This is the blog of a historian named Charlotte (she/it/they), known across the Internet as PhD, DSc, MD, PT Discworld. Officially a PhD! (also received a Professor of Thaumology from Unseen University, Ankh Morpork). She has interests in goth music, science, academia, Doctor Who, Discworld, and various other topics. Trans as fuck. GNU Terry Pratchett
I reeeeaaalllyy don’t like how widespread gender realism is in supposedly feminist circles on this website. You are one step away from becoming a radfem.
“Woman” is a socially constructed category and “women” have nothing intrinsic in common, other than viewing themselves as whatever “woman” is defined as in their society, or being judged by the standards of whatever “woman” is defined as in their society. Gender is as “real” of a category as race or neurotype, which is to say, it’s not objectively real at all. It’s an artificial category created on the basis of perceived shared traits among certain people. The people came first, they were grouped into their artificial category later. There are no intrinsic differences between men or women or nonbinary or multigender people.
Do you actually believe gender is a social construct or are you just mindlessly repeating the phrase because it sounds cool
Watching the queer way of interacting with gender go from “Gender is a social construct that can be fun to play with but at heart is a dangerous toy because it has been used for generations to oppress and divide people.” To “Everyone has a perfect crystal of true gender which you must deeply introspect to discover, and you can be wrong about its nature.” Has been a disaster.
its awesome that u now understand gender isn’t binary yay awesome but u do understand its not like trinary either right like it isn’t, man, woman, third option nonbinary. right? like its more complex than that and there are countless ways to experience gender. you get that right? right? and you also understand that sex isn’t binary either, right? please? please tell me you understand that?
To some people acceptance of queer people is contingent on the idea that we were born this way. That our existence must be tolerated because we didn’t choose to be this way.
Others on the other hand can’t accept us for who we are and think that we must have chosen to be this way, and because no one should ever choose to live as queer we must be by definition bad people.
But both of those points of view presuppose the idea that if someone were to choose to live queer it would be bad. Which is something I wholeheartedly reject.
I don’t know if I was always a trans woman. I don’t know if I actually became a trans woman as a sum of all of my lived experiences. It doesn’t matter. Being a trans woman is good. My being a trans woman should not be contingent on me being a victim of circumstance. Being a trans woman is cool as hell.
gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it’s like “this is what women are like” and you’re like “I’ve met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that” and it’s like “well women SHOULD be like that” and you’re like “why should women be like that” and its like “because that’s what women are like”
Part of the problem is that a few historians in the 70s and 80s argued that romantic friendship was seen as normative and was completely socially acceptable. Since then historians have done in-depth research showing that romantic friendship was only semi-socially acceptable and was seen as sexually suspicious by some people. But every time someone suggests romantic friendship might be part of queer history they’re told “that’s just the way people spoke back then” by someone who read a Tumblr post based on a Blogspot post based on the Wikipedia page that was based on a couple of articles from the 1970s.
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Emma Donoghue does a good job of explaining the nuances of romantic friendship in Passions Between Women (tho I do think the chapter on female husbands has a lot of room for improvement). She gives a good summery of what I’m talking about here:
The term ‘romantic friendship’ was widely employed in the eighteenth century to refer to a loving relationship (usually between women of the middle or upper classes) of varying degrees of romance and friendliness. Since the 1970s many historians have used it as a label for any passion between pre-twentieth-century women about which no hard evidence of genital sexual activity survives. But there are problems with this usage. First, it makes these relationships sound like slightly more fervent versions of ordinary friendships, whereas often they were lifelong emotional partnerships, more like marriages than friendships. Also, because the term is often used in opposition to a phrase like 'lesbian love’, for example by Lillian Faderman, the two are assumed to be incompatible, when in fact many of the romantic friends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have shared sex, 'genital’ and otherwise. It is crucial to distinguish between the dominant ideology’s explanation of romantic friendship - that it was sexless, morally elevating, and no threat to male power - and the reality of such bonds between women. A sensible point made by Chris White is that no matter how often society informed women that their friendships were purely spiritual, their bodies could have taught them otherwise: 'it seems hardly credible that simply because women did not have penile erections they would not have recognized how sexual arousal felt and what it meant’.
