Introduction edits

[fiafied]

After speaking with a non-binary person and another trans person who is a historian, and based on my own experience as a trans woman, I wanted to suggest some edits to the introduction. These edits adhere more closely to the quoted definition of gender, reduce references to physical anatomy, focus on broader historical claims which are unassailably well-sourced, and strive to foster positive reactions within the larger trans community.

[Twipped]

Some of this was reasonable wording differences, some of it completely changed the tone and purpose of the text. It's important to me that the opening paragraph references the fact that the american/european binary view of gender is not culturally universal.

The change to "sex assigned at birth" was not fitting for the opening section of a book intended for people who are by and large ignorant of gender discourse and terminology. I've, by and large, tried to avoid the concept of "sex" as an encompassing term, instead always referring to sexual subcategories (phenotype, genotype, etc). Sexual characteristics are far too broad of a topic to be reduced to a three letter word that most people associate with "penis or vagina".

I also strongly disagreed with the addition of "while true for some." This gives credence to far too many truly horrific depictions in cisgender media, and offers forgiveness to the ways we are being demonized in news media today. It opens the door to "well maybe some of these things the news says are true". That's not acceptable in this political landscape.

Beyond that, thank you. Merged.

[fiafied]

@Twipped

Hi, thanks for your response & for merging. This book was instrumental in the recognition of my own gender identity, and I'm so grateful for the work that you and others do in maintaining it.

I agree with the change to the definition in the opening section. I was trying to go for something more inclusive to intersex and gender non-conforming people by avoiding the idea that gender identity is naturally or essentially aligned with certain external physical features, but it ended up leaning a bit too much on existing terminology. Your change reads better and explains the concepts more fully IMO.

On re-reading I agree with the removal of "while true for some", while I was referring to the "knew from early childhood" narrative I can see how it could easily be misread and doesn't need to be there.

I also agree with the changes which avoid framing westernized culture as some kind of norm. That's what I was trying to go for, but I appreciate the improvements to that end.

My suggestion for removing certain references was due to feedback from the historian I talked to. She told me that the Elagabalus reference was especially shaky, but she also mentioned that calling the Gala "middle gender" was tenuous (and when I checked the more specific Wikipedia page, it was missing a citation for that part https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gala_(priests)). The reference to third gender also seemed tenuous given the last sentence of the introduction of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender, "... other scholars—especially Indigenous scholars—stress that mainstream scholars' lack of cultural understanding and context has led to widespread misrepresentation of third gender people, as well as misrepresentations of the cultures in question, including whether or not this concept actually applies to these cultures at all."

Due to my uncertainty about the sourcing as well as the relation to contemporary understandings of gender (especially as a non-BIPOC person myself), I was hesitant about the inclusion of those and so tried to restate more generally the worldwide nature of gender conceptualizations apart from the westernized binary. However I do appreciate the reference to African tribal cultures, which seems well-sourced at least to me.