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gendernihilist
[39081850]
[2016-04-19 22:57:18 +0000 UTC]
(Canada)
# Statistics
Favourites: 1968; Deviations: 0; Watchers: 1
Watching: 243; Pageviews: 3458; Comments Made: 285; Friends: 243
# Interests
Favorite visual artist: my friendsFavorite movies: Born In Flames, Vivir La Utopía
Favorite TV shows: anything on cable access channels, the weirder the better
Favorite bands / musical artists: Militia, Kalpa, Thou, Barrikad
Favorite books: bædan, The Conquest of Bread, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Mutual Aid, Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Favorite writers: my friends
Favorite games: Eclipse Phase
Favorite gaming platform: sitting around a table and rolling dice
Tools of the Trade: hormones, surgery
Other Interests: abolishing prisons, abolishing police, abolishing capitalism, abolishing states
# About me
nb trans nihilist ancom# Comments
Comments: 88
Thank you so much for the watch!!
I'm really glad you like my work!!
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No problem, I like your progression so far! Very impressive and inspiring!
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(Sorry for the super late reply >.<. )
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no prob I dig seeing artists at work doing sketchy stuff and photo studies and whatnot! ^_^
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No prob, it was some stuff worth 
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Thank you so much for the watch!!
If you have a chance, please consider following: My Tumblr | My Instagram |
My Twitch
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Thank you so much for the watch
Consider checking out my:
My Facebook
My Tumblr
My Patreon/
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np, followed your tumblr too!
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Thanks for faving my traditional works
XD but I think a simple watch would have sufficed
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I already was watching you! ^_^
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ooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
ah yea
sorry XD
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I fav what I like, and I liked those traditional artworks! ^_~
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Thanks for the watch, but I'm transsexual and believe that gender is an intrinsic biological feature of the self determined by the somatic mapping of the brain, and I dislike the attempts of sectors of the trans* community to define gender as a social construct.
I'm also a humanist and existentialist who rejects nihilism, seeing nihilism as a mere stage on the way to the transcendence of established systems of thought and the individual formation of values.
If you're fine with all that then I don't mind if you watch me.
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Since existentialism was formulated to opposed essentialism (a la Sartre's formulation "existence precedes essence" to oppose philosophies were essence supposedly preceded existence), you have a very unique take on existentialism if you believe in intrinsic biological features!
That said comrade, I am online pals with left-libertarian socialists and anarcho-syndicalists and nihilist communists and communization theory adherents and insurrectionists, with Marxists both orthodox and eccentric, anarchists and socialists of all stripes (even a mutualist, and I'm not a big fan of mutualism lol) and on and on and on. You're not the first person with whom I established an online connection who has a difference in opinion about philosophy or ideology or trans issues with me!
Although it's true many of the trans folks I follow are big Judith Butler fans like me and reject the essentialism of trans exclusionary reactionary "feminists" alongside all other biological essentialisms, and have an understanding of gender as always-already socially and historically constructed (and constructed differently culture to culture, especially outside the West), they're far from the only opinion on the matter among my trans friends and I'm proud to be friends and comrades with all sorts! A revolution is built through embracing and encouraging diversity, not through rigid and exclusionary ideological commitments!
So yeah, the long and short is I'm fine with all that! I have close comrades who I differ more from than I differ from the points you've outlined above, for sure. Besides, although my gender nihilism and nihilist communism are a bit more explicitly nihilist than my nihilism qua nihilism, my nihilism qua nihilism is tinged with Camus' absurdism, which is sort of a half-way between nihilism and existentialism anyway lol
I'm currently on t-blockers/anti-androgens, waiting for medical gatekeepers to let me start HRT so I can wait for medical gatekeepers to let me get on a waiting list for GRS. Being trans is a lot of waiting lmao, I hope your wait times are short comrade! ^_^
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It's interesting, I was just talking about how I reconcile these beliefs to another person!
I see "essence" as meaning the individually created purpose for life, and existential freedom as referring to individual morality and personal responsibility for one's actions in contrast to the inescapable reality of their material conditions, rather than as denying the scientific findings of the influence of genetics and environment on the personality.
