Thus making the term meaningless, and incidentally playing right into the hands of the bathroom bill bigots who are already making a point of using the “wrong” restroom with the intent of stirring up outrage, much like open carry meatheads walking into daycares and Chipotles carrying AR-15s.
Words mean things. A person who identifies, dresses, and acts as the sex assigned at birth, with no internal ambiguity or dysphoria is not transgender. Plenty of people consider themselves 1/64th Cherokee but considering doesn’t make it so. That said…
Me too. I was amazed to find out that it’s Reeve Carney, the lead from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.[quote=“L_Mariachi, post:61, topic:78219”]
Plenty of people consider themselves 1/64th Cherokee but considering doesn’t make it so.
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Going back to my comments about Natives upthread, it was really bizarre to make two discoveries recently: (1) that Iron Eyes Cody, who I always assumed was a full-blooded Cherokee, was Sicilian, and (2) that I genetically have more Native American blood than he did, being 1/16 Shawnee. If I had the proper paperwork, I could legally declare myself a Native American today, which for a super-white guy from the midwest is utterly weird.
Language is a means of communication between two or more parties, not an exercise in solipsism. Maintaining idiosyncratic personal definitions of words impedes communication and thus is not language at all.
If I say I’m a Jew or an Eskimo or a True Scotsman, are you obliged to respect that, no matter what? Are actual Jews or Eskimos or Scotsmen obliged to, or might they object to my appropriation of their identities?
It isn’t my business to tell someone who tells me that they’re transgender that they aren’t because they don’t meet my personal criteria for such a person.
Are you a transgender person who is deciding whether other people are as well or are you a cisgender person defining who is or is not trans for trans people? If the latter, I think you should reconsider your life decisions.
I don’t define who is queer for my queer friends and I don’t tell trans people that they aren’t really trans.
Well no, I wouldn’t tell someone they’re not really trans. I’m not a doctor, and I don’t date, and I have a hard time imagining another situation where it would be any of my business. To my knowledge, there isn’t a rash of people falsely claiming to be trans (in order to reap all those obvious advantages sex and gender nonconformists enjoy in our culture!) so I stand by my earlier agreement with @crashproof that “arguing about who is or isn’t is not constructive.”
But that doesn’t mean that all labels are up for grabs for anyone who chooses to self-apply them. Just ask Rachel Dolezal.
OK, from what I’ve seen from you, you do seem to be supportive of trans people, and I do appreciate that, but when you make statements like this …
… I’m hearing very much the same thing that I hear from the bigots against which you were previously railing.
No, none of us are “obligated” to respect anyone’s claims of culture or ethnicity, gender, or any other category, regardless of rather they’re “actually” a member of said group. That said, if someone wants to claim they’re a member of that category, I’ll personally take it at face value, because I’ve known a lot of people who didn’t look anything like the stereotype of their category. I’m not going to demand “proof” of this heritage any more than I’m going to ask to see genitals as proof of gender.
(This isn’t even getting into gender vs. sex, of course. I’m genderqueer, and present as male most of the time for numerous reasons. Of course, this often means I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt … the same as many of my cis-female friends.)
Anyone can self-apply any label they choose. That doesn’t obligate anyone else to accept that label and some are certainly going to be more difficult to apply than others. Rachel Dolezal can identify as black, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is going accept that. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the situation, but I’m one of those people who view race as a social construct anyway. (Yeah, it still has many all too real effects, but it’s pretty easy to trace many groups’ acceptance as ‘white.’)
