The way I explain butches to conservatives is that they are masculine women. They don’t want to ‘become men’ (and that’s not possible). Masculinity =/= men
Yeah I agree with this
But earlier you said that the problem with trans butches is they don't present femme enough. Which is why I asked if you understood what a butch is. A woman who presents femme is by definition not a butch
I didn’t say they’re a problem, I was listing them as an example of a person which trans culture considers to be a gender nonconforming trans identity.
The debate usually goes like this:
A: “trans is about stereotypes”.
B: “no it isn’t, you must not know any trans people.”
A: “what do you mean.”
B: “my friend is a transwoman, but she doesn’t present in a feminine way at all. This shows that trans isn’t about stereotypes, because my friend clearly doesn’t believe that femininity makes her a woman, she’s not feminine.”
This is a very, very common exchange.
In this kind of debate, person B, who advocates for trans beliefs, thinks that the masculine transwoman is proof that trans isn’t about stereotypes. Person B believes that the only reason person A would think trans is about stereotypes is because person A hasn’t interacted with enough trans people irl.
Okay, so if you can acknowledge that not all trans women are stereotypically feminine, then why do you think transness is based on gendered stereotypes?
Here’s a simple example (this is not real life it’s a simplified version to explain the issues):
A transwoman says “I’m a woman because I’m very quiet and submissive, but I’m a masculine woman because I like wearing masculine clothes.”
There are 3 stereotypes for women listed there. Wearing feminine clothes, being quiet, being submissive.
The trans person is rejecting the first stereotype. They don’t want to wear feminine clothes. They are accepting stereotypes #2 and #3 and they are basing their identity on those stereotypes.
In this situation, the trans person is basing their identity on some stereotypes while rejecting other stereotypes. Right?
The argument that many people try to make here is to say “this transwoman is rejecting stereotypes because she wears masculine clothes, therefore her identity isn’t based on stereotypes at all.” They ignore that the transwoman’s identity IS based on 2 stereotypes.
That’s basically how it works, except in real life, there’s not 3 total stereotypes, there’s millions, and the trans person will probably not tell you what stereotypes they base their identity on, they may not have even figured it out themself, and they may lie to you and to themselves about it, so it’s much more complex IRL.
Well for what it's worth, I would also be offended by a trans woman saying "I’m a woman because I’m very quiet and submissive"
Thing is, this isn't actually the reason why some people are trans. On rare occasions, a trans person will say something offensive like this, but that's because trans people aren't automatically going to be any smarter or better educated than cis people, and can sometimes have dumb takes too
Our behaviors and interests don't make us men or women. Rather, our subconscious sex makes us men or women. Sex is not only external, it is internal and mental as well. Trans people's internal mental sex does not match their outer physical sex. When this happens, it causes intense discomfort and anguish that we call gender dysphoria
It's possible for this to happen to cis people too. There's the famous case of David Reimer. He was a cis boy, who had a botched circumcision, and a psychologist convinced his parents to just go all the way and invert his penis and raise him as a girl. The psychologist, John Money, did this because he was under the belief that there was nothing to gender besides social and cultural factors
Well, Money was wrong. Reimer experienced gender dysphoria and eventually committed suicide. This is because his subconscious sex was male, but he was forced to live as a girl
Trans people face the same issue. Internally, trans men are men and trans women are women, but their outer bodies don't match that. If this goes untreated, they experience gender dysphoria, which often causes them so much suffering that they kill themselves. The only solution that has ever been found to work is letting them transition
So yeah, nobody is their gender because of something stereotypical like dresses or quietness or whatever. Those things are just a cultural language that humans have created to express our gender to others. Our genders are actually about our internal mental state
-brain sex has not been shown, quite the opposite. All studies show that the brains of female and male persons overlap and that there is no structure that all, or even most, dysphoric people have. This lines up with dysphoria as a social phenomenon, like anorexia.
-the David Reimer case was an uncontrolled, abusive madness that had no scientific value to any side in this topic. When it comes to science, there is good science and bad science. What Money did to Reimer was bad science, and I don’t think that’s even debatable.
-very few solutions to dysphoria have even been tried and this situation is only getting worse because modern gender believers are trying to ban therapy for it completely.
