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Well, not to nitpick, but a man can still look like a man without a beard. You also neglect the reality of hair loss for some trans men, which can begin as soon as other changes start taking effect. And... training yourself to talk at a certain pitch becomes as permanent as a physiological change to the vocal chords? That is surprising to me.
But yeah, I wasn't thinking about the breast growth
Still, removing breasts will cost you something, but once it's done, your appearance can return to some kind of masculine normal.
anyone can look like a man if they put efforts into it.
Jas, I've seen a lot of transmisogyny in my day, but this here is an impressive display of transmisandry. You're really freaked out about the female-assigned getting testosterone, and seem to care not a lick for the male-assigned who would like to prevent it. I am a slacks-wearing, makeup-eschewing, Maddow-watching, trans lesbian, and I am sick and fucking tired of seeing the radfem left mourn or venerate straight trans guys as some sort of lesbian vanguard.
Trans men. Aren't. Women. And most of them, the ones who are man enough to give up access to womens' space: They'll tell you as much. And if you disagree, guess what? They know themselves better than you know them!
I'm not mourning their loss - they haven't gone anywhere. I'm questioning the seeming rise in transgender identification leading to transition, and whether easier access is causing some to make the decision to transition for reasons other than being genuinely trans. Especially for those who possess no political understanding of how sexism, heterosexism and heteronormativity operate in our society. I mean, you ask why the definition of womanhood has to involve a vagina; one can also ask why it has to involve breasts and a higher-pitched voice and a lack of facial hair. Why does masculinity have to involve men's clothes, muscles and body hair and a lack of breasts? Why can't trans people feel masculine or feminine in the bodies they have? In other words, why base masculinity or femininity on certain physical attributes? I thought that trans people officially reject that notion. But at the same time you're selecting superficial physical characteristics for yourselves based on normative binaries. How is that genderfucking? It actually contradicts what you are saying about gender binaries.
If being a woman doesn't involve having breasts or a vagina or a higher softer voice, why adopt those attributes?
Wow. I don't know where to begin.
You have rolled out three tropes here:
-Trans people are reinforcing sexism
-All parts of the body are equally crucial to all people's body maps
-All binary presentation is inherently sexist
I don't have the energy to teach you trans 101 when you say you have a few concerns regarding public funding. If that were the case you wouldn't be questioning the very nature of our existence. From this point on, please discuss in good faith, because I've been talking to you for weeks and I was under the delusion that you didn't need a course of trans 101.
Maybe I can respond. I never felt like physical attributes is related to how I identify with my gender. I think the hormonal treatments helped me to be the gender that I am. I didn’t have to learn to be a woman nor do I have to look female to be a woman, the hormonal effects help me to be who I feel I am psychologically. I never remember having to consciously learn how to be a socially approrpiate female, it just happens on its own.
Interesting. I wonder if you would problematize a man with erectile dysfunction for taking viagra under the same logic. Could you claim that enhancing one's sex is a radically different practice when it is performed by a trans vs. cis person?
I do, however, remember having to consciously learn how to be a socially appropriate male. From spending 2 weeks practicing how to look at my nails, to trying to become comfortable with what is considered platonic male contact. (never managed that) to learning to shut my mouth around sexist behaviour because men (straight or otherwise) often feel comfortable intimidating other men who call them on their bullshit.
I remember that my fiance said that one of the things that attracted her to me were all those female mannerisms I couldn't learn away. How I flirted like a girl, in that I would continuously make eye-contact and then look down and away, that my speech patterns, my stance, mannerisms, when I no longer felt constant pressure to present male, just became more feminine, more natural. I didn't have to think of what to say, though sometimes I'd be aware of how much more femme my mannerisms had become, just by doing what felt natural. It's amazing the way society generally squeezes femininity out of those it perceives boys. I almost hadn't remembered what I had taken from me until I reclaimed it.
It now having been 8 months and 6 days since I asked for treatment, and my not having gotten any estrogen as of yet, I thought I might do something constructive with my time and reply.
That's odd, because I'm looking at the historically low rates of medical transition before we'd learned to synthesize estrogen, and OMG you're right! Nobody was trans before Christine Jorgenson!
Well, except Lily Elbe, or the Chevalier d'Eon, or Elagabalus (classic case of acting out, by the way, poor girl.)
