How to Stop Being Transphobic

Believe people when they tell you their gender.

Just because everyone you’ve ever met is a man or a woman does not mean that everyone you will ever meet will be a man or a woman. If a new friend…

• …tells you their gender is one that doesn’t match the one you feel they appear to have: absorb that data and use it to update your models.
• …tells you their gender is one you haven’t heard of before: absorb that data and use it to update your models.
• …tells you they have more or fewer genders than you are used to one person having: absorb that data and use it to update your models.

I would encourage people to take a more scientific approach to understanding all phenomena, including gender, in which we understand that the data-gathering phase never ends, and that all models are only approximations to the truth which must eventually be discarded.

Perhaps you are familiar with the idea of sex as a separate trait from gender. This is a better model than a simple “male/female” binary, since it accounts for the existence of trans people, but it is still problematic:

(1) It begs the question of Cartesian Duality—the spiritual notion that minds (which are said to have genders) and bodies (which are said to have sexes) are separate—while a more rigorous model might hold the “mind” to be a physiological process of the body.

(2) While it allows for minds and bodies to have non-matching sex/gender, it doesn’t interrogate the assumption that sex is a binary phenomenon with two discrete manifestations, and therefore has no means to account for the identities and experiences of intersex people, whose bodies sit at a midpoint on a continuum.

(3) Because of (2) it fails to reveal the fact virilization and feminization are also processes, which:

• continue throughout gestation, puberty, and adulthood
• can be halted and reversed
• can be undergone simultaneously or not at all

Considering this, it becomes clear that everyone’s body sits not within two discrete categories of “male” or “female” and not even at a midpoint on a continuum between “male” and “female”, but at a point in a two-dimensional field defined by varying degrees of virilization and feminization on each axis.

(4) Moreover, that because virilization and feminization may proceed variously across different tissues, organs, and body parts, this two dimensional field has a different value for every cell in your body.

(5) Because of (2) it fails to take into account that the process of chopping up the perceptual space of gender into two discrete categories draws an inevitable and arbitrary line across the continuum of human experience whose location can vary across cultures, and therefore provides no principled understanding of third-gender categories such as fa’afafine, hijra, mukhannathun, kathoey, sworn virgins, two-spirits, sekhet, kurgarra, and so forth.

Keep gathering data. Keep building better models.

Originally published on Facebook