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Transgenderism in a Numbered List (A Primer)
11 years ago
General
So in the midst of an internet argument (you know how those go,) the arguer stopped and asked for more information. BTW, that's an honest-to-goodness classy move for anyone in any situation.
So I ended up trying to write a condensed explanation of transgenderism. I'd never done it before, and it was challenging and forced me to look at some concepts I'd never paid overmuch attention to. I . . . honestly don't know if I got it right. I think it applies to me, but I'm actually kind of curious to have other people take a look--particularly other trans folks--does it cover your situation?
(Bear in mind that this is all from my perspective. If I'm completely, totally off base, let me know in the comments.)
*****
SEX AND GENDER
1.) The biological Sex of a person is (except in a small percentage of the population) an A or B concept assigned at conception. XY or XX, Male or Female. (Note that these terms apply to species in general, not just humans, because they are scientific terms.)
2.) Gender is a social construction (a social pattern) that a society agrees on. Man or Woman, Boy or Girl. (Note that these terms are generally applied only to humans, as they include social standards as well.)
3.) In most societies, a person is taught by parents/the society around them that their Gender must match their Sex. And thus there are numerous Gender roles and "expected behaviors." IN many cultures, it's something to the effect of men should be strong/tough, women should be nurturing, etc.
4.) It's important to note that Gender is an arbitrary construct, there's no genetic code that says that men are better at barbecuing, but there does exist a general agreement throughout that culture for that gender role (whether or not you believe that men actually are better at grilling, you'll find the concept easily recognized if not confirmed by a society at large.)
5.) Gender often includes a lot of things that a person is "allowed" to do by the norms of society. 'Men shouldn't wear dresses.' 'Girls play with dolls.' 'Boys don't cry.' "Ladies should raise the kids." And these norms, flawed as they are, affect a LOT of real world concepts. Lower payscales for women, can be seen as these gender concepts having real world effects: "Women don't work as hard as men."
TRANSGENDERISM
6.) One of the ideas behind transgenderism is that many people who have grown up with one gender associate more with the other gender, and feel that this gender is better suited for them. Since Gender is an arbitrary concept, in an ideal world, the easiest thing to do would simply be to declare yourself that gender and life would go on.
7.) The problem is that the association between Male=Man, and Female=Woman is so strongly cemented in most societies, that one simply CAN'T declare that they belong to the other gender without meeting a SIGNIFICANT amount of backlash from their entire society. Except for areas and societies where the gender structures are less rigid, a person who looks Male is seen as a Man, and a person who looks Female is seen as a Woman.
8.) The problem goes further in that the resistance to Male=Woman or Female=Man doesn't just exist in the world around a person, it's internal as well. A quick example of this is to draw a circle and tell yourself that it's a square. You can say "square" as much as you want, but you'll have a hard time convincing yourself that it's a square, the same exists if you were to point at a person who appeared male and tell yourself that that person is a Woman. It's an association we learn from the point at which we can speak--try pointing to an apparently male construction worker and asking a child if that person is a Man or Woman. (BTW This is an OVERLY simplified explanation of the situation.)
9.) The equation of Male=Man and Female=Woman are very OLD concepts (in many cultures, they're built into the language,) and they can't be easily swept out of a society or even an individual's mind, forcing it against a society often results in harassment, physical violence, and in far too many cases, death. Similarly, trying to force it within a person's mind has its own problems, and example of which might be GID--Gender Identity Disorder--is a common term that pops up in discussions about transgenderism. Furthermore, there is a HIGH rate of depression and suicide among transgendered individuals.
TRANSITIONING
10.) The reconciliation of being Male, being assigned a Man role and wanting to be a Woman, or vice-versa, is NOT easily resolved. For many people Sex and Gender are inextricably bound, as is the case in society at large (which has a doubled effect as human beings often judge themselves by society's standards.) For some people, changing themselves physically to match their self-identified Gender is the best resolution. Some are comfortable adding feminine or masculine traits to themselves to settle themselves closer to a Gender they feel comfortable with, others feel a need to change their sex on a biological level to better match their own inner perception of their 'correct' sex and gender.
