish already has perfectly useful gender-neutral grammar with no problems whatsoever". You were wrong. You will continue to show how wrong you are whenever you try to report on this subject. You can grow up and join the conversation we've been having and maybe you'll come up with something you like more than 'elle', or you can continue to fail because you lack the linguistic tools to do your job and refuse to acquire them. Up to you, really.

I don't have a hormonal cycle, that would imply it has any regularity, but I do experience my hormonal levels going up and down (when I for some reason or another stop taking my meds and then start again) and what I am guessing is mental correlates thereof. I'm crying a lot more easily lately and there seems to be fairly consistent pattern of this happening soon after (re)starting HRT.

Anecdotally people who are on weekly estrogen injections do seem to get hormonal cycles, which I think is one more reason to explore that possibility.

y'know sometimes I worry people will think I'm too easily offended by stuff and I should downplay some of my reactions to things they say, but I think there's some point where you have no right to be surprised when people object to your opinions, and "Telling your queer friend, whom you know to be engaged to be married and not gonna have biological children, that the purpose of marriage is procreation" is well past that point.

And yet. Somehow I still needed to spell that one out.

I'm in the mood to make a symbolic gesture against [TERF fantasy author], can anyone recommend any trans sf&f writers whose books I can buy?

("Yes, me" is a valid answer)

Imagine a writer who wants to write a character who is sick. They do their homework, research symptoms, find a treatment that's supposed to work sometimes, etc, and they write their book. Later, it turns out Science Has Marched On, and what the writer thought was a single disease was actually two different ones with overlapping but non-identical sets of symptoms. The things people thought were multiple unreliable treatments for a single condition are actually fairly reliable, just that some work on one disease and other work on the other one.

Our writer, it turns out, has written their character with symptoms that are actually a lot more likely given Disease A, but recovering after being administered the treatment for Disease B. This is not logically impossible or anything, some of the symptoms could have had an unrelated source, or the treatment had failed and recovery happened for other reasons, but it is still an improbable situation. Suppose the future fandom of this work has lively arguments about whether this character 'really' had one disease or ther other, arguing about the various improbabilities of each case.

The correct answer, of course, is 'neither'. The author's world-model was flawed and the writing derived from incorrect assumptions; there is no real version of the character who must have one microbe or another in their blood, and so while one might certainly headcanon one or ther other there is no meaningful sense in which one can talk about which disease was the 'real'.

I have no idea if this situation has ever happened exactly like this; it seems likely something like similar has, given the evolution of medical knowledge over time, but I have no specific examples in mind. No, this is all a metaphor about the TV Tropes page on Ambiguous Gender Identity.

"Is this character really gender non-conforming, gay, or trans?", whenever there is any actual ambiguity on the matter, should be assumed to be an incoherent question unless the author is themself queer(and even then that doesn't guarantee anything, but it improves their odds)

If I never read 'ah, but in the end she said she never really wanted to be a boy, she was just uncomfortable with her role as a woman in a sexist society, so she was not a trans man after all' as an argument again it'll be too soon.

(a different but related case being 'well, literally everything on the page points to her being a trans woman but the author uses male pronouns for her in WoG', which is not a question of ambiguity but of the character being transgender and the author being a transphobe)

I think the correct response to 'social contagion' fearmongering about trans people is to think of transition as a social technology.

There is some portion of the population who because of their current body shape/social role/associated gendery stuff is living a worse life than they could be. Because of the society we live in, for many of those people changing all those things is not an available idea, because they don't think it's possible or they think it's wrong in some sense or they think they will suffer serious social repercussions and it's not worth it. Realising that people are taking that option teaches them new things about transition-as-a-method-of-improving-your-life, and sometimes they decide it is possible or it is worth it or whichever, so they try it themselves. If it works for them, well then. What you actually have is a success story about people learning new ways to improve their lives and be happier.

This can be less obvious if you look at it via a medical model of being transgender, because transitioning is both the most obvious external symptom and the best treatment for the condition. If you think "oh no, lots of new people are showing symptoms when they meet trans people" you might think there's social contagion going on, but what actually happened is that those symptoms were already there, invisible to you, and people are simply adopting treatment for them when they learn such treatment exists and is effective.

sometimes i have to wonder, like, what do transphobic radical feminist lesbians feel about citing religious conservatives in their arguments against trans people?

like, obviously 'religious conservatives agree with you' is not, in itself, an argument against an idea. Hitler ate sugar and so on. and while you would expect the overall argument against trans people to differ between these two groups, nothing is preventing them from noticing individual facts that they think benefit their position and quoting each other on this observation. but, like, you're still aware that these people hate you. that seems like a hard thing to forget. So does it feel weird to cite them? does it trip up any ideological purity instincts? It definitely would to me, if for some reason i agreed with them on some controversial subject and decided to cite them for lack of better sources.

I've obviously cited people whose ideology I disagree with in some particulars, lots of times. That seems nearly unavoidable. but there's a distance between 'we disagree on some points' and 'we have diametrically opposite worldviews, they hate me just as much as they hate you, and in fact for the same reasons'.

maybe that's just my kneejerk reaction to religious conservatives, and i am incorrectly projecting it onto all the other groups religious conservatives hate. Maybe most people the religious conservatives don't like, even cis gay people and radical feminists, just see them in the category of 'yet another person who is wrong about some things and right about some things'.

Or maybe they have the exact same reaction i do and cite them anyway, who knows.

I am trying to fact check that one post about Scythian transgender priestesses using proto-Premarin for HRT. It seems Ovid talked about it?

i've found various references to a (Taylor, 1996) which appears to be The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture by Timothy Taylor. it's not on libgen and i'm not gonna spend however much money it might cost to get a copy, though.

