I've always bristled at the fact that opposing gender ideology is seen as a conservative issue, when it can be framed as a progressive one. The fact that gender ideologues are forced to resort to stereotypes is a very regressive choice.
Current gender discourse makes way more sense if you understand it as the result of uneasy collaboration between different groups with fundamentally different models of transness.
For instance, funding/ political clout is a huge background factor in message visibility, and it seems there's a substantial amount of patronage from late-transitioning MtF types (e.g. the Pritzkers: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers) specifically promoting the "trans women are super hot women" model that centers the validity of natal males adopting stereotypical feminine presentation based on gender-essentialist ideas. The most active body of internet enforcers also seems to be of this ilk.
Meanwhile, the respectable spokespeople in research and academia, whose nonprofits collect those grants, who hold those endowed chairs and fear cancellation by those mobs, have a native ideology that leans much more to the social-constructivist/ anti-binary, gender-isn't-real side of the equation. But anyone who's spent time in nonprofits knows their fawning respect for new ideas with full funding and powerful patrons behind them, so you get these weird, unstable syntheses that pay lip service to principles of social construction while working for practical results that match their funders' goals. One way to read the trend of very smart people stammering over "what is a woman?" is that it's what happens when you want to say "there's no such thing as a woman in the conventional social sense, that's an artificial and frankly oppressive construct" but know that your *backers* want to hear "a woman is Dylan Mulvaney and Rachel Levine, you can tell because of the lipstick and the killer heels."
Finally, there are lots of front-line workers in healthcare and K-12 who seem mostly excited about facilitating transition itself - maybe out of pure compassion, because it seems like miracle solution to certain kinds of intractable trauma and social maladjustment (what if you could just... be someone brand new and cute, instead of the lonely person that those terrible things happened to?). Or maybe because being the office Tumblr evangelist is a way to feel pleasurably enlightened, compassionate and powerful, while grinding in professions with rough working conditions and shrinking prestige. Some people in these spheres seem to dogmatically assert whatever will let them get on with the work - like that babies can demand transition, why not? - because the work is the point, not the model.
All told, I think "who/whom?" works better than "why/how?" as a guiding question for this corner of the present.
Interesting essay, and one I may have further comments on after a more thorough read, but offhand it seems you're starting off on the wrong foot by at least suggesting that gender stereotypes are cut from whole cloth. Which is typical of many feminists, Reilly-Cooper in particular, who seem think they were hatched in the inner sanctums of "The Patriarchy!!!11!! 🙄" simply to oppress women.
Great deal of evidence that stereotypes are often quite accurate, in large part because there are often bedrock biological differences in the groups in question -- particularly males and females which you conceded in later paragraphs -- which underwrite or motivate those stereotypes.
So you might have some interest in this essay from social scientist and Substacker Lee Jussim:
"Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All of Social Psychology":
Many of those stereotypes are less than flattering, or can be turned into something of a socially imposed straitjacket. But many others provide or constitute socially beneficial role models. Something which Kathleen Stock elaborated on in some detail in this essay where she credibly argued that Radfems were "barking (mad)" to try to abolish gender stereotypes:
Gender should be defined as masculine/feminine rather than male/female. This is the original definition before postmodernist views of sex and gender took over. When medical forms asked for gender in the 90's, they meant something like "it's really sex but we don't want to get yelled at by parents." Masculine/feminine is a spectrum in a way that male/female simply is not. The former are stereotypical descriptions that do not identify, whereas the latter are fundamental, unambiguous aspects of life on Earth. Not complicated. And somehow ambivalence about the interchangeability of the words "sex" and "gender" turned into the total inability to define a woman. Specificity matters.
Also, for the love of God, someone please admit to laughing at the "strap on, this is going to be a long one." It's like the subtitle to the South Park film.
