TERF

There's been a lot done over the years to advance the rights of trans people over the world, and this is on the whole a good thing. Trans people attempt suicide at rates far exceeding the population at large. LGBTQ young adults have a 120 percent higher risk of reporting homelessness compared to youth who identified as heterosexual and cisgender. Trans people deserve dignity, respect, compassion, and fair treatment under the law. The Trump administration has been working against this on many levels, proposing to repeal protections that prevent doctors from denying trans people general medical care on the basis of them being trans.

It is undeniable that trans rights need protecting. What is not certain is how that might be best achieved, and I’m concerned about a roadblock here.

Many who are agitating for trans rights insist that one should use a person’s preferred pronouns and current name, and will claim that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men”. While the pronouns and names are matters of ordinary politeness, the last points cause me discomfort and I have yet to be convinced of their accuracy.

For most of my life, the terms “man” and “woman” meant “adult male” and “adult female”, respectively, and I had no particular prompt to consider otherwise until recent years. But here is where the roadblock exists: I’ve found myself hesitant to discuss this, out of a fear of being labelled transphobic or a TERF. Conversations about this on Twitter appear polarized to say the least, and so this fear seems a reasonable one.

Here are my questions:

• If gender is a social construct, why is self-identification sufficient? Surely one’s gender is a function of both society at large and the individual, and not something that a person has sole agency over?

• Why (for example) are trans men part of the group “men” (which contains cis men and trans men) instead of some new superset, keeping “cis men” as “men”?

• The idea of “trans” seems to assume a gender binary instead of a wider set of categories. Why is this?

I am not making any particular claims as to what is true here, but I wonder: where can such a discussion can be had in good faith? Honest ignorance should not be inescapable.

Obviously, there are plenty of bad-faith pricks out there, and it is not the responsibility of anyone to educate me. But both the idea of staying ignorant of this, or pretending to believe something (instead of simply not knowing) for the sake of avoiding confrontation, are repellant. I suspect I am not alone in this.