I've wondered similar things, and sort of come to the conclusion that I'm unusually un-attached to my gender (cis-woman, for the record). All of the analogies that people use to try to explain how it feel to present as the wrong gender just don't resonate with me as things that would make me uncomfortable. Things like "imagine having to wear men's clothes every day" or "imagine if people referred to you as 'he' all the time". If wearing men's clothes didn't attract unusual attention, I wouldn't mind doing it at all. And as long as a different pronoun wasn't being used intentionally as an insult or pejorative, I'm not all that attached to "she" and "her". I mostly dress to avoid attracting attention (so in women's, but not especially feminine, clothing), but my only gender-related goal is to not stick out or be conspicuous. I don't really have an internal attachment to presenting one way or another.
(That's not to say I don't believe other people when they say that these things matter to them! I believe in calling people by the names and words they choose for themselves. No matter the reason.)
I've wondered similar things, and sort of come to the conclusion that I'm unusually un-attached to my gender
I feel that way to as a cis-male, but I also think I'm probably wrong, that this is a failure of introspection. Being male fits me, and I can't even conceive of what it would be like if it didn't.
This topic gives me castration anxiety.
Being male fits me
Yeah, the equivalent statement feels kind of nonsensical to me. I'm not quite sure what it would mean for being female to "fit me." Being female doesn't feel particularly connected to the parts of my identity that *are* important to me, and it feels like I could swap in a male gender identity without changing very much about the rest of my identity. As you say, this could just be a failure of introspection. But it feels like I could keep everything that makes me "me", even if I were male.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'd be totally ok with it if I'd been born in a woman's body, and I definitely don't grok gender identity the way I grok sexual orientation. I don't have any close trans friends (just acquaintances). One thing that helps me understand a little is thinking about close cis friends who do have a strong sense of gender identity. In particular one of my very good friends is bisexual and strongly femme, and it helps to think at a higher level of analogy, where I first think "oh, she must have the same problems getting why people care so much about the gender of the people they're dating, just like I have trouble understanding why people care so much about their own gender."
It also helps me more to think about women who care about being women, since it's hard for me to get past the "men who really care about their gender identity"="assholes" identification.
It's not all assholery. Castration anxiety is a thing.
it's hard for me to get past the "men who really care about their gender identity"="assholes" identification.
To be fair, I can't remember the last time I saw someone who was vocally concerned with their status as male who wasn't an asshole.
Not that being concerned over one's maleness without being an asshole is impossible, I just haven't seen any versions of this lately that didn't get pretty toxic.
I feel like it's much easier to imagine myself as a short woman than as a tall man.
Ha, that's interesting. If I picture myself male, I'm definitely short. Towering over everyone else definitely disrupts my idea of who I am. But maybe that's because the stories we tell don't usually draw on the height of the narrator? So I'm used to slipping into male shoes but not tall shoes?
Unsurprisingly, I am wholeheartedly attached to being a woman,* and perhaps relatedly I can vividly imagine the horror of having a body that doesn't match one's gender identity.
*for ex, when you've written here about the surgeon resisting your desire to avoid post-mastectomy reconstruction, heebie, it's made me realize that it would be an equally clear and opposite choice for me.
I feel like Roadruner. When I lived in Mtl as a student I came across the LGBT bookstore l'Androgyne and thought right away, oh that's me. I felt like a drag artist when I put on femme clothes, and yet I did it, to acquire the skill. I do think, if I was young now, my presented identity would be quite different (middle aged dowdy is my look of choice).
My strong id as a woman feels disconnected from my sexual orientation, btw.
I'm used to slipping into male shoes but not tall shoes?
Height reassignment surgery is also a thing, just to extend the analogy.
Anyway, I maintain that my attachment to my maleness isn't even one of the ways in which I am most assholey.
So I'm used to slipping into male shoes but not tall shoes?
That makes sense since most tall shoes are womens shoes.
Similarly it would be pretty disruptive to my feeling of self to be in a body that wasn't reasonably athletic. I do feel horror and body dismorphia imagining myself as an old person. But imagining myself with Heebie's gender presentation just doesn't weird me out the way that being old or tall or really far in either direction on the gender presentation spectrum does.
Middle-aged dowdy! Yep, that's me, despite not being middle-aged.