And this viewpoint is perfectly in line with the thinking of Sartre:
"In the light of all this, what people reproach us with is not, after all, our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism. If people condemn our works of fiction, in which we describe characters that are base, weak, cowardly and sometimes even frankly evil, it is not only because those characters are base, weak, cowardly or evil. For suppose that, like Zola, we showed that the behaviour of these characters was caused by their heredity, or by the action of their environment upon them, or by determining factors, psychic or organic. People would be reassured, they would say, “You see, that is what we are like, no one can do anything about it.” But the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament. There are nervous temperaments; there is what is called impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action. A coward is defined by the deed that he has done. What people feel obscurely, and with horror, is that the coward as we present him is guilty of being a coward. What people would prefer would be to be born either a coward or a hero. One of the charges most often laid against the Chemins de la Liberté is something like this: “But, after all, these people being so base, how can you make them into heroes?” That objection is really rather comic, for it implies that people are born heroes: and that is, at bottom, what such people would like to think. If you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do nothing about it and you will be cowards all your lives whatever you do; and if you are born heroes you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your lives eating and drinking heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether."
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
And I agree that gender roles are definitely malleable and arbitrary - though I do believe that the general aspects of male and female gender roles which are seen almost universally throughout culture and history have a basis in evolution, seeing as we have evolved for millions of years to live in a sexually dimorphic hunter-gatherer society, and it was only about 6,500 years ago that we formed civilizations - and only in the last 300 years or so that we have lived in a modern, industrial society, and so naturally we have not had adequate time to fully adapt to the society we have created. Although this is absolutely no reason to expect members of these genders to conform to conventional roles, as individuals have the freedom to define their own identities and be recognized accordingly - in fact, I'd say it's this residual hunter-gatherer psyche which is the source of many of the deep and recurring social and political issues we face today. It's interesting that you bring up how gender roles are constructed differently outside the West, because I live in an area where there are 3 recognized gender roles: male, female, and muxe . The place where I make a distinction is between gender identity as opposed to gender roles; I believe the former is biologically determined and the latter socially constructed.
I'm glad to hear you're open to differing stances on trans* issues, as they tend to be very polemic... in any case, there's not much use in trans* people being divided over the essence of gender when there are people who refuse to recognize us and deny us our human dignity.
Gah, I hate the WPATH! It seems to me their policies are aimed at assuaging the worries of the cis people that we'll "change our minds" rather than at trying to ensure the health and safety of trans patients. What's more, I find it ethically reprehensible that the decision to start hormones would be placed in the hands of a therapist - it would be akin to making a pregnant woman see a therapist in order to have abortion, where the final decision concerning the woman's body would not be made by her but by an overseer. It should not be the choice of a bureaucracy whether one can begin to take steps to actualize their authentic self. It's patronizing and shows disregard for the autonomy of the patient. I'm really glad I live in a country where I don't need a prescription for most drugs, so I can self-medicate without having to ask permission from a therapist.
I wish you luck and patience in getting approval to start HRT and surgery!
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Thanks! ^_^ I'm feeling not so much patience but hopefully it'll come to me once I get on HRT and start seeing changes! Right now with just the t-blockers not much is changing and that's probably part of why I feel so impatient lmao but hopefully your wishes of luck will speed up that gatekeeping (or usher in a very lucky event like a revolution that overturns the current system that prevents us from making choices about our own bodies) and perhaps give me the luck needed to figure out the right path out of impatience at lest lol
Warning: I'm about to get a bit polemic! lmao (but I promise I'm still open to how your stance accounts for what I'm about to rant about!)
I do want to point out that the excerpt you quoted of Sartre's is opposed to essentialism grounded in determinism, biological or otherwise, which is what his philosophy is all about as I pointed out before, so it sort of undercuts what you've said about biologically determined gender identity.
Saying gender roles or gender identity have an essence hard-coded in the brain or biology that precedes the choices of existence is much the same as the argument that heroes are heroic or cowards are cowardly, which he attacks in your quote there. Which makes sense, given that his formulation of existence precedes essence was not meant to have exceptions for biology (and in fact biology is one point he hits hard on throughout this, but particularly here: "For suppose that, like Zola, we showed that the behaviour of these characters was caused by their heredity, or by the action of their environment upon them, or by determining factors, psychic or organic. People would be reassured, they would say, “You see, that is what we are like, no one can do anything about it.” But the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament.")
