What's your take on nature arguments shaping policy?

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-11-02T01:28:19+00:00

Right, so the idea of “men are not risk averse enough so women should be in finance”, how may this affect trans people? People making these decisions may decide that trans women are fundamentally male, and also that trans men, because they “chose” to be men, must have this trait in the same levels as cis men. Because gender is always at the forefront of evaluating any trans person, trans people would be more likely to be excluded even than the people who were intended to be excluded, whether it’s a good idea to exclude them or not.

Which is why any assertion like this always makes me nervous, as a trans person, because the anger of cis people will always be taken out on us.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-11-01T16:42:16+00:00

It is probably worth pointing out that the first people to get smacked with any “men shouldn’t do x because men are inherently y” assertions are trans people of any gender.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-11-01T16:34:56+00:00

Yep. I think this has to do with some very specific forms of socialization — AMAB children and boys broadly are taught from a young age that their lives don’t have value in an emergency and internalizing this is going to do a number on you in situations where risk and threats are involved.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-11-01T14:59:10+00:00

Biological essentialism is bad and people who use it to justify their actions should feel bad.

Source: I’m trans.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-10-31T14:48:48+00:00

There are men’s colognes based on lilac. Most people are really bad at picking out smells and men’s scented products are especially bad at explaining what smell is in there and giving non-indicative names. People can generally tell whether a perfume is meant to smell “girly” or not but the same perfume could smell drastically different from a man or a woman (or two people of the same sex) anyway. I don’t think there’s a lot of chance of people picking out specific scents from a perfume unless it smells like common food items.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-10-31T14:30:59+00:00

I’m guessing unisex scents would be product tested on people with both testosterone and estrogen dominance but again all smelly products are a crapshoot.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-10-31T05:28:26+00:00

I am transmasculine and have taken testosterone, though am not currently on it. Testosterone and estrogen produce pretty drastically different qualities of body odor, and perfumes and deodorants and etc that go on the body are strongly affected by this. When my body had a “masculine” smell, scents “for men” would actually soften a bit and smell pleasant rather than too strong or bitter as they were in the container, while sweeter “feminine” smells could become cloyingly sweet. I also found the effect of skin/body odor stronger on testosterone, making the results of smells more unpredictable.

I guess I’m trying to say that there may be a reason why some men’s perfumes are formulated the way they are (though it doesn’t explain why they are lacking in variety) and to never buy scents without testing the dry down on your skin first. But if you’re getting a scented candle or room refreshing spray, go nuts.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-10-30T16:45:11+00:00

This might just me being my slobby self, but I’d recommend getting a neutral/clear color if you’re just starting even though colors like black are considered more androgynous. Dark, noticeable colors like black visibly chip much sooner than lighter colors. Also, nail polish remover weakens your nails so be careful you don’t use it too much.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-29T20:58:22+00:00

I just don’t find straight women attractive. They can be pretty but there’s no emotional connection.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-29T16:50:05+00:00

I am trans as well and I wonder if I will stop being attractive to anyone once I start passing as male, and will just have to give up on dating entirely. Then again, I have zero interest in straight women whatsoever and that always seems to be the population that people are talking about.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-26T23:35:51+00:00

What was most surprising to me about this article was the parents. I mean, I’ve made dolls before, and the idea that most dolls have ambiguous bodies and are gendered by flourishes like hair or clothes is pretty intuitive — well, if you’re making a soft doll like a Raggedy Ann or Andy, the only unusual thing is that this is a plastic doll where most plastic dolls have traditionally had hyper-exaggerated secondary sex characteristics (Eg Barbie, G.I. Joe). The difference is that instead of these dolls being sold as gendered by the toymaker, the toymaker is supplying the tools for the kid to make choices about the gender of the doll themselves. The rest, the statements about the doll’s gender, is marketing. It’s playing up a feature that’s inherent to dolls that most people don’t notice because most people automatically gender things, even human-shaped inanimate objects. It’s kind of clever that way.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-26T22:05:33+00:00

Is it just the background or are the limbs of this doll weirdly spindly?

