How to get out of an uncomfortable egg culture situation with this one simple trick.
Real talk: Calling people eggs is a violation of the egg prime directive, and is considered invalidating as you are trying to say that a person is not the gender they identify as, that their identity is invalid. Don’t call people eggs, like ever, it’s extremely uncool.
The only person one can ethically call an egg is themselves.
However, if one is self-referring as an egg, they’re obviously trans, so referring to themselves as eggs is transphobic.
Egg is something that can only be used in the past tense to refer to oneself. Present tense usage isn’t correct, or worst case scenario is presumptuous and toxic.
I.e.
“I remember back then I was such an egg” ✅
“Ugh I can’t believe I said that, I’m such an egg 🏳️⚧️” ❌
“See that femboy over there? She’s totally an egg.” ☣️
if one is self-referring as an egg, they’re obviously trans
Not sure I agree with that. An egg, as I understand it, is someone who is still questioning, or hasn’t started yet, so it’s presumptive to assume that they’re trans and in denial. And while being scared or in denial about possibly being trans is technically transphobia, I think it’s a bit unfair to lump them in with the foaming-at-the-mouth trans-hating crowd.
OTOH, yes, nobody should be calling you an egg but yourself. Preferably in the past tense <3
I think the only thing that bothers me about this counter is that transfems in denial do commonly identify as femboys to avoid acknowledging they are trans, whereas a trans man femboy has already transitioned and thus is definitionally no longer in denial and in fact has overcome denial to transition and live as a trans man. These are two different situations, the reasons for skepticism when encountering an “eggy” but self-identified cis femboy who insists they are not trans don’t apply to the trans man femboy, who is clearly not in denial by already going against the grain of society by having transitioned.
That said, I think it’s a much better argument to simply assert the pragmatic value of respecting someone’s self-identity, regardless of whether we think that self-identity is accurate or not (i.e. whether we think that person might be in denial or not).
A good example is Finnster, a femboy Twitch streamer who for a long time was speculated to be an egg. The debate raged on about whether he was actually trans, and this naturally brought up conversations about respecting someone’s self-identity. I still think even though Finnstser later came out as trans (thus maybe vindicating the “he’s an egg” crowd), it doesn’t mean we should think it was wrong for respecting his identity prior to his coming out. If he claimed he was a cis man, that’s what you respect whether you are skeptical that is actually his identity or not. This is a bit like the pronouns issue: you just respect the pronouns someone chooses, regardless of whether you think they suit the person or not.
Whether someone’s self conception of their gender identity is accurate is unrelated and essentially separate from the practical social etiquette of respecting self-identification.
I think the only thing that bothers me about this counter is that transfems in denial do commonly identify as femboys to avoid acknowledging they are trans, whereas a trans man femboy has already transitioned and thus is definitionally no longer in denial and in fact has overcome denial to transition and live as a trans man. These are two different situations, the reasons for skepticism when encountering an “eggy” but self-identified cis femboy who insists they are not trans don’t apply to the trans man femboy, who is clearly not in denial by already going against the grain of society by having transitioned.
I get what you’re saying, however this situation is used to illustrate that what they are doing by arguing someone is a trans girl in denial because of what they are wearing is misgendering, even though it might not seem like it. It’s meant to highlight the hypocrisy of claiming that one respects the way others identify and then refusing to respect the person who doesn’t identify as a trans girl because he’s a boy who likes to wear thigh highs, skirts, dresses, wear nail polish, hangs out with the girls, and whatever other non-stereotypical male things that lead the person to think he must be a trans girl.
That said, I think it’s a much better argument to simply assert the pragmatic value of respecting someone’s self-identity, regardless of whether we think that self-identity is accurate or not (i.e. whether we think that person might be in denial or not).
I do agree with this, the argument used in the initial post isn’t great, it would be better to focus on highlighting the importance of identity alone. Honestly the idea that a person can be in-denial of being trans to other people is really toxic IMO, it gives the idea that we have to answer to others when it comes to our identity. We do not! Ultimately someone being “in-denial” is between them and themselves, not anyone else. If a person identifies as a boy to everyone else, they are to be called and treated as a boy, end of story. The only way one can be helped out of denial is to understand themselves and resolve that conflict with themselves.
A good example is Finnster, a femboy Twitch streamer who for a long time was speculated to be an egg. The debate raged on about whether he was actually trans, and this naturally brought up conversations about respecting someone’s self-identity. I still think even though Finnstser later came out as trans (thus maybe vindicating the “he’s an egg” crowd), it doesn’t mean we should think it was wrong for respecting his identity prior to his coming out. If he claimed he was a cis man, that’s what you respect whether you are skeptical that is actually his identity or not. This is a bit like the pronouns issue: you just respect the pronouns someone chooses, regardless of whether you think they suit the person or not.
