Dyssonance

The following was originally intended for publication at Bilerico.  It’s not been spell checked or proofread or anything, but it was something that I needed to write in order to get on with the series I’ve started over there.

The source is the nature of some of the commentary an the underlying subtextual thoughts that are found there among many commenters of recent posts over there, both within my own columns and those of others.

There is a greater dynamic going on that I’;m finding fascinating to watch, and its caused me some trouble as I’m torn between watching the dynamic play out and actually being involved.

Nevertheless, I’ve committed to this series, and while I find the comments of some to be just this side of incredibly sexist and outrageously transphobic,  they are at least helping me to see how to refocus parts of the series as I move forward.

And so, without further ado, I shall gripe and prelude.

I apologize to the many people who have said they couldn’t wait for the rest of this series to start again – the holidays have been a time of rest for me, and recent columns have affected much of what I want to explore in this next section – so it just got a little longer.

Before I begin, I’d like to point out that I am indeed dyssonance, and I am doing this for a reason.  If you don’t like it, you are free to not read it. I’m not here to force you to educate yourself or even to agree with me.  I’m not known for being a kind sort, either, and my tolerance for logical fallacies at this point is nil. Keep that in mind, as I’m in a rather foul mood as I start this for the third time.

So let’s do a review and a bit of rebuttal this time, then get down in the next column to brass tacks.

Previously, I’ve discussed a basic set of concepts.

What is Trans, where I explored the particulars of the manner in which trans folk can be classified.  In that, I took what is the one thing trans folk hold in common and then noted how the various types of trans folk differ from each other in brief.

I could, of course, taken the time to break it down further, to show how the various types I note within the categories all interrelate – their differences and their commonalities. I didn’t for a simple reason: that wasn’t the point. The point was to give a brief reference of some fairly basic variances in the Trans community, and to show what it was that tied them together.

So from the very simple thing that ties all those diverse groups together, you get Trans.  As I’ve pointed out, this is not an umbrella term.  Unless, of course, you consider human to be an umbrella term,  or perhaps Citrus, or maybe Stone Fruit.  If, as an individual, you consider things like Human, Citrus, or Stone Fruit to be umbrella terms, well, you have a problem, and it is not one I share with you.

Within Trans, there are umbrella terms – I provided a general listing of them. Transsexual, for example, is an umbrella term. Transgender is an umbrella term. Each of them cover a wide range of persons who have something more specific than the Trans classification in common.

I’m fairly certain that people will find that all rather annoying, yet that doesn’t erase the basic truths to my points.

After that, I did an examination of What is Sex, meaning the physiological foundations of how we determine what is male and what is female.  The purpose of that post was to make it clear that doing so on the basis of any single factor is always going to be inaccurate – regardless of dealing with trans people or not. The material is derived from current understandings (and even provides a decade old discussion of the subject as a link) and is not something that’s uncommon.  In the field of sex typing, its critical and important stuff, and when it comes to trans folk and dealing with them, it retains that importance.  Both for trans folk and for others, since it affects the way people perceive the value of certain laws (such as marriage laws that limit it to between a male and a female).

Understanding that is important, but only as a part of the whole.  In that article, I reintroduced to this audience the concept of Sex Identity, which has been around for 60 years at least but doesn’t get the exposure that Gender Identity does.  I also describe how sex identity differs from gender identity, and how the two have been often conflated in colloquial (that is, everyday stuff, like here at Bilerico) conversation and use.

Following that, I discussed Gender as a whole, pointing out that Gender is not a singularity, not a solid single thing but rather a collection of aspects and elements. Gender can be used to refer to any of them, and often is, but each is slightly different in the way it affects the way an individual is perceived.

In those two, I pointed out rather clearly that sex is physiological, and gender is social.  In response among them, it was brought up that there were aspects of Butler’s theories put into play which “weren’t proven”.

I’m going to take a moment to point out a certain timeline so that people can see some stuff.  First off, it was the early 1950’s that Gender Identity and Sex Identity were coming into general use as terms. 60 years ago, basically. They are given “official” coinage dates in that period, and they had been used informally prior to that.

One of the points that Butler makes is that gender is social. In her case, she also meant that some aspects of what we call Sex Identity as well as Gender Identity were part of Gender, and created entirely by social forces.

As I pointed out, we know this is not the case, as in the last 60 years, there were two basic theories that derived from the nature versus nurture argument. One side held that gender (how we are seen by others) is taught to us as a performative action (Butler’s Gender Trouble). That is, because there are social expectations of conformity involved, we are taught how to be a little girl or a little boy.

The other side said that this wasn’t the case – that at least some part of it was not socially trained.

Butler wrote her book in the early 1990’s. Roughly 20 years ago. When she did, she used the best information she could find at the time.  At that time, 20 years ago, it was held that gender was taught.  Despite a large array of studies indicating otherwise, one study had more “authority” because it had a control, and was more scientifically sound as a result.