Lucky for me, instead of learning how to call Warren Farrel a misogynist, I was in economics class looking at price and its effect on demand. For some, the price of transition, from the violence and the threats, and the humiliation of the Real Life Experience (Oh, I wasn't aware I wasn't really living up to this point doctor!) discourage transition. If the price is lowered, then more people, who are still trans, still expressing a demand for medical transition, will obtain services. Just like some women are too poor to afford to terminate a pregnancy, due to the high short-term costs, or too poor to have a child due to the high long-term costs. Removing barriers does not increase demand, it just increases the population of people who will then buy.
Well, despite some really unisex t-shirts and slacks, when I was not transitioning, I had no visible musculature, visible breasts, and talked higher than most people I knew.
Same reason the cis do. They want to stop seeing things on their body that generally horrify them. Electrolysis wasn't invented for trans women, you do realize, right?
I'm selecting things that bother me personally and dealing with them. I don't, and I will strenuously resist, the notion that because I don't wear heels, or have an outie instead of an innie and see no pressing reason to change it, and am not too concerned with breast size, that that makes me any less of a woman. It's no more genderfuck than the last decades of presentation were, when I wore the most comfortable clothing I could that did the most to hide my physique.
And also, I have little interest in genderfuck as some sort of political statement. I'm just doing what's comfortable, and sometimes that's being very much the binaristic little femmegirl, and sometimes that's being a wonderfully geekish chapstick lesbian. The thread tieing these all together? I do them so that I can look in the mirror and feel good about myself. My instincts don't have to make logical or political sense. I choose not to reproduce too, and there's no logical evolutionary reason for that either.
Because these are, for individual women, the things that seriously stress them out. Why do cis women with an intersex condition often have it surgically corrected, you might as well ask. Because for some women, it's what bugs them.
Also, have you lived years of your life being uniformly misgendered? I don't mean on a regular basis, and from some angles, I mean: All. The. Time.
When someone treats me like they would treat any other woman, that's water to someone dying of thirst. First time it happened at work this month, and I'm still dressed in slacks and sweater and sneakers, mind you, I was on air. I floated home. It was like a fundamentally unrecognized part of me I had been trying to scream at the world had finally been heard. I can't make you logically understand what it's like to have the disconnect between brain and body and socialization begin to ameliorate, I just can't, because you haven't lived it. I consequently also don't know what it's like to be cis, though I used to talk a good game.
My gender will not make logical sense to you. I also don't know why people become men, jas, but when I say that, I mean, I don't know why half the population becomes men. I have to assume, that it's just hard wired. Same way I'm a lesbian and don't like to have romantic attachements to or even spend too much time with men, I have to assume that other people feel the same way I do, but replacing one variable for another. They are really happy with the way their brains work and can't conceive of feeling another way. Sure they may like the political or social advantages that come with being another gender or orientation, but ultimately they can't overcome that self-loathing by trying to go around it, so complete are the walls, and attempting to do so will only destroy them.
I adopt these attributes for the same reason anyone else does: They make me feel most comfortable. I like having a voice that sounds, well, proper. I don't know any other way to say it. I like my hair shoulder-length even though I could shave it bald and still consider myself a girl. You may as well go to all the other chapstick lesbians and start telling them how their gender presentation makes you politically uncomfortable too.
I leave you with this thought: If I had been cis and asked for the morning after pill, instead of having come to the doctor seeking help to transition, and I had been treated with the equivalent levels of disdain, dissemblance, and general antipathy, I would be 2 weeks and 3 days away from my due date. And still pregnant with a child I knew all along that I did not want. I am not equipped to carry a boy any longer. I don't want one and will only treat him badly.
thanks RTTG! So glad to see you back!
Jas . . . oh my! There is so much to be learned if we will allow other people to tell us what their experience is -- without trying to argue them out of the experience they are living!!!!! You need to do some reading and then come back to this: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler; "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough" by Anne Fausto-Sterling; and Gender (2nd ed.) by Raewyn Connell (who, if you pick up the 1st edition, was R. Connell for Robert). One other suggestion might be Entre Nous: on-thinking-of-the-other by Emmanuel Levinas: "Is our relation with the other a letting be?" This whole string has been incredibly disturbing. (Enough so that I've taken the time to post.) We need to move beyond gender binaries first of all. The trans/cis thing is quite offensive. Gender is a continuum and it's performative and our bodies are deeply implicated in that whether we like it or not, not because of biology but because of the discourses around what is 'properly' feminine or masculine that get attached to particular bodies in this society.
