I said, “I need the phrase ‘actual women’ in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call ‘trans women’ would want to make use of that technology; I need language that asymmetrically distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that’s trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology”.
Kelsey Piper replied, “the people getting surgery to have bodies that do ‘women’ more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don’t think ‘people who’d get surgery to have the ideal female body’ cuts anything at the joints.”
Another woman said, “‘the original thing that already exists without having to try’ sounds fake to me” (to the acclaim of four “+1″ emoji reactions).
I would also give that second comment a +1 (though not Kelsey’s). For cis women to achieve the social target of femininity requires active self modification—shaving body hair periodically, for instance. Okay, to nitpick, one could get it all lasered/electrolyzed (in which case it’s just one-time self modification) or be fortunately born with buttery smooth legs. But the modal woman actively performs womanhood. The level of effort and performance success is a matter of degree, and I think this follows a bimodal distribution with a peak of high effort lower results (trans women) and taller peak of lower effort higher results (cis women).
Perhaps we should have a different term for the target, for [that which women on average try to become or fantasize about becoming.] Trans people sorta call it “transition goals” but I think a more typical term would be the “ideal woman”? I think it’s hard to pin down what the “ideal woman” is like, because everyone’s personal aesthetic vision is different, and people probably bias towards everyone else having the same vision as they do. But if we look at virtual reality as glimpse at what people choose to be given the choice, then the ideal woman is a pretty girl that is overall human with the exception of cat ears and a tail, and sometimes paws but that is a little bit too experimental for me personally.
I mean, men also have to put in effort to perform masculinity, or be seen as being inadequate men; I don’t think this is a gendered thing. But even a man that isn’t “performing masculinity adequately”, an inadequate man, like an inadequate woman, is still a distinct category, and though transwomen, like born women, aim to perform femininity, transwomen have a higher distance to cross and in doing so traverse between clusters along several dimensions. I think we can meaningfully separate “perform effort to transition in adequacy” from “perform effort to transition in cluster”, even if the goal is the same.
(From what I gather of VRChat, the ideal man is also a pretty girl that is overall human with the exception of cat ears and a tail...)
I would also give that second comment a +1 (though not Kelsey’s). For cis women to achieve the social target of femininity requires active self modification—shaving body hair periodically, for instance. Okay, to nitpick, one could get it all lasered/electrolyzed (in which case it’s just one-time self modification) or be fortunately born with buttery smooth legs. But the modal woman actively performs womanhood. The level of effort and performance success is a matter of degree, and I think this follows a bimodal distribution with a peak of high effort lower results (trans women) and taller peak of lower effort higher results (cis women).
Perhaps we should have a different term for the target, for [that which women on average try to become or fantasize about becoming.] Trans people sorta call it “transition goals” but I think a more typical term would be the “ideal woman”? I think it’s hard to pin down what the “ideal woman” is like, because everyone’s personal aesthetic vision is different, and people probably bias towards everyone else having the same vision as they do. But if we look at virtual reality as glimpse at what people choose to be given the choice, then the ideal woman is a pretty girl that is overall human with the exception of cat ears and a tail, and sometimes paws but that is a little bit too experimental for me personally.
I mean, men also have to put in effort to perform masculinity, or be seen as being inadequate men; I don’t think this is a gendered thing. But even a man that isn’t “performing masculinity adequately”, an inadequate man, like an inadequate woman, is still a distinct category, and though transwomen, like born women, aim to perform femininity, transwomen have a higher distance to cross and in doing so traverse between clusters along several dimensions. I think we can meaningfully separate “perform effort to transition in adequacy” from “perform effort to transition in cluster”, even if the goal is the same.
(From what I gather of VRChat, the ideal man is also a pretty girl that is overall human with the exception of cat ears and a tail...)