In sitting down seriously and trying to analyze the concept of transgender, I realized that I didn’t really know exactly what the word even meant. My automatic, knee-jerk idea of the definition was person who feels and/or may or may not present the appearance of a gender different from birth gender* but I realized that I wasn’t really comfortable with that definition. For instance, what is birth gender? The presence or absence of a Y chromosome? The gender the medical personnel present at your birth assigned you based on their five-second visual inspection of your genitalia? Something else, either more medically abstruse or more societally programmed? And further back in the definition, is feeling that you are a different gender than your “birth gender” enough to make you transgendered, or is presenting yourself to the world as that different gender also necessary? And frankly–this is the one that really got me thinking–what does it mean to feel that you are a different gender, anyway..?
I have read more than one autobiographical account by a transgendered person that refers to that person feeling that he or she was meant to be the opposing gender from earliest childhood. This seems to point very clearly to a different sort of childhood than the one I experienced, for the most part–I was not prevented, in childhood, from playing anything I wanted to play or wearing any clothes I wanted to wear, based upon my gender. I was praised by my family for my beauty, my athleticism and my brains, pretty much in equal portions. I was encouraged to consider any and all professions growing up, and marriage and parenthood were practically never mentioned to me, also thereby eradicating any discussion of those future gendered roles as well. In short, I couldn’t imagine wishing to be either a boy or a girl in particular in childhood, as both genders were pretty meaningless to me in terms of defining who and what I was or ever wanted to be. I was neither pleased nor distressed to be a girl , and if I’d suddenly transformed into a boy, I really don’t think I would have cared too much. So did I lack a strong gender identity because of my upbringing, or because I personally simply lack a strong gender identity period..?
I try to imagine wanting to be a man as an adult, and I fail at imagining what about a man I would want to have or be that I don’t currently have as a woman. A penis? Is that what transgendered men wanted, back when everyone identified them as female? (I should note, it is a lot harder to find autobiographical writings on the internet by transgendered men than it is by transgendered women.) I wouldn’t think so, as I have gathered that the majority of transgendered men don’t actually get surgically altered to end up with as much of a penis as modern medicine can offer them. And conversely, how much does the fact that I have a vagina mean to me..? Not much, in of itself. I definitely have a preference for having a fully functioning set of genitals–but I don’t think I really have much invested in what type that set is. Well, how about being a father? I wouldn’t mind being a father–I don’t have any special feelings attached to being a mother in particular–I don’t care whether I’m the offsprings’ father or their mother as long as I get to continue to be their parent, period. But is there something about being a father particularly that transgendered men long for..? Or is it, perhaps, wanting other people to treat them like a man..?
That idea seems to have the most potential, but I’m still a little bewildered by it. Especially, I’m bewildered by the fact that, according to the APA, there are three times as many transgendered women as men. Frankly, being treated like a woman in general translates to being treated like a defective man in most areas of life and a prey animal in the specifically sexual ones. What on earth about being a woman in the eyes of society would anyone find himself or herself yearning for..? But clearly a lot more people find themselves yearning for that than for the reverse. So is it the cause more biological in nature? But if so, how on earth can you quantify what might, biologically, make you want to be a specific gender? Not have sex with a person of a specific gender but be a person of a specific gender..? As far as I can tell, I don’t particularly want to be any specific gender at all, which makes it hard for me to swallow that it’s a standard biological component of every member of H. sapiens. But maybe I’m a mutant freak..?
It’s interesting when taken in cross-section with a common theme in modern feminism, which is that there are very few hard-wired differences between the genders–but another common theme in modern feminism is unhesitating support of people who feel they are transgendered. So, what exactly is feminism supporting then, conceptually speaking?
