http://current.com/items/89405000_i_m_80_girl_20_boy

Intersex and transgenedered can cover different particulars, but they’re undeniably tied into the larger discussion around gender social norms, variation, and biology.

Though I don’t have enough of my own understanding to really draw those intersections out and build on this dialog, I’d love to hear your thoughts Anderov.

Ok. Those are some pretty good suggestions. I’ll do some more reading then.

Dude, I know when I’m looking at a transexual. I’ve met several over the last 20 years.

That’s amazing! How do you do it? Sometimes, I have wondered whether the person I’m looking at is a transsexual, but then I remember that for every observable trait X that I think describes transsexuals, there are some transsexuals that do not exhibit trait X and many non-transsexuals who do. So it can be very hard for me to tell. But maybe I’m just ignorant, having only met a few hundred transsexuals in my young life. If there is a way I can put all this ambiguity behind me and really *know* someone’s transsexual status, I would really like to hear it.

Regarding ENDA: Yes, many transsexuals look completely ordinary. That doesn’t mean that at some point in their life, they didn’t look visually quite gender ambiguous. I don’t know a single transsexual who didn’t go through an ambiguous stage somewhere along the way. And as I guess you’re well aware, people who look visibly gender are quite susceptible to discrimination.

Another big reason why ENDA is so important for trans people is that our legal documentation often reveals that while we may look perfectly ordinary, our history is not perfectly ordinary. In some places, the law makes it very difficult or impossible to change our gender markers on our legal documents, so every time we have to show an ID, a birth certificate, a passport, or whatever, our private medical history is made known, and whatever benefit we may or may not have received from appearing ordinary is lost.

I would encourage you to read more “Trans 101″ type materials to learn about some of these basic issues. Many of your remarks seem to be based on either stereotypes or really outdated information, and I think we could have a more productive conversation if we shared a common foundation.

Sex change operations are normally done by a plastic surgeon. Surgeons don’t normally have the expertise to ensure that they are dealing with a mentally well balanced patient. Given the extreme nature of a sex change operation, they need some outside assurance that their patients are in fact competent to make such a decision.

A psych. professor I’m friends with recently told me about a patient of his who is schizophrenic. He sometimes feels that he is an arch-angel sent to make rap music that will prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. Oftentimes the reality that he is dealing with is that he needs to get on a plane to Rome and ask the Pope for some money to create his music.

Obviously if part of this patient’s complex was that he was a “female” angel, if he just walked into a plastic surgeon’s office and signed up for a sex change operation, that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Hence, the requirement for psychiatric screening.

As far as my “voodoo” comment, what I meant to signify was that it is much more difficult in psychiatry to arrive at hard empirical truths – the phenomena being studied doesn’t boil down quite as easily to the hard sciences of chemistry and physics.

“I bet you have met trans people who don’t fit your stereotypes, and I bet you never knew it. I bet lots of us slip under your radar because we’re just so…ordinary.”

If trans people are so "ordinary" why do they want to be a part of the Lesbian & Gay rights movement at all? Why did HRC's position in the ENDA debate cause such an uproar?

“…how do you *know* you’ve never met a MTF who was not extremely femme?”

Dude, I know when I’m looking at a transexual. I’ve met several over the last 20 years. If you honestly think a MTF or a FTM looks legit you are seriously kidding yourself. There is no real comparison between biological and constructed individuals.
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re: Aidan

“…psychiatry is in many ways the “voodoo” area of medicine”

If psychiatry is the “voodoo area of medicine” how do you explain, then, it’s essential place in the Trans-Industrial-Complex?

Now, I have written at length about gender diversity in the trans community in previous comments on this post. Please! I beg of you! Go read and educate yourself before you write again.

And one last point – how do you *know* you’ve never met a MTF who was not extremely femme? Do you have chromosomal x-ray vision so that you can just “tell” what equipment someone was born with. I’m betting not. I bet you have met trans people who don’t fit your stereotypes, and I bet you never knew it. I bet lots of us slip under your radar because we’re just so…ordinary.