At the time she wrote her work, the idea that gender is taught was having a hard time, as there was that entire weight of things, and certain commonalities that come from other fields of science that it could not account for.  She was fairly aware of this, as she was coming at it from a direction that was informed by those understandings.

And that wasn’t the focus of her work – like I did, she was attempting to explain how gender operate in society and how we, as individuals dealt with it as members of that society.

An she did a damn good job of it.

In the late 1990’s – right at the cusp of the millennia, in fact – everything changed.

This is within living memory for most of the readership here.

It was a decade ago that we discovered that gender was not taught.  More precisely, it could be taught, but that did not actually change the way the individual so taught perceives themselves.  In short, it did not affect their gender identity or their sex identity.  That remained fixed.

This forced a re-examination of decades of alternative research which showed things were, indeed, fixed, and even established when (3 to 5 years of age), and that it was not affected by infantile rearing (that is, you can’t change it simply by rearing them a certain way before it fixes).

Over the next ten years, that everything change bit is what influences me, as it was in the last ten years that we’ve located the physiological location of sex and gender identity, have returned the idea of sex identity to active use, and have more or less settled the nature or nurture argument by establishing that some of it is nature, and some of it is nurture.

All of which I point out in order to show that if Butler was so damn wrong, then why did her stuff continue to hold up even under the massive change in understanding that happened?

I will also note that everything changed, but with a price; it cost the lives of two men, who found everything they knew or had thought they knew to be false, destroyed three families, and leaves, even to this day, scars among children who are just coming to adulthood now. None of that due to bias against trans people.

So, having taken the time to deal with Gender, I then turned to something called situational membership, where I described how it is that a trans person can be gay or a gay person trans or any of several different possibilities.

A lot of people failed to grasp that, and some, in particular, took it as an affront that they could ever even possibly be grouped into a set that they did not feel they belonged in.

Which ignores a fairly basic fact: you do not get to choose how you are grouped by others.

That cognitive dissonance on their part is not alleviated in this next, longer chapter.  Indeed, if you truly believe that you have a say over how others group you, then this chapter, in particular, will really set you off.

You see, you do not have a choice. You have an influence over them, but it is, in the end, not your choice, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Except, of course, isolate yourself and completely go off into your own little world. Some people do that, and I want to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with doing so.  There is also nothing wrong with the fact you do not get to choose how others group you.

Nor is there anything wrong with your not liking how others group you.

In the four points thus far, the only moral judgments (rightness or wrongness) I’m making are that people often need to learn more in order to be able to speak to trans issues more clearly.  Trans folk have an advantage in that they often have internalized much of this, and know it from personal experience that is then supplemented by research.

That experience is narrow, however, and usually flawed.  If I went solely off of my own experience in this series, then what I would write would likely be far more angering that Ron Gold’s post last month. My sole and personal experience has not been particularly positive, and given my background as an advisor to the Republican Party, it’s often much easier for me to just look at some of the stuff that we, collectively, are fighting and say “gee, I was right there, when I was a bigot.”.

Fortunately, I do not take the easy way in pretty much anything.

Because Trans folk often have that narrow and wholly anecdotal experience, they will overlook things that are inconvenient to them, and sometimes even speak out loudly against some stuff.

This is why we have trans people getting into fights here in the comments. Ultimately, all sides have a point, no side is entirely wrong, and all sides make all sorts rude and inflammatory comments because the issue is of great personal importance to them and their world view.

None of which I really give a damn about when writing these columns.

I usually do in my comments, but in my columns themselves, I don’t. I cannot afford to, since I am attempting to do something free of all of that.  The information I am presenting is not stuff that is just coming out of my hind end fully formed, regardless of how some commenters have tried to paint it.

This is not merely me speaking.  This is the sum total of what I see, professionally, as the overall understanding in the current reality of things. It does not matter if someone happens to disagree with Gender Expression being performative. That is an established fact.  If someone wants to argue with it, then they need to find a way to prove an alternative hypothesis, in accordance with the scientific method and sound logic.

Thus far, no one has. And not for a lack of trying. Indeed, in Butler’s later works, she took apart some of her own earlier arguments and presented not only a better hypothesis, but one that replace logically her earlier one.

Pretty privileged of me, isn’t it?  To ask for sound arguments instead of the same old tired “but that’s not me” when, in fact, it is. Well, tough.

In the next few parts of this column, I will examine the dynamics, however, that create that idea of “but I’m not one of them”.

I will go into set theory’s use in sociology, social networking theory, group dynamics, identity politics, social description, gestalt formation, and a couple other things related to all of that.

Fun words, aren’t they? Dry and boring and it feels like being in a class room. Well, I’ll do my best to make them interesting, and will keep them all within the usual 2000 word limit I’ve self imposed and stepped away from with this one.