I do think you're missing something fundamental about the distinction between stereotypes and gender identity. I'd like to help you understand it, and I feel like I'm in a good position to do so: although I'm a trans woman, I share your puzzlement at some of the contradictions you mentioned in the post.
However, I have a thing I need to do for the next half hour. So, I'll be back, but for now, I'll reshare a comment I wrote a while back arguing that "gender identity" is a simplified explanation of a biological phenomenon:
---
Wrapping it up in one term, "identity", isn't always helpful. It's a simplification, like the Bohr model of the atom, that can be useful for explaining it to people who are new to the topic and have no other frame of reference. But once they start asking probing questions that test the boundaries of that simplified model, it's time to move on to a more complex one that can answer those questions.
I've never had a voice in the back of my head whispering "Psst, don't believe the mirror! You're a girl!" And I can't speak for everyone, but judging from what I've read in comment sections, most people don't have a voice like that either.
What they have instead are experiences in which their gender becomes salient in some way and provokes an emotional reaction -- a reaction which they may or may not consciously connect to their gender at the time, depending on exactly what happened and how much insight they have into themselves.
[Someone who isn't here] linked to genderdysphoria.fyi above, a site that has a good (and long) list of ways in which GD can manifest. Interestingly, different people tend to experience different combinations of them: there are a bunch of things that *can* provoke the sort of reaction that implies they'd be more comfortable as the opposite sex, but none of them are 100% guaranteed to resonate with any particular trans person. They're just all correlated.
Kinda like how there are a bunch of observable physiological differences that *can* occur in people with some sort of gender non-conformity, but none of them are 100% guaranteed. Suspiciously like that, in fact.
So, here's a less simplified model. It may or may not be The Truth, but it lines up with my experience and research better than the singular "gender identity" model while explaining all the same things:
Many parts of the body develop differently in the presence vs. absence of testosterone before birth.
They all develop at different times during gestation, which normally doesn't matter, because the prenatal hormonal environment (and the body's response to those hormones) is usually consistent across the relevant time and space: either everything develops "the female way", or everything develops "the male way".
But sometimes it's inconsistent, and different parts develop in different directions.
Some of those parts happen to be in the brain, and the function they normally serve is to influence our psychology in ways that nudge us toward sex-specific behaviors, making us visible, attractive, and attracted to possible mates.
Because human behavior is complex, the way they exert that influence is through emotional cues and rewards that encourage us to learn sex-specific behaviors from other humans, and seek out positive feedback to confirm that we've gotten them right.
Because this is all just our species' particular version of something deep down that evolved a long, long time ago, something that's present in some form in any species with complex sex-specific behaviors... there isn't much we can do about it. Once it develops a certain way, we're stuck with it.
And because this is all happening at a low level, we aren't really conscious of what's happening, and if we try to explain our reaction, what comes to mind may actually be a story we write on the spot based on the things we *are* consciously aware of (just like trying to explain any other emotional reaction!). If seeing a beard in the mirror makes me feel a pang of disappointment, I may explain it as "this goatee looks dumb on me, maybe I should try a new style, but I don't really know what else would look good" when my brain is actually trying to say "that is NOT what I expect to see on an attractive woman's face".
So, "gender identity" is a concept representing what we get when we take stock of all of these emotional signals that we can consciously connect to gender, and try to decide whether they line up more with "the male way" or "the female way" of development. The explosion of gender identities happens because sometimes the signals are conflicting or unclear, and it's hard to make a call either way, but people still want to call it something. And gender identity can change over time as we get in new situations and experience new signals, or as we recognize the meaning of signals we've already experienced.
(This might get me tarred as a transmedicalist, I guess, but I'm throwing caution to the wind today!)
OK, here's the fundamental thing I think you're missing about the distinction between stereotypes and gender identity.
Gender identity is about which group you see yourself as part of, or aspire to be part of.
The role that gender stereotypes play, at least the one that's relevant here, is essentially that of branding, or uniforms: a way to advertise which group you belong to, and guess which groups others belong to.