Elizabeth Mavor resurrected the phrase 'romantic friendship’ in 1971 specifically to shield the Ladies of Llangollen from being called lesbians. It has become a popular term among historians, often invoked to neutralise and de-sexualise textual evidence. Many use it, as Bonnie Zimmerman points out, 'with an audible sigh of relief, to explain away love between women, instead of opening our eyes to the historical pervasiveness’ of that love. Because so many women were passionate friends, they argue, passionate friendship between women must have been nothing more than a fashion and could have no connection with sexual identity. (p122-123)
Views on romantic friendship varied from person-to-person and even one person could hold seemly contradictory options. Donoghue explains:
To emphasise how socially acceptable love between women was in this period, Lillian Faderman points out that Hester Thrale was a close friend and visitor of the Ladies of Llangollen. She suggests that Thrale must have made a clear distinction between their virtuous love and the illicit passions between women which she attacked in her diary, because the Ladies ‘seemed to follow to the letter the prescriptions for romantic friendship’, including scholarliness, retirement from corrupt society and spiritual communion with nature. Randolph Trumbach argues that, because Hester Thrale does not seem to have suspected them of the Sapphism she was so aware of, the Ladies must have been considered as having a friendship which, to the most suspicious eye, only 'approached sapphism in some regards’. Recently, however, Liz Stanley has unearthed an unpublished diary in which Hester Thrale describes the Ladies of Llangollen as 'damned Sapphists’ and claims that women were reluctant to stay the night with the Ladies unless accompanied by men. So it seems that romantic friendship had no symbolic refuge, not even in Llangollen Vale, in which to hide from occasional suspicions of Sapphism. Hester Thrale is a fascinating example of the doublethink that made it possible to be aware of lesbian possibilities, yet defend romantic friendship as the epitome of moral purity. Mostly she hid away in the back of her mind the suspicion that some of her best friends were Sapphists.
Donoghue also wrote the article ‘Random Shafts of Malice’: The Outings of Anne Damer which deals with the rumors of sapphism that surrounded Anne Damer and her romantic friendships.
Another book I have to recommend is Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleves that covers the romantic friendship/marriage of Charity Bryant & Sylvia Drake. Cleves does a good job of explaining a lot of the nuances of romantic friendships semi-social acceptability:
Romantic friendships did not often provoke a community’s concerns about illicit sexuality, in part because sexual feelings were not strictly coupled with romantic feelings the way they would be later in the nineteenth century. Men and women could experience and express emotional intimacy in a wide variety of relationships. In addition, sexuality figured into a lot of nonromantic relationships. The bonds of authority were just as likely to lead to illicit sexuality as were the bonds of romantic love. Society saw no more reason to link same-sex sexual behaviour with romantic friendships than with the relationships between master and apprentice or teacher and student. Plenty of masters made unwanted advances on the apprentices they hired, but early Americans did not cast a suspicious eye on all employers and workers. Likewise, friends who expressed passionate love for each other were free from suspicion unless they gave reasons for concern.
Concerns arose when friendships seemed to interfere with marital futures. Young people might become so devoted to each other that they dreaded to be divided. Educated young men sometimes worried that they would not find the same communion of souls with lesser-educated women that they shared with their male peers. Young women sometimes feared marriage as a traumatic event that would draw a curtain over the friendship of their youth by restricting their time and resources. Most young people put those fears behind them, because they saw marriage as the central pillar of adult life. But when friends became reluctant to separate, their elders sought to intervene. (p41-42)
She also highlights how some romantic friendships did induce sex:
Romantic friendship created scope for wide variety of strong feelings, including trust, pity, love, jealousy, happiness, and eros. Historical research reveals that the intimacy between female friends could extend to sex. The most overt record of lesbian life available from the period, the diary of English gentlewoman Anne Lister, shows that women looking for sexual intimacy with other women found ample opportunities within the framework of romantic friendship. Lister used a secret code derived from algebra and ancient Greek to record her orgasmic sexual encounters with a number of friends, one of whom eventually became her life partner. Romantic friendships were so popular among literate young women of Lister’s generation that it would have been strange if her sexual relationships took place outside their context. It was sensible for a young woman seeking sexual encounters with other young woman to do so within a popular form of relationship marked by physical intimacy, declarations of love, and elevated sentiments. (p41)
thank you! These are exactly the kind of recommendations I was hoping for.