I think this is legit but I would really like to know where in Ovid's works you can find it.

i like to think rainbow flags are a nice in-your-face reminder to God that, whatever his opinions, he's not allowed to drown us all for our iniquity any more.

unexpected downsides of changing your name: every few months, you come across a name that makes you go "oh gosh that's amazing, maybe I should have picked that one instead..."

[cw for Christmas, being trans/closeted around family]

so, Christmas happened! As it usually does around this time of year. I spent it with my dad's side of the family, which is also the side of the family where some people still don't know I'm trans and hence I still go by deadname. On the bright side, the unaware part of my family overlaps with the hard-of-hearing part and my sisters mostly used my real name without anyone noticing that shouldn't have.

Around Christmas started the worst part of summer. Heat reliably tanks my mood, trying to compensate for that. I should probably not have procrastinated on fixing my AC...

Also, my apartment doesn't have water right now. fun.

Commenting on another post, packbat linked me to this Philosophy Tube video on transphobia which I thought was interesting but have some significant disagreements with.

In the video, philosophy-tube-guy introduces the concept of 'yer dad', an abstraction of someone with the opinions of a typical relatively privileged member of a society. Yer dad's opinions evolve over time, and now, for example, they would be significantly less homophobic than they were 15 years ago. He states that yer dad's opinion on trans people nowadays is something like:

Well, if people wanna be called by whatever pronouns or wear whatever clothes or change their name, that's okay by me. I haven't got a problem with it at all; I think people should be able to do as they please!

He then goes on to argue that this position still contains a transphobic core, because it doesn't acknowledge trans people as members of their gender. He also confesses that he was yer dad on this issue when he first encountered it at the age of 18, because he thought it was 'what a nice person would do'.

(He then goes on to relate this to metaphysical scepticism which while fascinating and something I disagree with him about, not really the subject of this post)

Anyway, here's my reaction to this: if, when you first encountered the concept of trans people, your reaction was "hm, ok, that's odd but they can do whatever they want" without immediately accepting the idea that we are the gender we say we are... congratulations, you're doing great and you should be proud of yourself.

Sure, later on I would like you to actually agree with me about more complicated views of what gender is and that I am in fact a woman (or a nonbinary person, gender is complicated, we can deal with that later). But I don't expect you to agree with me immediately, without even taking some time to consider the idea and re-evaluate what, for most people, was the relatively straightforward conception of gender as a binary biological classification. You were raised in a cisnormative society where that's just what everyone treated gender as!

And if, having taken that time to think, you come to a different conclusion than me about how gender works, while still accepting that the polite thing to do is call me by the name I want and use the grammatical gender I want... well, yeah, I'm still gonna be disappointed and upset. Knowing that someone is misgendering me even in their private thoughts is not a pleasant experience. I will think you are wrong, and there are important questions I think you will get the wrong answer to. But you're still doing miles better than the garden variety transphobe.

If one is to hope that people learned anything generalisable from the change in opinion re: gay people society has experienced recently, something beyond "turns out we were wrong about gay people being bad", it would be something like "I shouldn't be an asshole to people for living their life different than me in a way that doesn't hurt anybody". That is an incredibly important heuristic, because it turns out in the world there's lots of people living their life in a variety of weird ways that hurt nobody, and for a disappointing number of people their first reaction is still "be an asshole". You are probably not going to deduce a priori my same views on gender before ever encountering a trans person. You are also probably not going to deduce poly dating norms, or why furries are furries, or why incredibly dedicated fans participate in fandom with the passion they do, without meeting the relevant people. But if you commit to 'hey, people can do what they want even if it's weird', you're going to get basically the right answer to interacting with these people without needing to figure out any of that ahead of time.

There's a lot of discussion in social-justice-y spaces about the messaging towards people who are basically on your side but still don't fully share your worldview, that more or less boils down to this: should we focus on turning them into full-blown allies, or should we focus on turning active bigots into them? If you push too hard on 'you don't deserve a cookie for basic decency' how many people are we motivating to do better and how many are we telling they're never good enough for our standards so fuck 'em?

I don't know the answer. Effective activism is hard. But I will say that the world where basically everyone has at least moved on to the basic tolerance position on trans rights is a win condition for trans rights. Not because every problem is solved, there are many issues that remain to be settled and for which basic tolerance isn't enough. But it gets you more people able to come out, able to have jobs and housing and lives, able to be right next to you being trans and not afraid to speak up. And once you get that, successfully making our case for our views on gender is going to be way easier than in this world.

there's this idea i run into every once in a while that some people who are not, let's say, sufficiently central examples of the lgbtq community should not 'use up' resources that would otherwise go to more deserving queer people. I see this from both sides: people saying that e.g. ace people are not really part of the LGBTQ community so we shouldn't let them in, but also like dysphoric people saying they are not really that trans so they shouldn't be on HRT. Because resources would get used up, and other people need them more.

the thing I am always reminded of, especially in the latter case, is this: I'm currently on two medications for HRT. One is an estrogen gel mostly used by postmenopausal women, and the other is an androgen blocker mostly used by people with prostate cancer. It turns out that there's a lot more postmenopausal women than people with prostate cancer; it also turns out that one of those medications is always available at any pharmacy I go to and the other went from 'spotty availability' to 'can't get it all except through my health insurance'. Guess which is which.

The resources available to queer people are not infinite, but they are also not a fixed amount set in stone. they respond to, among other things, how many queer people there are. Partly this is because people contribute resources to their community as well as using them; this is probably the case if you think about, e.g. donations to queer-focused charities. Partly, y'know, markets and stuff, people buying more hormones means people making more hormones.