A Very Simple Game Theory of Pronoun Degendering
I often vocally argue for the degendering of English Pronouns, that is to say, the replacement of the pronouns he/she with ungendered singular equivilents (depending on how knowledgable about the subject the person I’m talking to is, I’ll usually either pitch singular they/them, or my prefered option of a dedicated singular gender-neutral pronoun set like ey/em or xi/xir).
On account of having had far too many of these conversations, I’ve noticed a trend. The vast majority of people who I’ve had empathetically object to this are specifically trans women (as opposed to trans men, or nonbinary people).
While it’s easy to see why a smaller proportion of non-binary people might object to this (notably, many already consider some set of generic gender-neutral pronouns to be their personal ideal), this doesn’t explain the gap between trans women and men.
I think there’s a simple game theory lurking behind this difference.
Key to this game-theoretical model is an idea called “degendering”. The concept of degendering is that in addition to active “misgendering” of a trans person; which is a hard rejection of a persons gender identity characterized by applying gender markers congruent to a persons sex to them; the act of not applying gendered markers to them in the same context where you’d apply said markers to a cis person of the same gender is in effect a soft signal of rejecting their gender identity.
While trying to understand the viewpoint of trans-women who reject pronoun degendering, I stumbled into the following study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19419899.2021.1978529
Of particular interest is that clarifying a trans-womans pronouns decreased their rates of “degendering”, while the same intervention had no effect for trans-men and nonbinary people.
I suspect that the higher levels of pronoun-degendering opposition in trans women basically comes from the following mechanism:
1) Current gendered interventions have some non-negligible effect for trans women.
2) Attempts to degender pronoun usage will (presumably) decrease the rate of current interventions.
3) Even if an individual trans woman might prefer the end-state of degendering* the intermediary state is likely to be on the order of decades and come with a non-negligable cost.
Meanwhile, trans men and non-binary people don’t experience the benefit of existing interventions, and therefore don’t percieve a cost, only a potential long term benefit. Cis people (at least, gender conforming ones), on the other hand, probably percieve neither.
* (I’m not really sure how to do footnotes in this editor). In conversations I’ve had, I’ve also found that a larger number of trans women will express discontent at the desired end-state of pronoun degendering. But I’m unsure whether this represents a real preference difference, or if it’s instead a side effect of that being the belief that would most strengthen current policy preference.
I think it’s a real preference difference. Broadly speaking, I think trans people are either people with an understudied neuroendocrinological disorder,[1] or people ideologically aligned with some form of gender-abolition adjacent movement. You can be in both categories, but they’re not particularly related, and while the latter is predictive of “prefers a world where everyone is gender-neutral,” the former has little to do with that. Most people in the former group like being men or women, they just want to be in the right category.[2]
I also think this explains the difference between trans men and women you’ve observed. Trans men, on average, have an easier time passing than trans women. The ones you end up talking to about being trans are overwhelmingly the ones who are aligned with gender abolition; the ones who aren’t simply vanish.
I make no strong claims here whatsoever, only that it seems plausible to me that there is an underlying biological condition.
Epistemic status: vibe check. This is my best hypothesis based on people I’ve observed, not a rigorous stance, and it is obviously an oversimplification of a complex phenomenon.
Political alignments do not need to make sense (it is enough if both sides oppose the same enemy, even if they kinda disagree with each other), but it seems to me that insisting that you are a different gender is incompatible with insisting that genders do not exist.
More crudely, compare the “female brain in a male body” meme and “there is no such thing as a female and male brain, the only differences between men and women are their secondary sex characteristics, and socialization”. Could both somehow be true in the same world? I don’t see how.
(That’s basically the conflict between the trans-positive feminists and the traditional feminists a.k.a. TERFs.)
You’re falling for the Goomba Fallacy.
I agree it would be inconsistent to endorse “genders exist because I have one” and “genders do not exist.” I have never met a trans person that believes both.[1] The gender-abolition adjacent trans people I’ve met have viewpoints closer to “gender is real and bad” or “being transgender is a form of gender-nonconformity that helps break down gender norms.” For a straightforward instance of the latter, I’ve met several “politically nonbinary” people who go by they/them because they support the project of making all English pronouns gender-neutral, as part of the broader goal of making gender less salient in day-to-day-life, and aim to lead by example.
