I've settled on the idea that "How can you tell the difference between a 'real' trans person and someone who was passing for other reasons?" is unimportant I mean, it's interesting if you really care about the person as an individual but unanswerable in the endhttps://twitter.com/iridienne/status/1377475676400283651 …
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(Ironically Jesse Singal was embarrassingly interested in that whole fad of talking about "down-low culture" and Black men who have sex with each other but "aren't gay" before he made trans children his new "beat")
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Like look I've said I don't really think George Eliot was trans because she never "presented as a man" in normal day to day life, she used she/her pronouns and wore dresses and her husband and her family and everyone called her "Mary Ann" But ultimately so what
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There are people in our modern world who are "only trans on the Internet" about whom you could say the same thing Only difference is today we have a word and a concept "trans" allowing them to confirm it with the words "I'm trans but only on the Internet"
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What we do know is that the George Eliot "persona" mattered to her, on some emotional level, it was something she was personally defensive of after it no longer served any mercenary practical purpose She wouldn't let them change the name on her books long after she was outed
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There's obviously SOMETHING there, in the ballpark of what we'd call "being trans" You can tell because of the degree to which TERFs have to make shit up to deny it was there ("There were no lady novelists back then and if Eliot had been outed she'd have gone to prison")
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End of conversation
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Right, that's exactly my point. Questions about IDENTITY are entirely contingent on social and historical context.
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I dig up the Romans as an example of this particular thing a lot, because they had a really clear distinction between what we might, today, call "normal" vs "queer" sexualities, but it wasn't based on your & your partner's relative GENDER at all.
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