Skant-ily clad

[johnckirk]

I went to Nine Worlds in August, and one of the panels involved wild speculation about the future of Star Trek (particularly the new TV series). One joking suggestion was that we might see the return of the skant, i.e. the mini-dress from early episodes of TNG.

Comments

[nou]

So, why do some transgender women dress in a more stereotypically feminine way?

One reason for this is that they can be refused medical treatment (e.g. hormones, gender confirmation surgery) if their doctors think they aren't acting sufficiently feminine.

[johnckirk]

Looking on the NHS website (gender dysphoria), they say something similar: "If you want to have genital reconstructive surgery, you'll usually first need to live in your preferred gender identity full time for at least a year. This is known as "social gender role transition" (previously known as "real life experience" or "RLE") and it will help in confirming whether permanent surgery is the right option."

However, this is where I'm still confused. Are sex and gender independent or are they linked? If they're independent, why would someone need a physical change to confirm their gender? Or if they're linked, why is there so much emphasis on treating them as separate concepts?

[nou]

I think at least part of your confusion stems from thinking there is (or should be) one unified way of looking at the issue, whereas actually different trans people feel differently about it. Some don't feel the need for surgery; others do. Some think sex and gender are separate things; some don't. Some want to abolish gender entirely; others quite like it.

[shuripentu]

Yeah, I think you're attempting to apply far too simplistic a heuristic to an extremely complicated set of topics

[bazzalisk]

Humans like to put things into categories. Things like "Race", "Sex", "Gender", "Sexuality", and even "Species" aren't actual discrete properties, rather they're labels for particular common "clumpings" of a whole mess of somewhat correlated and interrelated continuous quantities. Most people fall somewhere within a standard deviation or so of a particular clumping point on all of those factors and so can easily be assigned a label based on the point they're closest to, but other people have traits that fall outside of that range, and some have a mix of traits that would normally not go together.

In the end it's rather arbitrary where we draw these lines.