Some of what prompted this musing was Germaine Greer’s recent article on Caster Semenya, which has affronted at least two of the feminist bloggers I regularly read. Lest there be any doubt, I totally oppose the whole idea of “gender testing”–the only thing I want to know about anybody else in the world’s gender is what they tell me about it of their own volition, no more and no less. In other words, whatever you say you are, I am 100% on board with that, and I can’t understanding caring even remotely under any circumstances whatsoever to lift a finger to “prove” that it’s other that what you say it is. From what little I know of and have read of Greer, she seems to have a real issue with transgendered women, and I seriously hope she gets over it and goes on to lead a productive life someday.
But it does focus my attention on the fact that I don’t understand transgender. Now, I don’t need to understand it, any more than I need to understand any attitude, belief or conviction held by any other person that does no harm to the holder nor any other person–but I would like to better. If anyone knows of any cutting-edge research or particularly good self-exploration by any transgendered person out there, I’d love to be pointed in the right direction. Let me know!
*I double-checked this with Merriam-Webster and the APA, and apparently the three of us have almost the same definition of transgender. If anyone knows of a better definition, though, please feel free to share.
I think if you go through the posts on transgender over at http://www.womanist-musings.com/ that will help you get started on sorting some of this out.
I want to point out one small thing here that jumps out at me. You discuss how it was a “non issue” when you were a child what gender your body was. This is because you are what is commonly called cisgendered (I prefer cis-bodied, there doesn’t seem to be completely settled terminology yet). Cis means same-as, so a cis-bodied person is in a body that matches their self-gendered identification.
This is privileged in the same way as being perceived white in this society is. That is, because it’s the norm, you don’t have to think about it. There’s no reason to think about it. It’s completely and totally the norm, nothing ever happens to make you even *think* about it. That’s one big huge issue about being privileged in some way — that privilege makes it hard for you to see it as being something in of itself instead of the default. As a white person, it’s hard for me to see a lot of things relating to racism because it’s erased for me — *I* don’t have to think about the fact that someone might watch me throughout a store just because of my skin color and therefore it would rarely occur to me that that would be an issue for a POC. As a deaf person, I see very clearly all the assumptions that hearing people make, that they don’t even *realize*how much is built into being able to hear. All you all ever think is zomg the music, and that’s a completely irrelevant angle. You don’t even realize for example that most TTY numbers aren’t even staffed so that calling those numbers is useless, even though we’ve been “provided for” in getting that number. And so on it goes.
It’s not simple, by any means, of course, and I think you’ll learn a lot more going through posts and articles by the people experiencing this, than by going thru dictionaries which barely even have the concepts in place and have no idea of how much privilege and thereby the privilege of ignoring all this stuff that they have.
Hmm…I think you’re confusing cis-privilege, which of course I’ve had because I have no conflict with my assigned gender, with the fact that I’m pretty indifferent to my gender overall, which I also have but that many if not most people I know who are cis-gendered do not have–they have a lot invested in their own identity as “male” or “female.” Being cis-gendered isn’t the reason I don’t have any yearnings towards or away from the gender assigned to me as a baby–surely you’ve at the minimum met many people yourself who are delighted with and invest a great deal of personal identity in their own “manhood” or “womanhood” who are cis-gendered?
AND thank you for the link!
On the topic of gender identity…it seems that some people have a strong sense of their gender from early on, and some of these are cis and some are trans, while others never really have this sense. Of this latter group, many end up being cisgendered while others (like me) are genderqueer. So to add further complexity, there’s the distinction between cissexual and cisgendered, and transsexual and transgendered. And these don’t always go together, although most people in our culture assume they do. For example, not all transgendered people want to change their bodies, and some cissexual people (like me) are not cisgendered. However, it does seem like the majority of people have a sense of their gender identity early on. Many cis people never experience it strongly because they feel OK with the gender to which they were assigned at birth. Sort of like white people don’t tend to be aware of their whiteness. But others have a distinctive sense that they’re not the gender to which they were assigned, but they don’t feel like they’re the opposite gender either.
