cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25042034
This post is “FYI only” for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the “adult human female” dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and “civil disagreement” on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
I’m so annoyed by these pseudointellectuals who can’t seem to grasp the relatively simple difference between “sex” and “gender”.
I don’t understand what this has to do with the difference between sex and gender. Is “woman” a sex or a gender?
It can vary on the context, but “female” and “male” are “supposed” to refer to biological sex alone.
That’s why it can be offensive when men talk about women as “females”, and why it also would sound slightly silly to talk about — for instance — women penguins. “Female penguins” sounds much more correct, doesn’t it?
Women penguins only sounds weird because that’s not the normal word for it. They’re girl penguins or lady penguins. “Woman” feels too formal and human.
And why isn’t “women birds” the normal word for it? And do you think scientific studies call them girls or ladies?
Nah.
You can, but it works because it’s essentially joke-y, because clearly female penguins aren’t women, but female.
Kinda like referring to a granny as “young lady/miss”, even though everyone knows they’re not.
Scientific studies also use male and female in reference to human subjects’ gender identities. Woman and female are both incredibly old terms which have been used interchangeably as there was no widespread concept of gender identity in the English-speaking world until recently. We had to invent the term “gender identity” to separate gender from sex because they’d previously been used to refer to the same thing.
You seem to be saying that a trans man is female because he was assigned the female sex at birth. Have I understood that correctly?
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex–gender_distinction
https://www.etymonline.com/
Small sample of studies using male/female to refer to gender:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6748626/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10685922/
Well, sort of. I know sex isn’t as black-and-white as people make it out to be, but since we’re already having troubles explaining gender being a spectrum, I’d thought I’d leave out the more nuanced bits in favour of succinctness.
I mean yeah, the word gender, meaning “male or female sex” is from as early as 15th century, but only came to be the more common word for “sex” as “sex” started getting erotic connotations.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
Edit whops I posted before finishing writing just a moment
As I was saying language nor gender identities are never as black and white as we’d like them to be. So yeah, you are right in that in different contexts, scientific studies like you say, may as well use female and male to refer to subjects. As in male for trasnmen and female for transwomen. As it should. If they’re not like studying uteruses, I don’t see why them being trans would matter.
Trans women are women. Trans men are men.
I’ve never heard of a gender/sex distinction between ‘woman’ and ‘female’, what are you basing this on? By whom is this distinction ‘supposed’ (as you put it) to be a thing?
I doubt the general public would agree, anyway. In the Cambridge Dictionary, I find ‘female’ defined as ‘belonging or relating to women or girls’
You may of course argue your definition of ‘female’ should be the correct one, but it’s not the common one at the moment. I would think it’d be strange, though, if you couldn’t refer to a trans woman as ‘female’, which your distinction seems to imply.
The general public are a subjective take, and also, dumb as fuck.
Yeah, sex is related to gender, but it’s not the same thing.
If its your colloquial necessity to objectify women, then I don’t know, be equal and objectify the trans girls as well.
But if you don’t, then it’s gonna be preferable to address them as “women”, not “females”.
If you’re purely referring to ‘female’ as a noun, I do have a similar intuition about ‘female’ (noun) vs. ‘woman’, but it has little to do with objectification and more to do with ‘female’ generally being used in a biological sense, specifically non-human animals.
As an adjective, ‘female’ is pretty neutral, though.
Yeah, it’s to refer to biological sex. But language doesn’t have exact rules, it’s descriptive more than prescriptive.
Most people don’t understand that sex and gender are similar, yet distinct concepts.
But it’s implications aren’t always. I used to think that as well, but unfortunately language is a cooperative thing and if the person you’re talking to doesn’t consider it neutral, then it isn’t.
And if a police was giving a description of a trans girl, they probably wouldn’t say “male”, would they?
So the problem is the word “female”, not the word “woman”, am I understand this correctly? If I am, then what should the correct sentence/statement be? “A woman is an adult …”
I’m not trolling, I’m genuinely confused because I thought XX -> female, XY -> male, but there are a bunch of combinations that present themselves / have a male or female phenotype. Is woman supposed to be the gender and female the sex?
Yes.
But like I’ve said, the issue is that most people don’t know their difference between “gender” and “sex”. Hell, my native language doesn’t even have two distinct words, which is a huge negative when trying to educate them on the subject.
And because they don’t understand the difference, they sometimes, or all the time, think “woman” refers to the biological sex, and thus they insist “men can’t become women”, because biologically you don’t change from male to female, and that is true. But your gender does change from masculine to feminine, so it is not wrong to say that men can become women.
It’s honestly just a lack understanding. And that lack of understanding stems from fear of seeming stupid, so they fear talking about it and interacting with the subject. Which is why it’s called transphobia, despite those people not necessarily being directly afraid of trans people.
Languages, or gender identities, are never quite as straight forward as we’d like them to be.
“Biological sex” refers to many different traits, some of them changeable, some of them not. It would not be inaccurate to refer to medical transition as changing one’s biological sex
Okay, that is true enough, biologically you do change, but not genetically, or gonadly, at least not yet. Who knows what the future brings?
I’m just trying to “use their language” to get the ideas through, not trying to differentiate between trans and cis. In fact that’s sort of been my point that there’s usually just no need to.
OK. That makes sense. But why is it offensive to refer to certain women as females and certain men as males?