Sartre's point is that essentialist philosophy, which was still the norm when Sartre was writing and often tried to use "scientific" appeals to determinism (and which, minus the science bits for much of it, nearly all of European philosophy was up until Schopenhauer, and even Schopenhauer had enough of it in there that Nietzsche attacked him for it lmao) doesn't make any sense given (among other things) the malleability of human beings over time both to themselves and to factors around them (which amount to the same as themselves; Sartre elaborates elsewhere in his writings that factors which are external amount to our own reactions to them and then subsequent confirmations or rejections of those initial reactions...in other words, a chain of existentially free choices stretching backwards and forwards rather than some essential determining factors for this or that choice).
A coward has made themselves a coward, a hero has made themselves a hero, and a coward can make themselves a hero despite circumstances and a hero can make themselves a coward despite circumstances. This sounds a lot like trans ideology that rejects biological determinism to be honest! One thing I don't like about TERF ideology (and I'm going tangential here, this isn't me saying you're making TERF arguments, because you're not) is that it says there is a biological essentialism of gender identity, saying a female essence is something you either have or you don't, and then ascribing bits of biology to it.
I think ascribing brain biology to it is just as essentialist (but not as violent or harmful when used to reinforce rather than exclude the womanhood of trans women, which is part of why I say you're not making the same arguments), although I'm sure you'd find a trans girl who believes it's a choice they made recently after feeling they were a boy for a long time to fall into your definition of someone who chose that way because she had some essence of gender identity biologically determined that led her to feel she had to make that choice...however, Sartre would likely side with the trans girl who felt she made herself a girl's interpretation of herself, since he rejects biological essentialism. He'd also side with a trans girl or cis girl who always felt she was a girl, since she also made herself a girl just with a different phenomenological experience of that existential chain of choices. Sartre was actually quite guilty of gender essentialism and...we'll call it "sexuality essentialism" or maybe "hetero-essentialism" in his lifetime (as the vast majority of white male philosophers born before World War I were), but I feel if he'd been around today he'd have read things against gender and sexuality essentialism like Judith Butler and realized those positions were more consistent with his rejection of essentialism (and I know if he'd read and known Butler, he would have joined her in defending her positions against TERFs who misappropriate her for an essentialist project like she does here: theterfs.com/2014/05/01/judith… ).
I definitely know trans girls who have always felt they were girls as far back as they remember, girls who only more recently felt as though they were girls, and girls who recently felt as though they were girls and then begin to see past impulses and actions in a new light and realize they probably just didn't have the concepts or language to pin down that they felt they were girls (as well as a subset of this latter group who are always unsure if their re-coding of the past is accurate or not, but still do feel and know that they are girls now). I feel like all of these girls do still make themselves girls, none of them have an essence they only have their existence, and in this I agree with Sartre's existence precedes essence formulation. Our essences are ours to forge for ourselves, not for biology to determine (whether genital or brain or chromosomal or whatever). No cis girl has an "essence" of girl coded into their biology either, whether identity or role, however much TERFs may try to argue this point by saying they have science behind them (which they don't, since they're using 70s Grade 8 biology textbook understanding that ignores decades of science that refute their points about biologically determined gender and they'd all do well to keep up with science like this: www.newstatesman.com/future-pr… ).
And I'm just going to reiterate that I'm not saying you use TERF talking points or their misunderstanding of science and genetics (I actually don't know what your understanding of science and genetics is and/or how it informs your ideas about biologically determined gender identity since you didn't specify, but I imagine it's well beyond TERF level understanding lmao), I'm just trying here to outline why I think Sartre (and why I) would be opposed to saying there is anything essential about how one identifies. A coward can't just fall back on "but I'm a coward by nature" and neither can a hero just fall back on "I'm a hero in my very essence", and I think Sartre, if he'd been born in the 90s, would have been someone who championed trans causes in part because he would want to refute essentialist ideas that locate the totality of (or any facet of) gender in biology. He was very opposed to racism, in part because he was a proto-racial skeptic/racial eliminativist (plato.stanford.edu/entries/rac… i.e. someone who felt race was not a scientific concept, which it isn't, and that it was biological essentialism, which it is, and he was thus very opposed to it even if he didn't articulate it as well as Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack do in that Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy link). And I think that opposition to biological essentialism is something he'd have been more consistent about re: gender if he had post-genome sequencing knowledge of DNA like in the New Statesmen article above, which unfortunately he never got to see before he died.
