Non-gendered kids

[Bluegoat]

11 hours ago, Ravin said:

 

Recommendations under the Prison Rape Elimination act, from Transequality.org :

 

It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a critical feminist to figure out that it's a bad idea to put a transgender woman who has a history of violence against women, especially sexual violence, in the general population of a women's prison, especially if she's had neither surgery nor a long time on HRT. Cases like that of Karen White in the U.K. (where they are supposed to use similar guidelines) are simply unacceptable, and that's got nothing to do with being pro- or anti- woman. But to say that such a bad decision means ALL transgender women should be placed in men's prisons where they are at higher risk of sexual assault is just as wrong as to say that ALL transgender women should be placed in women's prisons without individualized consideration of what is appropriate.

Obviously, there is more research to be done when it comes to transgender and gender nonconforming children. When it comes to the desistance statistics, we don't have any that are scientifically rigorous enough to quote with the certainty you seem to give them. There are some important criticisms out there of how those numbers were derived, most notably in my opinion that the definition for gender dysphoria in children under the DSM-V is different from the definition for Gender Identity Disorder in Children under the DSM-IV, and that in one of the studies, children who couldn't be found to ask for the follow-up were assumed to have desisted. 

Given that for a long time transgender people who would, after transition, then be situated in non-hetero relationships based on their sexual orientation (i.e., if you were 'straight' you weren't allowed to transition), there was at that time some legitimacy to the critique that the binary transition model served to erase gay and lesbian identity. Under that older model, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to transition, because I am married to a man. It is only more recent changes removing some of the gate-keeping and revising definitions to make room for transgender people to be allowed to own our sexual orientations and our gender identities both that have removed that barrier. 

Your insistence that gay and lesbian people are still erased by transgender identity is, to me, nothing more than a way of trying to erase transgender identities. It is not necessary to extend some people's personal preference in sex partners into wholesale erasure of the identities of other people. A lesbian or heterosexual man saying, "I would not be comfortable dating or being intimate with someone with a penis" or a straight woman or gay man saying "I wouldn't see the point in a sexual relationship with someone without a penis" is not the same thing as them saying "I would not be comfortable dating or being intimate with a transgender person." 

Again back to the pie: When it comes to sports, a medically transitioned transgender woman is not going to be on a level playing field with cisgender men any more than a cisgender woman is. Hormones make a most significant difference there. So if you insist that she can't play with women,  a transgender woman athlete is being shut out of any opportunity to play, and that is just as unfair. Setting reasonable standards for whether someone has undergone age-appropriate medical transition that evens the playing field isn't unfair, however. The solution if there is a sense that there aren't enough opportunities for women to play is to work to expand those opportunities, which are still far from reaching parity with men's sport, not to shut some women out of them. If it's really a pie, let's bake a bigger one instead of denying someone a piece. Likewise, a transgender man who has undergone medical transition (HRT in particular) is going to have unfair advantage over cisgender women, so he should be allowed to compete against other men.

As long as you insist that erasing our identities is part of your political stance, you cannot credibly claim to support human rights for some of us (transsexual being a term that defines only a subset of those who fall under the transgender umbrella). People with nonbinary identities, and people who are transgender but choose not to transition, or who cannot transition medically even though they want to for economic or health reasons, are also deserving of human rights and dignity. 

 

The bolded isn't actually true - it's a common misreading of that study.  

[Bluegoat]

9 hours ago, Ravin said:

 

You want to redefine transgender people on your own terms, and thereby relegate us to third class (at best) status in relation to other (cisgender) men and women. The very language you use demands this. We might fit some third category, but transgender women don't get to belong to the category you label "women" without qualifiers. You want them to be a subset of the social category "men" based upon biological sex, and would support protecting their rights only through separate protections using different words than those protecting other women from sex-based discrimination.

Except those separate protections don't exist. Not in my state. Not at the Federal level in the U.S.. So your position leaves us out in the cold. You have yet to demonstrate that there is some steep cost to what we are asking for. Society has a long way to go before we are free from all forms of sexism. I'm not denying that. No one is asking you to abandoning advocacy for women's issues that you consider most important. There is a balancing act that needs to be done to ensure fairness and safety for all women without prioritizing safety of transgender women over cisgender women (or safety of cisgender women over transgender women).

You know full well the power of language in this debate, which is why you insist on the language of critical feminism while claiming ignorance of the language of critical gender theory (which has been discussed, and definitions linked to, in other threads in which we both have participated).