This is a VERY superficial look at the situation. I barely touched on GID. I didn't mention androgyny, or asexuality (which would open up an even larger discussion on sexuality.) It doesn't apply to everyone, and everyone sees their own situation differently. For some transgendered individuals, I may have gotten it mostly right, for others, I'm absolutely, completely wrong on every point. I And I think that's okay, because I think creating hard definitions for things (like gender) can be problematic.
TL;DR: Transpeople are people that are unhappy with their current sex/gender combination and are working towards a situation that works better for them.
*****
Did I get it about right? I'm actually really interested in feedback. Obviously, this is meant just as a primer, a quick intro to transgenderism, and I left out a LOT, but in that context, is there anything I SHOULD have covered?
So I ended up trying to write a condensed explanation of transgenderism. I'd never done it before, and it was challenging and forced me to look at some concepts I'd never paid overmuch attention to. I . . . honestly don't know if I got it right. I think it applies to me, but I'm actually kind of curious to have other people take a look--particularly other trans folks--does it cover your situation?
(Bear in mind that this is all from my perspective. If I'm completely, totally off base, let me know in the comments.)
*****
SEX AND GENDER
1.) The biological Sex of a person is (except in a small percentage of the population) an A or B concept assigned at conception. XY or XX, Male or Female. (Note that these terms apply to species in general, not just humans, because they are scientific terms.)
2.) Gender is a social construction (a social pattern) that a society agrees on. Man or Woman, Boy or Girl. (Note that these terms are generally applied only to humans, as they include social standards as well.)
3.) In most societies, a person is taught by parents/the society around them that their Gender must match their Sex. And thus there are numerous Gender roles and "expected behaviors." IN many cultures, it's something to the effect of men should be strong/tough, women should be nurturing, etc.
4.) It's important to note that Gender is an arbitrary construct, there's no genetic code that says that men are better at barbecuing, but there does exist a general agreement throughout that culture for that gender role (whether or not you believe that men actually are better at grilling, you'll find the concept easily recognized if not confirmed by a society at large.)
5.) Gender often includes a lot of things that a person is "allowed" to do by the norms of society. 'Men shouldn't wear dresses.' 'Girls play with dolls.' 'Boys don't cry.' "Ladies should raise the kids." And these norms, flawed as they are, affect a LOT of real world concepts. Lower payscales for women, can be seen as these gender concepts having real world effects: "Women don't work as hard as men."
TRANSGENDERISM
6.) One of the ideas behind transgenderism is that many people who have grown up with one gender associate more with the other gender, and feel that this gender is better suited for them. Since Gender is an arbitrary concept, in an ideal world, the easiest thing to do would simply be to declare yourself that gender and life would go on.
7.) The problem is that the association between Male=Man, and Female=Woman is so strongly cemented in most societies, that one simply CAN'T declare that they belong to the other gender without meeting a SIGNIFICANT amount of backlash from their entire society. Except for areas and societies where the gender structures are less rigid, a person who looks Male is seen as a Man, and a person who looks Female is seen as a Woman.
8.) The problem goes further in that the resistance to Male=Woman or Female=Man doesn't just exist in the world around a person, it's internal as well. A quick example of this is to draw a circle and tell yourself that it's a square. You can say "square" as much as you want, but you'll have a hard time convincing yourself that it's a square, the same exists if you were to point at a person who appeared male and tell yourself that that person is a Woman. It's an association we learn from the point at which we can speak--try pointing to an apparently male construction worker and asking a child if that person is a Man or Woman. (BTW This is an OVERLY simplified explanation of the situation.)