We all know that some things (behaviors, interests, mannerisms, styles of dress, etc.) are associated with men and others are associated with women. Regardless of whether those associations are based in biology or totally arbitrary, or indeed whether we find them acceptable or regrettable, the fact that we're all aware of them makes them useful signals.
Humans have the same evolutionary need to distinguish between the sexes as any other sexual species. We also have sex-specific behaviors that are too complex to be instinctual, and in our evolution we've stumbled on the solution of psychological drives that motivate us to learn the "right" set of behaviors from those around us, make ourselves identifiable as members of the "right" group, and seek confirmation that we've done it.
This, perhaps not coincidentally, is similar to how we experience other types of group affiliation. The difference is that for gender, the group affiliation is at least partly innate rather than learned, and the "branding" is at least partly made up of biological traits.
"""The point here is that preferences about one’s body (either aesthetic or functional) exist without a reliance on paradigm shifts of one’s “internal sense of self”. If someone wants to, for example, bulk up and build muscle, they can just do it; it’s nonsensical to say they first need to “identify” as their chosen aspiration before any changes can occur."""
"""The perennial challenge for this camp remains the logical impossibility of harmonizing the twin snakes of “trans people don’t owe you passing” and “trans people will literally kill themselves if they don’t pass”."""
Can't say I've ever heard anyone say the second part in quite those terms, but assuming it's an exaggerated version of something like "we shouldn't get in the way of trans people doing what they need to do to pass", I guess I don't see why harmonizing them strikes you as difficult, much less impossible.
Passing isn't a binary yes/no question, a fixed finish line you can cross and then be done with. It's a question of how often, to whom, and to what degree, and everyone has their own sense of how much it matters to them. "Trans people don't owe you passing" is an acknowledgement that not every trans person will be able to pass 100% undetectably in your view -- and a reminder that encountering someone who's having a bad day, or who was dealt a bad hand, or who just doesn't mind if you know they're trans, isn't a license to be rude.
"""Dr. Ehrensaft literally said that a baby throwing out a barrette is a “gender signal” the baby might not really be a girl"""
Stripped of context, yes, that'd be an absurd statement. But she was talking about a specific individual who did grow up to be trans, and citing that moment as an example of preverbal communication about gender. Isn't there a reasonable chance that that's what it was?
You're right that babies do dumb shit for all kinds of reasons, and we can't know why they did any particular thing when we see it happen once. But no one's making clinical decisions about gender based on that kind of dumb shit; there are no such decisions to make at that age. So what really puzzles me about that clip is: why does it even matter? Who cares what 1-2 year olds have to say about their gender? They can speak for themselves when they can speak for themselves.
"""The only possible explanation for this unrelenting dedication is to maintain access to what Dembroff refers to as “the robust associations welded to that particular gender classification.” Stereotypes, in other words. It’s also the only explanation for why the circular definition “a woman is someone who identifies as a woman” garners so much intense attachment despite its emptiness. It maintains the ability to hint-hint-wink-wink toward gender stereotypes without having to say so out loud."""
To claim that winking at stereotypes is the "only possible explanation" is to deny that social group identity, in and of itself, could possibly matter to anyone. But clearly it does.
The idea of caring about which group someone is part of, separate from any of the visible aspects of what it means to be part of that group, isn't especially unusual. Sports teams can change their colors, change their names, move between cities, trade players, and still keep their fans and rivals. Corporations can rebrand, rename, pivot, turn over staff and leadership, and still maintain a continuous identity. Even companies in the army that wear the same uniform, go through the same training, follow the same orders, and are otherwise indistinguishable to outsiders can develop an identity and inspire loyalty.
The thing that's surprising about gender, in this sense, is just that our "loyalty" to a gender is at least partly innate rather than learned. I could believe that seems far-fetched to most cis people. But the evolutionary need for such a thing is clear enough, and there are plenty of first-hand reports from people who say that's what they experience.