Nelle, I don't believe in gender binaries. I do believe that gender is essentially a two-party dominant system, and that there's so much room for overlap that I don't know where to begin. I like where I am, and that's pretty much on the binary, but that's not for everyone, hell no.
Very sad to see that CP felt driven away. I think all the labelling conundrum could be mitigated easily enough by respectfully borrowing terminology that some First Nations have coined - i.e. by using the term "Two-Spirited". My feeling from the little experience I've had with transgendered people is that transitioning is less about following peer trends than it is about realizing an inner knowledge about what one's "true essence" is, as it were.
But I'm definitely not an expert on the topic and would have loved to have heard more about CP's experience that she had so bravely started to bare. I suppose we will have one less diverse voice now to reflect those experiences to all of us who are "not in the know" about this.
Well, and this is in a spirit of education, since you're trying to dialogue here instead of debate my right to exist. (Yay for that BTW) I really don't like that label as it implies some degree of confusion or being some sort of gendermutt. It's kind of erasing to people who know what they are and are of one mind on the subject.
RTTG, I agree. The available discourses would like to have us believe there are only two possibilities, i.e., male and female, and that these are performative in very specific (and constraining) ways. It is very good to see the available discourses around gender begin to broaden through threads like this even if it is frustrating and painful. We will have begun to make progress when we teach kids in school that there are really female, intersex, and male for a start and open up the discussion to an understanding of gender as fluid, not fixed. There is so much policing of gender performance through harassment and bullying in the schools (and elsewhere, too, I know). Yes, we need to control offensive behaviours, but I also believe we need to educate kids fully. (My apologies to all for the double post.)
CP had mentioned that every trans person she knew, had a conviction from early childhood "what they were/are". Red Tory, do you feel that transitioning should begin when a child starts asking about it and says something like "I should be a girl/boy"? I'm just curious about this. It seems we're doing everything wrong about this, at this point.
I didn't mean to offend with the term "two-spirited", I just thought this was one of the few positive - and dare I say - celebratory terms I have heard referring to transgendered people. From what I've seen it's not meant to be a "confused" term about one's gender but rather an inclusive word meant to acknowledge one's physical reality as well as inner feeling or sensation about who one is. But if it's not considered a very accurate or appropriate term I can understand that too.
I appreciate the analogy of carrying an unwanted baby (boy, in your case) and wanting to terminate while having to endure all the external humming and hawing about something you're already sure about!
Thanks for your post RTTG.
I'm also sad that CP felt she had to leave.
Well, honestly, I think people should do the least amount required to make them feel right. So maybe you let your child be gender variant, and choose more or less, how they want to present, and where, and at about 11, you have a talk with hir (trying to let stuff go both ways here) about hormone blockers. I mean, from the age of 12 on, we don't let parents assign a new name to a child without their consent, and, if a parent knows about a child's transsexual expression, and does nothing, really, they're assigning a new gender without the consent of that child.
I'd say you tell your child they can do as much or as little as they want, that some things will be permanent, like height, and bone structure, and voice. I would, ironically enough, tend to agree with Jas, that it's easier to go boy than go girl, and recommend, in the case of all things being equal and undecided, a female puberty with freedom for masculine expression, rather than the other way round.
I know you didn't. And celebration is not necessarily the same thing as respect. Quote Julia Serano, (99% certain on this) regarding the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival restricting their policy restricting access to women-born-women. (There's a minor disagreement with the radfems there. I think the term is redundant, they think that gender is genetalia. And by minor I mean it's fundamental.) She said:
They don't let us [trans women] on the land because they don't respect our identity.
They welcome trans men with open arms because they don't respect their identity either.
Ha! Point taken.