9.) The equation of Male=Man and Female=Woman are very OLD concepts (in many cultures, they're built into the language,) and they can't be easily swept out of a society or even an individual's mind, forcing it against a society often results in harassment, physical violence, and in far too many cases, death. Similarly, trying to force it within a person's mind has its own problems, and example of which might be GID--Gender Identity Disorder--is a common term that pops up in discussions about transgenderism. Furthermore, there is a HIGH rate of depression and suicide among transgendered individuals.
TRANSITIONING
10.) The reconciliation of being Male, being assigned a Man role and wanting to be a Woman, or vice-versa, is NOT easily resolved. For many people Sex and Gender are inextricably bound, as is the case in society at large (which has a doubled effect as human beings often judge themselves by society's standards.) For some people, changing themselves physically to match their self-identified Gender is the best resolution. Some are comfortable adding feminine or masculine traits to themselves to settle themselves closer to a Gender they feel comfortable with, others feel a need to change their sex on a biological level to better match their own inner perception of their 'correct' sex and gender.
This is a VERY superficial look at the situation. I barely touched on GID. I didn't mention androgyny, or asexuality (which would open up an even larger discussion on sexuality.) It doesn't apply to everyone, and everyone sees their own situation differently. For some transgendered individuals, I may have gotten it mostly right, for others, I'm absolutely, completely wrong on every point. I And I think that's okay, because I think creating hard definitions for things (like gender) can be problematic.
TL;DR: Transpeople are people that are unhappy with their current sex/gender combination and are working towards a situation that works better for them.
*****
Did I get it about right? I'm actually really interested in feedback. Obviously, this is meant just as a primer, a quick intro to transgenderism, and I left out a LOT, but in that context, is there anything I SHOULD have covered?
Regarding 4, this is mostly true, but it's not completely true. Males and females do have things that they are, on average, better than each other at. Males might not be better at barbequeing, but they would be better at something that required physical strength (like, say, football). And that's why we got such things being identified with the gender (It's a MAN's job/sport/whateverthehell).
Here's the part that confuses me, if we're talking about transgender people who are *not* transsexual, we established above that gender is just being an abitrary set of cultural constructs and general classifications - if you don't feel that your gender aligns with your sex, why do you even have to identify as the other gender? Why identify as one at all? The checkboxes are never going to fall all on one side or the other.
In regards to your confusion, /I'm/ transgender and not planning on going transsexual. I'm sliding towards a more physically feminine form, but I'm not concerned with reassignment surgery. It's part of the concept that gender is fluid, and I, personally, and using it as a sliding scale, and just moving towards one end, but not concerned with an either/or category.
There are people that reject the binary all together. Some people identify as androgynous, and don't go for the traditional gender roles. Power to them, but there are plenty of people that can't just shake off the ingrained gender roles.
Transexuals more often possess this valid difference in their brain tissue from a person who is not. On a CAT scan, there's marked similarities in the brains of a transexual person to the sex they identify with on the inside. This is caused by an anomaly when the chromosomes are getting into order in the embryo, or the alleles failing to properly function. It can lead to regular ole transexuality, or it can even be as extreme as a male body with nonfunctioning sex organs that tried to be testicles, but are really just ovaries.
Transgenders it's like arguing with a person from a religious position, as what they're saying they feel is often as psychological as anything else that could be. Unlike transexuality, where the anomaly is caused by a very physical disassociation of brain tissue (did you know male and female brains are shaped by the endocrine system and chromosomes, too?), it's not quite the same with transgenders. So differentiating an "actual" transgender, vs. someone that is just bandwagoneering to feel like a special snowflake on Tumblr ("Die, Cis Scum!") is made even more complicated..
And this only gets more painful when one realizes that you cannot call them on it and maintain any kind of integrity in their eyes, because to them, their perspective is just as valid and deserves as much respect as a transexual's. And if you disagree, clearly you're a transphobe and your perspective needs to change to accommodate how they think and feel. You can't even offer up the alternative that just maybe, maybe, there are some individuals claiming to be transgender that have, at best, a psychological condition of insecurity, not exactly transgenderism but some interrelated symptoms.
