"Trans people, by necessity, are more aware of these forces; that fluency is a strength, and it has afforded us an opportunity to question the stories about the 'biology' of gender that are so foundational to American culture: Do we all really want to co-sign the notion that a uterus, and thus reproductive potential, is how we define womanhood? When a nonbinary person births a child, why must the birth certificate dictate that the person who gave birth is a 'mother,' and what does being a 'mother' even mean, exactly? What might it mean for all parents if 'mother' and 'father' were not such distinct categories in child-rearing? Who benefits from their continuing separation?"
Writes Thomas Page McBee in "What I Saw in My First 10 Years on Testosterone" (NYT).
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9 comments:
Owen writes:
Where is the border between fluency and incoherence?
“Trans people, by necessity, are more aware of these forces; that fluency is a strength, and it has afforded us an opportunity to question the stories about the 'biology' of gender that are so foundational to American culture:..”
I read this as self-promoting sophistry, straight out of post-modern literary criticism. This guy thinks he’s Humpty Dumpty, and things mean whatever he says they mean. Sorry, pal. That’s not how language works. It’s not your personal word game, and your tiny faction, however noisy and petulant, cannot muscle or seduce the rest of us into accepting radical new meanings of foundational facts.
I don't think he's saying words mean whatever he says they mean. Aren't you hypocritically taking his words and saying what you say they mean?
He's talking about the fluidity of language and inviting you to think about meaning, not dictating the meaning.
Jen R. writes:
Yay! Another member of the LGBT+ community has tips for us boring straights on how to better define ourselves and live. But I'm not mad though, because this paragraph (not dealing w/ paywall) reminded me of plays I like.
1) Two plays came to mind: "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "My Fair Lady." You can tell WAoVW is written by a gay man understandably weirded out by straight couples -- we fight over household chores, get obsessed with babies/kids to an unsettling degree, and are always renegotiating our roles in the family. Edward Albee's characters are ludicrous, but so entertaining the play is rightfully a classic. The movie is great, and with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton throwing all their lust/love/hatred for each other on screen, you get the sense that, imaginary kid notwithstanding, you are learning something real and raw about our dimorphic species that defies definition. I've never met anyone like any of those people, but who cares? McBee's writing is less entertaining, but has that same funhouse mirror quality.
As for "My Fair Lady," in the last sentence, Thomas McBee is channeling Henry Higgins: "Why can't a woman be like a man? ... Why can't a woman be like me?" I don't know if McBee deliberately took the imaginary Henry Higgins as a male role model, but I enjoy the notion.
2) Free to be you, me and xe vs. Free to be me and me and me and me
I've been waiting for it, and here's the first distant signal of the switch from the expansion of gender identities to their flattening.
Our words 'mother' and 'father' are an attempt to describe our physical/social reality, and we have the word 'parent' for when we're talking about generic childrearing work. Having useful words helps anyone who wants to describe these states of being. I was expecting to see a call to add to the birth certificate options: circle one of 'father/mother/parent1' etc. But here, McBee challenges us to drop mother & father altogether -- because it doesn't suit everyone all of the time, so it can't really suit anyone, ever. A lesbian couple might want "mother X" and "mother Y" listed. A gay male couple adopting from a surrogate might want "father A" and "father B" listed. But because nonbinary people might have kids, no one should use the terms we like. So deep is the human desire for conformity that even those who spend a lifetime fighting society's structures & their own bodies to try to more perfectly express themselves end up trying to persuade everyone to match their own model of life. Here, is McBee acting like a woman (consensus-seeking), like a man (mansplaining/commanding), or just human (self-centered)?
Right now, pronouns are proliferating wildly, and the kids seem to be having a lot of fun picking or making up their preferences. If McBee's irritation with the terms "mother/father" heralds the next wave of T+ activism, we should expect an anti-pronoun backlash at some point in the near future. It will start far on the margins, while corporations and universities are still scrambling to make all their staff comply with pronoun diversity, but at some point we'll see calls to drop 3rd person pronouns altogether or settle on just one.
R.T. O'Dactyl writes:
"... it has afforded us an opportunity to question the stories about the 'biology' of gender that are so foundational to American culture: Do we all really want to co-sign the notion that a uterus, and thus reproductive potential, is how we define womanhood? When a nonbinary person births a child, why must the birth certificate dictate that the person who gave birth is a 'mother,' and what does being a 'mother' even mean, exactly?"
The cascading series of questions in the quoted text -- starting with "stories about the 'biology' of gender" -- and leading to more extreme conclusions -- challenging whether "the person who gave birth is a 'mother'" and deliberately conflating that concept with "a person who assumes a nurturing role in a parental relationship with a child" -- seems a bit tendentious to me. A line of demarcation may be fuzzy in places, but that doesn't mean that the line doesn't exist. All women may not have a uterus -- my wife's was removed some years ago -- but nobody who lacks a uterus has ever given birth to a child. In that sense, "mother" has a fairlly well-defined meaning.
