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judith butler (quokk.au)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/philosophymemes
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[–] 4 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Sex is not a sort of biological precursor to gender. It does not exist before or independent of gender. Sex is produced by gender being enforced by power.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (4 children)

    I just want to preface this by saying I am not coming into this with hostility, but because I'm curious about this and would like to understand a bit more about where you're coming from (if this is something you believe and you're not just explaining what the meme says?)

    I agree with and understand the first statement in the meme, that "sex" is how we describe various biological differences (e.g. "sexual dimorphism") and how we categorise people medically (afab, amab). I kind of viewed sex and gender as two different things, one medical and one personal/cultural. Neither binary, just to be clear, I understand that biology isn't a binary thing and people are often born with a mix of sex characteristics, which is part of why I thought "assigned gender at birth" terminology was quite good as it just describes what a person was assigned at birth, rather than conflating gender and sex and asserting that a person is a particular sex, and that it can be useful to have afab and amab as medical shorthand for things to look out for when dealing with surgeries or medication or diagnoses (e.g. amab people aren't likely to be pregnant for instance, I dont know if that's true but as an example).

    But my understanding of what you're saying is that sex and gender are much more closely linked, and that neither are biological/medical in the way I described above - in fact that gender informs sex, and is in turn informed and enforced by culture and power structures.

    Is that an accurate understanding of what you're saying? Or is that much too simple? I'm not a scholar, obviously, but I am interested in making sure I understand how people interact with and understand their own bodies and identities etc as I have trans and non-binary friends

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I agree with Judith. Assigned at birth terminology is attempting to convey the same sort of thing that Judith is in the quote. Gender and sex don't arise from the body, they are applied or assigned to it by various forms of power. They aren't based on a holistic understanding of what the body is or who the person that inhabits the body will become. They are based on the perception of a few small external features of the infant. And when those are inconclusive, doctors perform surgery on the infant to assign a binary form based on how they think the body should be gendered.

    I will note that these surgeries on intersex babies are not what fascists and transphobes refer to when they describe gender affirming care as mutilating children. They are perfectly ok with surgically altering a person when it enforces a gender binary. They also don't advocate for the banning of circumcision, another form of cultural genital mutilation.

    Even sexual dimorphism isn't a binary, but rather a distribution with a lot of overlap. In most medical situations, amab or afab carries a lot of assumptions that may not be true but nevertheless the treatment of the patient will be based on those assumptions and may harm the patient. For example, HRT changes the risks of certain illnesses and a doctor ignorant to that (a common problem for trans people getting healthcare) wouldn't treat the patient appropriately. This is another example of sex being gender applied to the body through a material process. It's not figurative. It has real consequences that are played out in physical bodies.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    (disclaimer: not OP, but I'm a trans woman with an opinion) Thanks for being inquisitive. It's really hard to speak for all trans people, as even trans people will have different personal takes (some can even be based on internalized transphobia - e.g., transmedicalism - the idea that one is only genuinely transgender if they change their physicality completely)

    I think your reading of Butler's quote (through the OP's explanation) is correct. (Also feel that this is true for science in general. Bruno Latour writes about the social construction of objectivity in scientific discourse.) I very much ideologically agree with Butler, with their idea the sex binary is an extension of the gender binary. On a social level, I wish we didn't police these binaries on people.

    But I feel conflicted because it's different when it comes to how I feel about my own gender. I feel like I'm on the right hormones when I'm on HRT, and I can't see how that's just social conditioning. Same with dysphoria. I can see that some ways in which I feel dysphoric is socially driven, but it also feels like my brain literally has a map for "female" genitalia (acknowledging that plenty of trans women also don't have bottom dysphoria, and that's fine). There should be a way to reconcile this difference, and maybe they are compatible (that the sex binary is made up and built on top of the gender binary AND that gender affirmation can be biochemically contingent as much as socially). But I don't have the language to make sense of it yet.

    Anyway, at the end of the day, what matters most is not that you understand us, because even we don't understand ourselves but we have chosen to love ourselves. I believe that the rest of the world can do the same too! Happy new year, stranger!

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