Finally, one separate point I'd like to make is that while I don't know much about Muxe identities, I know many colonized people consider those not as roles, but as full on identities. These are some good resources on that if you want to know more: comrade.tumblr.com/post/807071… and they do tend to reinforce that gender identity, and not just roles, are socially, culturally and historically constructed rather than biologically determined (except perhaps in the West, but that just shows how relative leaning on biological determinism is, and exposes that biologically determined aspects of gender aren't a universal facet of identity but instead a scientistic rather than scientific ideological underpinning of Western gender construction more than an actual scientific fact)
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It's interesting because I was just talking to a philosophy graduate on the subject and he explained to me that Sartre made allowances for biological/psychological determinism in his book Being and Nothingness:
"We wished only to show that there exists a specific consciousness of freedom, and we wished to show that this consciousness is anguish. This means that we wished to establish anguish in its essential structure as consciousness of freedom. Now from this point of view the existence of a psychological determinism could not invalidate the results of our our description. Indeed anguish either is actually an unrealized ignorance of this determinism--and then anguish apprehends ignorance of this determinism--or else one may claim that anguish is consciousness of being ignorant of the real causes of our acts."
Therefore Sartre doesn't rule out the existence of biological determinism; he only rejects the forms of determinism which deny that freedom is experienced by the consciousness.
Also, I used that quote from Existentialism is a Humanism to demonstrate the same concept, I think you might have missed a key part of the quote:
"There are nervous temperaments; there is what is called impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action."
Here Sartre makes the distinction between the facticity of biological determinism, acknowledging that there are fundamental characteristics to a person that are determined by biology - but that this does not negate their freedom, and does not prevent them from acting authentically. For example, if a person is born deaf, that's biologically determined and outside of their control. However, the person's free will determines how they will act accordingly - if they spend their whole life feeling sorry for themselves and never have any success, that is intrinsically their own fault for choosing to act that way; their deafness is not culpable. I happen to view transsexuality as a part of one's facticity, not a part of their essence. I see gender identity as being one of the conditions of existence which precedes the essence. When put into practice, these ideas look like this: I didn't choose to be phenotypically female, I was born that way; I didn't choose to identify as male, I developed with a masculine brain . However, I can choose whether to live my life being ashamed that I wasn't born already having a penis, or I can transcend the conditions of my facticity and pursue avenues of progress in order to live as my authentic self.
In other words, I think of my being male as the same as my having grey eyes and brown hair. I think of gender identity as being akin to the rich/nervous temperaments or impoverished blood that Sartre speaks of. These things are all biologically determined; I can no more choose to be or not to be male than I can choose to have or not to have type A negative blood. These things are all a part of my facticity. What produces my essence are the actions I take, whether they be authentic or in bad faith. And as Sartre says, a temperament is not an action, and so too I view gender identity. Being male is biologically determined, a part of my facticity - but how I choose to go about being a male, how I choose to go about being a person - that is what determines my essence, and that is where I display freedom.
Oh, and on the topic of the muxes I only said "gender role" because there is a lot of diversity within the label of muxe: some muxes would identify as "trans women" according to Western terminology, while others identify as feminine males, while still others identify as belonging to a third gender.
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Like you, I think of gender identity as being akin to the rich/nervous temperaments or impoverished blood that Sartre speaks of. My reasons are opposite yours though, because like biological sex/biological gender, these things have since been discredited by science as folk concepts with no actual analogy in biology and not because I agree with Sartre here. He was one to adapt to new information, and I imagine he would have come to see that statement about "impoverished blood" as folksy essentialist notions lurking in his existentialist project that he could do away with, and he would have done so promptly upon learning his ideas were antiquated, outmoded and unscientific.
Similarly, masculine and feminine brains aren't actually a thing:
www.theguardian.com/science/20…
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scien…
www.newscientist.com/article/d…
www.newscientist.com/article/d…
and a study for good measure:
www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15…
But all that said, the way that people identify can't be biologically determined if you concede that there are people who identify differently from one another as trans women (or as muxes, as you elaborated there), don't you think? You said earlier that gender roles were choices but gender identities were determined, but if gender identities are determined, how is it that people freely choose different ones?
these blog posts (most of which are by trans women, some of whom are medically educated) elaborate arguments which are against TERF essentialism in particular, but I still think they're quite good at laying out this point:
softkats.tumblr.com/post/64557…
givemeunicorns.tumblr.com/post…
namihatfield.tumblr.com/post/6… precioustranswoman.tumblr.com/…
punlich.tumblr.com/post/649037…
I hope these links help explain my position!
