Draft (unpublished)
Lukas
Created: Updated:
One of the most contentious topics in the recent years has been whether trans people should be included in their self identified groups or not. The left argues yes, people are whatever they express they are and the right argues no, people can not change their gender and therefor stay whatever their gender was. I think both farmings are false and a red herring. I propose a alternative way of looking at the problem.
It took me quite some time to figure out why the saying trans women are woman rubbed me quite so wrong. For a very long time, even before puberty, I have desired to be women. This sentence is wrong. I always say it wrong and I always write it wrong. I do not want to be a woman, I want to have a womans body. I don't think I, as in my soul or being, is a man or woman, but I do have the desire to have a womans body. My luck is that I feel perfectly fine in a mans body. If I was in a womans body I might even desire to have a mans body, although that is hard to tell for me right now. It took me quite some time to figure that out because it is just me, I have never though that I am trans and I still don't because I don't want to transition. I think it only make sense if someone has a desire to be the other gender and extreme discomfort in their current body. It needs to be extreme, because our current technological advancement in gender affirming care is pretty poor. It got much better over the last decades and it will get much better, because it profits from advancements in the beauty industry, into which we sink enormous amounts of money. But it will probably still take centuries until we get it right. If someone tells me you can be a trans woman, I say yes sure. If someone tells me you can be a woman, I would probably roll my eyes up, breath exasperated and say fuck off. There might be many reasons they tell me that, they mean well, want to virtue signal, want to fit into their left leaning bubble, have been gaslit into saying that, just regurgitate a talking point from someone they listen to online, probably a mix of all the things before. And even though someone might mean well, it is a lie, a well meaning lie but a lie non the less. If we were technologically more advanced and we could perfectly change our bodies from man to woman, there would be no trans man or trans woman, we need those words because we are not there yet. It is sad for the people who suffer from this immense discomfort in their body, but I don't think coloring the truth is going to help them, because it is going to inevitable lead to disappointment when reality catches up.
So how should we handle this? I don't think trans woman are woman, but neither are they man. They are trans woman. One doesn't have to be part of the other!
I have heard the idea of woman being the super category and cis and trans woman being the sub categories but that is not more then a slight of hand. It is for one, not how anyone uses language. Always interesting to look at people who try to use it that way and half a stroke while talking because it is so hard to handle and two, if that were true, I and probably every trans woman would aspire to be a cis woman and therefor make the term woman completely irrelevant. Essentially it just moves the goal post.
The areas that this would influence and bring clarity to are toilets, sports, prisons and dating apps, solutions for each of them:
Toilets are a problem area in the first place because people feel not 100% comfortable in them with the current design. Everyone should be able to poo in peace and the gaps on the bottom and top are not really helpful. Building uni sex toilets with the same space and price constraints might even provide more toilets because not having to overbuild sinks. The conservative argument that woman are less save is a red herring because if someone wants to rape someone a magical toilet border won't stop anyone and if we talk about feeling one could argue both ways. If trans woman have to go to mens toilets, trans man like Buck Angel would have to go on a womans toilet and I am very confident that they wouldn't be happy about that either. Most people are sensitive to what other people think so go wherever you feel right. With building more uni sex toilets and normalizing interactions in that space soon probably nobody will care.
In sports I would split everything up, man, woman, trans man, trans woman. It's interesting that many people on the left want trans woman in womans sport, but nobody seems to think ahead and that by that logic trans man would have to compete with men where they get annihilated. Trans woman will always have an advantage if they went through male puberty and you might be able to dope a trans man up to a mans level or they might be able to compete because the sport doesn't provide the male physic to big of an advantage but I don't think it's wise to require anyone to dope up. Aside with limits on testosterone for men, it's hard to draw any conclusive line. We could also make a sport category were we dope everybody up and see if we can create hulk but I don't think that would be ethical. The base idea of sports is to have a fair playing field to compete against one another. We created womans sport to create that for woman. We can create the same for trans woman and trans men. Would people care less about it then mens sport? For sure but they care less about womans sport as well. Life is not fair, but we can at least aspire to make it fair in some areas.
For prisons I would split it up even more and create additional categories for before and post operation. Essentially any variation that might lead to a higher chance of getting raped. Complete separation is probably the way to go. If not then something like mixed prisons should also be possible. If that doesn't make sense then trans people in general population in prisons probably doesn't make sense either. Mixed prisons are something that should be studied though in my opinion because at least at some stage people should be OK in that environment because how can we release them out of prison if they can't be in mix areas.
And the final area, dating apps should give you the option to select men, woman, trans men, trans woman and give you the option to additionally select and provide pre and post operation if you want to. This could enable advanced filtering. There is no point in showing trans woman to people interested in woman if around 96.7% of strait men immediately reject them. For trans men it is even worse with 98.2% [^1]. This would also shield trans people from people being cunts to them, give people who are really interested in trans people the option to filter for them and give trans people the option to be seen by people that would like to date them. I don't see how including them in the woman category and making it a worse experience for everybody around, just so we can pat our self on the back and say, oh we are so inclusive is worth the trade off. What does it help if you are seen by more people that just reject you or treat you poor. Even if we get rid of treating people poor, which should never be a thing, it is still wasting a lot of time.
In summary, by separating the genders into these groups, we acknowledge their existence, can cater to the individual groups and stay true to how far we have come with our technological advancements. Hopefully we continue our progress and reach a point where we can just snap our fingers and change bodies. I am pretty sure most people would then try at least once and many would use it liberally.