The Finnster situation is a little bit thornier too, because the fact that he identifies as genderfluid, means that the egg people saying they were right and “he was a girl all along” is extremely disingenuous because, the whole thing about genderfluidity is that it means gender shifts and changes over time. That means someone who is genderfluid might very well have a different gender identity when they started than they do now. Though I’ve found egg spaces to be not very understanding of, or even intolerant towards genderfluidity saying that “gender is set in stone” or “it’s in your brain/genes when you’re born”. It really does go to show the importance of just respecting how people identify right now and not worrying about whether they were wrong or are wrong. At the end of the day, it’s their life, their gender. Their destiny is in their hands.
Whether someone’s self conception of their gender identity is accurate is unrelated and essentially separate from the practical social etiquette of respecting self-identification.
Well said.
this situation is used to illustrate that what they are doing by arguing someone is a trans girl in denial because of what they are wearing is misgendering
I think you mean more than just what they’re wearing, but I get the point.
It’s meant to highlight the hypocrisy of claiming that one respects the way others identify and then refusing to respect the person who doesn’t identify as a trans girl because he’s a boy who likes to wear thigh highs, skirts, dresses, wear nail polish, hangs out with the girls, and whatever other non-stereotypical male things that lead the person to think he must be a trans girl.
Right, my point is that it’s not hypocrisy because there are reasons to not be skeptical of a trans man femboy who has transitioned the way there are reasons to be skeptical of a person claiming to be cis but who engages in lots of transfem behaviors. The difference as I pointed out before is that lots of trans people actually do remain in denial and claim to be cis femboys to avoid acknowledging they are trans or having to go further with transition. This is not true for the trans man femboy, who has already taken the risk of transitioning and no longer has reason to be in denial.
It’s not that I don’t understand the setup and how it is meant to highlight hypocrisy - I’m just trying to point out that the reasoning is not great and there actually are real differences between a trans man femboy and a self-described cis femboy that give someone reasons to not be skeptical of the trans man femboy but to remain skeptical of the cis femboy.
This isn’t even theoretical for me, I know trans men femboys IRL and I of course have first-hand experience with transfem denial in myself and with others who struggle with denial.
Besides the differences between trans man femboys and cis femboys, there is also just the way that this flowchart is so aggressive and black and white, where any skepticism that a self-identified cis femboy is labeled as transphobia. It just doesn’t come across as reasonable, not only in the way it glosses over differences but the way it mislabels skepticism about a cis identity as “transphobic”. It’s not transphobic to be skeptical of a cis identity, if anything it is a kind of inverse bias that trans people in particular are going to hold. It is not stigmatizing or furthering hatred, violence, and bigotry towards trans people, but rather it is a common reaction trans people have to others they suspect are in denial (and often based on having been in denial and gone through those phases themselves).
It is identity-denying, certainly, but the fact that this is labeled as “transphobia” strikes me as not only inaccurate but aggressive against trans people. This is probably because it’s coming from a defensive posture, born from frustrations after having being denied an identity, and at this point pushing against a dominant trans culture that intuitively accepts concepts like eggs and denial in a way that invalidates cis femboy identities. But let’s be clear here, if you are cis, skepticism about your cis identity when you act much like a trans person in denial is not itself anti-trans.
Honestly the idea that a person can be in-denial of being trans to other people is really toxic IMO, it gives the idea that we have to answer to others when it comes to our identity. We do not! Ultimately someone being “in-denial” is between them and themselves, not anyone else. If a person identifies as a boy to everyone else, they are to be called and treated as a boy, end of story. The only way one can be helped out of denial is to understand themselves and resolve that conflict with themselves.
I agree with you that when people over-reach and deny someone’s self-identity as a cis person, even when there seems to be adequate evidence that they are indeed a trans person in denial like Finnster, it is toxic or bad in some major way. Like you said, a trans person in denial has to come to terms with being trans on their own, otherwise there are all sorts of problems - like blaming others for being trans, or built-up resentment and anger for having been labeled trans by others. When I was a trans person in denial I certainly felt like the people who were closest to understanding my transness were influencing me and trying to encourage me to be trans, and it made me not trust that I was actually trans - that I was just being manipulated or subtly coerced into being trans. This is absurd of course, but this is the kind of psychology of a trans person in denial, and exactly why it’s good for people to come to terms on their own.
However, I do think there should be more education about the way gender dysphoria can look, and I do think there is some ethical obligation for experts who spot signs of transness to investigate and work with families to ensure trans children get the help they need, esp. since we live in a society so hostile to even the concept of being trans. Just from a harm-reduction perspective there is a reason to intervene and ensure that people have access to gender affirming care, therapy, and so on to help them understand and explore their gender since the consequences of going through the wrong puberty are so negative and so difficult to fix.