I could describe these viewpoints in more detail if you’re curious, but I am not transgender and these are not my beliefs, so I am not the right person to ask to defend them.
I agree it would be inconsistent to endorse “I have a female brain in a male body” and “there is no such thing as a female and male brain.” I have never met a trans person that believes both. In fact, the phrase “female brain in a male body” is something I’ve only ever heard repeated by anti-trans activists as a strawman[2] - my impression is that it is decades out of date at minimum.
“Transgender” is just a category of people. It is a mistake to expect them to all agree.
No, it isn’t. As a certified passer of the Ideological Turing Test, I don’t think either trans-inclusive or trans-exclusive feminists would agree with your characterization. If nothing else, most TERFs would argue that primary sex characteristics matter more than secondary ones, and that behavioral or personality differences between men and women are determined by biology, not just socialization.
This is ahistorical. Both trans-inclusive and trans-exclusive feminists have made up significant factions in the feminist movement since trans issues rose to awareness. As an example, consider the controversy surrounding Sandy Stone, a trans woman who worked for the feminist record label Olivia Records from 1974-1978. Trans-exclusive feminists protested her involvement and the record defended her; she resigned after receiving death threats from a group that showed up to her concert with guns.
Moving back earlier in history, the famous Institute for Sexual Science[3], which pioneered modern transgender healthcare, promoted many feminist causes. Lesbian feminist Helene Stöcker worked with the Institute and its founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, to advocate for women’s equality, lesbian rights, and access to abortion and contraceptives.
Moving back even further, individuals we would recognize as transgender today have fought for women’s rights long before the modern feminist movement existed. In the US, the genderless Quaker preacher Public Universal Friend (1752-1819) advocated for women’s equality and abolitionism. The formerly enslaved trans woman Frances Thompson (1840-1876) testified before Congress about her rape in the Memphis massacre, despite the personal risk this entailed, which helped pass the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871.
These are just a few examples of a long and complex history, of course, but it demonstrates that trans-exclusive feminism don’t have a unique claim to “tradition.” Trans people have fought for women’s rights before TERFs, or radical feminism as a whole, existed.
Since some portion of all people are stupid, we can assume some portion of trans people are also stupid, and hold contradictory beliefs. However, I’ve never met one. In my experience, trans people are no more likely to have contradictory beliefs than anyone else.
I’ve met people that believe some form of “intersex brain theory,” but they would all tell you “(fe)male brain” is a gross oversimplification.
You may know them as the target of Nazi book burnings in this famous photo.
I haven’t read through the links that OP sent yet, so I don’t feel confident replying directly to them, but it’s worth noting that trans inclusive radical feminism exists (even if somewhat unpopular). People who consider themselves TIRFs usually believe at least one of two things:
1) A sexed body map in the brain, which trans people have swapped; but no other significant changes. (Either that, or the weaker form of believing in functionally sexed brains but thinking that even if outcomes were to differ we should still treat people the same).
Or
2) Some form of radical body autonomy.
Would this be a fair summary?
If you benefit from telling people “I go by ‘she/her’,” then you don’t want to lose the words “she” and “her” from your vocabulary, because you’re using them for something!
Hi Karl, thanks for the typo pointers!
The way I’d summarise my argument is something like:
If you’re trans, the benefits of degendering pronouns are long term. There’s something that you’d have to remove in the middle of the process that benefits trans women, but doesn’t bring benefits to any other trans group. This is why I think of all trans people, I’ve met most opposition from trans women.
I think your summary has more to do with my ideal terminal state, and notably it’s symmetric (trans men should in theory agree with that as much as trans women), even though opposition is in my experience assymetric.
Makes me curious about trans women from countries that do not have gendered pronouns—what short explanations do they use? (Also, how do they know whether they are being misgendered?)
I’ve chatted with a few Japanese trans men and women online (although nobody who considered themself non-binary).
A relatively common complaint was being “-Kun”d or “-Chan”d (somewhat gendered Japanese name suffixes), and while I don’t know enough Japanese to fully understand, they complained about gendered uses of keigo (kind of polite speech) at/about them.
It’s worth noting that the Japanese queer community has a lot of English influence though, so a surprising portion of Japanese trans people seem to have preferred English pronouns.