When you’ve gone through 4 years of med school and 5 years of a psych residency, I’ll be a bit more willing to listen to a lecture from you on the “delightful” attitudes (I’m not really sure what other adjectives you are trying to ascribe to it – at least something in the same family as heteronormative?) of the medical community as regards transexualism.

There’s actually no real broad consensus within the profession. Some psychiatrists believe it is a mental illness and that sex change operations, as cooperations in that illness, violate the hypocratic oath. Some obviously feel quite differently. Since psychiatry is in many ways the “voodoo” area of medicine, it’s much harder to build a consensus for standards of care in the same way as it is in, say, endocrinology. Hence the neverending DSM wars – which basically no practicing psychiatrists refer to canonically.

Meanwhile, I’d suggest that as a rank amateur in the issues involved, you refrain from calling anyone a freakshow or telling people how much they don’t understand the realities that are part of their self identified gender – even if you may hold such opinions privately.

I’d like to know why transexuals are gender freakshows. I’ve never met a MTF (pre or post) who didn’t think being a woman meant femming out to the point of caricature. I mean being a woman is not running through a field of flowers in a sundress on a warm spring day. I think any biological woman can tell you that being a woman has nothing to do with make-up, clothes and hair, nothing at all to do with the fantasy of “womanhood” marketed so aggressively in this culture as a consumer item.

Similarly, the FTM’s I know of butch out to awkward and creepy proportions when the truth is they don’t understand how being a man is more than taking hormones and getting tattoos. They don’t understand the beautiful and ugly realities that are part real men’s lives.

The “trans” industry perpetuates hetero-gender systems meant to control us by coercing our cooperation. The whole thing is like a minstrel show of fem-acting and butch-acting wannabees deluding themselves to the delight of a medical establishment that agrees sex MUST match gender or you’re a freak. Those who ask questions are shunned and vilified. The whole thing reeks of a cult.

I’d like to know what’s wrong with feminine men and masculine women? What is wrong about being a “man” in the body of a “woman” or vice versa? The one thing I can say about transgender folk is they keep their bodies and insist upon themselves. That is truly changing the boundaries of what we think is “male” or “female”. That I respect.

Lipstick on a pig my friends. Lipstick on a pig.

Wow! You get the award for “most level-headed response to an obviously incendiary comment”. Please email me at michael@thenewgay.net to receive your prize.

Seriously, though. Andreov, I love your writing. We’d welcome official posts from you sharing your experiences and perspectives on trans issues or our shared queer life in general. Please do email me at michael@thenewgay.net if you’d like to take me up on this offer.

Well, cheers for at least not being wishy-washy about it. Three questions:

The vast majority of non-transsexual trans people don’t modify their body at all, so how is it they get included in you “mutilation=crazy” category?

Do you consider all other people who get “cosmetic” surgery similarly psychotic?

Also, how is it that I “completely negate … [my] psychologically developed self” when it’s my psyche that’s telling me I’m a man?

Race (as sketchy a concept as that is) does have physically verifiable features that can be used to define it, much like biological sex. You could, probably, define Asian “race” in such a way so as to include a Caucasian, but you’d have to admit that your definition of “race” is probably just as valid as anyone else’s. (Again, same with sex. Is it gonads? Hormones? Reproductive capacity? All have their merits and flaws).

However, if you had a Caucasian individual who had been born and raised, and spent his entire life in Japan, might that individual not rightly consider himself Japanese? Most Japanese are Asian, obviously, and there are probably aspects of Japanese culture where our hypothetical person would have issues navigating by virtue of not appearing Japanese, but being Japanese is not a biological trait, it’s cultural. Just like gender – female man is like a Caucasian Japanese.

For example, these two statements:

“I’m completely fine with whatever people want to call themselves or how they identify themselves. … I respect that.”