It seems unreasonable to dismiss all of that and assert that the "stereotypes" are secretly what everyone really cares about... especially since for a lot of trans people, the cultural/behavioral stuff is all secondary to the physiological stuff anyway.
I feel like there's a general pattern going on with LGBTQ issues (and perhaps all progressive causes) that bugs the heck of out me, which is more or less: "There's a problem X; there's a rational response Y that would solve the problem, but there's also a far more radical response Z that will also solve the problem, and somehow Z has become enshrined as the solution you must support if you don't want to be labeled a garbage person by Twitter mobs". Examples:
Problem: many heterosexuals are verbally or physically abusive towards homosexuals because they see homosexuality as deviant, unnatural behavior.
Rational solution: teach people it's not cool to verbally or physically abuse people because you don't like them. (Note that this is a universally applicable rule that covers all kinds of use cases other than homophobia, as valuable as gold. A "Golden Rule", if you will.)
Radical solution: embark upon a massive project of societal reprogramming via official government messaging, public education, news media and popular entertainment to convince everybody to think that homosexuality (a sexual behavior practiced by perhaps a tenth of the population and that does not lead to procreation) is just as "normal" and "natural" as heterosexuality, and that to suggest otherwise is violence.
Problem: some people have hobbies, interests, and behaviors that don't conform with the traditional gender expectations associated with their biological sex, and they are sometimes made to feel bad about that, or are abused and bullied by their family and/or peers.
Rational solution: teach people it's not cool to verbally or physically abuse people because they're not into the things you expect them to be into based on what genitalia they have.
Radical solution: embark on a massive project of societal reprogramming via (the Cathedral) to convince everybody that gender has nothing to do with biological sex and that it's simultaneously super important to respect and uphold transpeople's gender identities, and also gender is socially constructed and we should stop having any kind of gender expectations whatsoever.
My very religious and conservative friend is amused that trans activists, who he assumes are all completely atheist or agnostic, seem to have reinvented the concept of the soul, in asserting that gender identity is completely separate from the physical body.
Maybe I'm lucky. When I (a male) was in junior high I got into doing cross-stitch one winter because I was bored and needed something to do and was curious about how to do something that my mom did. Maybe I'd feel more of a need to embrace radical gender politics if my dad (or mom) had flown off the handle and made me feel bad for wanting to do a girly thing instead of wanting to do a boy thing.
The way to square the circle here is that gender stereotypes are true, have always been true, etc. Trans people are a nice additional proof of this but not really necessary. Of course it is weird that many left leaning people believe both contradictory things but you can paper over a lot of doublethink if you control the entire media and all major institutions of knowledge. Google Rebecca Tuvel if you want an example of it in action.
"Matt Osborne wrote a devastating piece about her very long history of dangerous quackery."
Citing this made me think less of you. In addition to the source being openly biased, they only "quote" her a handful of words at a time (at most - often just one or two!), and I had to put "quote" in quotes, because they don't even cite where she said those things!
Invalid evidence doesn't invalidate the point, but you should be able to find a valid source discrediting her, if she's genuinely this bad.
Know plenty of women my age (younger millennials) who identify as non-binary or even ‘demi-girl’ (come on, you’re 32) who are on a spectrum of autism and/or ADD. I guess it’s one way to deal with your problems but I doubt it’s the best way. Just makes me sad, really.
Don’t think there’s all of it, though; zoomers just seem to be grossed-out by sex altogether and I’m pretty sure some of them adopt these sorts of identities to pretect them from the evil eye of being perceived as sexual beings
I've always bristled at the fact that opposing gender ideology is seen as a conservative issue, when it can be framed as a progressive one. The fact that gender ideologues are forced to resort to stereotypes is a very regressive choice.
https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/i-am-a-true-progressive
Here come the new gender stereotypes, same as the old gender stereotypes:
https://thecritic.co.uk/here-come-the-new-gender-stereotypes-same-as-the-old-gender-stereotypes/
I'm still trying to figure out how conforming to male stereotypes makes you a dude.
https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/
This is comedy gold.