When you base your advocacy for this "separate but equal" categorization and separate treatment, on the same footing as those who seek to marginalize and dehumanize us and deny us  any consideration whatsoever, all you're doing is helping the patriarchy erase us.

This thread started with a discussion about raising children without gender. I think it would be great if we could do that. If we could somehow parse out all the trappings of culture that we unnecessarily tie to biological sex, and just let kids be kids, so they can figure out for themselves who they are and what they like and who they love without burdening them with any unnecessary assumptions. Children growing up in such a world would be free of sexism, and would be able to answer the questions we aren't going to settle with our clashing language. 

Trying to do that as a single family in isolation is unlikely to be a successful experiment. We are all too steeped in gendered expectations around everything we do. But it's kind of sweet that the OP's cousin at least wants to try. 

 

If "transgender identity" didn't include redefining the identity of others, the language they use to talk about themselves, there would be a lot less controversy over this.  

 

[Paige]

Getting back on topic, what do you think of the Swedish gender neutral preschools? Do you think they are a positive step towards equality and increased health for both sexes or a risky experiment being conducted on small kids? Other thoughts? I found it interesting that they are encouraging positive touches among the children while we are discouraging all touching in American schools because of fears of sexual harassment. 

Here's a couple articles, but there's more if you google. I find it interesting and I'm not sure what I would do if such a school were offered near me. I think at worst they probably do no harm.

http://sciencenordic.com/what-happens-girls-and-boys-gender-neutral-preschools

http://sciencenordic.com/gender-equality-creates-new-school-boys

[Bluegoat]

8 minutes ago, Paige said:

Getting back on topic, what do you think of the Swedish gender neutral preschools? Do you think they are a positive step towards equality and increased health for both sexes or a risky experiment being conducted on small kids? Other thoughts? I found it interesting that they are encouraging positive touches among the children while we are discouraging all touching in American schools because of fears of sexual harassment. 

Here's a couple articles, but there's more if you google. I find it interesting and I'm not sure what I would do if such a school were offered near me. I think at worst they probably do no harm.

http://sciencenordic.com/what-happens-girls-and-boys-gender-neutral-preschools

http://sciencenordic.com/gender-equality-creates-new-school-boys

 

My inclination is to think they won't make much of a difference one way or another.  Especially once puberty begins, I don't think the kids will fail to differentiate on the basis of sex.

Sweden has some of the craziest constructionist ideas around things like sex and sexuality and such.  

The stuff about the boys being really obsessed about hair and such, and the relation to status, is a little funny.

[Scarlett]

 I believe young children should be allowed to be humans and not immediately pidgeon holed into ‘boys don’t cry and girls don’t have short hair’ type of mentality.  Those things and many other gender expected feelings and behaviors ARE cultural and the insistence of conforming at an early age is usually based on the parents fear that they will screw up their kids somehow.   However, allowing both genders the same experiences and feelings is a FAR cry from letting or encouraging a child to pick a sex or gender.  No matter what people do or say a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl.  Changing cultural expectations of the sexes won’t change basic biology.  Even surgery won’t.  I do believe there is a very small % of children/ people who have a serious mental illness or disorder and current medical advice is to allow them to live as the opposite sex.  And I know that the overriding advice in those situations is for parents and others to support that.... but I am still not convinced that is the answer.  Thankfully I don’t currently have to make that kind of decision.  

And further it seems like the voices are very very loud from people in that small camp for the rest of society to fall into step with the idea that people should be supported and celebrated for making such a change.  They certainly are not just ‘live and let live’. Telling the world we must call a girl a boy and pretend that the sky is green and the grass is blue is not live and let live.  Of course NO ONE should be abused or discriminated against.  But some of this stuff is pushing to an extreme degree. It reminds me of the clerk who would not issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.  The law of the land dictated that her job required that. So if her conscience was harmed by that task she was free to quit that job.  She was not free to refuse the duties of her job—-because there was another option available to her.  Her refusal to do the task was much more of a protest than it was adhering to her conscience. 

I have been part of a non mainstream religion my entire life.  So I totally understand being ‘other’. I suppose I am more accustomed than most at doing my own thing without attempting to force everyone else to follow along. Being the minority....whether you choose it or not....usually has a cost to it.  Ones reaction to that cost can make all the difference in personal happiness. 