“a female can be/do whatever she wants, but she will always be a woman and she will never be a man”

These are fundamentally at odds. “I respect your right to self-identify. But you’re still wrong.” And that second bit? That’s the part where you’re calling me a liar. Or insane. Or stupid. Which is it?

If you’ve deciding to rationalise your disrespect, I cannot hope to convince you to abandon that with logic. But at least have the [sex appropriate gonads] to own it.

anyway, what i said is this:
I DO support gender segregation, semantically and ideologically. This does not mean That because you say it does.

Yes, a female can be/do whatever she wants, but she will always be a woman and she will never be a man. This is not limiting her on the basis of her sex/gender, this is just a fact. A person is not an inanimate object just because he/she identifies as an inanimate object. It’s just a logical impossibility.

As far as the chromosomal abnormalities, I don’t have any experience or knowledge in that arena, but as far as I am concerned gender corresponds with biological sex. If someone is biologically both male and female then, I would think that they are both man and woman. I’ll leave it up to the biologists to define the criteria for sex.

At this point, Anderov, I think Aidan is right: we’re probably both wasting our breath. Neither of us is going to “convince” the other of what we know to be “right” (whatever that means). In fact, I don’t even think that’s the point of the conversation. I think it’s good to just get different ideas out there and to discuss them (as we’ve been doing over the last few days).

Also, FWIW, I don’t at all agree with the statements that “fake name” made about “heterosexually-controlled surgical/psychological process” – I don’t think that’s accurate at all.

Also, though, the charge of sex operations as a means of enforcing heteronormativity has some historical basis. The original sex reassignment clinics had very strict rules about who was and was not qualified to have surgery. They’d only perform on people who they thought would make a “successful” transition – i.e. be straight 50s housewives (and to a lesser extent, manly men, since the medical visibility of transmen lagged). Consequently, transwomen seeking surgery would have to do their very best to conform to gender roles and be the perfect feminine women. And today, I think there are some countries in the middle east that have state sponsored “sex change” surgery, as a “cure” for homosexuality (which carries a death penalty… Dead gay man, or straight woman? What a choice).

Not sure if you are arguing with the same anon person or not, but I think you might be wasting your breath.

“The entire surgical/psychological transition process is controlled by heterosexual physicians and therapists who believe your biological sex must match your gender. If not, it is appropriate, they believe, to enact surgical violence on your body to make you conform.”

Okay man, sex change operations are only performed after a pretty lengthy process of informed consent and psychiatric evaluation to ensure that one is competent and mature enough to make such a decision. The idea of informed consent is to ensure that physicians do not “enact surgical violence” upon their patients.

What exactly is the point you are trying to make? You say you’re all cool with people’s gender identities and whatnot, but you describe consenting medical intervention as “violence.”

And FWIW, I find your idea that sex change operations are the result of a bigoted heteronormative medical community to be absolutely hysterical!

And why is humanity neatly divided gender/sex pairs of man/male woman/female? Like I already pointed out, there is certainly biological grey area (chomosomal abnormalities, hormone conditions, etc). What are those people in your nicely dichotomised world?

If anything, this dichotomy of yours supports the perpetuation of gender segregation. “Oh, as a female, you can be anything you want. You just can’t be a man. That’s for males only.”

This is exactly my point with regard to gender: There are as many ways of being a woman as there are females. There are as many ways of being a man as there are males. No matter what people call themselves or how others perceive them.

I’m completely fine with whatever people want to call themselves or how they identify themselves. People can, and do, do whatever they want. And I respect that. I just think that the notion of “trans” is antithetical to the statement above and so I disagree with it.

re your (fake) name here (again) – You are also forgetting all of the trans people who aren’t transsexuals, people who never see a psychologist or doctor for anything related to their gender. Genderqueers, bi-gendered people, third-gendered people, drag kings, drag queens, cross-dressers, non-op/h transsexuals – these people make up, in fact, the majority of trans people. Since they are not participating in the heterosexual medical hegemony, on what basis do you exclude them?

