Re "changing gender identity", yes, it would depend whether cis-friend was using this to refer just to their trans friend (because that's the terminology that trans-friend prefers or at least preferred at one point and hasn't issued a new memo), or to trans people in general, or specific other trans people they knew nothing about. If the latter, I would say it's worth critiquing gently, but certainly by pointing out that many trans people view the process as discovering what their identity always was, as opposed to changing it.
I think this language issue is important, actually, because I feel like much of the confusion comes from cis people assuming "oh, you're changing how you present yourself to *me*, therefore you must be changing who you are" because I guess they're assuming that other people have no internal thought processes and mental states other than those that are visible to *them*? And that's rather erasive of other people's agency and autonomy.
As for "biological sex", _Biological Exuberance_ by Bruce Bagemihl talks a lot about species that have non-binary gender systems, of which there are many... and probably more than the ones we know about, since even scientists (gasp, scientists aren't always objective?!) project their biases onto the species they're observing. So personally I look at it in the other direction: it's not necessarily that we came up with all these ideas about gender and sex for observing non-human animals, *then* applied them to humans; rather, it's more that cis people developed ways of talking about gender and sex that were politically expedient for them, and then these ideas got projected onto other animals because people no longer understood that those models were distinguishable from reality. (This is also something Bruce Bagemihl talks about.)
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Date: 2013-02-08 09:54 pm (UTC)I think this language issue is important, actually, because I feel like much of the confusion comes from cis people assuming "oh, you're changing how you present yourself to *me*, therefore you must be changing who you are" because I guess they're assuming that other people have no internal thought processes and mental states other than those that are visible to *them*? And that's rather erasive of other people's agency and autonomy.
As for "biological sex", _Biological Exuberance_ by Bruce Bagemihl talks a lot about species that have non-binary gender systems, of which there are many... and probably more than the ones we know about, since even scientists (gasp, scientists aren't always objective?!) project their biases onto the species they're observing. So personally I look at it in the other direction: it's not necessarily that we came up with all these ideas about gender and sex for observing non-human animals, *then* applied them to humans; rather, it's more that cis people developed ways of talking about gender and sex that were politically expedient for them, and then these ideas got projected onto other animals because people no longer understood that those models were distinguishable from reality. (This is also something Bruce Bagemihl talks about.)