The idea that we should delicately avoid ever implying a person displaying signs of transness might be trans is I think a manifestation of anti-trans bias and stigma (we obviously wouldn’t do that for other possible endocrine conditions like hypothyroidism or diabetes, for example). That said, the internet community are not experts and there are no best practices, ethical guidelines, or other guardrails that would apply to a medical or therapeutic context. So I pretty much agree with you that lay people telling others they think they are trans generally violates the norms like the egg prime directive. Still, it is one thing to say one shouldn’t openly invalidate another’s self-identity (even when it is dubious), but it’s another to claim that skepticism itself is problematic, or that there aren’t grey areas that fall short of an obvious violation.
For example, there was a post of a screenshot of a 4chan greentext describing a gay femboy who took estrogen and wanted to be treated as a woman by their lovers, etc. and one of the cis straight male commenters seemed to miss the trans subtext of the greentext (that there might be something else going on besides just being a gay man for the femboy, that they might be struggling with gender dysphoria), and the reaction to the suggestion that the femboy is actually trans in denial was met with such hostility because it violates the self-identity of the femboy in the greentext … well, this is a case where skepticism is I believe the explicit intent of the greentext, and where the story is likely fictional and regardless this is being shared so far from the original author of the greentext that it is not reasonable to expect the author to run across my comment explaining the trans in denial subtext, so nobody is being harmed by their self-identity being invalidated … and yet to introduce the idea that the femboy might be trans is met with a rigid and extreme hostility. I think the intentions of respecting self-identity are good, but when applied so rigidly and with such taboo, it in this context resulted in a trans person being shut down when trying to educate and share awareness to a cis person what common trans experiences look like.
We have to remember that trans experience is not understood or part of the mainstream. It is easy to forget this when we spend lots of time with trans people, but society is cis-dominant and most cis people do not understand trans experience. This constitutes a kind of cis hegemonic attitude, and creates a situation hermeneutical injustice, i.e. where the ability of trans people to even interpret or understand their own experiences is threatened. Much like a time before (cis) women had words or concepts to describe sexual harassment and even trying to describe those experiences were met with resistance, skepticism, or outright denial. The default and dominant situation in society is that trans people will be unable to recognize they are trans, communicate their experiences in a way that will be taken seriously, etc.
Hopefully you can see my point here that cis identity is truly not as vulnerable as trans identity, and society already creates immense pressure to conform to cis norms, even if you are not cis.
Ultimately someone being “in-denial” is between them and themselves, not anyone else.
I just want to return to this and say that individuals don’t exist in a vacuum - someone being in denial absolutely impacts other people and while I would prefer a situation that focuses on the individual in terms of how rights like self-identification would work, I do think we have to acknowledge that a trans person in denial often causes harm not only to themselves but others in their life. This was certainly the case for me and every trans person I know. Denial is not good, and society bears a cost from the way the individual in denial suffers.
That said, I don’t think this invalidates the general principle that we shouldn’t tell others what they are, or that we shouldn’t respect a person’s self-identity when interacting with them. If we think a femboy is an egg, we probably shouldn’t say that to them unless they ask if we think they are (and even then, you have to weigh the consequences of the blowback if the person is not prepared to hear they are probably trans). I still stand by this principle for pragmatic and social reasons, even if I think there might be ethical issues in terms of the actual harm that a person in denial experiences and the problems with a society that prefers to respect denial rather than ensure people are correctly diagnosed and live healthier, happier lives.
I’ve gone too long, will wrap up my thoughts in a second comment 😰
part 2 of my comment:
The Finnster situation is a little bit thornier too, because the fact that he identifies as genderfluid, means that the egg people saying they were right and “he was a girl all along” is extremely disingenuous because, the whole thing about genderfluidity is that it means gender shifts and changes over time. That means someone who is genderfluid might very well have a different gender identity when they started than they do now.
I tend to think of genderfluid as more a way someone is describing their experience of their gender rather than a genuine gender identity. We don’t really have any scientific evidence that gender identity can change or be fluid, and in fact we have plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary, that unconscious sex / gender identity is fixed and biological. This is part of why conversion therapy doesn’t work, you can’t make a trans person cis or a cis person trans - it just doesn’t work. It also means a trans person isn’t choosing to be trans, it is part of their nature and won’t come and go.
That said, in the interest of respecting someone’s experience, I try to reconcile the evidence against people’s self-conceptions, and it’s not really surprising to me that a person who insisted they were 100% a cis man first would use a label like genderfluid.