Current gender discourse makes way more sense if you understand it as the result of uneasy collaboration between different groups with fundamentally different models of transness.
For instance, funding/ political clout is a huge background factor in message visibility, and it seems there's a substantial amount of patronage from late-transitioning MtF types (e.g. the Pritzkers: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers) specifically promoting the "trans women are super hot women" model that centers the validity of natal males adopting stereotypical feminine presentation based on gender-essentialist ideas. The most active body of internet enforcers also seems to be of this ilk.
Meanwhile, the respectable spokespeople in research and academia, whose nonprofits collect those grants, who hold those endowed chairs and fear cancellation by those mobs, have a native ideology that leans much more to the social-constructivist/ anti-binary, gender-isn't-real side of the equation. But anyone who's spent time in nonprofits knows their fawning respect for new ideas with full funding and powerful patrons behind them, so you get these weird, unstable syntheses that pay lip service to principles of social construction while working for practical results that match their funders' goals. One way to read the trend of very smart people stammering over "what is a woman?" is that it's what happens when you want to say "there's no such thing as a woman in the conventional social sense, that's an artificial and frankly oppressive construct" but know that your *backers* want to hear "a woman is Dylan Mulvaney and Rachel Levine, you can tell because of the lipstick and the killer heels."
Finally, there are lots of front-line workers in healthcare and K-12 who seem mostly excited about facilitating transition itself - maybe out of pure compassion, because it seems like miracle solution to certain kinds of intractable trauma and social maladjustment (what if you could just... be someone brand new and cute, instead of the lonely person that those terrible things happened to?). Or maybe because being the office Tumblr evangelist is a way to feel pleasurably enlightened, compassionate and powerful, while grinding in professions with rough working conditions and shrinking prestige. Some people in these spheres seem to dogmatically assert whatever will let them get on with the work - like that babies can demand transition, why not? - because the work is the point, not the model.
All told, I think "who/whom?" works better than "why/how?" as a guiding question for this corner of the present.
As Bette Davis once put it, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night" 😉🙂
https://youtu.be/eja-popojUo
Interesting essay, and one I may have further comments on after a more thorough read, but offhand it seems you're starting off on the wrong foot by at least suggesting that gender stereotypes are cut from whole cloth. Which is typical of many feminists, Reilly-Cooper in particular, who seem think they were hatched in the inner sanctums of "The Patriarchy!!!11!! 🙄" simply to oppress women.
Great deal of evidence that stereotypes are often quite accurate, in large part because there are often bedrock biological differences in the groups in question -- particularly males and females which you conceded in later paragraphs -- which underwrite or motivate those stereotypes.
So you might have some interest in this essay from social scientist and Substacker Lee Jussim:
"Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All of Social Psychology":
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all#gsc.tab=0
Many of those stereotypes are less than flattering, or can be turned into something of a socially imposed straitjacket. But many others provide or constitute socially beneficial role models. Something which Kathleen Stock elaborated on in some detail in this essay where she credibly argued that Radfems were "barking (mad)" to try to abolish gender stereotypes:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
Gender should be defined as masculine/feminine rather than male/female. This is the original definition before postmodernist views of sex and gender took over. When medical forms asked for gender in the 90's, they meant something like "it's really sex but we don't want to get yelled at by parents." Masculine/feminine is a spectrum in a way that male/female simply is not. The former are stereotypical descriptions that do not identify, whereas the latter are fundamental, unambiguous aspects of life on Earth. Not complicated. And somehow ambivalence about the interchangeability of the words "sex" and "gender" turned into the total inability to define a woman. Specificity matters.
Also, for the love of God, someone please admit to laughing at the "strap on, this is going to be a long one." It's like the subtitle to the South Park film.