It seems like I might have just made this more confusing. =)
I feel like you kinda just went, “Um, no,” to anon’s comment up there. Maybe if we re-examine it a bit: it seems to me that feeling comfortable to the point of indifference to your birth gender is exactly the point: you could feel that way b/c your birth gender was consistent with your sense of yourself, however low-key that might’ve been. And that feeling is basically something transfolk *never* have. I can’t express the amount of effort it can take to not go insane living with that degree of dysphoria in your own flesh. Take our word for it.
I have to disagree with the “3x more MTFs than FTMs” thing, too. Many other estimates place the numbers closer to parity; and for myself as an FTM that’s what I’ve seen. I find a pretty fair web presence of the guys too. But it could also be said that the guys are somewhat more likely to just live their lives more or less quietly.
Read my blog. I attempt my best to explain it. Hopefully it helps.
Delphi
Thaniel–you’re missing the same point that anon missed. I don’t deny that I have no conflict with my assigned gender. However, I suspect strongly that I’d have had had no conflict with it if I had been assigned the opposite gender, either, and that feeling is not a component of being cisgendered–all the men I’ve been married to in the past, for instance, were both cisgendered and hugely invested in being A Man and would have had hysterics if they’d somehow switched genders overnight. So, my feelings (or rather, lack thereof) don’t arise from being cisgendered.
I don’t have anything staked on the 3x number; it was simply the only number I could find that had actual research rather than anecdotal estimates attached to it. If you have links/sources with better numbers, please point them out, and also, I really had a hell of time finding transmen writing on the ‘net so if you know where they are, definitely share.
Delphi–thank you!
“What on earth about being a woman in the eyes of society would anyone find himself or herself yearning for..? ”
There’s a bunch of reasons, but just to grab one at random, just walking down the street, a person presenting as a woman is much less likely to induce startle reactions in passers-by than a man, is much more likely to be presumed to have emotions, has much more flexibility in clothing and is much less likely to be involved in a gender-based physical altercation. Also such a person is likely to be excused from participation in male-bonding exercises such as street harassment and gang rape. The more men who question the idea that their biology is destiny, the better I think.
You’re right to say that there are very few hard-wired differences between the sexes. It’s because the process of gendering is the same for everyone – random images your brain absorbs at different points when you are growing up, which your brain then attaches to your sexyfuntime system – that the presence of absence of a penis really has no bearing on what kind of person you feel like being.
Unfortunately presence/absence of a penis does have a significant bearing on what kind of person other people and society treat you as. If you have a penis but want to act or dress in a way that’s “girly” (no more or less legitimate than vagina-americans dressing up in female drag), other men might decide to use violence to force you to conform.
In this way I don’t see any difference between feminism and trans-feminism, because both are about fighting against the idea that other people have the right to tell you what your gender presentation should be, and then enforce that with violence. It’s not about trying to be one or the other: it’s about recognizing that who you are and what your genitals look like are two separate things, and that whether you are an innie or an outie is something between you and your doctor. It shouldn’t determine how you dress and act, because that’s oppressive and harmful to everyone, and it’s not the business of Joe Gender Enforcer on the street what’s under my skirt.
If who you are or what kind of sex you like to have more closely matches one of the two options in the larger cultural binary, and one of the many sub-options of your own personal gender pantheon, then it is your right as a human to decorate your body in such a way and to express whatever body language and intonation etc. that your mirror neurons liked best, so that others treat you the way you want them to. It’s not about being treated like a man – it’s about being treated as an individual, not as one of two flavors of ambulatory genitals.
Longtime lurker here…
I’d suggest checking out some of the big trans blogs. Two that I read regularly (and have learnt a LOT from) are:
Questioning Transphobia (which has a specifically Trans 101 section as you scroll down the right sidebar – plus a whole lot of links to other good blogs)
Taking Steps
Also, in terms of the definition of birth gender: I think that maybe a better way of thinking about it would be to use the term “gender ASSIGNED at birth” (often shortened as GAAB).