It seems to be the correct terminology to be more specific e.g “she’s a male woman” makes more sense to me than transwoman because I never know which “direction” it is (transitioned to woman or transitioned from woman). And if would also be clearer to say that somebody is male/female for those that don’t want a question to “linger” whether it’s what they identify as or whether they were born that way.
It seems like only romance languages do, because they have “gendre”. I do wonder which other languages do.
Other languages have gender as well. And we have a word for gender. It’s just the same word as for “sex”, but we do have words for “woman”, “man”, “male” and “female”, so you might ask “kumpi sukupuoli” (which sex/gender) and depending on context, you’d reply either “man/woman” or “male/female” as in “mies/nainen” for man/woman and “uros/naaras” for a biological sex, however those terms are even more clearly not for humans than in English. As in English, a cop might reasonably say “suspect is a white male, six foot”, etc, but no Finnish cops would ever use “uros”. You could in very specific contexts perhaps sometimes use those for people, if you’re like trying to invoke animal imagery for very masculine males or something, but it’d be closer to “bitch” almost than “female” to call a woman “naaras” in Finnish. Not really, but it wouldn’t be far off. It’s like almost halfway between those, I’d say.
Well if there’s “trans” in front of the “man” or “woman” that’s like having - in front of a number. Like 7 isn’t the same as -7 you know? They look similar, but it’s not hard to learn. That being said, I do actually agree with you that that would be the correct terminology, however we can’t really ascribe rules to language and I can see reminding people that they’re not “true” women, but “male” women would be like deadnaming. There’s just no need to specify. A woman is a woman. A woman is a gender, or should be, and that’s the direction we’re taking the language in. (And by “us” I mean “the woke people” as opposed to the transphobes and conservative fucknuts) Be you short, tall, black, trans or even ginger, you’re still a woman, they’re all just adjectives. Unless there’s honestly a genuine need to specify, then what’s the point of having that adjective there?
Trans women are women, quite simply.
You misunderstood me. I’m talking about languages that do have different words for gender and sex. Romance languages do, but I wonder which other languages do as well. If you look at the wiktionary, languages that do have their own different words for it are in the minority. Most seem to borrow it from English.
Anyway, it seems like gender studies have a lot of work to do bringing their point across. It doesn’t look like they’re doing a good job, because it seems to be in a state of flux and the chosen terminology is extremely confusing as it overloads or seeks to replace an existing term with a new definition. And when someone doesn’t understand, often they are written off as a transphobe (luckily not in our discussion) and called out instead of called in.
The wikipedia article on the word “woman” starting off with “A woman is an adult female human” parses terribly. A ‘gender’ is an adult ‘sex’ human. Wat?
Had it been “A ‘new term’ is an adult human presenting as a woman”, it would’ve been waaaay easier to point someone to it and say “see, this is what I mean when I use ‘new term’”. Instead we ge discussions like these where someone has to explain “Look, the definition says this, but the ‘old term’ doesn’t refer to the old concept, but to the new concept. I know it doesn’t mention the new concept, but if you read the whole thing, you’ll see that it’s complicated, but can be broken down to ‘new term’ are ‘old term’” and by then you’ve lost a bunch of people who just aren’t interested and would rather talk about politics or the weather.
But thanks for being more illuminating than the wikipedia article. What a terrible article.
Wikipedia is good — for some things. But as everyone knows, it’s also able to be edited by anyone.
My native language isn’t even in PIE languages.
We generally call people “it” without anyone even being aware there’s a connotation there if one translates the terms into English. (Except pets, they’re afforded the proper they/them or just she/her or he/him, but not as often “it” as of people.
To me it seems like transphobia and active denial of these facts they don’t accept is more the issue.
It’s really not a complex issues for any one dedicated to finding out what it’s about.
‘Female’ is a sex, while ‘woman’ is a gender.
Sex refers to biological characteristics like chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy. That’s why we say things like ‘female dog’ or ‘male cat’—we’re talking about biological sex, not identity.
Gender, on the other hand, is a social and cultural construct—it includes roles, behaviors, and identities that society associates with being a ‘woman’ or a ‘man.’ That’s why it makes sense to say ‘a woman wears makeup’ or ‘a man wears a suit,’ but not ‘a male wears makeup.’ Saying ‘a male wears makeup’ sounds off because makeup is associated with gender expression, not biological sex.
The wikipedia article is a jumbled mess then.
That seems to be an incorrect definition. Shouldn’t it be “A woman is a human identifying as female”?
I mean, sure? Not really? Language is imprecise, and different peoples in different cultural backgrounds will use it slightly differently, and to me both read as interchangeable. I’m not an expert in this area, nor am I trans, and this is getting into the detailed weeds of gender and human sciences.
Language is imprecise, but definitions should be precise. Because reading that article is very confusing when sex and gender are constantly being mixed up. People who are confused, like me, are then accused of being “transphobic”, but how are we supposed to understand when even the definition mixes things up? Not everybody wants to have a similar discussion as we just had, in order to somewhat understand what’s going on.
Reading the wikipedia article confuses people even further. The comment that caused defederation looks very much like the person read the wikipedia article which states “A woman is an adult female human” and continued down that path. In fact it’s even the very first thing they say.
It is complicated and messy, which is why, if it doesn’t directly concern you, maybe the correct thing to do is to not weigh in with your opinion.