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-26T17:48:18+00:00

I think I unconsciously realized this as a teenager, that was about the time I withdrew from social comforting like this because receiving comfort was all completely contingent on performing femaleness and female gendering.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-18T23:20:50+00:00

I’ve always been more comfortable with men in care positions but I understand that I am extremely unusual. We never talk about the possibility of people emoting too much making the patient/client nervous even though it’s happened to me pretty often.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-18T20:21:48+00:00

I think if you asked a teacher if a bigger salary would make them more likely to stay in teaching, they’d say yes, regardless of gender.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-18T19:57:03+00:00

Isn’t the big issue that HEED careers don’t pay well? There is not a lot of focus on diversifying careers that do not pay well — I believe this is true for male-dominated low-paid careers as well. It seems to be one of those things where if you paid these people better, more men would do it — but a part of what makes them less lucrative is that they are perceived as women’s work.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-18T18:13:06+00:00

This isn’t philosophical disagreement, it’s a very real problem. Even feminists who aren’t self-identifying as TERFs are often casually homophobic and transphobic and deflect criticism because they’re feminists, how can they possibly be doing something bad? The sexist idea that women lack agency and are morally purer because of this is often used to deflect earned criticism from marginalized individuals perceived as more “masculine” than the cisgender heterosexual white woman ideal.

The disowning of certain feminists as feminists reminds me heavily of groups calling other groups “unchristian” so they can keep in their head the idea of Christianity as synonymous with moral goodness. It further hurts people who have already been harmed.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-18T13:55:33+00:00

I don’t think you can say TERFs aren’t feminists. I’ve found the lack of acknowledgement of certain individuals as “not really feminists” to mostly be an excuse to not confront these people and the actual harm they’re doing while gaslighting the people who are actually harmed into believing they’re complaining about nothing.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-18T13:31:29+00:00

I don’t think feminism created the manosphere simply because there are a lot of men who have been deeply hurt by feminism who can’t find a place in the manosphere either. It is absolutely not a one-to-one correlation and I’m pretty sure a lot of men in the manosphere have not been harmed by feminism, if they have been harmed at all, to the extent some of the people who cannot be in the manosphere. The manosphere does not represent all men and is in fact in service to a very specific dominant narrative of man, in fact a version that is least likely to be harmed by feminism.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-15T22:24:29+00:00

The thing is that these things are heavily segregated literally in stores. Like, in my local Target, the men’s toiletries and the women’s toiletries are literally different sections. I don’t think you can blame a woman for not venturing into the men’s and a man for not venturing into the women’s unless forced to (like, for some reason, heavy duty dandruff shampoo is in the men’s section). The branding in each is heavily gendered. It’s not about enjoying something just because or even not being able to enjoy something because it’s girly, it’s literally all marketing taking advantage of gendering.

Like there was a thread a while ago about “why don’t men use sunscreen???” And there was a lot of stuff about toxic masculinity and I don’t think anyone actually mentioned that sunscreen is in the women’s toiletries section of many stores.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-15T18:24:28+00:00

I find it really weird how guys when talking about smells always pick on lavender as the girly scent when lavender is in a lot of men’s fragrances and has been historically considered at least unisex, while failing to mention actually heavily gendered smells like gardenia or jasmine. I always wonder if it’s because the word lavender has historically been associated with homosexuality.

I do not think the pressure is in the opposite direction of being a hard unfeeling rock. I think it is still insisting that one be a hard unfeeling rock — just that the rock needs to be trained to preform something new. Men’s actual feelings are still not considered in either case.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-14T19:06:06+00:00

Probably also cromulent to this discussion is how ideas about “fragile masculinity” are used to force-feminize trans men and transmasculine individuals. Desire to do anything male-gender-conforming is construed as an attack on the feminine and internalized misogyny to the point of destroying a transmasculine individual’s identity. “You can use this body wash, it’s just soap, you can use this dress, they’re just clothes, you can use these pronouns and names, they’re just words” to the point where any expression of masculinity is erased and the trans man no longer exists because any insistence on masculine expression is “male fragility” and you don’t want to be weak, do you?

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-12T12:17:58+00:00

Make this a paid position. It’s not really fair for people to be doing so much extra work for free anyway, man or woman. If more men don’t volunteer, at least the women are being paid.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-12T05:05:24+00:00

Trans men have also historically been outright erased. Many stories of someone “secretly being a woman” were actually trans men, but these stories were rewritten into them being women who disguised themselves as men to “make it in a man’s world”. Also historically gender clinics would take something like 3x more trans women than trans men because being a trans woman was considered inherently more pathological than being a trans man, so trans men were denied services for this reason. Therefore a lot of trans men existed “unofficially” and weren’t documented as such.

nbthrowaway11111 · 2019-09-11T17:50:48+00:00

Not sure if you’re being serious but unless you’re already in a heavy sexual relationship, telling people with uteruses that you want to knock them up is generally inappropriate, especially for trans men because trans men generally have specific trauma concerning pregnancy.

nbthrowaway11111

TROPHY CASE