Thread:00d4n1/@comment-40256450-20190814131547/@comment-45618903-20200427174339

Part 1 Okay, allow me to chime in as someone who hasn't watched much of this show, just based on the discussion I've seen here. First of all, I'm getting the sense that the two of you have different understandings of what it means to be transgender. Commielizard47 didn't recognize the existence of 16 year olds being transgender, which seems to imply they think people become transgender. The more common understanding is that people don't become transgender, they just are transgender. It's not like you get a genital surgery and then you become transgender, rather transgender is more akin to an identity or psychological profile a person has, which may or may not lead them to seek medical intervention. I for example, did not start taking hormones until I was 18, but that doesn't mean I wasn't transgender before. I realized who I was as early as 14. Commielizard47 also emphatically repeats the word "Male" in particular. It makes me wonder if this is a conflation of sex and gender. "Male" is often used to refer to a person's sex, and not their gender. In such a case it would often be correct to refer to even a trans woman as "male", although there would be much more ambiguity when it comes to medical interventions like HRT or SRS which change our physiologies. Next, I take issue with the appeal to explicit authorial intent. Let me give you a disconnected example of where this could go wrong. Let's suppose that we watch a show where a character eats what appears to be an orange. The fruit looks on its face like an orange, peels like an orange, and is even described as having a citrus flavor. But what if the author called it an apple. In an interview, the writer-director insists that the fruit we see is an apple. So what the fuck is it? I think this is potentially a strong analogy for the treatment of a lot of "trap" characters in anime. Just consider for a moment, a transphobic person writing a biographical story of a real life trans woman. It's not unlikely the transphobic author would describe them as a man, but this isn't really strong evidence that the author did not mean to portray this person as a specific type of person (a trans person), rather they likely don't believe there is any worth to labeling them according to their gender identity. So I'm saying that in the case of a character like hideri, the creators may very well be portraying a concept that is identical to the concept we associate with the phrase "trans woman", but in their minds, perhaps due to ideology or lack of exposure to LGBT terminology, they can only bring themselves to use the word "male" or "trap" or "crossdresser" to describe the concept. It makes a lot more sense to look at the traits portrayed in the show, and determine whether they match up more with the concept of a trans woman, or the concept of a crossdressing man. We can't do this deductively. But we can make some inferences, like for instance, a biologically male person who fully expresses like a woman full-time is statistically more likely to identify as transgender, than as simply a cross dresser. People generally wish to use the bathroom that lines up with their gender identity. It's also worth considering that the way you describe your identity tends to vary along with culture and ideology. For example when looking at survey data on gender identity, we see a rise in the term crossdresser and a decrease in transgender or transexual as age goes up. Rather than inferring that the underlying nature of people's identities are changing, it makes more sense to infer that it's becoming more acceptable to describe these identities one way rather than another. I for example used to be more right leaning, and even when I started transtioning I reffered to myself as a guy, but obviously I'm a trans woman. The issue was that ideologically it seemed technically incorrect and socially unacceptable to call myself a girl. This is where the definition of transgender, being based on identity, has it's flaws for descriptive use. The construct of identity is complicated and it's often not clear what we mean by it.