I do think you're missing something fundamental about the distinction between stereotypes and gender identity. I'd like to help you understand it, and I feel like I'm in a good position to do so: although I'm a trans woman, I share your puzzlement at some of the contradictions you mentioned in the post.
However, I have a thing I need to do for the next half hour. So, I'll be back, but for now, I'll reshare a comment I wrote a while back arguing that "gender identity" is a simplified explanation of a biological phenomenon:
---
Wrapping it up in one term, "identity", isn't always helpful. It's a simplification, like the Bohr model of the atom, that can be useful for explaining it to people who are new to the topic and have no other frame of reference. But once they start asking probing questions that test the boundaries of that simplified model, it's time to move on to a more complex one that can answer those questions.
I've never had a voice in the back of my head whispering "Psst, don't believe the mirror! You're a girl!" And I can't speak for everyone, but judging from what I've read in comment sections, most people don't have a voice like that either.
What they have instead are experiences in which their gender becomes salient in some way and provokes an emotional reaction -- a reaction which they may or may not consciously connect to their gender at the time, depending on exactly what happened and how much insight they have into themselves.
[Someone who isn't here] linked to genderdysphoria.fyi above, a site that has a good (and long) list of ways in which GD can manifest. Interestingly, different people tend to experience different combinations of them: there are a bunch of things that *can* provoke the sort of reaction that implies they'd be more comfortable as the opposite sex, but none of them are 100% guaranteed to resonate with any particular trans person. They're just all correlated.
Kinda like how there are a bunch of observable physiological differences that *can* occur in people with some sort of gender non-conformity, but none of them are 100% guaranteed. Suspiciously like that, in fact.
So, here's a less simplified model. It may or may not be The Truth, but it lines up with my experience and research better than the singular "gender identity" model while explaining all the same things:
Many parts of the body develop differently in the presence vs. absence of testosterone before birth.
They all develop at different times during gestation, which normally doesn't matter, because the prenatal hormonal environment (and the body's response to those hormones) is usually consistent across the relevant time and space: either everything develops "the female way", or everything develops "the male way".
But sometimes it's inconsistent, and different parts develop in different directions.
Some of those parts happen to be in the brain, and the function they normally serve is to influence our psychology in ways that nudge us toward sex-specific behaviors, making us visible, attractive, and attracted to possible mates.
Because human behavior is complex, the way they exert that influence is through emotional cues and rewards that encourage us to learn sex-specific behaviors from other humans, and seek out positive feedback to confirm that we've gotten them right.
Because this is all just our species' particular version of something deep down that evolved a long, long time ago, something that's present in some form in any species with complex sex-specific behaviors... there isn't much we can do about it. Once it develops a certain way, we're stuck with it.
And because this is all happening at a low level, we aren't really conscious of what's happening, and if we try to explain our reaction, what comes to mind may actually be a story we write on the spot based on the things we *are* consciously aware of (just like trying to explain any other emotional reaction!). If seeing a beard in the mirror makes me feel a pang of disappointment, I may explain it as "this goatee looks dumb on me, maybe I should try a new style, but I don't really know what else would look good" when my brain is actually trying to say "that is NOT what I expect to see on an attractive woman's face".
So, "gender identity" is a concept representing what we get when we take stock of all of these emotional signals that we can consciously connect to gender, and try to decide whether they line up more with "the male way" or "the female way" of development. The explosion of gender identities happens because sometimes the signals are conflicting or unclear, and it's hard to make a call either way, but people still want to call it something. And gender identity can change over time as we get in new situations and experience new signals, or as we recognize the meaning of signals we've already experienced.
(This might get me tarred as a transmedicalist, I guess, but I'm throwing caution to the wind today!)
OK, here's the fundamental thing I think you're missing about the distinction between stereotypes and gender identity.
Gender identity is about which group you see yourself as part of, or aspire to be part of.
