Marie Monday

I'm a lazy and sloppy debater but I'll try to articulate it better. What we think of as 'feminine' encapsulates a lot more than one's sex, and of course we all agree that letting your sex dictate that you should be any of those things is hateful. So you can peel back what femininity means until you're left with anything to do with genitals etc. If we could just do that (which would be ideal) there would be no gender dysphoria, in fact there would be no 'gender' at all.

But in practice, gender does exist and we can't wish it away. A lot of what we consider aspects of female experience are not bound to sex and a cis woman does not nexessarily need to have them, but we do identify them as feminine because, inevitably, the word does mean more to us than things that come with a vagina. As it is, I don't think you can limit the female frame of reference to those few things that cis women necessarily have in common; it's just not that simple, it doesn't reflect femininity as we understand it, and the differences in perspective between people of female sex are great enough that I think the frame of reference would be scant and incoherent.

So we have two options. Either we impose that femininity is just about sex, in which case the flexibility of identifying as trans would disappear, but the associations we have with femininity would remain because you can't force people to just think differently, and trans people would be confined in a role that doesn't correspond to who they are, so we would be back in the old, reactionary situation. Or we can (as long as gender still means something to us) make it more flexible and give people at least the space to navigate these ideas of masculinity and femininity as they wish, while breaking them down naturally and gradually.

Of course I see the problems you see. I've been worried about them since I was 16. I just think that it's still the better option, for the reasons stated above.

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