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It's okay to say you feel like a woman.
It's okay to feel like a woman.
It's qualia, like feeling happy or content or angry or seeing the color red or warm sensation of sunlight on your skin. It can't be empirically measured or observed. It's purely subjective. GCs whose refrain
It's okay to feel like a woman.
It's qualia, like feeling happy or content or angry or seeing the color red or warm sensation of sunlight on your skin. It can't be empirically measured or observed. It's purely subjective. GCs whose refrain
is a long stream of "woman isn't a feeling" are probably at least instinctively aware of this, if not explicitly (most of them aren't good at philosophy, esp JCJ and Stock). What they try to do is rule out the words trans women use to describe what it's like to be trans women.
I had one GC a couple of years ago demand I explain how I know my gender without using "gender identity" because he insisted he didn't have a gender identity and thus gender identity cannot exist (such solipsism), and kept redefining gender to mean stereotypes. Or "define woman"
without referring to any gendered stereotypes or traits. They do this because their arguments are logically and rhetorically indefensible without ruling out all of the language that refutes them. It's why Kathleen "barely a philosopher" Stock write a Medium article insisting that
anyone who wanted to discuss trans women's access to womanhood with her would first have to agree with her that trans women aren't women. This is a dishonest and anti-philosophy stance. As has been documented extensively, she refuses to read the existing philosophical writings
about and most especially *written by* trans people, and then claims that no such writings exist, exhibiting a form of "stolen valor" by falsely claiming that she is the first or among the first to write on this topic. Also relevant is how when another philosopher disagreed with
GC ideology, the GCs as a whole immediately declared that publishing this article by a cisgender woman on a philosophy blog was misogynist and targeted @nathanoseroff as the so-called ~misogynist~ who approved the article. It is again ruling out any discourse that effectively
counters their extremely weak and emotive arguments. It's why they insist all the science that supports the existence of trans people was done for ideological purposes, or they falsely claim the data are weak or "low quality," despite the studies aligning with trans people's
lives and lived experiences. They claim that gender identity cannot be empirically observed and thus belief in it is superstitious or metaphysical, unconcerned with ~material reality.~ But this is nonsense. Ruling gender identity out this way rules out pretty much every human
mental state that's ever been reported. How can you tell if someone is *really* happy? Really sad? Really in love? Really angry? Really enjoys their hobbies as much as they say they do? The same argument - that it cannot be observed or found in a blood test - has been used to
attempt to discredit the validity of ADHD, one of the most studied neurodevelopmental conditions in human history, with historical references going back at least a couple thousand years. Just as with trans people, whatever they would be called in earlier days.
What I'm saying is if you feel like a woman and you want to say so, it's fine. There's literally a song about feeling like a woman and many many more that are about the experience of feeling like a woman. Your qualia are yours, and it's not for others to police them.
You also don't have to "feel like a woman" to be a woman. It's subjective whether you even have a feeling like that, and it's okay if you don't. You can't even show that any two women, cis or trans, will feel the same thing if they report that feeling, let alone feel it at all.
This thread doesn't say anyone has to feel like a gender to be one. It says that you're allowed to feel like one if you have that feeling.
It also doesn't say you have to be any particular gender regardless of how you feel.