It reminds me of the Otter Defense in Animal House:
“The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests – we did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg – isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America! Gentlemen!”
Keep fuzzing the line to broaden it, and your position can be anywhere you want it to be.
Mitch writes:
I don’t think I’ll fall into the trap McBee sets by saying I’ll sign on to the concept that a uterus and reproductive potential is how we define womanhood, because the inevitable question would be “what about hysterectomies? Does removing the uterus change a woman into something different?”
At that point, we’re probably talking about thought experiments like the “Ship of Theseus” and going deep into the weeds.
What I will sign on to is this: the presence of only X chromosomes is how I define a woman. XX means female. That’s it.
Also, “non-binary” persons cannot give birth, unless they are women who choose to give themselves the label of “non-binary.” It’s not a scientific term; it’s a science-y sounding word, made up by people who want to justify the way they feel about themselves. There’s a difference.
Owen writes:
“He's talking about the fluidity of language and inviting you to think about meaning, not dictating the meaning.”
I think he’s humblebragging about some mystical ability of Trans people to discern and navigate new meanings —even if what’s really going on is a forceful taking of a word, gutting it of its universal denotation and stuffing the carcass with a new meaning preferred by this tiny group. He wants to annihilate the old meaning under the cover of “fluency.” This is exactly what happened to “marriage.” You can view the process as a useful (and even inevitable) adaptation of language or as a power grab that impoverishes the language. My acid test is, does the change in words leave us with more information or less? Are we going to be left guessing what “mother” or “father” means? I think yes.
So I see his “invitation” as a bad one.
Chris writes:
The nonbinary idea reminds me of a classic biblical text from St Paul:
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:28 NIV
Galatians was written 20 years after Christ’s death and resurrection.
This nonbinary vision didn’t last long in the church, but it’s intriguing that it was there at the beginning.
Irving writes:
You posted:
“When a nonbinary person births a child, why must the birth certificate dictate that the person who gave birth is a 'mother,' and what does being a 'mother' even mean, exactly?”
- Thomas Page McBee in "What I Saw in My First 10 Years on Testosterone" (NYT).
The science of biology. How does it work? Apparently – based on the unnatural, self-inflicted, hyper-testosterone-distorted musings of Thomas Page McBee -- not as we believed.
ALP writes:
This author lost me with his "the stories about the 'biology' of gender that are so foundational to American culture..." statement. What kind of pretzel logic is required to discount everything that came before America and the role gender played in these cultures? I would like to challenge this author to convince me gender wasn't important during, for example, Japan's slice and dice samurai warlord era. Or any era in Europe where blood relation was crucial to the monarch system. Really, really very tired of humanity's problems being cast as uniquely American.
I have kept my eyes peeled for anything written about the transgender issue that points out how fucking shallow and boring it is. Maybe it is a function of my age (60) but I find that issues of gender along with sex just don't hold the same elevated place in my list of 'items by which I assess people by'. Whether you have the genitals you were born with or they were surgically altered, its all a flabby, wrinkly mess of flesh in the end. If you were a self-absorbed, boring fuckwit as a woman - you'll be a self-absorbed, boring fuckwit as a man. Your gender doesn't relieve you of having to solve the same damn problems all genders face: how to be true to one's self, how to be happy, what IS the 'good life'? I get it - you transitioned. Now can we talk about what your hobbies and interests are, what books you read, etc? Or do we have to endlessly focus on Your Big Issue?
Surprised no one has brought up Tiresias. Seems like many transgender folks have taken the myth to heart - they consider their opinions to have been elevated to that of a seer.
Lee writes:
Jen R gets to the linguistic point clearly and directly : “McBee challenges us to drop mother & father altogether -- because it doesn't suit everyone all of the time, so it can't really suit anyone, ever.”
The traditional meanings of “mother’ and “father” are useful to the great majority of people most of the time – they refer to concepts that are relevant in the world, which is why there are words for them in the first place. If we eliminate the words for those concepts, in deference to the feelings of those who find those concepts uncomfortable, we don’t eliminate the concepts for which the now banned words stand. If the concepts are real, we will still want to refer to them. So we will have to invent new words to refer to them, that will rapidly become offensive to the same people for the same reason as the old words became offensive.
We have seen it all before with other words – sex, gender, human, racism, liberal, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, violence, equity and on and on. Redefining the word doesn’t make the old concept go away. It just makes it more difficult to refer to. That of course is usually the point of redefining it. But why should the rest of us go along with the attempt to make communication more difficult ? Why should we now be required to refer not to “sex” but to “biological sex”- as if there was some other kind ?
btw – neither XX chromosomes, nor a uterus maketh woman. What you need – at some stage in your lifecycle – is an ovary (two is better). Of course a uterus comes in very handy too, which is why people with ovaries tend to have a uterus too – evolution has arranged it so – but the docs now have the technology to escape the requirement for a uterus, by enabling you to borrow someone else’s.
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