"Androgynous" doesn't even quite match my feeling, because it implies an intentional middle-ness--women with short hair, men with make-up, or wearing masculine and feminine clothes in an intentional mixture, but that's definitely not me. I wear whatever won't attract attention (even positive attention, like "that's such a nice dress!" or "I love your shoes!"), which for me, means boring women's clothes (oh, the cardigans...). Rather than a gender in the middle, my gender just feels absent.
Maybe I'm just weird about clothes, and this has nothing to do with gender. I'd be interested in reading about a trans experience of gender that *doesn't* focus on outward presentation (which is necessarily attached to things like clothes, hair cuts, make-up) or how other people treat you, and more about the internal experience of what gender feels like.
I'm pretty androgynous, but I care A LOT about my clothes.
I can't imagine being female at all. But I'm severely lacking in empathy so that doesn't necessarily say anything about gender identity.
I'm sort of where Heebie is. Gender feels to me like a series of social facts about how people treat me because they've identified me as a woman, and the personality I've developed as a result of those experiences over my lifetime. I'm perfectly content being cis-female -- I certainly have plenty of issues, to which you have all been exposed over the years, about the social facts about how our society treats women, but that feels to me like "people in a category I belong to, that is, women, are being treated unjustly" rather than "the social treatment appropriate for women generally is inappropriate for me." But despite that contentment, there's nothing particularly aversive or disturbing about the thought of having been male instead of female, I don't feel powerfully attached to my gender.
But like Heebie says, possibly I have the luxury of not having strong feelings about my gender because the gender I was assigned at birth feels comfortable to me.
Anyway, this comes out to having a lot of trouble empathizing with the trans experience. I figure I don't need to empathize, being trans is important enough to the people that are trans that the right things to do are very clear (that is, be supportive, don't be an asshole, oppose oppressive laws and so on). But there's an internal level where I really don't get it.
20: Perhaps my identification is more "vain" than "woman"!
My strong imagining of the horror of feeling you've been born in the wrong body may be in part due to having been raised by No Cal hippie parents with a very strong vibe that any interest in makeup, perfume and overtly feminine clothes was derided and discouraged, plus it was in a suburb with a large mormon and evangelical christian population so there were plenty of oppressive examples littered about BUT it turns out that for me suppressing my attraction to makeup, perfume, hair business and feminine clothes makes me seriously miserable.
Listening to trans women talk about their dysphoria was how I ruled out that I might be trans. Whatever discomfort I have with my gender, it's pretty minor and maleness works well enough often enough.
The point about the salience of sexual orientation being stronger than gender rings for me, too. If I were a woman or trans, I think I'd be a lesbian. Dudes are fine but just aren't really as interesting. Maybe I should be saying sexual preference instead of orientation--the constant seems to be andro/gyno/panphilia even while gender varies. I wish we'd use those words (or more etymologically correct equivalents) instead of, or complimentary to, homo/hetero/pansexual as in many circumstances they're more relevant.
I was thinking about this question on the bus, into work, and I realize that I have strong reactions.
In short, I think that my gender presentation could be fairly similar if I was female (and already leans in the direction of, " I wear whatever won't attract attention (even positive attention, like "that's such a nice dress!" or "I love your shoes!"), ... Rather than a gender in the middle, my gender just feels absent.") but I suspect my lived experiences and life choices would be very, very different if I was female, and I'll try to elaborate on that when I have time.
I am puzzled by the interplay of trans identity with gender essentialism. I found this piece interesting but ultimately unsatisfying.
Some aspects of the trans experience seem to clearly implicate some kind of gender essentialism, no? How can one be a man in a woman's body if "man" and "woman" don't mean some essential thing? The linked piece explores the various different kinds of experience labeled "trans" that are not, in fact, gender-essential, but it doesn't deny the existence of the "man trapped in a woman's body."
Like some others here, I don't really comprehend transsexuality on a personal level. I mean, I'm not gay, but I understand attraction to men both as something women experience and as something gay men experience. That is to say, when I'm around an unusually attractive man, I am sometimes aware of it in a way that isn't "sizing up a competitor" or whatever.
And, of course, you get into variations where people who are born with male genitalia regard themselves as women and lesbians. I don't see how to separate that phenomenon from gender essentialism.
