[Alex's unpopular opinions] Defining the (terms of the) discourse: "socialised as female"

[kaberett]

(Cis friends, by all means ask me questions to clarify, but maybe consider sitting out of actually having an opinion in comments on this one. Anon comments are permitted but will be screened; I expect to unscreen unless otherwise requested.)

Here's the thing: I am absolutely done with permitting trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) to set the terms of the conversation. I am done with ceding ground to them. I am done with accepting their framings.

I will take and I will keep and I will own that I have been socialised as female. This is the flag I bring to the battle of my days.

Because here's the thing: socialised as has absolutely nothing to do with what I am; like privilege, it's about perceptions, and how people treat me. It is, absolutely and unequivocally, an externality, a thing that was done to me, not a reflection of my self and my interior, and - much like abuse - not something that I could possibly have meaningfully influenced from the inside out. That people abused me says nothing about who and what I am; that people treated me as female, similarly.

But it is a simple statement of fact that adults treat children differently depending on whether they are perceived as male or female (because the concept of other options has not, by and large, made it to the mainstream of the cultural context in which I am working), and it is a simple statement of fact that this has a measurable effect on how children - in aggregate - perceive themselves. This is how stereotype threat works. It is why, in aggregate, in my cultural context, children perceived and consequently treated as female consider themselves worse at mathematics. It is why children perceived as female ask fewer questions (up to undergraduate level!), and apologise more for speaking.

I need to have a language, a framework, in which to discuss being sexually harassed in maths lessons, by boys who perceived me as female. I need to have a framework that acknowledges that my apologising for speaking, my being taught to be silent, forms a pattern. I need the acknowledgement that children perceived as female are massively underdiagnosed when it comes to autism. I need all of this, and I need language to speak about it, and I need to be able to acknowledge the effects of the ways external agents treated me, without people telling me that the terminology we have to describe this experience - "socialised as female" - contains any deep truth about myself, means that I'm really a woman. It is entirely apparent that I am not.

"I was socialised as female" places agency in exactly the same hands as "I was abused". Both are statements of how other people treated me; both are routinely framed in a way that (unhelpfully) obscures the existence of external actors. How individuals interpret or react to similar treatment varies enormously: there are people who were subjected to the same shit I've survived who don't have PTSD. That doesn't mean that how they were treated was right; it doesn't mean that either of us is reacting wrong; but the belief that I'm female because I was treated in the way that children-perceived-as-female are treated is as misplaced, as wrong, as the idea that I deserved abuse because I was abused.

TERFs want you to believe otherwise. TERFs want you to believe that "socialised as female" is an integral part of womanhood; they want you to believe that there is a single unitary experience of childhood-while-perceived-as-female, and they want you to believe that anyone who didn't have it isn't a woman (and that anyone who did is).

They're wrong, on every single count, not least in that childhood socialisation is inherently, unavoidably intersectional: there is no such thing as a universal experience, and, again, how adults chose to treat me says nothing about who I am; and the way I respond to particular treatment are self-evidently not universal responses. Nonetheless, in aggregate and statistically, how adults treat children varies by gender (and a whole host of other factors), and how children in aggregate behave is shaped by how they are treated.

I refuse to let TERFs take this terminology away from me. Their attempts to co-opt this language are completely inconsistent with the rest of the theoretical framework in which we discuss privilege and oppression and misogyny and toxic masculinity; their attempts to poison the discourse through deliberate misapplication and misrepresentation of theory do not render the theory itself incorrect.

They do not get to silence me.

Comments

[commodorified]

Question for clarity: in terms of deciding which term to use in a given conversation, how would you distinguish between "socialised as female" and "assigned female until age X" and "assigned female at birth"?

[kaberett]

Depends what I'm talking about? I haven't ever used the "assigned female until age X" construction and can't think of circumstances under which I would; if I'm talking about behavioural expectations and pressures I'll usually use socialised-as, if I'm talking about medical or legal bullshit and it's relevant I'll usually use assigned.

[onyxlynx]

Sing it!!!