Use of the term “birth gender” reinforces the idea that trans people “change” gender. My understanding (which is not complete!) is that this is probably not the best way to conceptualise trans-ness.
Using GAAB instead emphasises that all of us – even those of us who are cis – have been shoved into the gender binary at birth, without our consent and potentially against our will. Now, it may not end up being a problem for most of us, those of us whom that gender fits, but it still HAPPENS to all of us.
It also emphasises that a cis-woman (for example) who is assigned female at birth is no more “innately” female than a trans-woman – it’s just that the cis-woman was lucky enough to have been assigned, at birth, a that fit her.
I’m not trans and I don’t really *get* it either. It’s as hard for me to imagine being short (I’m pretty tall) as it is for me to imagine being or wanting to be a man.
However, the best way that I’ve had it explained to me (by a mtf high school student I know) is that it’s like losing an arm. Even after a really long time and after you’ve gotten used to not having that arm, sometimes you forget and reach for something with the arm you don’t have. Or how some people will report that the space where there used to be an arm itches. Because subconsciously, you still expect to have an arm there. And when you can’t scratch the itch or pick up whatever it is, it’s jarring to remember that you don’t in fact have an arm, and you have to start over with the whole process of getting used to not having an arm.
Being cis, I’ve never felt any disconnect between what my brain/subconscious says I am, how society sees me, and what my body looks like. I’m a woman and I present as a woman and I have woman parts and everything matches and so there’s no problem there. But in her mind, it’s like not having an arm. She’s also a woman. And she expects that as a woman, she’ll be accepted as a woman and have female parts and everything else, until she goes to the bathroom or some insensitive idiot says something and reminds her that as far as they are concerned (or as far as her body is concerned), she isn’t. And it’s jarring and heartbreaking and she has to start the whole thing all over again. And she can minimize the effects of it, but it’ll never go away completely. All because the gender she was assigned to (or that matches the biological parts she has) doesn’t match up with the gender she *is* psychologically.
The notion that since gender is socially constructed—and thus, gender identity is constructed from social experience—we ought to generally trust people when they say they’re women, or when they say they’re men, or when they say they’re neither men nor women, regardless of the shape of their bodies.
Gender identity is made in trans women in fundamentally the same way that it’s made in cis women (and likewise for trans men). That renders trans identity neither more nor less valid—and neither more nor less gender-reifying—than cis identity. (It also seems to indicate that at least in the instance of gender, role-identity construction is much more objective than subjective—that is, we primarily teach, “this is what a woman is,” and only secondarily teach, “and you are one.” Which isn’t at all surprising.)
But they are, assuredly, enabled by it. You don’t get to have a milquetoast gender identity if you’re trans any more than a starving person gets to feel so-so about a sandwich.
Note that I mean that fairly literally: there are in fact starving people who would turn down a sandwich for various reasons. And there are people who could be trans, but don’t feel their gender identity strongly enough for it not to be beaten out of them in one of a dozen ways: literally, psychologically, medically….
I think the issue with Greer isn’t really Greer, and is more intense systematic transphobia in some feminist communities. (I mean, yeah, she spews hate, but when we see ten thousand hate-spewing preachers, for example, the correct response isn’t, “man, look at those ten thousand individual assholes.”)
It’s not about yearning.
Imagine this actually happened: You wake up tomorrow with no tits, no hips, a penis (operational…), stubble, coarse skin, short hair, the whole manchilada. And everyone acts like this is perfectly normal. They call you “he.” They talk about what a great father you are. It’s like your life has been utterly re-written.
If that sounds like a Kafka-worthy mindfuck… well, there you go.
“You wake up tomorrow with no tits, no hips, a penis (operational…), stubble, coarse skin, short hair, the whole manchilada. And everyone acts like this is perfectly normal. They call you “he.” They talk about what a great father you are. It’s like your life has been utterly re-written.”