Edited November 6, 2018 by Scarlett

[Pen]

Could someone help me understand how the idea of ungendered words necessarily relates to transsexual issues?  Most of the people I know who use “they”, it isn’t about being transsexual. They are apparently the sex they appear to be, but want a world that doesn’t so much define people by whether they are a He or a she for equal treatment reasons. 

Though there is, of course, still the issue that chicks even if treated equal and not called him or her or dressed in blue or pink may turn into rather different behaving hens and roosters. 

[maize]

8 minutes ago, StellaM said:

 

Ironically, not much. Queer culture and theory isn't really invested in the wellbeing of old school transexuals, who are known by the revolting word 'truscum', especially if they acknowledge women's sex based needs.

'They' arises directly out of a theoretical postion, as stated upthread, that obscuring sex, removing sex as a protected category, and challenging all single sex provision is the key to challenging heteronormativity. Does it have anything to do with people who, after experiencing persistent and intractable dysphoria around their sexed bodies, underwent a meaningful, medically supervised transition to relieve their symptoms ? Tangentially, but not centrally.

You know, during the Cultural Revolution, girls dressed like boys and cut their hair like boys. Women were bare faced, no make up because it was decadent. No idea about pronouns - ask a language person - Maize ? Differences in gender presentation were deliberately minimised ( this was State supported and mandated). Did this reduce violence against women, or even garden variety sexism ? Well, we don't look to the Cultural Revolution often as a utopia, which may go some way to answering. 

 

Chinese personal pronouns are not sex specific--ta is the third person singular for both males and females.

[Bluegoat]

17 hours ago, StellaM said:

There we go. Same hair styles, same dress, gender neutral pronoun - thanks Maize! Someone who knows more than I do about Chinese history might be able to dig up relative rates of violence against females, and other forms of sex based discrimination, under this linguistic and politically imposed non binary presentation, as compared to earlier or later times. Seems like the experiment's been done already.

 

 

I think this might be quite difficult to judge.  There were a lot of changes to women's lives during that period, things like entry into the workforce and so on.  But so much of it was directly mandated, and there was a clearly communicated political narrative.  I think it would be difficult to pull apart the threads.

However - as far as the identical clothing and such, it does not seem to have stuck. 

[LMD]

From my very meager knowledge, Russian uses sexed pronouns, and had a more officially egalitarian society (women are more likely to be maths professors in Russia than in America). There is certainly still sexism - still institutionalized sexism, didn't they just make domestic violence legal again? I think there's a whole lot of threads to pull there, culture, religion, communism... It is a subject that interested me, I was trying to tease out my husband's worldview wrt women/family/etc - he was very influenced by his grandparents who immigrated from a poor agrarian town in a Soviet country. Lots of interesting looking books here:

 https://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/molly-wolanski/

Now, I said I'd be back. I'm not too inclined to comment much more, because it looks like my direct questions were ignored. That's fine, I'm just not interested in talking past each other.

3. Yes there does need to be more research. However, studies get pulled because of fears of transphobia. See James Caspian.

4. Shall we talk about 'criticisms about how those numbers were arrived at?' How are the suicide statistics arrived at? (The famous 48% figure from 27 self selected and self responding trans people under the age of 26). I would love to see good studies.

5. In the UK, one of the reasons that the gender recognition act was passed in '04 was to avoid making same sex marriage legal. 

6. We're talking about lesbian erasure because genderists insist that male people can be lesbians and hold seminars about how to overcome the 'cotton ceiling' - how to coerce females who are same sex attracted into sleeping with the opposite sex. Lesbian erasure is literally erasing the meaning of lesbian to include it's discrete opposite. I notice you said 'personal preference' as if orientation is just a preference/kink, which is, as I understand it, an assumption that the LGB fought against. But we've had this conversation before...

7. No one is 'erasing trans identity' and it's emotionally manipulative to accuse people of that. I'm still waiting on your definition of what this gender identity is that we're supposedly erasing. Be a proud trans person and you have my support. 

8. Hormones don't erase a puberty of male physical growth. Even if they did, the transgirls beating girls in high schools sports aren't on any hormones yet. Even the Olympic guidelines allow males to compete with females if they declare that they believe they have a female personality/mentality and have testosterone in the low male range (still 5x higher than the highest female range) for 1 year.

