#first drafted this sucker so if its rambly and confused i apologize

[ellevandersneed]

also none of this is to suggest that I can go up to any trans person and say like "ok I don't have to respect your gender identity because it's all just like, an idea," because again, ideas are very helpful; people in general really like using ideas to navigate themselves and the world around them and as such there's no reason to suggest that someone *isn't* something just because you believe that your idea of reality is more legitimate than theirs. My idea of reality is that if someone tells me they are a woman or a man then I will believe them; what I can actually determine from material conditions is how someone is treated based on their identity as say transfem, and how that plays into the idea of what womanhood materially means - in the sense that, while ideas come from the human mind, humans and human policy both political and social, influence reality, because humans help create the conditions of their own reality and the reality of others, for example: settler colonialism and imperialism developing the taxonomy of and continually deepening the psychological divide between the colonizer and the colonized, and attributing material conditions (light skin vs dark skin, and even the concept of "light and dark" being inherently different) to said taxonomy so that individuals can be identified by their material features and arranged into the taxonomy of colonizer vs. colonized with these material features being used to reinforce the "legitimacy" of the taxonomy. In the case of gender, this could be a matter of applying material (and often socially determined to be private(!)) conditions such as genitalia, voice register, facial hair, body fat distribution to a gender taxonomy. "You have x,y,z features therefore you are a or b gender."

There is also a general awareness of the artificiality of social conditioning as being distinct from material reality, which is how you get transmisogynist rhetoric around "male socialization" in the sense that individuals are coercively assigned male at birth and are groomed from birth to fit into the category of "male" and this is supposed to either lock the individual out of ever "being a woman" or it exists as a means of treating any transfem as a lesser woman who does not have a sort of divine right of protection from misogyny by virtue of having been "born into it." This fails on a number of levels, and I'm still working on understanding the various the avenues in which it fails (other people have almost definitely written on this before and most certainly better than I have), but one thing for sure is that there exists NO homogenous male upbringing - two coercively-assigned-male individuals in a single family unit can have vastly different relationships to masculinity because people have unique experiences with others, society, and life itself. There can be overlap in experience, but no true homogeneity, nothing truly one-to-one. This generalization itself seems to be able to identify the power of ideas but fails because it is a generalization, an artificial taxonomic idea created by human minds in order to organize experiences into gendered categories of "male" and "female," and, because human experiences are so varied, it has to intentionally erase nuance and bend various human experiences towards the taxonomic idea in order to justify said taxonomic idea, in the same way that the "biological gender" taxonomic idea seeks to erase biological nuance and bend biological features towards a binary. An example of the former is the erasure of closeted transfems experiences with and relationship to masculinity in order to create an artificial homogenous "male socialization;" in the case of the latter, with "biological gender" taxonomy, it seeks to erase say, intersex lived experiences and biological variation in order to reinforce a strict "biological gender" binary. Not to "third gender" intersex people, as many comfortably identify as men or woman, from my understanding, but in the sense that nonconsensual surgeries to "fix" intersex people are commonplace for the purpose of reinforcing a gender binary drawn on biological lines. To return to the main point, "male socialization" is the idea that camab people are coerced to fulfill/grow into the idea of "manhood," whereas the truth is that transmisogynists who adhere to the concept of "male socialization" are attempting to coerce the literal personal histories of transfems on the whole in order to fulfill the idea of male socialization. It's the understanding that humans and their material reality are affected by ideas that are separate from material reality but also that stuff like "male socialization" is the secret kind of idea that IS material reality, where "male socialization" as a concept has about as much legitimacy as other ideas like phrenology or auras, things that do not materially exist but the belief in them as concepts can have real world consequences.

Does this make sense?

My general reading on the whole "materialism doesn't work for trans people because trans identity is an idea and biology is material" or however the fuck the argument goes is that the basic premise that certain biological characteristics can be assigned to either male or female categories is that "male" and "female" are themselves an artificial taxonomy - an idea - and ideas do not emerge independent of human thought. Ideas are very useful, and they are how we navigate our lives, how we understand ourselves and each other, right - like I'll make the potentially bold claim that your average person will process the information of the world around them in terms of ideas and presumptions, not strictly in the idea that there is a god but in terms of pure ideology - concepts of right and wrong, benign or dangerous, what is worthy of nuance and what is obvious and can be succinctly explained. That shit is all ideas, an interpretation of material reality. Gender in any sense is the same. Again, this isn't to discount anyones trans identity - but that cisgender presumptions are not more legitimate than trans identity, and any claims towards "material reality" to suggest otherwise are just the ravings of an idealist.