this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Oh man, I'd never even considered the fact that all these supposed "male rapists in female prisons" have had bottom surgery.
Like, what man cares so much about being able to rape women that he gets his dick cut off? That's so much easier to believe than the idea that trans women actually are what they say they are (i.e. they are trans women, not men with a fetish or whatever other grossness)?
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex... But in talking with cis people I actually think it's something else. I think the vast majority of cis people's experience of gender only comes from external influences... I have met cis people who recognize what we're talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it's actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who's entire experience of gender is performance based... So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand... But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
I don't think it's that they don't have an internal gender identity, I think it's just hard for them to tell. Ask a cis woman how she knows she's a woman and she'll probably say something like "because I have a woman's body", but I don't think that means she has no internal sense of her gender, it just means it takes a lot more introspection and nuance than she's spent to get to that than it takes to go "boobs, check, vulva, check, I'm good". She doesn't have a disconnect, so she's never had to really consider it, doesn't mean she doesn't have it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think research indicates we aren't special because we have a gender identity, but because of what it is.
I don't know who (Abigail Thorn? Contrapoints? ...Vihart?) but someone was talking about how sometimes that's the case, that they really don't have a sense of their own gender. That they're "really" something like agender, but that it's just too much of a bother to worry about correcting people. But there are also plenty of cis people deeply invested in their own gender, who really do have toes to it and identify as that gender, but when you ask them how they know, they put it all on external things rather than internal.