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.....Except that science does back up biological gender identity, and there is such a thing as "impoverished blood" - how about anemia, leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, etc.?
Male and female brains are certainly a thing. There are countless ways in which male and female brains differ in structure and function and objective analyses show this, despite adversity from cultural bias/those who find it politically incorrect. Marked sexed differences are found in many species of animal; why should one expect humans to be any different? If you accept Darwin's theory of natural selection as true, it makes perfect sense, seeing as males and females employ different strategies to pass on their genes.
Why Sex Matters For Neuroscience
www.pnas.org/content/111/2/577…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/94…
www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
www.thieme-connect.de/DOI/DOI?…
www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cont…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/78…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24…
dare.uva.nl/document/2/120946
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16…
www.brainfacts.org/brain-basic…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic…
www.jneurosci.org/content/19/1…
www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
brainmap.org/pubs/Hill_BP_14.p…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22…
younglab.yerkes.emory.edu/Getz…
www.eje-online.org/content/155…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic…
rebrn.com/re/neuroscientists-h…
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19…
www.researchgate.net/publicati…
www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
And the list goes on...
Also, I never said that people identify differently from one another as trans women, and I never said people choose their gender identities. I said that the word "muxe" included different types of people with different gender identities (which they did not choose), the same as how the word "transgender" refers to a broad spectrum of gender identities.
I certainly understand your position, I just don't think I'll ever agree with it. I'm a transmedicalist, so like I said earlier, I see gender identity as about as much a choice as having a certain blood type, and being trans as a medical condition rather than a personal election.
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I linked to articles and posts making scientific and medical arguments against biological gender identity and past paradigms of "brain difference" science. The links included discussion of how the anthropocentic imposition of "marked sex differences" onto animals is being moved away from in biology not for reasons of political correctness, but for more rigorous science that has more explanatory power that was denied to previous generations of biologists stuck on sexual dimorphism, as well as discussion on how some of this faulty paradigm's research continues in neuroscience despite the consensus shifting into the majority recently away from them (which is how science works, existing models become less precise and outmoded over time, new models are tested, and new norms are found in the consensus accepted models, but there is usually a few decades overlap where some scientists refuse to use the new models despite overwhelming consensus, which is outlined in some of my links as well in brief re: the gendered brain issue but Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend write extensively on faulty modeling overlap in science in general if you care to read more).
I assume you didn't read the links though, as the first few links you posted fall under the knife of the criticism I linked previously and the articles themselves present no counter-argument nor did you preface their inclusion in your list with a counter-argument. I'll still read the rest of the links later (I'm heading to bed now), but I think I can see that you don't actually want to understand the current science so much as you derive comfort from the transmedicalist stance, which is based on past paradigms that are discarded not just at the cutting edge of neuroscience and genetics, but at the norm at this point. As long as you're not denying womanhood to women who believe being trans is a matter of personal election and choice, I have no issue with that comfort taken, as I certainly don't deny womanhood to transmedicalist women despite not finding the arguments convincing!
tl;dr agree to disagree it is! lmao
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My counter-argument was in the second paragraph. You say "past paradigms" but there is no paradigm this research is falling under; these are studies done by leading neuroscientists and there's no denying that there is sexual dimorphism in brain anatomy - this is one of the most basic facts in psychology and biology, and the truth is that there is an abundance of studies which show gendered differences between brain composition, structures of different brain regions, and the brain's reactions to various hormones and neurotransmitters, as well as other examples of brain function.
I could just as easily say you're denying the current science in order to take comfort within the stance of your trans ideology. Also, I find it interesting how you refer exclusively to trans women within the context of this discussion. Trans men exist too!
Agree to disagree, I guess.
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Thank you for the watch, much appreciated! have a nice day!
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Thank you for the watch! 
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I need to GIT GUD before I post things here, I'm mostly trying to learn right now!
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You can do it! Just remember there's no end to improvment!
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Thanks! I'm definitely absorbing a lot of info, and after I settle in more here I'll be applying it and trying to learn.
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