Gender stereotypes, yes, need to be expanded or eradicated. But gender itself is not the issue there. “

I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say here… can you clarify?

If you’re going back to your “Saying that he is not male because of this non-conformity is reinforcing the stereotype by existing, by definition, in opposition to it.”… Let me straighten this out for you – I’m not saying he’s not a man, necessarily. I’m not in his head, I’m not living his life. But I am saying that that person has the freedom to tell me that he is a man, that she is a woman, or that zie is neither man nor woman, and I will respect that. There are females who have done exactly what I have done in transitioning – worn men’s clothes, cut their hair short, bound their chests and even taken testosterone – who still identify as women and I am completely fine with that.

To some extent, you are right – it’s not about gender. It’s about accepting that no one can possibly know someone as well as that person knows themselves, that there are as many ways of being human as there are people.

re your (fake) name here – Your insistence that trans people are reinforcing gender boundaries by sometimes having normative gender identities is like insisting that black people are perpetuating racial boundaries by having dark skin. Is every non-trans person (including LGB people) similarly reinforcing gender boundaries by not living life as androgynes?

Also, the last time you interacted with the trans-related medical community was… when? This might have been the case 20 years ago, and, I’m sure, there are still people who hold that mindset now.

However, there are many professionals who on our side. The psychiatrist I saw for my surgery recommendation is actively working to get gender identity disorder removed from the DSM (which belongs in there exactly as much as “homosexuality” did). The first person to prescribe me hormones was a lesbian working at WWC, and the doctor currently maintaining my hormones is a gay man who also has helped lesbian couples get pregnant (zomg heterosexual medical hegemony!). No one who I have ever interacted with has ever tried to convince me I needed genital surgery (which sucks for transguys, anyways). The system is certainly not perfect, but it’s also not some sort of Stepford-esque manly-man/50s-housewife brainwashing-and-surgery factory.

Changing sex to reaffirm and perpetuate hetero-normative gender strengthens the very structure used to marginalize lesbians and gay men.

The entire surgical/psychological transition process is controlled by heterosexual physicians and therapists who believe your biological sex must match your gender. If not, it is appropriate, they believe, to enact surgical violence on your body to make you conform.

How is agreement with this hegemonic totem part of the L&G community?

What I am saying is that the assertions of the trans community are antithetical to the belief that gender itself is in any way limiting (or has ‘barriers’ that need to be crossed or opposed).

Gender stereotypes, yes, need to be expanded or eradicated. But gender itself is not the issue there.

You’re right, I did mix up the vocabulary (hey I’m new to this!), but clearly you understood my point. Thanks for clarifying the language bit.

We disagree, that does not mean that I am insulting you. That is not my intention in any way whatsoever. My intention is just to talk about this issue and to allow for both of our positions/perspectives/ideas to be expressed.

Fundamental to the argument that gender is not a concept distinct from sex is the idea that sex biologically clear-cut, when this is not actually the case. What makes a male male? Based on your example, it cannot be his gonads (and therefore also cannot be his capacity to reproduce, nor his hormone levels, both of which could be used to define “sex”). Is it his chromosomes? What then, is someone with Klinefelter’s syndrome (XXY chromosomes) – is that person incapable of being a man? Or a woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes but whose body does not process testosterone normally, and so matures as an infertile female) – can she not be a woman?

If people with uncommon sex chromosomes or hormone reactions can have common genders, why can’t a non-androgen insensitive “male” be a woman?

Obviously, what it means to be trans is far outside the experience of most non-trans people – your incomprehension makes illustrates that. And that fine – it’s okay to say “I don’t understand”. What is not okay, however, is disrespect. I am a man who is not male; I assure you, it’s very possible. By insisting that my existence is impossible, you are either calling me, and every other trans person, a liar, insane, or stupid.