Let me sum this whole series up in a nutshell:  it doesn’t matter what you identify as. L, G, B, and T, and all the varieties in each and all the additional letters that one might want to add on in any order, are all, in the end, the same thing, because the collective will of the society we live in holds that we are such.

Your personal identity has value when you use it politically as part of a toolset of achieving a cultural change that enables us all to live as citizens equally and equitably. To do that you must be part of a group, and that group must be large enough for a gestalt to happen.

Even then, you will have dissent, and the onus of involvement is on the dissenters – if they do not wish to be part of something, then they shouldn’t be involved in it.  To any degree.  It still takes two to tango.

So all trans people are gay, and all gay people are trans.

Not a good thought to many, but, again, they don’t have a choice in the matter. Until they can deal with that, and, more specifically, the reasons why that is the case, they will always have problems, both within themselves and with the society at large they are part of.

Lastly…

I am admittedly not the kindest person. I don’t pretend to be kind. I am not a kind of extreme left liberal, I am not out to destroy any sort of gender binary, I do not deconstruct gender.

In fact, for those who don’t know it, I am a former republican who became an independent only because the people who lead the republican party are, at present, bigots and idiots.

For those who don’t know, I will be running for office in 2012, and I start that process this year — something I plan to discuss at length here as I do it. I will talk about pretty much everything that goes into my thoughts in doing that.

When I run, odds are good that I will run as a democrat. But it is not certain.  Since my goal is to win, I will run as whatever I need to run as to do so. Nor will I be running on a platform of LGBT rights. And I will, one day, explain that, as well.

I read the comments here at Bilerico. All the comments.  I don’t always have something to say, but all too often when I do, it’s in response to something someone else has said that is, simply put, stupid.

I am not a moderator. I am not an editor. I am a loose cannon, admittedly so, and part of the reason for it is that I don’t always go with what’s popular.

I go with what is evidenced.

My personal experience is not enough. It is not a measured and calculated weight.  It takes far more than that.

I have, recently, not dealt so much in the differences, but in the commonalities.  And anyone who wants to try and establish how the commonalities I’m pointing out are, in terms of a *group* and not an *individual* had best be able to do so with logic and strong reasoning.

Instead, what I read, in comment after comment, on every single article here, is a lot of lacking logic and unwillingness to educate one’s self.

I see trans people saying that a cis person cannot speak to trans issues.  This is illogical and untrue,. They absolutely can do so. The question is *to what effectiveness* can they do so?

As long as they are educated, they can do it to no end, but the problem is that most of them ae not educated on the subject, and so when they do speak, they do more harm than good. That’s the problem, not that they are speaking for us, but that when they do, they screw it up.

THere are some people who want to say that I’m some form of policing agent, ascribing me powers that I do not have. I am not a policing agent. If I see someone say something that is wrong, I will likely comment on that.

And it doesn’t matter if they are trans or cis or whatever.  Trans folk are not endowed with some great and awesome power of understanding simply because they are trans. That is magical thinking, and it will take you down a road towards some ugly stuff you’d be better served not dealing with.

Trans people need to be educated as well on their situation.  And the reason for it is that they are part of the very society they are struggling to change, and not immune to the vagaries of institutional discrimination.

When I write something, often I see comments that make the logical fallacy of arguing from a general concept to a specific one. Sociology is not based in the individual, it is based in the collective group of them.

Marketing is one of the best examples of sociology in practical applications, and it is amazing how many people say that marketing has no effect on them.  And yet, they have their cell phones, their computers, their broadbrand internet, their brand name goods, their movie stars and their personal quotes.

They have those things because of marketing. And marketers know what they like because the sceince behind it all has shown them that particular groups of people like particular things, and can be counted on to buy them.

Set theory is math. Networking theory is math.  Both, however, are disciplines of sociology. And they work because they have been teste and examined and tried.

When I write, I come from that world view. When I talk about Trans, I am not talking about an individual person.  As an individual, that person may be completely different from others around them in terms of how they see themselves.  Indeed, its somewhat essential to sociology that they do so,.

But when grouped with people, they will either be a part of that set, that group, or they will not.

Being part of one set, or group, does not mean they are not part of another set or group. They may be part of multiple sets — but, in the end, they are always a part of the set or they are not, s9nce what determines that set is the defining parameters of it.

And an individual will is not a collective will.

Democracy allows 2 people to tell 8 people what to do in a set of ten. All that’s required is that the two people agree and the other 8 not agree.

That does not mean the 8 people who do not agree are not part of the set of ten.  They still are, if they meet the requirements of the set. Even if they don’t want to be (which, if they let 2 people have all the power because they are too busy arguing about it is almost certainly the case).

It doesn’t have to be fair.  It just has to be.

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