Re: When will men wear women's clothing...
Posted: Sat May 26, 2018 11:26 am
Well, that's an interesting piece of logic. The main flaws I see are, well, all of it. So maybe I won't bother undoing the many errors in your syllogism and just point out that you agreed with me. You said "trans people maintain link Y" but that is just the same as my assertion that the interests of the community of non-trans men who wear skirts and the interests of trans people are in direct conflict there. Trans people want their visual appearance -- their "gender expression" -- to identify their sex/gender and non-trans men do not want that. Full stop.pelmut wrote:If the three underlying concepts of sex, gender and gender expression are distinguished from each other, there is no conflict between transpeople and people who wear skirts for other reasons.Daryl wrote:The last thing anyone committed to the idea of "transgender" should want is to de-gender things, because without markers of gender there would be no way to "present" or "express" gender and thus no way to be transgender.
And this is the precise spot where the interests of the community of men in Skirt Cafe conflict with the interests of the trans community. Those interests don't merely sit with each other uneasily. They are in direct opposition to each other. Trans requires the maintenance of gender norms while equality requires the destruction of gender norms.
Society has erroneously linked gender to biological sex and then drawn up what it sees as gender norms (other gender norms are available in other societies). This has produced a chain of connections:
Sex =X= Gender =Y= Gender expression (norms)
...where links X and Y are the false links imposed by society.
Transpeople demonstrate that link X is incorrect, they break the false chain at X but continue to maintain the link Y and dress according to their gender. Male skirt wearers break the false chain at Y and dress according to their personal preferences, they do not care about link X because it is not relevant to them.
The difficulties arise when people wrongly use the chain to insist that your gender expression, or simply your mode of dress, ought to align with your sex - or, worse still, use the chain backwards to suggest that your mode of dress says something about your gender or your sex. Transpeople maintain link Y and cis-gendered skirt wearers maintain link X - but neither of them created these links and neither of them should be generating conflict by trying to impose false links on the other.
As for the rest of your reasoning, we already know that we vigorously disagree on the inventive conceptualisation of "gender" that is being promoted by some activists today, so not much you say that depends on reifying "gender" as other than a property of language (and not a property of people) holds water.
As for anyone "imposing" anything, unless and until you and people who agree with you have been successful at imposing new meanings and new abstractions on our common language, accusing others of imposing anything in that regard is a bit rich.