Oh wow so me saying “no government documentation should ever include a gender marker for any reason” has been right all along. For exactly the reason I stated when people were giving me shit for not supporting x markers on documents.
Gendered parenting is so weird. As a little kid I was a total daddy’s girl, I was told I would always try to sneak into the garage, I was always very interested in everything he was doing and would follow him around while he was working, but while my family was never the type to outright say “you can’t do that because you’re a girl”, they simply didn’t entertain the idea that I could possibly be interested in cars. Then when my little brother was born, it was just assumed he would become a mechanic like our dad because he was a boy. Even though he, unlike me, didn’t like being in the garage much and wasn’t all that interested in what dad was doing. Once he got to a certain age, dad started making him help and would drag him away from his actual interests for it, which lead to a lot of arguing and not much actual learning.
Gendered expectations sort of create doubles of children. There’s the real child with their actual personality, interests and behaviors, and then there’s the Gender Child.
My real brother hated soccer and team sports. The Gender Child that existed only the minds of the adults in his life needed to play soccer because that’s what a Boy Child does.
Growing up, I always felt like adults didn’t actually know me as a person and they weren’t interested in getting to know me. Because they felt they’d already learned everything there was to know about me when they were told “it’s a girl”.
When I talk about how I never got gifts I actually liked from my relatives (to this day I still don’t like getting gifts that aren’t something I picked out myself), it isn’t actually about the gifts themselves. I don’t even remember them. What I do remember is the feeling of being given gifts that were seemingly not bought with the real me in mind. They were for the Girl Child™️ version of me. The me that adults wanted me to be, not who I actually was.
there is a weirdness to how I can escape particular kinds of threats through removing body parts. I can’t be threatened with forced pregnancy now because I removed my uterus. If I get my breasts and nipples removed my torso will no longer be legally obscene. The ability to change the body brings into stark focus how policed the body is. I think that is a large part of why reactionaries prioritize opposing transition so fiercely— changing one’s body and watching the legal system contort itself to apply new laws to the same person makes obvious the violence necessary to maintain the political structure they want people to believe is “natural” and “innate.” People undergoing sex change are almost walking symbols of how much effort, how many resources, how much violence (threats and punishment) everyone must collectively expend in maintaining the pericis patriarchal order. Transition suggests the possibility to everyone that patriarchy is deeply artificial and not as difficult to undermine and dismantle as one might imagine. Not an immutable force of nature but a delicate system constantly needing to be collectively maintained by a global majority of people in order to prevent collapse. Trans people by virtue of existing provoke cis people to realize they themselves might benefit from refusing to participate in this maintenance. Might it be easier and more freeing to not police bodies? Might the world be more just if we all refuse to revoke the bodily autonomy of others along axes of political power? These realizations threaten the hold of naturalized patriarchal ideologies and so trans people are relentlessly targeted for extermination.
hot (bitter) take but getting asked for your pronouns is kind of useless when you use anything but One of the big three. cis people short circuit when you answer with it/its or neopronouns or even just multiple alternating sets
one time a girl asked my pronouns, i told her it/its, she tried ONCE before asking if she could just use they/them. right in front of my salad. like why even ask me at that point
people have talked about how it’s not okay to they/them someone who you know uses she/her or he/him but it’s also not okay to do that to someone who uses any other pronoun set. neopronouns & it/its are not interchangeable with they/them! xe/xyr is not code for “if you want a challenge try this out but otherwise they/them me because all non-binary pronouns are basically the same anyways” that is the devil talking!!!!!!!
YOU ARE STILL MISGENDERING PEOPLE EVEN IF THEY ARE NONBINARY AND YOU USE THEY/THEM IN PLACE OF THEIR ACTUAL PRONOUNS
The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.
It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.
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After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.
If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.
The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.
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