RTTG, I'm still chewing on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival comment -- I was there when the first protest happened. I'm not sure the comment is totally fair to them even though I fully respect the protest and some of our group stood with the protesters. Legally, we have to declare a sex for a child at birth -- male or female. There is no box where you can check "pending" and we 'know' statistically that 4% of live births are ambiguous genitalia to begin with. That's without any consideration of inner identity. On top of this, society privileges maleness. As an embodied female I can wear male clothing, do male identified things publicly, etc. because of the power differential. One of the things feminism has done is to open up a broader performance for embodied womanness. The reverse is not true. I believe this is the next piece of work feminism has to do. As Connell says, "[The binary opposition] does not have a way of understanding change as a dialectic within gender relations." As a woman-identified woman I believe men/maleness/masculinities are my concern and 'problem' because this has such a huge impact on my life as lived. I see trans and gender 'variant' (variant to what??? do you see this as a judging, pathologizing and 'othering' word by the way it establishes a norm from which to distance some people?) as both caught in the middle (pun unintended but I'll let it stand) and terribly important to the process of change. We need a new definition of 'normal' that is inclusive and empowering to all!
I'm not really sure how to respond to the whole of your comment, though yes, I agree that we need a new definition of normal. I would reply specifically to this:
To hide behind the law is not really fighting oppression. Might I suggest, at least for my fellow lesbians, a new maxim:
Render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar's
And render unto Sappho what is Sapphic.
I'm not hiding behind the law, but merely stating what 'is' right now. Parents are compelled to make choices they are ill-equipped to make sometimes to register a birth. To argue that the solution is to refuse to register the birth is to then deny citizenship rights and recognition to the child with big implications for social entitlements. India has now included male, female and other in its census information. This is a start perhaps.
And the pathologizing of homosexuality is a recent construct in Western society (check out Foucault on this) and does not hold across all societies (see Connell) -- or at least not until the Europeans and missionaries catch up to them. It is connected to the institutionalization of psychology as a discourse.
That said a clerical error is not a very good excuse for excluding a trans woman from womens' space.
I wouldn't say that it's a clerical error; it's more of a legal conundrum. I would say that the first place for activism is to create open space between male and female on the birth certificate from the get go. I'm not sure if intersex should be lobbied for as a term or not, but something should be, because what gets institutionalized has power. Of course, there is still stigma attached to this. One of the reasons surgeons and parents initially thought they were doing intersex babies a favour by rendering them 'normal' as quickly and early as possible.
There are many ways some women are excluded from other women's space. And that's ok. There is no generic 'woman'. That's why the term feminism has become feminisms. To return to Michigan so to speak, there are spaces within the festival for particular identities. The Womyn of Color tent is separate space, as it the Womyn Over Forty tent, women of differing abilities have separate space within the festival, etc. At the time it would never have occured to me to picket or protest the fact that I was excluded from these spaces. Theirs is not my experience, and I respect that. Similarly, it is a very different experience to grow up socially identified as female as opposed to re-crafting the body to be socially identified as female later. One might argue that this is indeed grounds for the festival as separate space. There is a privileging that goes with a male-identified body even if there is a choice made to abandon that identification later. That experience is alien to the majority living lives in women's bodies.
One last thought, I think it is really important not to conflate gender identity with sexual orientation. The two are mutually exclusive. The social 'we' likes to make assumptions about who we believe people to be -- 'we' like to categorize and get folks into their proper little sexuality box (coffin?) pretty quickly.
Thank you, nelle. This is what I have been arguing all along.
And subvertisement, 'two-spirited' is a term that most accurately describes my experience of my own gender expression and sexuality. Much more so than 'trans', 'cis', 'gay', 'straight'. I don't use it in everyday discourse, but when I first heard it, I thought, "that's exactly what I am."
I'm sorry, but there are three fundamental points I must raise here:
One, I fail to see how a forced boyhood is privileging for any woman. It is an unending trauma of ostracism, stunted expression, both social and economic, and mutilation by negligence. If any woman was abducted and filled full of testosterone, and forced to be a man, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't call that privilege, even if she was recognized as male. I'm pretty sure we'd call that horiffic. Just because the majority have not been so traumatized is no good reason to exclude those who have been.
Two, howabout we go with pick-your-own for gender. We have lots of boxes on forms that aren't binary decisions, and yet still have modal, bi-modal, or poly-modal answers given.
Three, to say that a space is for womyn-born-womyn is much like founding the No Homers club, especially when that space initially said that they welcomed womyn, and then decided to add the distinction that they must be cisgendered, or if they're trans men, to fall back on the cachet that having originally had an F stamped on their birth certificate would give them.
I don't know what to say about the gender-identity sexuality thing myself, other than the general public does not think there is such a thing as a trans lesbian, and, for that matter, I doubt Lisa Vogel does either. And yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a warranted dig, but of course, we haven't mined the transmisogyny gold that's on the michfest forums yet, if you need me to underline my point.
