Nuance. It’s something we’ve really lost the art of in Britain, isn’t it? Whether you blame it on Americanisation of British culture, a growing individualism as a backlash against perceived ‘forced collectivism’ in the form of multi-culturalism, or social media giving everyone Main Character Syndrome, most of us can readily acknowledge that nuance is absent from dialogue, newspaper articles, news programming, and, most obviously, social media.
But what does nuance actually add to discourse, and does a lack of nuance actually cause any real harm?
Isn’t this demand to bring back nuance just more woke snowflakery and crying about feelings?
Not really. Nuance can be perceived as being most often demanded by socially marginalised and disadvantaged groups, which makes it easy for some people to dismiss as “more Snowflake Agenda nonsense”, but the reality is those groups are just the canary in the coalmine for demographics who have never had to consider that their own position may be more precarious, and less privileged, than they imagine.
Nuance is what both allows and triggers the “what if” and “what about” thinking that creates links between concepts and realities, policies and people, possibilities and potential pitfalls.
To take a very hot button topic, many people don’t see any issue with the statement that:
“A woman has a vagina, a man has a penis”, or even its more overtly hostile correlation: “Women don’t have penises!”
Nuance, however, points out that there are intersex conditions, most notably Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), can cause normatively female people to be born with what, to passing observation, would be ‘a penis.’ These individuals do not generally have any pressing medical necessity for ‘corrective’ surgery (which is, in most cases, purely cosmetic, and intended to ensure that the individual does not experience bullying and harassment by the kinds of people who are deeply committed to the belief that “women don’t have penises!”)
Both CAH, and more severe Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) can result in women who present a more masculine profile, including deep voices, broad shoulders, and visible facial hair. These women - who are born women, and typically identified as female on their birth certificates - may well be perceived as men, especially if they prefer a more neutral style of dress over overt femininity.
Nuance allows that women can have visible facial hair, can be broad shouldered, can have deep voices, and can even have anatomy that looks and functions like a penis (as men can be unable to produce sperm, so “but they can’t cum like a bloke, so it’s not the same!” isn’t a valid rebuttal - there’s some more nuance for you!)
Nuance also presents the question: “Well, if women don’t have penises, and someone who is identified as a man loses their penis in an accident, for example, is that person now obliged to identify as a woman, because they no longer have a penis, and people without penises are women?”
Oh, come on! This ‘trans’ stuff is just snowflake nonsense! How would you define a man or a woman, then?!
Using minimal nuance? A woman is a person who does not want to have a penis, in the way that ‘penis’ is mythologised, and assigned associations and connotations, by society.
A man is a person who desires to have a penis, with all the mythology, associations, and connotations that society places on the concept of ‘penis.’
Plenty of women are more than happy to purchase devices which allow them to urinate from a standing position, including using urinals; these are practical for women who enjoy outdoor pursuits, which often take place many miles from toilet facilities, and come in very handy at festivals, where queues for toilets are often impractically long, and the facilities, once you get to your turn to use them, not all that clean. These women may be quite happy with something that resembles, or could even be described as, a penis (some devices are very realistic!), but they do not want the associations, connotations, expectations and mythology that surrounds the concept of ‘a penis’ - this is why trans women, including those who chose not to pursue vaginoplasty, or are unable to do so for medical reasons, are women; if they do not want the sociological assumptions about ‘what a penis means and is for’, and they just want the practicality? They are women, just as much as a woman who has genitals which resemble a penis and scrotum owing to an intersex condition, or a woman with a vagina who purchases a stand-to-pee device (or, indeed, is able to urinate standing without a device, as some non-trans women can), is a woman.
A man who loses his penis through accident or disease will still wish he had that part of his anatomy, just as a trans man will, to a greater or lesser extent, at the very least have thoughts about pursuing phalloplasty to create a penis. Both these men are men.
If I were to bring more nuance to the question of “defining a man or a woman”, then the answer would be that we have separate terms of ‘male/female’, ‘masculine/feminine’, and ‘man/woman’ for a reason; that ‘male/female’ speaks to an observed physicality, and several assumptions made as a result of that observation, while ‘man/woman’ speaks to how someone perceives themselves, on an internal, psycho-spiritual level, and the social norms they most closely connect with and ‘masculine/feminine’ relates to how they want others to perceive them.
It is therefore quite possible for someone to be a masculine, female man - perceiving themselves as a man, engages in and identifies with behaviours and norms which are most usually associated with men, and wishing others to perceive them as a masculine person, but having anatomy which is classified as female - or, equally, for someone to be a feminine, male woman - their biology is identified as male, but they perceive themselves, and engage culturally and socially as, a woman, and want others to perceive them as feminine.
There are as many combinations of male/female-masculine/feminine-man/woman as there are individuals to have unique and complex experiences, and, within those combinations, we find people who are non-binary; they can’t grin and say “Well, two outta three ain’t bad”, because they don’t necessarily have two ‘correlating identity aspects’ (eg, ‘feminine’ and ‘woman’, or ‘male’ and ‘masculine’). Some of these people will make that lack of ‘two out of three correlations’ obvious in their presentation, because it helps them to hold a place of peace in themselves about how they experience their body, their self, and their place in the world. Others don’t feel that need, and may appear to be “normal men and women” to the casual passer-by.
But people are how they appear! That’s literally what reality is!
I’m registered blind. I have 40% centre field vision remaining in my left eye.