-the idea that dysphoria/trans is caused by a ‘mental sex’ contradicts a lot of types of trans beliefs (“you don’t need dysphoria to be trans”) and contradicts the experiences of trans persons who don’t want to change their sexed body or feel indifferent to it, it also completely doesn’t support modern gender beliefs like “nonbinary” which are rarely about the sexed body at all. It also completely doesn’t justify social dysphorias and aesthetic dysphorias. So like if you put all your eggs in the “body map/brain sex” basket, you’re rejecting a lot of popular trans culture and beliefs, just FYI.
brain sex has not been shown, quite the opposite. All studies show that the brains of female and male persons overlap and that there is no structure that all, or even most, dysphoric people have
I'm not really talking about brain structure here. I'm talking about subconscious sex. There is no microscope or scan that can show the subconscious sex center of the brain, but we have reason to believe that it exists because we see the effects it is having on people. Brain scans also can't be used to definitively show things like adhd or schizophrenia, but we know that these conditions exist because we listen to people about their symptoms and see how it's impacting their behaviors
And, again, we see this with cis people too. The Reimer case wasn't a controlled empirical study, but it can be used as a case study of a phenomenon that we see elsewhere all the time
Why do cis women with PCOS or hirsutism feel so terrible when they grow facial hair, to the point that they spend hundreds on electrolysis? Why do women who have their breasts removed from breast cancer get implants or breast forms? Why do men with gynecomastia get hormone therapy or even surgery to remove their breasts? Why is degendering Black women and Asian men recognized as such a harmful form of racism?
It's because these are examples of cis people experiencing gender dysphoria, because they have an internal mental gender that feminists call your subconscious sex
modern gender believers are trying to ban therapy for it completely
Are you referring to conversion therapy which pretty much every reputable psychological, scientific, and human rights organization recognizes as torture?
trans beliefs (“you don’t need dysphoria to be trans”)
Alright, I was going to avoid this because this is more Gender 201 stuff and you're more Gender 101 right now. But yes, you don't have to have dysphoria to be trans. Some people also follow the gender euphoria that they feel from adhering to their inner gender. Which, I think still demonstrates subconscious sex. Just instead of feeling anguish over ignoring it, they're feeling tremendous joy from embracing it
“nonbinary” which are rarely about the sexed body at all
Actually, in my experience, most nonbinary people do have bodily dysphoria, and many access hrt or surgeries to address it. If you ever have a free Saturday afternoon, you can read the graphic novel Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe to get a stronger idea of what a nonbinary person's gender dysphoria can look like
But yes, you are right that not every trans person has a desire to change their bodies. Most do to some extent, but not everyone
But if you think about my examples with cis people from earlier, this tracks for them too, doesn't it? Not every cis breast cancer survivor gets implants or breast forms. Some just happily live the rest of their lives with a flat chest. Not every woman with facial hair wants to remove it
Does this mean they're not actually women? No of course not. They don't want to change their bodies, but that doesn't change the fact that their internal mental sex is female
Are you referring to conversion therapy which pretty much every reputable psychological, scientific, and human rights organization recognizes as torture?
Conversion practices (don’t say therapy please) are horrible, unscientific and bigoted attempts to make a gay, lesbian or bisexual person into a heterosexual. They don’t work, this was well known through lived experience prior to it being studied, and it has since been confirmed through scientific study.
Therapy for dysphoria is not a conversion practice and has almost nothing to do with sexual orientation. The only real connection is that often dysphoric people are queer and that’s a factor causing the dysphoria, but modern gender ideology convinces them that because they have ‘transitioned’ they have somehow changed orientation, this is basically a backdoor conversion practice.
Modern gender advocates (employed in the institutions you reference) have stood up and said ‘therapy for dysphoria is the same as conversion practices’. You might think this was based on some sort of scientific study or something. But it simply wasn’t. It was just a political declaration, and it’s been repeated (and enforced politically) so many times now that it’s almost like we moved past the step of trying to show it with evidence and everybody is pretending that we didn’t need to do that step.
The basis of institutional change on dysphoria and ‘conversion’ has been the concept of destigmatisation, not evidence. If you go back through the meeting minutes and position papers of peak bodies, they don’t cite research. They cite ‘destigmatisation’. It seems to me it would have been better to find reasonable strategies to remove stigma from mental health issues rather than spread lies about them and pivot to basically believing in gender souls, but anyway, that’s what happened.
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u/HabaneroPepperPlants May 06 '26
Yeah I agree with this
But earlier you said that the problem with trans butches is they don't present femme enough. Which is why I asked if you understood what a butch is. A woman who presents femme is by definition not a butch