This statement about Michigan only works if trans women are considered more privileged than cis women, which seems to be the ongoing attitude of the MWMF organizers. Spaces for women of colour, older women or women with disabilities would presumably have been created in recognition that these women may be marginalized, and are less privileged than women who are not. (Women over forty? Really?) What should be the case is that trans women are welcomed to the festival as women, and hey, if there's a need or a desire, create a trans women tent, in recognition of the privilege that cis women experience.
Do you think there is privileging when growing up socially identified as female when you also identify as female? I do. More than any male privilege that might be incidentally garnered by someone who has been misgendered and has struggled against it for most of their lives, and who has the strength and resources to defy pretty much every social convention regarding gender if they transition ... only to face the intense opprobrium that is meted out to anyone who does so.
Alright, then let's follow that logic.
Peter Lougheed, being 1/16th aborignal by ancestry, does not have white privilege, should not be labelled as white, because race is a continum, and to deny his identification is unfair.
Stephen Harper may not identify as straight, and thus it's unfair to say he has straight privilege, unfair to label him as straight, or heterosexual, or in a heterosexual relationship.
Class is a continum, therefore we ought not offensively call David Asper a bloated plutocrat, since class is performative.
...
Plainly this sounds completely fucking ridiculous to most of you.
Yes, gender is expressed, but it is also constructed in response to instincts and impulses. To erase the discrimination people face when they attempt to act on those instincts, be it femmephobia or transphobia or the intersection of the two, is one of the last acceptable bigotries in Western society. (Not one of the last practiced, but definitely among the last acceptable.) That you are so concerned with finding some way to ascribe gender guilt to a gender that isn't ours, that was forced despite our best attempts at subversion, defiance, and escape, is, quite simply so at odds with your stated values that I simply do not know where to begin.
This does begin to become frustrating, after a time, being the lone champion of something as simple as not allowing a dissonance to persist when it can be easily corrected.
RTTG, we live in a society that privileges men, preferably white, heterosexual, and European. The more your gender performance matches that of a white, heterosexual male, the more privilege you can pull -- get taken seriously when you make public complaints, not have to be constantly alert to strange men and places like parking lots after dark, etc., etc. Whether you wanted it or not, the penis and matters.
I'm not going to debate oppressions. You can never fully know my experience. I can never fully know the experience of a woman of colour. I can never fully know your experience.
I may be an ally, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with you in all things.
Class is neither a continuum nor performative. It is learned. Think of "My Fair Lady" or "Educating Rita." Bourdieu refers to it as a "habitus." We are acculturated into language, manners, relationships, i.e., ways of being in the world, that are different based on whether we have money or not.
Race, too, is neither a continuum nor performative. It is definitely a signifier, and no matter how hard Michael Jackson tried, he could not make himself white. Nor can Obama, even though he is biracial.
I choose my gender performance daily by the clothes I choose to wear, my hair, makeup, what I choose to do. For some situations I "girly" it up -- not my favourite choice, but there are better social results to be had by working with the situation if that's what's important. What I'm saying is, we are given bodies that can lend themselves to a particular gender performance. How we choose to work with that depends on how safe we feel, what we need from the situation, etc. and this changes daily, if not more often, as we move in and out of social situations. What is most important to me is allowing other people to make their own choices about their own gender performances. 'We' make judgements about other people in so many ways based on the bodies they have and how 'we' think they ought to be. (Fat is a good example here.) And I'm using 'we' because this is so deeply implicated in the society of which we are a part, that it's an illusion to hope to escape it.
RTTG, the "gender guilt" stuff is yours. I'm just saying there are spaces and places for all of us, sometimes together as women, and sometimes not. Sometimes the signifier "woman" is not the only ticket you'll need for admission. (And believe me, this really ticked off the white women with biracial daughters who were denied entrance to the Womyn of Color tent when their daughters went in.)
Really. Because of course it's visible on the outside of my clothing now? And yes, see Tehanu for the rebuke to the 'residual male privilge' argument.
And if you want to have a music festival that's trans exclusive, that would be fine, if I could still get into a domestic violence sheleter if I'm battered by my girlfriend, or get HRT like any cis woman, but no, this exclusion permeates.
I think though, I'm actually going to quote someone from the Michfest forums who puts it far better than I: