Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
It's not "opening up" a definition. It is the definition.
No we don't. Not everyone who undergoes medical transition undergoes the same journey. Some folk want surgery, some folk want HRT, some folk want both, some folk want one but not the other. Some folk want to micro dose, some folk want to replicate cis hormone levels.
There is no meaningful catch all term that summarises the needs of all of those folk. Trying to find a single term to capture that spectrum leads to a single narrative of what medical transition looks like, and makes it harder for people to transition on their own terms.
The language we need to talk about these things already exists, and is improving and changing with time. Nothing is gained by returning to the old days of binary terms and all or nothing language.
Yes there is. It's defining folk who medically transition as being a different class of trans folk. We're not a different class. We all of us have unique needs, and the language should focus on those individual needs, whether they're medical, social or other.
This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my original reply. I'm a binary trans woman, who medically transitioned with all of the bells and whistles, and so I get lumped in with people who genuinely believe statements like this.
I actively, loudly and strongly disagree with what you've said here, and I hate that people often assume I share beliefs like that. Defining the term trans to be narrower than it is is gatekeeping, end of story. It denies people the right to their own identity. That is inherently bad. People define for themselves, even in a hypothetical scenario where bad faith actors try and fuck it up
So I agree with the first half pretty well, you make some good points. But:
In general, just because everyone has unique needs/qualities/etc., that doesn't mean that it's not useful to have categories anyways. Although in this case perhaps you're right, the situations are often complicated enough that it would be too reductive. In extending my wider pro-categorization stance to this issue in particular I may have ignored the naturally complex nature of it.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, and you reacted differently enough compared to the rest of what I said that I think you may have misinterpreted my stance here?
And that's why I started this off by saying that it wouldn't be productive to argue for this. Even if I were correct in theory*, nobody who this matters for would ever accept my definition, or any definition, other than the one that they believe to be true. You cannot force someone to accept a label that they don't want, even if there would be benefits to using it. Although given what you said I'm not sure now that there would be benefits anyways.
*as far as that could apply to language, anyways