Of course, none of this is to deny people's lived experience. I'm just describing my own lived experience.
Gender feels to me like a series of social facts about how people treat me because they've identified me as a woman, and the personality I've developed as a result of those experiences over my lifetime. I'm perfectly content being cis-female -- I certainly have plenty of issues, to which you have all been exposed over the years, about the social facts about how our society treats women, but that feels to me like "people in a category I belong to, that is, women, are being treated unjustly" rather than "the social treatment appropriate for women generally is inappropriate for me." But despite that contentment, there's nothing particularly aversive or disturbing about the thought of having been male instead of female, I don't feel powerfully attached to my gender.
This is exactly how I feel too. I gender is not a category I feel internal to my identity, and while I think of myself as deeply androgynous, I present as a normal cis-woman.
To the extent I have problems with my body, it's that my physical body is super femmy (medium height for a woman, hourglass figure, very feminine-looking face, high-pitched voice, blonde hair*), and I don't feel femmy at all. I dress in women's clothes mainly because they fit me better, but I sort of actively dress to hide my curves. I feel intensely uncomfortable in anything that's waist defining, or anything that shows off cleavage.
*obvs. men can be blonds too, but blonde hair on a woman is usually associated with a certain sort of normative femininity.
28
I've wondered about this too. Agreeing 100% that people feel how they feel and no one has a right to deny that or demand that people don't identify openly and live their lives however they want, but, I wonder, what would it mean to be trans in a world where gender was dismantled?
Also, a lot of the non-binary or gender queer stuff I've read about seems like people who identify as non binary do so by reinforcing the binary for everyone else. I don't know if that's because people are bad at articulating something that's hard to articulate, but I've read lots of essays by people who are like, "I'm genderqueer because I don't like pink or wearing dresses or putting on make up." And it makes me fed up because I'm like, yeah, identify however you want, but none of that is essential to being female.
I feel pretty male.
I'm not especially wedded to traditional male gender presentation, appearances* to the contrary.
For most of my late teens, and much of my 20s, I had very long hair, was skinny, wore makeup, and could easily have passed for female if I'd so wished. And I thoroughly enjoyed playing with androgyny of appearance, and playing around with a certain flamboyance of appearance.
But even at the time that I looked really femme much of the time, that wasn't about not being male or being uncomfortable with being male. I struggle to imagine what _I_ would be like, if I were a woman (rather than just imagining being a woman in the abstract). Things like having the kind of voice that I do, or certain other things,** feel quite strongly part of my self-image.
22.last sort of works for me.
I had a couple of friends as a teenager who transitioned, and one who was in a band with me, and we used to dress up together, wear make-up together, etc. Except, it seems she meant it, or experienced it, in a way that I didn't. I find it quite hard to mentally shift, in the sense of real identification rather than just general empathy, from my experience of that time to her experience of that time.
* fat, bearded.
** male hands, and so on. I'm not talking about the obvious primary sexual characteristics.
And I thoroughly enjoyed playing with androgyny of appearance, and playing around with a certain flamboyance of appearance.
And if I was thinner, and had more money, I think I'd still enjoy a bit of dress-up, except it'd be middle aged man dress up. As in, really nice suits, or beautifully tailored clothes, etc.
I've read lots of essays by people who are like, "I'm genderqueer because I don't like pink or wearing dresses or putting on make up."
A lot of that is just young people being faddish, I think. Identifying as genderqueer today is kind of like what identifying as allergic to gluten was 10 years ago. Not that there aren't genuinely genderqueer people, of course.
I mean, lots of this is academic naval gazing, because our world right now is really really far from being gender neutral in any way, and clearly we have to fight for people to live how they want in the here and now. I'm intensely uncomfortable with "born this way" as an argument for gay and trans rights because of its biological essentialism, but if it works in the here and now getting people accepted by those in their lives, then I'm not going to speak out against it.
I'm intensely uncomfortable with "born this way" as an argument for gay and trans rights because of its biological essentialism
Yes, this. Men fucking men just because they feel like it, or think it'd be fun to try sometime seems like it should be just as morally acceptable as someone who feels profoundly that they were 'born that way'.
I don't get the gluten thing either. Gluten is what makes the bread chewy and delicious. If it makes you shit uncontrollably or whatever, you just have to shit uncontrollably. You can't not eat bread.
