I don’t know too much about Thai culture, but my understanding is that for a very long time, they’ve had the label of “ladyboy”. If you ask a ladybody if they are a man or a woman, they will say they are a ladyboy.
I think this may come across as transphobic, but I’ve always thought this was a much more elegant solution than trying to figure out whether to apply the man or woman label to a trans individual.
The issue is that in countries with a binary as the norm, a large part of transgender identity is the desire to exist within the norm. A trans man doesn’t get on testosterone because he wants to be regarded as a trans man, or some other third signifier like ‘manlygirl’, he gets on testosterone because he wants to be regarded as a man, like his father or brother.
The dysphoria, the main source of anguish that leads to the desire to transition in the first place, comes from category mismatch between how the world views the individual and how the individual views themselves.
Some group of people with gender dysphoria may be fine with your ‘elegant solution’, and find themselves comfortable being genderqueer or ‘nonbinary’, but a large majority will find it no solution at all.
Yes, but this largely because trans man or trans woman doesn’t exist within the norm right? I think the terms ‘genderqueer’ and ‘nonbinary’ are implicitly about being OUTSIDE the norm, whereas ladyboy is not, it’s just another gender category, not a special ‘my gender doesn’t fit’ category.
The dysphoria, the main source of anguish that leads to the desire to transition in the first place, comes from category mismatch between how the world views the individual and how the individual views themselves
I suspect that ladyboy’s don’t get this, precisely BECAUSE they are accepted in society as something like “man’s body but women’s gender”.
I imagine that it’s much HARDER to have this with the way we try to implement ‘trans women are women’ (compared to the Thai approach) without significant transhumanist tech we don’t have yet. Significant aspects of what people see women as are missing from a trans woman’s experience, such as being able to bear children (of course, infertile women frequently ALSO get a kind of gender dysphoria from not being able to reproduce, but this is just one of hundreds of little examples).
I don’t know too much about Thai culture, but my understanding is that for a very long time, they’ve had the label of “ladyboy”. If you ask a ladybody if they are a man or a woman, they will say they are a ladyboy.
I think this may come across as transphobic, but I’ve always thought this was a much more elegant solution than trying to figure out whether to apply the man or woman label to a trans individual.
The issue is that in countries with a binary as the norm, a large part of transgender identity is the desire to exist within the norm. A trans man doesn’t get on testosterone because he wants to be regarded as a trans man, or some other third signifier like ‘manlygirl’, he gets on testosterone because he wants to be regarded as a man, like his father or brother.
The dysphoria, the main source of anguish that leads to the desire to transition in the first place, comes from category mismatch between how the world views the individual and how the individual views themselves.
Some group of people with gender dysphoria may be fine with your ‘elegant solution’, and find themselves comfortable being genderqueer or ‘nonbinary’, but a large majority will find it no solution at all.
Yes, but this largely because trans man or trans woman doesn’t exist within the norm right? I think the terms ‘genderqueer’ and ‘nonbinary’ are implicitly about being OUTSIDE the norm, whereas ladyboy is not, it’s just another gender category, not a special ‘my gender doesn’t fit’ category.
I suspect that ladyboy’s don’t get this, precisely BECAUSE they are accepted in society as something like “man’s body but women’s gender”.
I imagine that it’s much HARDER to have this with the way we try to implement ‘trans women are women’ (compared to the Thai approach) without significant transhumanist tech we don’t have yet. Significant aspects of what people see women as are missing from a trans woman’s experience, such as being able to bear children (of course, infertile women frequently ALSO get a kind of gender dysphoria from not being able to reproduce, but this is just one of hundreds of little examples).