The worst are the transgenders that go to the extremes of society's interpretation of what boy and girl roles are, just to reinforce gender stereotypes to fit their perceived mold, when trying to "be" the opposite gender. It's like.. it's like if some sheltered white kid from the 'burbs tried to be "trans-ethnic", with only a few hundred MP3s of rap songs, some Farrakhan and Tyler Perry movies for reference. What you'd get is just this ugly, mixed up, unflattering product of a social construct strained through an individual that clearly isn't really interpreting it properly. Either side of this binary, the "trans-from" and "trans-to" communities, would just look at them like they had lobsters crawling out their ears.
It's also very difficult to have intelligent discourse on this subject if you aren't gender fluid in one way or another (I hesitate to use the term 'gender queer,' despite having no malice when I say it) because then they argue that because you're copacetic with your orientation, you aren't fit to even speak or understand the subject or the issue. This has frustrated me to no end.
I'm not a huge fan on the social construct of gender. I believe that sexually dimorphic characteristics exist, and I believe there are things in this world that either sex can do equally. And the things that we can't do equally with the same parts, we possess the ability to adapt and handle things in our own sexually dimorphic way of dealing with it. To me, gender is monkey babble, and about as valid when it comes to biology as man's written law. It only matters as much as the person obsessing over it believes it to matter. So the question becomes (not given to you as the journal writer!) "Why do you care so much?"
1. The only one I know offhand is Swaab's, and I read it as more that his findings suggested that there was a genetic component to transsexualism, rather than stating it as fact. I think the embryonic studies dated back to 1995/96. But if it's the Garcia-Falgueras, Alicia, and Swaab 2010 study, I think even the researchers stated that while in-utero factors had an effect, they were not solely responsible for the entire scope of transsexualism.
2. But there's still the problem of trying to set up "transgender" and "transsexual" as separate, defined categories. The terminology gets blurry when you try to distinguish them from each other--as "Transgender" often gets used as an all-inclusive that often covers transsexualism, as many of the identifiers, like GID are reported across the spectrum. It's a very clunky parallel, but you run into similar problems when you try to categorize sexuality for a population as a whole--the language demands labels, but the reality denies them.
I think on the whole, though, a good philosophy might be to accept that people are in charge of who and what they want to be. If someone wants to play up a female stereotype, whether they're genetically male or female, who am I to say "No, you're not allowed to be that!"
Furthermore, I think (and forgive me as this gets a little airy--it's quite late) that part of the human condition is to change and improve ourselves as we see fit. This is as myriad as the person working out the gym because they're trying to improve their health, to the person getting a tattoo because they see their body as a canvas, to the person taking hormones to shape their body into a shape that makes them happy. In that sense, gender becomes one more abstract barrier that people can move through in order to be who they want to be.
Because I'll tell you, I might not have had an increased flow of any particular hormone while in the womb, and I don't feel the need for reassignment surgery, but I'm transitioning in my own way, towards my own goal. I think in a kind of wonderful sense, we all are.
While I've done a bit of reading on the subject, I couldn't tell you the names of the researchers, the years of discoveries or etc.
In such a scenario, would you ever consider flicking that switch?
100% hypothetical right now. I know the cause and root is not anywhere near close to being proven as something as simple as that. I'm more asking how you'd respond to a reality where these particulars are absolute.
Oh, and some of those extreme people? Have to do that, because certain physc people will deny treatment if you -don't- do that.
That's not to say all of them are like that. Some of them are quite helpful.
And it makes me happy that the BRAIN initiative should do a lot to help alleviate all this obnoxious witch doctoring and get down to the bare metals of how it works and functions. I can't stand philosophy that gets in the way of science and proof.
It definitely makes sense, and I can understand what you mean quite easily.
I mean the most common question on transgender support boards is : "Am I?" Followed by "I don't want to be, how do I make this STOP?!"
For most, transition is the only thing that works. My brain is fundamentally broken on testosterone. It works much better on estrogen.
That's only speaking for hormones. There's any number of other issues that go along with it.