33
Yeah, and it doesn't help that I spend my days in an elite private gender studies dept environment. I'm surrounded by wealthy 18 year olds with skrillex haircuts reading Judith Butler for the first time and having "your privilege is showing" pissing competitions. I have to remind myself that I basically live in opposite world from Trump's America.
I'm so deeply enmeshed in getting health care for well-off, elderly white people that I'm afraid I'll turn into a Republican member of Congress.
I think I'm a little like Matt. That some of the experiences as described by others, sound very similar to what my experiences growing up were (tomboy-ish girl, not liking dresses, wanting to be a boy) but I guess I didn't mean it?
I've never felt very 'female' except as a way everyone treated me based on my looks. All the cool things women's bodies do seem to be done poorly/late/not at all compared to other women so I definitely have some body-sex-related bitterness. My first thought when I realized I might not be able to get pregnant was 'Of course. You-body could never do anything right, could you?' Although my hair is amazing these days so I'm really performing femininity super well.
I am puzzled by the interplay of trans identity with gender essentialism. I found this piece interesting but ultimately unsatisfying.
There was a long and very good essay on that topic in the LRB last year. I do think a lot of trans narratives draw on or reinforce the idea of gender essentialism, but there are other strong voices that see transgender individuals as part of the subversion of gender binaries.
Trans is not one thing. In the public mind crossing over - the Caitlyn Jenner option - is the most familiar version, but there are as many trans people who do not choose this path. In addition to 'transition' ('A to B') and 'transitional' ('between A and B'), trans can also mean 'A as well as B' or 'neither A nor B' - that's to say, 'transcending', as in 'above', or 'in a different realm from', both. Thus Jan Morris in Conundrum in 1974: 'There is neither man nor woman ... I shall transcend both.' Even that is not all. If transsexuality is subsumed in the broader category of transgender, as it is for example in the Transgender Studies readers, then there would seem to be no limit; one of the greatest pleasures of falling outside the norm is the freedom to pile category upon category, as in Borges's fantastic animal taxonomy which Foucault borrowed to open The Order of Things (no order to speak of), or the catechisms of the 'Ithaca' chapter in Ulysses, whose interminable lists doggedly outstrip the mind's capacity to hold anything in its proper place. At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In 2011 the New York-based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. 'In these pages,' the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor's note, 'you will meet persons who could be characterised, and could recognise themselves, as one - or some - of the following: a girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as a girl, a girl who has to be a boy to be a girl.' We are dealing, Stryker explains, with 'a heteroglossic outpouring of gender positions from which to speak'.
RWM volunteers at a teen space that has a lot of 30.last genderqueer teenagers. In addition to faddishness and general teenageness, she thinks a lot of it is clearly misogyny-driven. But again it's kids and hopefully they'll grow out of some of that misogyny.
Link to the essay, which I strongly recommend.
There's been some work arguing that the now nearly ubiquitous distinction between sex (male/female) and gender (man/woman) doesn't adequately capture the trans experience. E.g., if we accept the sex/gender distinction, it suggests that the correct analysis is "male who prefers a woman-gender presentation" But that's clearly not what trans people are saying that they experience, so some people think there's a good reason to rethink the distinction.
I'm skeptical that a thought experiment would be helpful here. I can imagine very easily having a different sexual orientation. But imagining the deep gender dysphoria trans people report is much harder for me to try to grasp, because it's clearly not just preferring feminine or masculine presentation (there I identify as inept feminine, trending frumpy but I blame the baby) but rejecting their physical body -- but I don't really experience endorsing my body -- it's just there.
So for me trying to imagine what it's like to be trans I think is going to be less helpful than just listening to their experiences. Empathy is overrated.
I think my gender identity and sexual orientation have more or less co-evolved over time, and are both pretty specific and idiosyncratic, although well within the normal band for my demographics. Gender identity is a carefully selected* mixed bag of masculine and feminine traits, but female overall. My sexual orientation feels to me like a deeply private matter that goes person-by-person (the words "bisexual" or, worse yet, "pansexual" seem to exaggerate the scale to a comical degree). But it also gets emotionally messy in social context: I'm committed to monogamy in part because I'm not madly in love with two people** who reciprocate, just one; but I do feel like my queer identity gets lost in a sometimes painful way.