My own experiences could be labeled as genderfluid, I certainly have days where I think of myself more or less as a man or a woman, etc. - but careful observation has made it clear to me that my gendered self conception which seems so fluid is truly separate from my gender identity or unconscious sex, that there is something that will always be there deep down that causes me to be bothered by body hair no matter how I think of myself. I can’t actually observe or know my gender identity, I have to infer it. I don’t think most people are so introspective or careful about their self-understanding, so it does not surprise me when people create new labels and concepts to try to capture something about their experience and it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. I tend to think this is OK, and that it’s healthy and good to try to describe your experiences. The problem I see is only when people get extremely rigid about these labels being taken as inerrant objective reality, which I think naturally happens as our subversive gender experiences smash up against the wall of cis-normativity. Again defensiveness seems to lead to rigidity and black and white thinking.
Either way, you don’t have to characterize the egg crowd as thinking “Finnster was a girl all along”, you can simply say the egg crowd will say “Finnster was not a cis man all along” - that is true regardless of where Finnster lands ultimately.
Though I’ve found egg spaces to be not very understanding of, or even intolerant towards genderfluidity saying that “gender is set in stone” or “it’s in your brain/genes when you’re born”. It really does go to show the importance of just respecting how people identify right now and not worrying about whether they were wrong or are wrong. At the end of the day, it’s their life, their gender. Their destiny is in their hands.
Not to side with “intolerance,” but I do want to at least present some of the empirical evidence we have about gender actually being biological and “set in stone” (not that this means our self-understanding of gender is set in stone, or that the way we might identify can’t change). I still agree with respecting the way people identify in the moment and being respectful even when their self-conception seems dubious or contradicts evidence.
- Joshua Safer’s “Evidence supporting the biologic nature of gender identity” (DOI)
- Joshua Safer’s “Etiology of Gender Identity” (DOI)
- the collective research of Daphna Joel and Dick Swaab for the current scientific theories of “brain-sex” (which likely plays a role in gender identity and gender dysphoria):
- Joel & Swaab, 2019, “The Complex Relationships between Sex and the Brain”, (DOI)
- Joel, 2015, “Sex beyond the genetalia: The human brain mosaic”, (DOI)
- Swaab, 2008, “A sex difference in the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus: relationship to gender identity”, (DOI)
- Swaab, 2000, “Male-to-female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus”, (DOI)
- Swaab, 1995, “A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality”, (DOI)
Reading Swaab’s work in particular was eye-opening, since trans women whose brains were autopsied were found to have structures in their brain that were like cis women and not like cis men, even without ever undergoing hormone therapy. While the picture that emerges with later research did not point to something as simple as “male” and “female” brains, it is particularly grounding to me to have empirical evidence like this that lends credibility to our experiences. It really is more accurate to say trans women have a “female brain” than to say trans women have a “mental illness” as though the gender identity were due to delusions or psychosis.
If reading scientific literature is challenging, the famous neuroendocrinologist, Robert Sapolsky, has some talks that summarize the situation:
This science isn’t some kind of inerrant rigid belief system either, by the way - but that’s not to say it doesn’t provide solid evidence that has consequences in legal and political contexts. Ultimately I think it is important for policy makers, scientists, medical doctors, etc. to engage in inference to best explanation and lean on the body of evidence we have to do that. I think it is important to recognize that the evidence we have about gender identity (by which I mean the generally immutable unconscious sex that we are born with, likely due to the way our brains develop) is that it cannot be changed, that conversion therapy does not work, and that trans people cannot be made cis and vice versa. These are essentially “facts”.
None of these facts require that we invalidate others’ self-identity even when they contradict those facts, we can still hold the principle that we should respect others’ self-identity for pragmatic reasons even when there are reasons to doubt a person’s self-understanding or the way they have theorized or come to think about their gender. It is a matter of politeness and respect.
I think referring to people as eggs in private is okay, buuuuut not something you do in a public place nor in front of the person you think is an egg. Imo “egg” is really just a way to say, “I think they’re secretly trans”, and as such, is not something you expose the “egg” to because it can cause them to push back.
Don’t push people into being trans, and calling someone an “egg” to their face can come off as such. Let them come to that conclusion themselves.
I don’t really think doing it behind their back is really much better, like I could see that as trying to influence people to treat them differently without them knowing why. Maybe for some it could be a funny story if they end up coming out as trans but if they’re not trans it’ll just be real awkward, and if they find out about it, they might feel betrayed that people talked about them and misgendered them behind their back.
That’s a big way I think people misunderstand the egg prime directive. In my opinion it should be that you do not presume their gender, you may try to help them feel comfortable and understand different genders but you must let them come to it. To presume is bad because it’s trying to know them better than they know themselves. But you can’t know them better than they know themselves. The internal thoughts, feelings, and desires of another person are… internal. They can’t truly be known or understood by others.
Obviously you might think it, just like someone might accidentally misgender someone in their mind without saying it, but you need to not express those thoughts. It’s ideal you don’t think them in the first place, but “Don’t think of a pink elephant” and all that. To start thinking and believing yourself that you know someone else is trans when they don’t identify that way or haven’t told you is risky, and probably should be avoided.