However, if you were to encounter me without my white cane, I wouldn’t appear any different to a sighted person.
I can still (just) read most books (newspapers are a challenge, beyond the headlines, and some books are just too small for me to read), I can write (albeit with a very specific, thick-line pen, in block capitals, and only in black ink), and I can use a computer (although sighted people can’t actually read anything at the magnification level I need to use!), but, in passing, I would ‘appear’ to be someone with average eyesight - that’s very far from factually accurate, and certainly not ‘reality’.
Going blind is actually a very good ‘showcase’ for how an ability to tolerate nuance helps to understand transgender experience: I haven’t always been blind, but, at this point in my life, I am not able to successfully pass myself off as a sighted person, however much I may look like one if I don’t have my cane with me: I can’t read a computer screen at anything less than 175% magnification, I can’t read anything, even large print, for more than about 20-30mins at a time before I start to experience severe visual disturbance, eye strain (which is physically painful), and nausea, I will typically lose 1-2 days a month to ‘acute-angle attacks’, which are an aspect of glaucoma, one of four separate vision issues I live with (in totality, I have been diagnosed with: FEVR, macular degeneration (about 20yrs earlier than would typically be expected!) glaucoma , and cataracts, which can’t be operated on because of the macular degeneration, and other issues, caused by the FEVR, which make my eyes too unstable for effective surgery), I can’t make out faces beyond, at best, skin colour and hair length/colour, I am completely unable to see in dim light, or at night… you get the picture. I may look like a sighted person, I may have had extensive experience of being a (mostly) sighted person - the FEVR has apparently always been present, but I didn’t notice the effects until I was in my teens (I’m 38 at the time of writing, 2024), but I’m not a sighted person, and no amount of some random on the street insisting that I am, because I don’t have a white cane or a Guide Dog, will do anything to change the reality of the way I experience and navigate the world. (I usually do use a white cane, but I’ll fold it out of sight if, for example, I’m taking out cash, because I don’t need to attract that kind of attention. Also, if I’m just going to the shop at the end of my road and back, I won’t usually bother with it - I don’t go out if there’s a lot of people moving around unless I absolutely have to, and, if the pavement’s relatively clear, it’s a short, straight line down, with no hazards).
Women and men, whatever they have in their pants, experience and navigate the world differently. Trans women experience and navigate the world in ways which much more closely resemble the ways non-trans women experience and navigate the world than the ways in which men do so.
Whatever - some snowflakes get their feelings hurt if I refuse to tolerate nuance! So what?!
It’s not just about feelings, but about facts.
I went to school with two non-trans women who were over 6ft tall, one of whom had a deep voice and broad shoulders. Two other non-trans women I went to school with had visible Adam’s apples. (This was is the late 90s, when transition was very much gatekept, and children weren’t allowed anywhere near it. It was also in a very rural area of the UK, where the word ‘gender’ was barely known as anything other than a synonym for ‘biological sex’, never mind the idea that a person could be ‘trans’ anything…it would have been very much known if any of these girls had been anything other than identified as female at birth.) Your refusal to allow nuance would see those girls - now adult women - refused access to toilet facilities, refused permission to participate in women’s sports, and denied preventative gendered healthcare, such as cervical smear tests.
Yeah, but they didn’t have dicks, did they?!
Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t live in a place where folk typically walk around naked, or even in just underwear or swimwear, and I certainly don’t introduce myself to someone by mentioning my genitals, and asking about theirs. I don’t stroll around eyeing peoples’ crotches for signs of a bulge, or its absence - and I’m also aware that a non-trans woman’s mons pubis can be very prominent under tight fitting clothing.
If someone is wearing female clothing, and introduces themselves by a female name, I’ll assume that person is a woman. If I refer to them as “her”, and am informed they use a different pronoun, I’ll apologise, and switch to the pronoun they use for themselves.
Likewise, if someone is wearing masculine or neutral clothing, and introduces themselves with a male name, I’ll assume they’re a man.
If I can’t tell someone’s gender from their clothing, and they give me a name like “Alex”, “Ashley”, or “Robin”, which is gender-neutral? I don’t worry about it, and just refer to them by the name they’ve given me. Absolutely, if I felt sexual attraction towards them, and there were signs it was reciprocated, I’d probably ask about genitals, and how they liked theirs interacted with in the bedroom, but not in order to freak out if I’d assumed they had one set, and they turned out to have something different - I have plenty of ways to have fun with another person, in an intimate sense, which don’t involve genitals at all, and, while I am predominantly attracted to women, by which I mean people who experience and navigate the world in the way women typically do, and who present and live a female gender experience, I’m not excessively disconcerted if I find myself attracted to people who are not women - although their not-womanhood does tend to shut down any desire for a long-term, romantic/domestic arrangement.
Stop talking about trans stuff, and sex - how does nuance actually affect me, a normal person with a normal life?!
Well, apart from the fact that most trans and non-binary people I know personally are very ‘normal’, in every sense beyond their gender experience, nuance is what allows you to say “Curry is my absolute favourite food!”, but also, on occasion, to say “I don’t like curry.” Nuance allows you to like madras, but not vindaloo, or korma, but not jalfrezi. Nuance lets you like chips and crisps, but not jacket potatoes. Nuance is what allows you to sleep under two blankets and a duvet, with a fan on, and one foot uncovered.
If you demand a world devoid of nuance, you’re going to have to give up a lot…
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