I think "MYOB" should be a recognized identity along various axes. It's super easy to recognize: one step and you're done.
* Not deliberately selected by me, exactly; but I'm not sure what other word to use.
** To be quite clear, I am only madly in love with one person, period.
So for me trying to imagine what it's like to be trans I think is going to be less helpful than just listening to their experiences. Empathy is overrated.
This is true. I have an old friend who was recently identified as transgender and has been experiencing truly awful gender dysphoria in ways that I don't really understand, and it's clear that her experience is complicated, intense, mostly very negative, and manifests in a wide range of ways.
I was taking the original post to be talking less about the Trans experience and more just speculating about how we would be different had we been born, with our current personality, in a body of the opposite gender. What would my experience of the world be as a girl/woman?
Also not a question which can be answered precisely, but one worth thinking about.
My sexual orientation feels to me like a deeply private matter that goes person-by-person (the words "bisexual" or, worse yet, "pansexual" seem to exaggerate the scale to a comical degree).
I feel a bit like this. I identify as straight and my sexual fantasies all involve men and in general I'm attracted to men, but my actual IRL attraction is person specific. I've only had one attraction to a person who at the time was a woman (he's now a man, and weirdly I'm less attracted to him as a man than I was to him as a woman), but the attraction lasted for 2 years of college when I pined away nonstop for (now) him, and while I was attracted to this person, I found the thought of cis-men really sexually unappealing. I'm not someone who develops crushes easily, and thought of casual sex with strangers isn't all that appealing either.
In general though, the proliferation of labels annoys me, because it feels like, "people are complicated and not easily separated in boxes, so lets just make more boxes!" I'm like, can't we just *not* label things? The kink stuff too really irritates me, because it's like, sex acts can't just be stuff you do, it has to be who you are. It also feels really limiting, like once you're an X, then if you decide you want to do Y, or don't want to do X anymore, suddenly you have to have an identity crisis, rather than just moving on and saying, I'm not into X any more.
Actually, I think what it mainly boils down to is I *hate* the move from doing to being. I'm like, why can't we just be people who do and enjoy doing various stuff, rather than having to be certain types of people?
I think if I was born with a male body, I would have been even more mad about my body's ability to do things 'right'. I'm small and competitive which was frustrating as a female but would have been worse if I had gotten more pressure to be athletic. I was also one of the oldest people in my class so I didn't even have that the excuse.
lots of essays by people who are like, "I'm genderqueer because I don't like pink or wearing dresses or putting on make up." And it makes me fed up because I'm like, yeah, identify however you want, but none of that is essential to being female.
I would ascribe most of that sort of thing to a. hazy thinking + b. lazy writing. I'd assume that most people identifying as non-binary* have considered it on a deeper level than "I have a vulva yet I don't like makeup, so I must be genderqueer," but I do think that an aversion/distaste/disinterest in that sort of thing is probably one of the first clues to such a person that they aren't cis-gendered, and so it becomes a shorthand, and they never really examine whether that was even a meaningful signal (let's go crazy and suppose that only 80% of XX humans are cis- and straight; you're still going to have a billion women in the world who don't really care about being femmey).
It's annoying because hazy & lazy is a recipe for poor writing on any topic, but there simply aren't enough editors in the world. I doubt that it's a real source of confusion among the TQ community.
*I'm going to leave alone speculation about sincerity vs trendiness
Yeah, I dunno, as a transmasculine person (not that I'll be, like, transitioning anytime soon - thanks, Trump!), I sure know a lot of cis people who are "not that attached to their gender" and would be "totally okay with" being the other gender. Because I encounter so many cis people who feel this way, I am a little suspicious of this and it feels like a failure of introspection, since it seems to imply that gender, in some fundamental way, does not exist. How does gender arise if so many, many cis people are not really attached to their genders? Why is there such a gender hierarchy if gender is such a trivial thing?
On perhaps a related note: a key feature for me in all this has been realizing that I unconsciously do not expect to look female. So if I'm photographed in a mixed gender group, for instance, I'm surprised to see that I still have a rounder face, less craggy skin and a general softer outline than the men in the group. This has actually been the case for many years, but I never really put two and two together until later in life. Similarly, at the gym, I'm surprised to see that despite all the weightlifting, despite the wider shoulders, etc, I still don't look like, eg, a fattish cis dude who lifts. My unconscious setting is "I should look in the mirror and see someone who looks unambiguously male". It actually really gets me down that this will never happen now, since I finally lucked into a job where I could transition - but I'm scared of the political climate, ending up unemployable, etc.
