I speak with Aaron about many issues related to transgender people, or the Trans+ community. We discuss how the perceived binaries of sex, sexual preference, gender, and gender expression are more complicated and nuanced in reality. Aaron details how many people identify as transgender and nonbinary in Canada, and provides insights into many current controversies including pronouns, sports, puberty blockers, and incarceration.
Dr. Aaron Devor, PhD, FSSSS, FSTLHE, is an internationally recognized leader in Transgender Studies who has been studying and teaching about transgender topics since the early 1980s. He established and holds the world’s first Chair in Transgender Studies; initiated and hosts the international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational Moving Trans History Forward conferences; and founded and is the subject matter expert for the world’s largest Transgender Archives. He has published widely on transgender topics and has received numerous awards for his research and advocacy work. His opinions are frequently sought by the media, and he has delivered more than 40 keynote and plenary addresses to audiences around the world. He is a national-award-winning teacher, a former Dean of Graduate Studies, and a professor of Sociology, at the University of Victoria.
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To avoid chaos in preferred stable social organization structures, the rabid right requires strict dimorphism whereas the loopy left requires monomorphism, but nature is messy, so only strong institutions, with capacity for nuance, will allow us to have both individualism and order. Nevertheless, instead of advocating for sex/gender pluralism, both extremes try to have it both ways by insisting that it's either all biology or all socialization, while undermining their own ideologies by trying to limit 'grooming/recruiting', in the first case, and pushing for surgical/medical interventions, in the second...
ReplyDeleteIt's curious that all the cool gender-typical stuff that makes life worth living (intelligence, agency, leadership) is socially allocated to men and all the drudgery and caregiving second-fiddle roles/preferences to women, no matter where people fall on the LGBTQ+, trans+ and queer spectra! Well, that makes me both hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine, at the same time, so explain gender-balance/equilibrium in a binary individual, fuckers, and then we'll talk!
It's also curious that those opposed to gender-confirming surgeries, for both minors and adults, have no problem mutilating newborns who can't consent if they happen to be born with ambiguous genitalia. I'm hoping that they at least check chromosomes, hormones and the internal reproductive system first...
Why is the elimination of communal peeing overlooked as an elegant solution to the bathroom wars? It's simple enough to offer individual water closets, with sturdy gapless doors that lock, for anyone to access, thereby precluding all discomfort or safety issues, especially as relates to vulnerable trans+ people!
And we already have laws that allow people to 'discriminate' when performing services of an intimate nature, so why don't we apply/enforce them instead of making an ideological brouhaha out of aestheticians who refuse to perform pelvic grooming on trans women sans bottom surgery? Women, both trans and cis, have a right to penis-free intimate environments, at work and elsewhere...