“Facts and feelings. Like Ben said. Facts don’t care about your feelings”
I can understand your discomfort in seeming to agree with a statement by Ben Shapiro. However, since you highlighted it, it got me to thinking. What if the relationship between facts and feelings is sometimes the fact that you have certain feelings which put a lie to the facts that seem obvious to everyone else? Huh? I suppose that needs a little bit of explanation.
As you have often observed, trying to express the reality of the transgender experience can be exceedingly difficult because of its complexity and infinite nuances. We are constantly trying to refine our language so that there is no misunderstanding.
Towards the end, you talk about the criticism you received regarding your article about being a trans lesbian. I suspect you were referring to my various comments. That is a good example of the confusion that can be created where our language is ambiguous or imprecise. As you remember, I have no problem with a trans woman (preop or postop) calling herself a trans lesbian. It merely means she is attracted to women. However, for most people (including most lesbians), the idea of being a lesbian implies that the person has a vagina and is only interested in other women who have vaginas. This would tend to exclude trans women with penises.
When the term lesbian originally became a part of language, the assumption of the people who used it was that they were talking about cis women. Trans women were not even on the horizon at that point. It is not surprising that the word “lesbian” does not adequately describe all trans women who are attracted to women. The idea that a woman could have a penis was not anticipated when the term originated.
Accordingly, we need a new term, or a more precise description, to differentiate between women with penises and vaginas, and perhaps even to distinguish post op trans women and cis women. (Unfortunately, too many cis lesbians would not consider an intimate relationship even with a post op trans woman.)
Part of the problem, I think, is that when we try to describe the myriad of different needs of transgender people, we often describe their feelings about their dysphoria. Some, like myself, are so dysphoric that we need to change every aspect of our anatomy and physiology to match as closely as possible cis women.
For others, HRT, or even just socialization, may be enough. Our individual decisions are based upon our feeling of at what point we have done enough to neutralize our dysphoria. Each solution is highly personal, and there is no one answer which works for all of us.
When we feel good about ourselves, we know we have reached the point where the fact of our transition has been accomplished. Notice the juxtaposition of the two terms. The fact of one’s transgender status and needs is based upon how one feels when they take certain steps to alleviate their dysphoria.
The original comments by Ben Shapiro assumed that facts and feelings were two entirely different things. But then he was focusing strictly upon the fact of external sexual characteristics and not the internal sense of gender identity (which he considers to be delusional). The truth is that gender is also factual and real, but different than sex. Yet it can only be analyzed in terms of how we feel about ourselves based upon where we are on the gender spectrum and our individual transition related needs. In a very real sense, identity is understood by feelings, but that does not make it any less a fact.
Ben’s comment is nonsense because his assumed premise does not describe reality. Gender and sex are two different things, but both are factual. However, gender can only be properly understood by analyzing a particular individual’s feelings about their gender. That’s the source of much of the confusion, I believe. That is why we keep working to refine the precision of the terminology we use when discussing the transgender experience.