I think "are you horribly upset by the idea that someone might misgender you" and "do you feel intrinsically deeply feminine/masculine" are bad questions. "Do you feel surprised that people treat you as the gender you were identified as at birth" is a slightly better question that gets at the experience a little more, IMO.
It would be interesting to know how things would shake out in a world where gender isn't dismantled or whatever, but vastly reduced in significance (I'm thinking along the lines of religion in western Europe, where for about 450 years there were basically two viable options, and it was a life and death decision, rarely considered as a real decision regardless). Like, what percentage of the population wants to be a masculine man/femme woman, and how many of those are gay or bi? Does non-binary become a huge portion while trans shrinks, or vice-versa?
Unknowable, of course, but interesting.
46.2: I suspect some of this has to do with the outsized impact of tumblr on the culture and habits of younger people who identify as progressive. Tumblr started out dominated by teenagers, with all of the obsessions over creating/defending one's identity that goes along with being that age. The habits seem to have influenced the somewhat older (20s, early 30s) people who made tumblr one of their major socializing spaces.
How does gender arise if so many, many cis people are not really attached to their genders? Why is there such a gender hierarchy if gender is such a trivial thing?
Physical sexual dimorphism seems like enough to explain a lot of social facts around gender to me. Plausibly not all of them, but a lot.
Why is there such a gender hierarchy if gender is such a trivial thing?
I don't think that follows (and I tend to agree with your overall point). Using race as a comparison, it's the very triviality that makes it so potent for creating hierarchies. I mean, to me that's the main lesson of the Irish and Italians "becoming white": the ability of the powers that be to grant or deny status based on something that has some biological basis (so not 100% arbitrary) but is fundamentally trivial* lets them define society while the rest of us run around following their lead.
Again, I think you're basically right that there's a lot of failed introspection (or just failure of imagination) on this topic**, but I don't think the social salience of gender says much of anything about its personal salience.
*after all, if the Irish and Italians really were inferior, than letting them into the white race would weaken that race and bode ill. People of course made that argument (kind of) at the time, but the power structure didn't see it as an actual problem. By contrast, letting dumb people be surgeons (pace Carson) or weak people be firefighters would be resisted at every turn, because those differences aren't trivial (for those roles, anyway).
**see my point above about the heuristics we use to think about our relations to our own genders; it's (relatively) easy (these days), I think, to say that "I'm not femmey, so I'm not attached to my gender", when there's so much more to it
"Gender as tragedy" has been my working model since college. I probably shouldn't say that and then not elaborate one teensy little bit, but... busy day, so you guys can improvise with it.
53: But the issue is whether people feel that a condition is an important part of their identity. "This is highly socially salient but I personally don't actually care about it, and neither do any of the other cis people in Frowner's social circle" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't think we get outside of the social like that.
Race is a constructed identity, hugely socially salient and people have strong feelings about it; it's very clear that racial identity is sustained by social forces that people internalize and are aware of. It's the part where people say that gender is obviously enormously socially important but not to them, of course that makes me suspicious.
"Do you feel surprised that people treat you as the gender you were identified as at birth" is a slightly better question that gets at the experience a little more, IMO.
That's useful, thanks. And for me, the answer is unsurprisingly no.
I know someone who is a "gender abolitionist" - gender won't exist after the revolution, gender arises only in response to patriarchy, she doesn't "feel like a woman, what does that even mean", etc. Of course, she always and only wears tight-fitting women's clothes, grows her hair long, wears make-up, loves attention from straight men, etc. Now in theory, of course, anyone of any gender can do all those things - it's not like "women's" clothing is only sold to women and so on. But it's very interesting that she reports "not feeling like a woman" but by happy coincidence is the most "womanly" of my straight women acquaintances.
"Do you feel surprised that people treat you as the gender you were identified as at birth" is a slightly better question that gets at the experience a little more, IMO.