Not the world’s greatest comparison, as an actual transgendered person has been the opposed gender to their internal desire their whole lives, as opposed to waking up one morning at age 36 as the opposite gender as a total surprise event.
Not QUITE comparable…but to be honest, say that I knew it was coming…to be *very* honest with you, I wouldn’t really be that distressed. I’m not particularly attached to my tits, I don’t find that men have much coarser skin than women anywhere on their bodies except where they’ve artificially coarsened it by shaving or hard manual labor, it would be a relief to have short hair that people admired for being short, and I would be absolutely indifferent to being called “he,” just as I am to being called “she.” Frankly, my professional life would be much easier and I would have to put up with a lot less shit all around in nearly every social setting…Vi, I think I’m the wrong person to try to make this point with. 
Which was actually my point all along.
It’s not a literally comparable situation, of course, but I think it’s a psychologically comparable thought experiment that’s accessible to cis people. Not having any warning nor any idea what’s going on nor being given any external validation for what you know and remember are all integral parts of the scenario. And, sure, it might not seem particularly jarring for you, personally, but you can certainly imagine how, for many people, it would be.
(It’s also meant to demonstrate how, regardless of whether your life is actually easier after the reboot, it would not necessarily be peculiar to want to change back, even if doing so would entail substantial costs.)
Yeah, just not a good thought experiment for me personally. Clearly I just don’t have a strong gender identity. I’ve been thinking, and I think it may be much like being 50/50 bisexual as opposed to, say, 75/25 bisexual or 99/1 bisexual (which is essentially heterosexual). Perhaps gender is an orientation as much as sexuality? If I did wake up a man one morning, one thing about that would be that I would be a homosexual man…and that would be a much more difficult life than the one I have now as a heterosexual woman.
Maybe this is an analogy that would work for you?
In my mid-20s I had breast-reduction surgery and the thing that went through my mind when I woke up and looked down my top was this overwhelming sense of ‘This is how they were always MEANT to be.’ Since puberty hit at 11, I’d just had this continual awareness that how I was was wrong somehow- my breasts were always *them*, they were not *me*, they were some sort of alien growth that I was condemned to lug around while no one could understand that there was something WRONG. After the surgery, it was like being freed to be the way I knew, in some bone-deep way, I should have been all along.
And now move that outwards- imagine it’s not just a particular body part, but the entire thing. It’s a weird feeling unless you’ve experienced it- the conflict of your form from the way you KNOW you ought to be, that this is Not *You*.
Lisa, this may be one of those times when you just kind of have to say (as you seem to be doing) “Hmmm … that’s a perspective I really don’t have, but it sure is real and immediate to the people who express it,” and go on from there. Like, I have a sweetie who would be a negative number on the Kinsey scale if the scale went to negative numbers. He thinks that men are, in general, kind of oogy, and can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in any many (including him). So, while he can kind of see that women might undergo a lot of societal pressure to sleep with men, the idea of women being attracted to men (including him) is just kind of … “Well, it seems to happen, but I don’t get it.” The idea of men being attracted to men is even weirder, because there’s no social or reproductive pressure on them to do so. But he observes that some men and many women continue to be attracted to men, so there must be something in it for them/us.
Some people are, for whatever reasons, more aligned with a particular set of socially-constructed gender norms than other people are. If you happen to be really aligned with the gender assigned to you at birth, you’re probably going to find it easy to live as that gender. If you happen not to be especially aligned with the gender you were assigned at birth, nor especially aligned with a different gender, you may never really pay a lot of attention to your gender expression, other than to be a bit irked when other people impose gendered expectations on you. But if you find that the gender assigned to you and your personal alignment are pretty much at odds with each other all the time, you’re probably going to find yourself thinking about it a lot.
[...] Tons of quality reading material here. “Homosex” is a good post, I also dug “Transgender” in which the poster mentions: I was encouraged to consider any and all professions growing [...]