The role that gender stereotypes play, at least the one that's relevant here, is essentially that of branding, or uniforms: a way to advertise which group you belong to, and guess which groups others belong to.
We all know that some things (behaviors, interests, mannerisms, styles of dress, etc.) are associated with men and others are associated with women. Regardless of whether those associations are based in biology or totally arbitrary, or indeed whether we find them acceptable or regrettable, the fact that we're all aware of them makes them useful signals.
Humans have the same evolutionary need to distinguish between the sexes as any other sexual species. We also have sex-specific behaviors that are too complex to be instinctual, and in our evolution we've stumbled on the solution of psychological drives that motivate us to learn the "right" set of behaviors from those around us, make ourselves identifiable as members of the "right" group, and seek confirmation that we've done it.
This, perhaps not coincidentally, is similar to how we experience other types of group affiliation. The difference is that for gender, the group affiliation is at least partly innate rather than learned, and the "branding" is at least partly made up of biological traits.
"""The point here is that preferences about one’s body (either aesthetic or functional) exist without a reliance on paradigm shifts of one’s “internal sense of self”. If someone wants to, for example, bulk up and build muscle, they can just do it; it’s nonsensical to say they first need to “identify” as their chosen aspiration before any changes can occur."""
Indeed. And doing that is more common than one might assume from the popular narratives about gender identity. For example, everyone I've shown this article to has found it relatable: https://medium.com/@kemenatan/gender-desire-vs-gender-identity-a334cb4eeec5
"""The perennial challenge for this camp remains the logical impossibility of harmonizing the twin snakes of “trans people don’t owe you passing” and “trans people will literally kill themselves if they don’t pass”."""
Can't say I've ever heard anyone say the second part in quite those terms, but assuming it's an exaggerated version of something like "we shouldn't get in the way of trans people doing what they need to do to pass", I guess I don't see why harmonizing them strikes you as difficult, much less impossible.
Passing isn't a binary yes/no question, a fixed finish line you can cross and then be done with. It's a question of how often, to whom, and to what degree, and everyone has their own sense of how much it matters to them. "Trans people don't owe you passing" is an acknowledgement that not every trans person will be able to pass 100% undetectably in your view -- and a reminder that encountering someone who's having a bad day, or who was dealt a bad hand, or who just doesn't mind if you know they're trans, isn't a license to be rude.
"""Dr. Ehrensaft literally said that a baby throwing out a barrette is a “gender signal” the baby might not really be a girl"""
Stripped of context, yes, that'd be an absurd statement. But she was talking about a specific individual who did grow up to be trans, and citing that moment as an example of preverbal communication about gender. Isn't there a reasonable chance that that's what it was?
You're right that babies do dumb shit for all kinds of reasons, and we can't know why they did any particular thing when we see it happen once. But no one's making clinical decisions about gender based on that kind of dumb shit; there are no such decisions to make at that age. So what really puzzles me about that clip is: why does it even matter? Who cares what 1-2 year olds have to say about their gender? They can speak for themselves when they can speak for themselves.
"""The only possible explanation for this unrelenting dedication is to maintain access to what Dembroff refers to as “the robust associations welded to that particular gender classification.” Stereotypes, in other words. It’s also the only explanation for why the circular definition “a woman is someone who identifies as a woman” garners so much intense attachment despite its emptiness. It maintains the ability to hint-hint-wink-wink toward gender stereotypes without having to say so out loud."""
To claim that winking at stereotypes is the "only possible explanation" is to deny that social group identity, in and of itself, could possibly matter to anyone. But clearly it does.
The idea of caring about which group someone is part of, separate from any of the visible aspects of what it means to be part of that group, isn't especially unusual. Sports teams can change their colors, change their names, move between cities, trade players, and still keep their fans and rivals. Corporations can rebrand, rename, pivot, turn over staff and leadership, and still maintain a continuous identity. Even companies in the army that wear the same uniform, go through the same training, follow the same orders, and are otherwise indistinguishable to outsiders can develop an identity and inspire loyalty.
