The ad is the second one from a Democratic candidate in a swing state responding to an onslaught of anti-trans advertising.
I love in Ohio and all repub ads only talk about illegal immigrants and trans people. That’s all they have, with a sprinkling of late term partial birth abortions.
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https://www.advocate.com/election/brown-ohio-ad-trans-rights
This language reinforces the narrative that transgender women are “biological men,”
What narrative? This is mostly true, and only untrue in cases of transgender women who are intersex AFAIK.
It’s the framing of trans women as “biological men” as opposed to just calling them trans women. It gives ground to the right as trying to frame us trans folk as fakers as opposed to showing us as who we are, trans men and women.
I mean that’s exactly what trans means, so they’re just being redundant and perpetuating this weird fear mongering. Honestly some of them are just stupid, others seem to know a lot of constituents are stupid and appeal to it while knowingly preventing funding for education so future voters AREN’T stupid
The framing being a fact check on a GOP claim, that a Dem is now being disparaged for including in their ad, that dispells the misinformation.
Lefties hurting themselves in their confusion is just classic.
I think the more important question is “why is that relevant?”
I don’t introduce myself with random facts about my past. “Hi, I once kissed a man on a dare”. That’s not relevant.
and the inclusion of a fact check stating it is “false” that Sherrod Brown “voted to let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports.”
It was relevant to the ad to clarify the politicians voting record and counter misinformation being spread by their opponent.
This is very simple and I’m concerned that so many are completely incapable of
- Reading the article and
- Comprehending it
- Understanding that this ‘narrative’ line is targetting the Dem ad but it was from the GOP misinformation.
I mean, this is supposed to be where the distinction between sex and gender comes up. So it’d be incorrect to say trans women are men, but correct (I guess) to say they’re male. I don’t know, I might be behind the times.
A lot of the distinction of sex and gender gets muddied because as scientific evidence mounted about how blurry the lines between the sexes actually were “gender” ( not as we understand it in a modern queer context) started out as a construct that played fast and loose with phenotype and form to create a scientific construct of sex. It’s in part why gender is sometimes a synonym for sex because it was aiming to preserve a biological binary which was really falling apart.
However philosophy looked at that construct and elaborated on what they were seeing and realizing that we draw arbitrary cultural lines around these things so “gender performativity” theory tends to group gender as something you do.
However gender performativity theory doesn’t really cover what trans people experience. Basically, a lot of gender dysphoria is actually closer to the original use of gender. It involves people reacting to their physical bodies sex characteristics not falling in line with a sort of internal compulsion…so for a severely compressed example if I feel like everytime I am reminded through language that I do not conform to the physical features typical of the male phenotype I feel depressed, anxious and like essentially life has denied me something essential to me then I can backwards engineer that series of reactions to “I am a man / male”… Man might be a cultural category but the lack of the cultural category isn’t what is upsetting, it’s the social construct of woman drawing attention to the real problem of existing in my own body.
So where this gets culturally sticky is if someone insisting I am “female” it really is no different then misgendering. What’s often culturally happening is they are just trying to do it in a pseudo scientific way which is why people will call you out on it… Here’s where it gets complicated. Trans people are a group of people who are lay masters with personal experience of the malleable nature of physical sex and the science of sex. Since the people often trying to categorize us as “male and female” alone are not actually giving any kind of scientific specificity it’s not actually correct in a scientific biology based context so when we say you are wrong we usually don’t mean it on a strictly metaphysical axis. We mean, * that’s not how science uses those words*.
If I have been on testosterone a while and a couple of surgeries / or if I never went through a feminizing puberty at all I am going to fit more aspects of the male phenotype than female. I might have female chromasomal make up… but chromasomal makeup is only one facet of sex. If you wanted to be actually scientifically correct in regard to the “biological sex” of a trans person then you are going to have to take us on as individuals and that answer is going to be a lot more complicated than just rendering it down to “male” or “female”. From a strictly taxonomic perspective a lot of us have become intersex. We biologically fit a category that is beyond the male/ female binary… We just did so as a matter of using technology to achieve that end.
Thanks for sharing your perspective!