Huh. I'm maybe being annoyingly oppositional here, but this still doesn't click for me. At least, I'm familiar with the experience of being surprised that people are treating me in a way that they conventionally treat women, but internally it feels like being surprised that they'd treat anyone like that. Say, having a stranger tell you to "Smile!" That feels like a weird event, despite being a fairly common experience for women. But it doesn't feel weird to me like "No, you've got the wrong person, go tell that woman over there to smile," it feels weird like "Why would you do that at all?"
if I was thinner, and had more money,
Now this I can identify with. I am rich young skinny guy trapped in the body of a fat old broke guy.
58: Do you feel surprised when people say "Lizardbreath brought these cookies, she stopped at that little bakery down the street" instead of "Lizardbreath brought these cookies, he stopped at the bakery down the street"? Do you feel surprised that you get catalogs for women's clothes in the mail? Do you feel surprised that your hairstylist asks you questions that pertain to women's haircuts? That the doctor asks you about birth control?
There are a lot of ways to "treat someone as a woman" that are not "here, milady, step first into the elevator" and so on. There are all kinds of social cues in terms of tone of voice, body language, etc that are predicated on perceived gender. Only if your felt gender does not match what people perceive does this stand out sharply to you, precisely because one does not customarily experience both.
55.2: When people say it's not important to them, maybe they're commenting on the amount of mental energy they put into the notion of their gender during an average day. If I say that my gender isn't super important to me, I mean that I can easily get through a typical day without consciously thinking about the fact that I'm [gender].
Of course, if you fit neatly into one of the 2 standard genders (and especially if you're male), society is in many ways designed to allow you to just get by by doing the normal* things for your gender and not over thinking it.
But then you have people like MRA types and the pickup artists and the whole "manosphere". Those folks fit nicely into one of the standard gender identities and yet they seem to be totally obsessed with their gender.
*where the parameters of normal are pretty broad in a standard rootless cosmopolitan liberal big city.
55.2 makes sense.
What I'm thinking about is "who can afford not to 'care'?" That is, when discussing race, it's privileged white people who get to say race doesn't matter to them, while disadvantaged white people tend to cling to race*, POC tend to identify strongly even as they decry the salience of race, and POC who edge into whiteness (e.g. Jews, light-skinned Hispanics) might claim or decry their racial identity depending on circumstances.
Gender is very different because the hierarchy isn't linear like that: in most (recent) times and places, better to be a femme female than a cis-, yet non-masculine and gay, male (frex). Hell, in American high schools, better to be a femme female than a cis-, straight male who isn't masculine.
But what I'm pondering is whether the current mode, wherein those who are cis-gendered but not per formatively so are free to decry gender because they're still so privileged relative to all of the other categories who weren't even acknowledged a generation ago but are now recognized but parlous.
*as do a good chunk of privileged whites, obv
60: Nope, none of that surprises me. But it is sort of impossible to distinguish a situation where markers of femininity that are arbitrary in themselves (like pronouns) feel inoffensive because they don't feel important to my identity as opposed to where they feel inoffensive because they're meaningfully consonant with my identity.
I'm not saying that I can tell the difference between a situation where I don't notice strong feelings about my own gender as an intrinsic component of my identity because it isn't one, and one where I don't notice strong feelings because my gender identity is well-harmonized with my social presentation. But I can't see how to rule either possibility out.
re: 55
My own position isn't that I don't feel strongly gendered. I absolutely feel male.
But that I don't particular care -- vis spending a lot of my youth experimenting with a certain degree of femme-y appearance -- about strongly exhibiting all of the external social signifiers of maleness.*
* probably less interested in divergence as I get older, due to laziness/inertia.
in American high schools, better to be a pretty femme female than a cis-, straight male who isn't masculine. Femininity gives very little status boost if you're not regarded as pretty, and plenty of feminine people ain't. Conversely, I think in a lot of usage "masculine" seems to be synonymous with "attractive" for men: or at least, if you have the former you don't have to worry about the latter.
I sure know a lot of cis people who are "not that attached to their gender" and would be "totally okay with" being the other gender. Because I encounter so many cis people who feel this way, I am a little suspicious of this and it feels like a failure of introspection, since it seems to imply that gender, in some fundamental way, does not exist. How does gender arise if so many, many cis people are not really attached to their genders?
Sample bias of asking lefty people? Because I sure as hell know a lot of local people who would be horrified to be the other gender.