The thing that's surprising about gender, in this sense, is just that our "loyalty" to a gender is at least partly innate rather than learned. I could believe that seems far-fetched to most cis people. But the evolutionary need for such a thing is clear enough, and there are plenty of first-hand reports from people who say that's what they experience.
It seems unreasonable to dismiss all of that and assert that the "stereotypes" are secretly what everyone really cares about... especially since for a lot of trans people, the cultural/behavioral stuff is all secondary to the physiological stuff anyway.
I feel like there's a general pattern going on with LGBTQ issues (and perhaps all progressive causes) that bugs the heck of out me, which is more or less: "There's a problem X; there's a rational response Y that would solve the problem, but there's also a far more radical response Z that will also solve the problem, and somehow Z has become enshrined as the solution you must support if you don't want to be labeled a garbage person by Twitter mobs". Examples:
Problem: many heterosexuals are verbally or physically abusive towards homosexuals because they see homosexuality as deviant, unnatural behavior.
Rational solution: teach people it's not cool to verbally or physically abuse people because you don't like them. (Note that this is a universally applicable rule that covers all kinds of use cases other than homophobia, as valuable as gold. A "Golden Rule", if you will.)
Radical solution: embark upon a massive project of societal reprogramming via official government messaging, public education, news media and popular entertainment to convince everybody to think that homosexuality (a sexual behavior practiced by perhaps a tenth of the population and that does not lead to procreation) is just as "normal" and "natural" as heterosexuality, and that to suggest otherwise is violence.
Problem: some people have hobbies, interests, and behaviors that don't conform with the traditional gender expectations associated with their biological sex, and they are sometimes made to feel bad about that, or are abused and bullied by their family and/or peers.
Rational solution: teach people it's not cool to verbally or physically abuse people because they're not into the things you expect them to be into based on what genitalia they have.
Radical solution: embark on a massive project of societal reprogramming via (the Cathedral) to convince everybody that gender has nothing to do with biological sex and that it's simultaneously super important to respect and uphold transpeople's gender identities, and also gender is socially constructed and we should stop having any kind of gender expectations whatsoever.
My very religious and conservative friend is amused that trans activists, who he assumes are all completely atheist or agnostic, seem to have reinvented the concept of the soul, in asserting that gender identity is completely separate from the physical body.
Maybe I'm lucky. When I (a male) was in junior high I got into doing cross-stitch one winter because I was bored and needed something to do and was curious about how to do something that my mom did. Maybe I'd feel more of a need to embrace radical gender politics if my dad (or mom) had flown off the handle and made me feel bad for wanting to do a girly thing instead of wanting to do a boy thing.
The way to square the circle here is that gender stereotypes are true, have always been true, etc. Trans people are a nice additional proof of this but not really necessary. Of course it is weird that many left leaning people believe both contradictory things but you can paper over a lot of doublethink if you control the entire media and all major institutions of knowledge. Google Rebecca Tuvel if you want an example of it in action.
"Matt Osborne wrote a devastating piece about her very long history of dangerous quackery."
Citing this made me think less of you. In addition to the source being openly biased, they only "quote" her a handful of words at a time (at most - often just one or two!), and I had to put "quote" in quotes, because they don't even cite where she said those things!
Invalid evidence doesn't invalidate the point, but you should be able to find a valid source discrediting her, if she's genuinely this bad.
Know plenty of women my age (younger millennials) who identify as non-binary or even ‘demi-girl’ (come on, you’re 32) who are on a spectrum of autism and/or ADD. I guess it’s one way to deal with your problems but I doubt it’s the best way. Just makes me sad, really.
Don’t think there’s all of it, though; zoomers just seem to be grossed-out by sex altogether and I’m pretty sure some of them adopt these sorts of identities to pretect them from the evil eye of being perceived as sexual beings