I don’t give a flying fuck on what you intend. Both of these terms are harmful to the trans community. “Reassignment” is not accurate, nor properly describes most trans people’s experience. We are not being “reassigned”, we are bringing the reality of who we are to the outside world. There’s no “reassignment”.
The word “transgenderism” is an EXTREMELY harmful term. It states that being trans is a belief system, WHICH IT IS NOT. I do not believe I am a woman, I AM one. As I said earlier this reinforces the bullshit cis belief that trans experiences are just performative, that we are just enjoying drag. This enables people to keep misgendering us and treating us like shit. JUST STOP.
In fact, please stop talking about trans experiences all together. You are constantly showing your ignorance of the subject and you have no compassion and are not showing any want to understand our experiences. You’re arguing from stereotypes, misunderstandings, and latent transphobia. Just stop.
What you said earlier was that this percentage was
Which is not the same thing, as many here will tell you, as “noncontroversial”. Even those of us who aren’t transgender can find problems with this approach. So, as @Melizmatic said, citation needed.
We really do need a better lexicon. I will stop this direction of the conversation, but the “noncontroversial” part was the fact that the delivering physician’s observation of female during the post birth examination is a strong indicator that, if the infant is developing normally, the infant will conform to this chart: https://www.cdc.gov/growthcharts/data/set1clinical/cj41l018.pdf
This is true regardless of what gender the child may be.
So lets find new ones. But “reassignment” does seem to be the term largely in use by the medical community, including those, like the Rutgers Center for Transgender Health, who perform the surgeries in question. The OED does not note negative connotations, and ism as a noun is very different than ism as a suffix. But it is a good rule to not use words or phrases which are likely to offend. So I will take that to heart.
We have words. You just are not listening. Process of bringing one’s self to their proper gender: TRANSITIONING. There is no need for the word “transgenderism”. We have the words to describe our experiences, it’s just you are not listening.
“Gender confirmation surgery” is another term I’ve seen proposed as a more positive/affirmative replacement, since it more accurately describes the purpose of the procedure.
These are all terms that are used colloquially anyway. When dealing with the procedures themselves it’s better to call them by their medical terms, i.e. vaginoplasty or phalloplasty. I’d overall prefer to use the medical terms for their specificity, since one can really lump any of the procedures to bring one’s body closer to their gender as GCS (this includes things like orchiotomy or rhinoplasty or things like that).
You are explicitly conflating sex (male/female) with gender (masculine/feminine, boy/girl, etc.) again. You might find you are communicating more effectively if you stop doing that.
You already know this lexicon, you are simply refusing to use the language as though sex and gender are distinct concepts:
Common sex terms
Male, female, intersex (and there’s lots of intersex that is not ambiguous genitalia, BTW).
Common gender terms
Masculine, feminine, woman, man, girl, boy, she, he, they, nonbinary, (there’s lots of these, but you can enact remarkable understanding and compassion by using these here, and not trying to insist that they apply to male or female sex).
To be fair, it’s a common practice:
I suspect Mindysan33 was aiming at “…in the boy or girl box from day one.”
See that’s the rub with TERFs, they claim to be for a wider acceptance of gender expression but they often will lapse into reactionary bull crap that justifies all the toxic masculinity which perpetuates violence against women. It’s almost as if they don’t want the world to get better because it might mean their purpose would end. But aside from that they’re not genuine in their acceptance of any kind of gender variance. I’ve seen them whine about trans women in the same way that MGTOW/incel men do about women. As in they have these faulty beliefs about the gender binary and persist in their assertions that everyone else is wrong but them.
Well, I am at least trying. I had to read it twice to see where the problem was, but I see it. And I will try to keep it straight from now on.
But my conversation with Mindysan was about observation of sex at birth as a transgender dogwhistle. It seems on reflection that the original person who posted that remark (to Brown as a complaint about the study) was also conflating gender and sex.
I think it would be helpful when people more informed about this issue chose to discuss it with the less informed, like I am, some patience should be employed, especially when making criticisms about word usage. As someone who was not a native English speaker, I look up a lot of words in the dictionary. It can be confusing to be accused of ignorance and lack of compassion when one enters a discussion trying to be as open minded and polite as possible, and using terms as they are currently defined in the dictionary. I think most decent people are willing to police their language so as to not cause offense, but it can be a learning process.
At the risk of being snapped at again, I would like to ask one question that relates to the post: Does anyone have information that shows that the author of the study is actually transphobic?