[jelazakazone]

I am wondering if this is why *trans* is so important to people as a label for themselves.

Also, TERFS can go suck it. I don't understand the TERF perspective at all.

[commodorified]

One of the problems, as in Technical Difficulties as opposed to Cis People Problems, I actually have is that I understand the TERFs just well enough to know they're horribly wrong and I should avoid them, which sometimes means that I end up absorbing their teminology at second- or third- hand without catching the fucked-up connotations.

Like, in this case, assuming that "socialised X" was a nice, useful, neutral term that could be used interchangably with "assigned X" without qualifiers or disclaimers.

So I'm very grateful to have it clarified so that I'll understand and respond to transfolk better in conversation.

[hairyears]

Worry less, or not at all, about not understanding the terf perspective. It's not a 'perspective' - a construct of geometry, logic and art permitting objects and spaces to be seen as if from another point of view - it's a belief system.

By our analogy with perspective, it's a construct of blinkers, coloured lenses, and freehand lines drawn with little reference to what is seen, or none.

Belief systems *can* be built on facts and logical principles: but most are not, and many cannot be understood - and, most especially, the oppressive and damaging ones cannot be 'understood' - except in the sense of identifying pathological behaviours, recognising patterns of interaction within dysfunctional communities, and an analytical approach to their logic which recognises that the worst belief systems distort facts, logic and ethical principles to fit themselves.

So your tools of understanding are probably going to fall short: some of what you're seeing seems to make no sense *because there is no sense in it to see*, in any sense except moral, pychiatric and social pathology.

The one tool of understanding that I hope that you can keep, even with terfs, is compassion. Participants in that system are in a terrible place to be.

But I hardly need to say that the resources you can bring to bear with compassion are not infinite, and are best deployed with due regard and first regard to protecting those the terfs would seek to damage, yourself included.

[highlyeccentric]

Oh. I am very glad to see this framed by someone not-cis, because i had thoughts in that direction but it's not my job to tie this together.

TERFs want you to believe otherwise. TERFs want you to believe that "socialised as female" is an integral part of womanhood; they want you to believe that there is a single unitary experience of childhood-while-perceived-as-female, and they want you to believe that anyone who didn't have it isn't a woman (and that anyone who did is).

Was it Ozy who posited that some people don't really *have* an sense of their own gender as a, a strong thing?

[kaberett]

It's certainly a thing a lot of people have posited; I'm not pulling any particular instances to mind immediately but would happily read (or go digging)...

[davidgillon]

Is 'Go you!' an opinion? :) Very informative post.

[kaberett]

In an ideal world I might have linked more shit and made it a generaly more 101-accessible argument, but in an ideal world I wouldn't still have been fuming after going away from the internet for an hour and washing up and making dinner, soooo. ;)

[hilarita]

YES.

Extra yes for the autism.

And even more yes for rejecting TERF notions of shared womanhood. Fuck that shit. It's taking the understanding of childhood socialisation, and locking it into a 'biology is destiny'-type framework (which has horrible kinship with eugenics) with no way out. Which is clearly extrapolating way beyond the evidence, in order to reflect their worldview.

Keep shouting.

[kaberett]

THEIR BIOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM IS ALL-PERVASIVE AND IT IS BULLSHIT

[alexseanchai]

TERFs also don't like discussing how, even when discussing cis women exclusively, race and sexuality and disability and class and all that play in to the ~*girlhood experience*~. Gag.

[kaberett]

Yeah, pretty much? Which is why some of the epic FUCK THAT -- their feminism is not intersectional and is therefore bullshit, and their pushing for a narrative of universal womanhood demonstrates that everything they say is inherently, fundamentally unsalvageably flawed. I don't understand why the take-home from this particular argument is ever anything but "they will twist and misrepresent everything they can, and the best way to play this particular game is to refuse to meet them on their own terms".

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

Question for clarity: what does "who I am" mean to you? You seem to hold this as a concept independent of how you were socialised, and I can't make any intuitive sense of that. It feels to me as though (whether I like it or not) the upbringing I got forms an essential, inalienable part of who I am. But you feel differently?

[kaberett]

I'm here using "who I am" to refer specifically to my gender & experiences of genderedness; how I was socialised did have pretty big impacts on me in terms of self-confidence with respect to STEM, working out how to navigate social situations, working out how to handle autism etc; but for these purposes I'm treating gender as to-first-approximation intrinsic and not under conscious control or meaningfully subject to external influence, because for me (like sexuality) that's how it works. (There's a whole bunch of issues with born-this-way etc as justification, as in oh-well-if-the-poor-dears-can't-HELP-it; I'll expand on that if helpful but I think it's a bit of a sidetrack.)

-- whereas being socialised-as-female is by definition external influence. So really I'm here using "who I am" to refer (insofar as the distinction can be made, but it's a model I'm finding useful at the moment) to internal experience of self (as distinct from how those internal wossnames get expressed/externalised) in this instance, though you are perfectly correct that that is not general usage and is not even my general usage!

[elf]

Cis female here, who could never figure out why anyone else's sex or gender was my business, other than needing pronouns.

Are there TERFs who claim that "socialized as [gender]" is definitive for adult identity? I thought they were all tangled up in genitalia being definitive, or maybe chromosomes; do they have a fallback point of "socialized as" when those fall apart?

Seems like there's some gaping holes in their syllogisms somewhere.

[kaberett]

You have indeed understood the fundamental failing of TERFism, yes. I am not exaggerating.

(Personally I am all for having a much wider range of gender-specific pronouns, in addition to pronouns for "gender unknown" and "gender irrelevant", but those'll be a while coming ALAS.)

poke me if i'm overstepping?

[highlyeccentric]

A thought that does not actually constitute an opinion: I wonder if one difference between your perspective and the TERF-ist is based on *who the mental model of trans ppl is*? I know various trans men and nbies whose raised-as-a-girlness is important to their experience of the world (eg: confidence in STEM). But when a TERF is talking about socialisation she is talking about ~socialised as male~, almost exclusively. And the arguments against socialisation as useful that I've seen, a lot of them come from trans women, who point out that while being nominally treated as men they were being policed and shamed for femininity and absorbing a whole truckload of shit about women (eg: women must be feminine, an idea you can pick up while being a bb!transgirl and then have trouble assimilating into your own gender identity if you turn out to be kinda butch).

Common factor here: misogyny.

Re: poke me if i'm overstepping?

[kaberett]

Right, but they then use "you weren't socialised as female" to erase people's gender and that's still a bullshit argument on every single level that causes me direct harm, too -- and trans discourse that then shuns ever discussing the "socialised as" model leaves me without any sensible way to talk about what I did experience. And, you know, some of those experiences included a lot a lot a lot of incredibly toxic stuff about masculinity and maleness; sure there's the gradient of misogyny but choosing to erase the fact that I & people like me have been explicitly and directly targeted by it (in addition to osmosing all the general shit that absolutely everyone picks up) doesn't... actually help anyone?

Like. I've got a bunch of trans dude friends who've been really massively fucked up by misogyny, in that they are in fact extremely femme in gender expression -- and they have been targets of femme-phobic aggression and violence, too, in addition to having a whole pile of shit about how they clearly couldn't really be dudes if etc etc etc. I just... am really massively uncomfortable about the way this particular conversation goes, in general.

[boxofdelights]

the belief that I'm female because I was treated in the way that children-perceived-as-female are treated is as misplaced, as wrong, as the idea that I deserved abuse because I was abused.

That is clarifying. Thank you!

[ixt]

Thank you for saying things I have been unable to put into words even in my own head!

This makes me think about me and one of my best friends - we grew up together, but she was socialised as male and is now a girl, I was socialised as female and am now sort of undecided and all over the gender identity spectrum. We've both noticed how hard it is for parts of our families not to act like my friend was a boy right up until the moment she asked them to use different pronouns, and they still feel that since I was socialised as female, I am somehow more a part of some "great sisterhood" than she is.