[Bluegoat]

1 minute ago, LMD said:

From my very meager knowledge, Russian uses sexed pronouns, and had a more officially egalitarian society (women are more likely to be maths professors in Russia than in America). There is certainly still sexism - still institutionalized sexism, didn't they just make domestic violence legal again? I think there's a whole lot of threads to pull there, culture, religion, communism... It is a subject that interested me, I was trying to tease out my husband's worldview wrt women/family/etc - he was very influenced by his grandparents who immigrated from a poor agrarian town in a Soviet country. Lots of interesting looking books here:

 https://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/moderneurope/molly-wolanski/

Now, I said I'd be back. I'm not too inclined to comment much more, because it looks like my direct questions were ignored. That's fine, I'm just not interested in talking past each other.

3. Yes there does need to be more research. However, studies get pulled because of fears of transphobia. See James Caspian.

4. Shall we talk about 'criticisms about how those numbers were arrived at?' How are the suicide statistics arrived at? (The famous 48% figure from 27 self selected and self responding trans people under the age of 26). I would love to see good studies.

5. In the UK, one of the reasons that the gender recognition act was passed in '04 was to avoid making same sex marriage legal. 

6. We're talking about lesbian erasure because genderists insist that male people can be lesbians and hold seminars about how to overcome the 'cotton ceiling' - how to coerce females who are same sex attracted into sleeping with the opposite sex. Lesbian erasure is literally erasing the meaning of lesbian to include it's discrete opposite. I notice you said 'personal preference' as if orientation is just a preference/kink, which is, as I understand it, an assumption that the LGB fought against. But we've had this conversation before...

7. No one is 'erasing trans identity' and it's emotionally manipulative to accuse people of that. I'm still waiting on your definition of what this gender identity is that we're supposedly erasing. Be a proud trans person and you have my support. 

8. Hormones don't erase a puberty of male physical growth. Even if they did, the transgirls beating girls in high schools sports aren't on any hormones yet. Even the Olympic guidelines allow males to compete with females if they declare that they believe they have a female personality/mentality and have testosterone in the low male range (still 5x higher than the highest female range) for 1 year.

 

It's interesting about the kinds of sex based differences we see in supposedly egalitarian societies.  Women are more likely to go into the high status "male" jobs is less egalitarian societies.  More egalitarian ones have people in more traditional male/female splits, with women entering caring professions much more often than men.

I've seen something recently too about societies where men and women have more similar lives having more extreme cultural gender differentiation.  I haven't looked much at what they studied, but it's an interesting idea.  I'm really not convinced we can decouple sex from cultural expression in any kind of complete way.

[bolt.]

I think preschools are a really nice safe setting for adults to be consciously using "they" for all of the students. It's not likely to be very hard to implement because a preschool teacher is going to be using the second person (singular or plural) much more often than the third person (to refer to students in their professional role). Talking to one student about another student (in the third person) would be the only time you would need to use a "they". I'd love to see this become more common with young learners. They might carry the habit with them into other settings.

[bolt.]

2 hours ago, StellaM said:

I think preschools, which are generally full of  poorly paid women, are the last place we should be making ideological demands that have no evidence base.

Wow, really?

I was only a client of two preschool programs. Both were excellent educational environments, owned and staffed by trained educators. I assume they were paid well — I certainly paid plenty as a client.

If the staff aren’t educated and qualified, why would people send their children to school?

[EmseB]

Most "preschools" I've ever encountered are daycares and parents send their kids there because they have to work. And they pay minimum wage or maybe slightly more. And the people offering the service do so because barriers to entry into offering care for preschool age children is relatively low and easy to do from home even.

An expensive private school that offers preschool from "trained educators" isn't the reality for most people. You're generally lucky if the staff have a few ECE credits from the local community college.

Edited November 8, 2018 by EmseB

[Kassia]

My kids attended excellent preschools with educated teachers  (college graduates in early childhood education) but I don't think the teachers were paid well.  I think they did their jobs because they loved what they did and were fortunate enough to not need more money/benefits from a job.  

Edited November 8, 2018 by Kassia

[freesia]

Yeah, my mother college educated mother made, as a preschool teacher, one third of my starting teacher salary. No, not well paid. 

[maize]

6 hours ago, bolt. said:

I think preschools are a really nice safe setting for adults to be consciously using "they" for all of the students. It's not likely to be very hard to implement because a preschool teacher is going to be using the second person (singular or plural) much more often than the third person (to refer to students in their professional role). Talking to one student about another student (in the third person) would be the only time you would need to use a "they". I'd love to see this become more common with young learners. They might carry the habit with them into other settings.

