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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Yep. People have strong feelings about their own journeys and identities. They're welcome to do that. But when they start having strong feelings about other people's journeys and identities, when they feel like that get to decide who isn't and isn't trans based on whatever criteria they particularly feel to be important, then they're gatekeeping.
Those are the truscum and transmeds I want nothing to do with.
No it doesn't. That's just an excuse people use to post hoc validate their gatekeeping.
Gatekeeping as I'm using it in this context is the act of unnecessarily excluding someone from a community or diminishing their attempts to participate*. That's why I think the best definition of most personal identity terms is a permissive one, eg. "anyone who decides to transition is trans". But opening up that definition means we need another way to refer to people who are physically transitioning, because there are meaningful differences in their experiences and needs. ("Physically transitioning" honestly suits this purpose fine IMO.)
But there's nothing wrong with choosing a narrower definition if you don't use that to discriminate or exclude non-physically-transitioning trans people from spaces that could apply to them. It's not a good idea because that message is easily able to be twisted to be exclusionary, but there's nothing inherently gatekeeping about it; the term that would be common use would likely just become the one that refers to all types of trans people. Defining "trans" to be narrower than the wider definition is only wrong because we're attached to the current definition. Which is a very good reason to keep that word defined as the broader group, but again someone who isn't familiar with this would rightly see it as a valid definition.
It's not "opening up" a definition. It is the definition.
No we don't. Not everyone who undergoes medical transition undergoes the same journey. Some folk want surgery, some folk want HRT, some folk want both, some folk want one but not the other. Some folk want to micro dose, some folk want to replicate cis hormone levels.
There is no meaningful catch all term that summarises the needs of all of those folk. Trying to find a single term to capture that spectrum leads to a single narrative of what medical transition looks like, and makes it harder for people to transition on their own terms.
The language we need to talk about these things already exists, and is improving and changing with time. Nothing is gained by returning to the old days of binary terms and all or nothing language.
Yes there is. It's defining folk who medically transition as being a different class of trans folk. We're not a different class. We all of us have unique needs, and the language should focus on those individual needs, whether they're medical, social or other.
This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my original reply. I'm a binary trans woman, who medically transitioned with all of the bells and whistles, and so I get lumped in with people who genuinely believe statements like this.
I actively, loudly and strongly disagree with what you've said here, and I hate that people often assume I share beliefs like that. Defining the term trans to be narrower than it is is gatekeeping, end of story. It denies people the right to their own identity. That is inherently bad. People define for themselves, even in a hypothetical scenario where bad faith actors try and fuck it up
So I agree with the first half pretty well, you make some good points. But:
In general, just because everyone has unique needs/qualities/etc., that doesn't mean that it's not useful to have categories anyways. Although in this case perhaps you're right, the situations are often complicated enough that it would be too reductive. In extending my wider pro-categorization stance to this issue in particular I may have ignored the naturally complex nature of it.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, and you reacted differently enough compared to the rest of what I said that I think you may have misinterpreted my stance here?
And that's why I started this off by saying that it wouldn't be productive to argue for this. Even if I were correct in theory*, nobody who this matters for would ever accept my definition, or any definition, other than the one that they believe to be true. You cannot force someone to accept a label that they don't want, even if there would be benefits to using it. Although given what you said I'm not sure now that there would be benefits anyways.
*as far as that could apply to language, anyways