I will not automatically feel included among women just because people around me thought that my given name and I both looked female. Why can't people realise that it's more complicated? There won't ever be one Brotherhood and one Sisterhood, there are only lots of subgroups, like "people with these body parts" or "people who identify as this" or "people who others think are like this", all very useful for different things without having to sort people into this or that half of humankind.

[kaberett]

yeeeeep.

TW: religious abuse

[meneltarma]

Keep trying to come up with a "yes this" strong enough for this post, and keep circling the drain about the way that my childhood gender socialization was abusive, which I think is probably not true for a lot of people but is very true for me. I mean, my assigned gender was a weapon used against me and framing socialization as a thing which happens to you like abuse does is huge for me and really validating so: thank you for that.

I say sometimes "I had Stockholm syndrome about my assigned gender until I got away from the people enforcing it on me" and I mean: it was used to hurt me, at every turn, on a religious level and a relational one, and to survive what seemed like a biological inevitability (harm, sometimes physical, came to me when I failed to perform "my" gender correctly but there were no other options) I attempted to identify with it and love it when those performances were so hurtful to me.

I was socialized that way to believe passive acceptance of things that will hurt me is heroic. It doesn't say anything about me except a past experience that shapes me the same way the non gender-specific parts of my abuse have shaped me; I am afraid of things my brothers are not afraid of but my experience of childhood was slightly different from theirs -- but we share collective traumas that are unique to our family and the religious upbringing we had. I hold myself up to impossible, rigid standards of perfection around things like cooking, and cleanliness, and emotional labor, that other men don't expected to be responsible for. I feel responsible for other people in a way unique to the Evangelical Christian experience of my childhood. This socialization is not "a true thing about me" -- if I had been raised in my wife's family instead of mine, I would have different triggers, tics, traumas, sneaky needly beliefs about what I "should" do with my life and what constitutes success and failure. I am not a collection of my traumas, and the things my traumas make me do and think and feel are not who I "really am".

My wife says not all gender socialization is abusive (I don't know. I genuinely don't know) but very little about my early life wasn't, and even the things people did trying to care for me were along the lines of "this will make being your assigned gender easier" and the construction of binary gender in Evangelical Christianity as it was enforced upon me and my brothers is inherently textbook abusive, based around confining and restraining people into rigid roles that prevent healthy development of self and boundaries, and enforced with violence, even if you are a cis person. If assigned gender socialization can not be coercive, to be honest, I haven't seen it.

Re: TW: religious abuse

[kaberett]

I am honoured you felt safe to talk about this. Thank you.

I... pretty much think gendered socialisation is by definition coercive, yes; I haven't... got much far beyond that.

[403]

TERFs want you to believe that "socialised as female" is an integral part of womanhood; they want you to believe that there is a single unitary experience of childhood-while-perceived-as-female, and they want you to believe that anyone who didn't have it isn't a woman (and that anyone who did is).

Those criteria equally deny womanhood to cis-women who were feral children (see post-1980 list), which is also bullshit.

[kaberett]

Oh good shout, thank you for the link.

[pipisafoat]

Socialized as female is why I am afraid to walk alone, at night, anywhere, anytime: socialized as female has given me a lot of anxiety that is largely irrational. I am not consistently read as female, especially if I'm not talking. I know how to carry myself to project "I am strong and capable and not the easy target you are looking for." I also don't tend to wander around at night, anyway, because I'd rather be online haha. (I have some reason to be more afraid than others, given my small size and physical & health issues, but I do know some self-defense skills and carry a knife that will only see action in self-defense, sharpening pencils, or cutting food on picnics.) I should not look at darkness and wonder if I should call the police to walk me across campus to my dorm. I should not look at an empty parking lot and decide to wait in a building until a friend comes to walk with me across that lot. And yet, that's what my socialization taught me: you are weak and a target and there is nothing you can do that will ever change that; you must have a trusted male friend to walk you places to escape harm; you can not trust any males because they will attack you without provocation. NONE of that is true. None of it. Not a single word. But that's what I still hear. And you know what? That particular instance is something that is NOT related to my gender. Being other-than-female with this socialization does not make the socialization untrue; the socialization remains untrue for females as well. And that pisses me off more than anything. Stop telling children what they can and can't do as adults, that they can't trust whole groups of people, that they need to live in fear of others their entire life. STOP DOING THAT. THIS IS WHAT DIVIDES US AND RUINS US.