Or they might become very confused about normal usage in the native language they are still learning?

[maize]

Average preschool teacher salary in the US is $26,901.

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Preschool-Teacher-Salary

[maize]

4 hours ago, bolt. said:

Wow, really?

I was only a client of two preschool programs. Both were excellent educational environments, owned and staffed by trained educators. I assume they were paid well — I certainly paid plenty as a client.

If the staff aren’t educated and qualified, why would people send their children to school?

I'm kind of floored by this comment. I thought it was common knowledge that early childhood educators were underpaid. And...people send their children to school for a few reasons. Not least that parents need to work and children need to be somewhere. Also preschool is becoming the expected standard for young children.

Surely you realize that the vast majority of parents could not afford the sort of tuition that would actually support good teacher pay on top of other overhead costs?

[Bluegoat]

17 hours ago, bolt. said:

Wow, really?

I was only a client of two preschool programs. Both were excellent educational environments, owned and staffed by trained educators. I assume they were paid well — I certainly paid plenty as a client.

If the staff aren’t educated and qualified, why would people send their children to school?

 

THe average pre-school teacher in Canada makes about $35,000 per year.  They top out at just under $48,000.  It's also not the case that they are all "well-educated".  That varies a fair bit.  But even the well-educated ones get crap pay.

People send their kids because they don't have much choice.  

[bolt.]

21 minutes ago, Bluegoat said:

 

THe average pre-school teacher in Canada makes about $35,000 per year.  They top out at just under $48,000.  It's also not the case that they are all "well-educated".  That varies a fair bit.  But even the well-educated ones get crap pay.

People send their kids because they don't have much choice.  

Yeah, I wasn’t really thinking.

In my case I was evacuating preschools as a form of *school*. I only looked into serious learning programs (Montessori, in my case).

Being privilidged not to need ‘preschool’ as a form of childcare, I didn’t fully consider the full scope of preschools and the reasons people use them.

[maize]

1 hour ago, bolt. said:

Yeah, I wasn’t really thinking.

In my case I was evacuating preschools as a form of *school*. I only looked into serious learning programs (Montessori, in my case).

Being privilidged not to need ‘preschool’ as a form of childcare, I didn’t fully consider the full scope of preschools and the reasons people use them.

Perhaps you are also in an area with enough higher income families to support more expensive preschools (though I doubt there is anywhere preschool teacher salaries are not well below the median income for the area).

One of my children attended an excellent Montessori preschool for a few months. He was there four mornings a week and tuition was $200 per month. Which was more than the average tuition for our area and a stretch for our budget but certainly not enough for the teachers to be well paid given the low adult to child ratio.

Nurturing and teaching children is not something most capitalist societies put a high value on; I think the real value of such work is one of our biggest blind spots.

[Dmmetler]

19 hours ago, EmseB said:

Most "preschools" I've ever encountered are daycares and parents send their kids there because they have to work. And they pay minimum wage or maybe slightly more. And the people offering the service do so because barriers to entry into offering care for preschool age children is relatively low and easy to do from home even.

An expensive private school that offers preschool from "trained educators" isn't the reality for most people. You're generally lucky if the staff have a few ECE credits from the local community college.

I was offered a whopping $8.25/hr with a graduate degree, at a very, very well regarded, pricey program. Having a higher degree was not a help over having a CDA, except that it also lets me teach in the public school and university systems. In teaching college ECED classes, I tried to assign some project every year that would force students to look at the job market and what they were likely to actually make, very early in the process, and give them the opportunity to talk to those in the field-so they realized that they were getting a bachelor’s Degree in a field which often paid as well and was given about as much respect as saying “Do you want fries with that?”-and had poorer benefits than being a Starbucks barista. 

[maize]

10 minutes ago, StellaM said:

I can't spell today for some reason, but tired of editing to correct. I mean 'activist'.

Maybe the uni grads were activisitors...

(I didn't even notice the typo until you mentioned it, I just read the word as activist)

[LMD]

Stella, you might be talking about Lucy Mcdonagh? She's interviewed in the second half of this article.

https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/

[LMD]

Lucy Mcdonagh is a freaking warrior woman. All respect.

[LMD]

Apropos of nothing, now I have 'common people' stuck in my head... ?