Socialized as a middle-class white person who lived very close to predominantly-black poorer neighborhoods, I was also taught that only people of my same ethnicity can be trusted not to attack or harass me. This was easier to lose because of my mother's complete acceptance of all races and ethnicities as equally human, thankfully, and in fact, I'd like to say that my best male friend is black and has stepped up and stood up with me against white men harassing or threatening me. (As I have done the same for him when they'd go after him. Reciprocal friendship.) This is proof that the way I was socialized taught me incorrectly and did not prepare me for the reality of the world.

I see parallels in the two socializations there. One was broken when I was still young, though tendrils of it remain despite my best efforts. The other I am still hammering at as hard as I can, but it persists today because I was told, implicitly and explicitly, day after day for my entire life including now, that there is no other way the world can exist than man attacks woman, black attacks white, white woman is the most likely to experience attacks and harassment. Statistics I believe say otherwise, but socialization doesn't care about numbers. It cares about fear and control.

[flippac]

Being socialised arounds males was enough to make me pretty damn jumpy in later life. By which I mean, I know the kind of too much about self-defence that means long nights up being horrified at what I'm capable of as well. I can't wear anything I can't fight in: I'm sure I don't need to tell you how that interacts with women's fashion!

No run-ins that turned into actual violence so far. Long may it remain that way.

[vass]

I've managed to steer clear of TERFs enough that I've only heard the pushback against that point of view from trans women and allies, without the original context. And it was confusing me and kind of getting to me, so thank you for helping to clarify where they're coming from.

[kaberett]

Oh, it is good to know I presented the position I'm arguing against sufficiently well that it's comprehensible. Because that's the thing, I really do get where people are coming from in making that set of assertions, I just also think they're wrong.

[sfred]

Yes.
Thank you for writing this.

[kaberett]

You're welcome. x

[ofearthandstars]

I really want to just emphatically fist-pump and scream, "YES, THIS!"

Am cis-gendered but not particularly tethered to my gender/do not strongly identify with it. In some ways I was socialized as female and in others my parents were more progressive and so I wasn't pushed to adopt feminine characteristics. The idea that there is a standard "socialized as female" experience is bullshit, like all arguments put forth by TERFS.

[naath]

TERFS are a whole sack of wrong, one of the ways that they are wrong is that I, although I was assigned female at birth and continue to ID as basically female-ish most of the time wasn't really "socialised female" in many of the ways that they drone on about. I had a sort of weird childhood maybe? but it isn't the one the TERFs imagine when they say "socialised female".

I do see how it could be very useful to be able to have a space for people who were "socialised female" and told things like "you can't do maths because you are a GIRL" and "shut up and listen while important ME are talking" could talk about how that was shitty without regard to their gender (or indeed why parts of it might be good), and thus useful to have words to talk about it with. And TERFs stealing the words and putting them to nasty use is mean of them.

[forthwritten]

Your thoughts are interesting *chinhands*

I think it is important to be able to talk about gender socialisation, even while destroying the concept of a "shared girlhood". While my socialisation was not a typical one for either binary gender, it's still left traces - "you have to be twice as brilliant to be seen as half as good", the fact I consciously have to think about how I take up and manage space rather than doing so as easily as breathing, the fact I refuse to wear headphones or be on the phone when I'm walking by myself late at night, the fact I'm very, very aware of my personal space and am wary of people getting in it.

[ex_we935]

This is a really good post. You can be 'socialised' as a lot of things, but not be one of those things, because internal self-perception and -definition take precedence against externalised definitions in this case. There aren't universal experiences of femaleness, or of maleness, or of genderlessness or genderfluidity or any other gender identity. I think misogyny directed towards people who are perceived as female should be called out for how horrible it is but that doesn't mean people who have experienced that prejudice are essentially female.

~K.