What I'm trying to say is that rightwing lunatics protest too much, and it often masks the fact that they're struggling with their sexuality/gender/daddy issues/etc. When leftwing sane people don't protest, it doesn't mean that they're denying the existence of sexuality/gender/daddies and related issues.
"Do you feel surprised that people treat you as the gender you were identified as at birth" is a slightly better question that gets at the experience a little more
Well, somewhat - when people treat me like an earth-mother or a lady or something, it is very weird. One of the things I disliked about pregnancy is the extreme-female-ness that you're automatically endowed with. It was disorienting and not-me.
Just to clarify, 65 was specifically about relative status within the quoted comparison: femme female vs cis, straight male who isn't masculine. Not the whole h.s. social structure.
What I'm thinking about is "who can afford not to 'care'?"
To come back to my thought earlier in the thread -- what would my life be like if I had my personality and preferences, but was born female (treating it just as a thought experiment, rather than as any specific commentary on my real life gender identity.
I am aware that both my hobbies and my work life have been in very male spaces. I don't identify as somebody assertively masculine, but I am clearly (and more or less comfortably) male. For example, would I have gotten interesting in role-playing games were I female? Quite possibly yes, but my experience in that social space would have been very different and quite possibly uncomfortable.
Secondly, my personality is such that I am not very ambitious, terrible at self-promotion, and generally slightly suspicious and averse to doing things which attract institutional attention, or are designed to advance within a hierarchy.
My basic personality (in both school and work) is to start out with some idea of what I'm interested and then to want to be able to work on it in private for a while before showing it to anybody. I really dislike having to start with some conversation about, "here's what I'm going to do and why it's going to be great." My approach is more, "I have some ideas, they may or may not address the problem, I don't know how productive they will be but I'm going to try them." and then, two weeks later, "oh, hey, I think I solved that problem that we had, remind me, at some point I'll show you what I did."
I suspect that both of those traits would have made it very easy, had I been female, for me to be nudged out of spaces which I (as male) prosper in. The fact that I'm male means that I'm much less likely to have to fight for the space to go disappear for a while and then still be able to get credit when I do show up with a solution. It's hard to say for sure, of course, and I can imagine various alternative histories of my own life where, had things gone slightly differently, that aspect of my personality would have derailed my career, regardless of the fact that I'm male.
I sometimes have a sense that my alternative life is my, at forty, working in an IT job at a university, having less interesting work than I do now, but also less stress, and having a regular weekly gaming group, reading a lot of science fiction (and, to continue the stereotype, probably not eating particularly well or exercising a lot and feeling some anxiety about that fact but not having a lot of structure to change that). In some way's I'm jealous of that alternate life; it would have advantages. But, overall, it would be a significant step down from my current life.
Having already had that thought, I think that, were I female, and doors were slightly less open to me in my life, it would have been even easier for me to settle into something which had the primary benefits of stability and avoiding either conflict or having to asset ambition. And that's a depressing conclusion.
The number one social ill on the topic of transgender people is the enormous bigotry and prejudice they face on the most basic of human rights. Because this bigotry is so enormous, the public conversation needs to be focused overwhelmingly on that fact, and introverted navel-gazing exercises like this one can be counterproductive.
In my opinion, Unfogged is sufficiently a sanctuary of leftihood that we can indulge the navel-gazing and probe the biology without anyone questioning how strongly committed we are to the rights of trans people to be able to lead lives of self-determination, free from fear. (That said, that's just my opinion about this website.)
But bearing in mind all that: it is very plausible to me that gender-assignment has a bimodal distribution, and the middle chunk is being truthful when they say they would not have noticed if they were born with the opposite plumbing.
Is this a useful thing to say, in the context of the US in 2017 with trans issues being what they are? In general, no.
"Plumbing" seems like a misnomer for "balls". Which is the really important thing.
Femininity gives very little status boost if you're not regarded as pretty, and plenty of feminine people ain't.
Yes, I absolutely thought of this, but I also thought about bullying*, and decided it wasn't worth additional discursion. An unattractive** femme girl isn't going to be high status, but is also unlikely to attract a lot of negative attention; her similarly-attractive unmasculine male counterpart is quite likely to be bullied, both physically and emotionally, and potentially by both genders.
Conversely, I think in a lot of usage "masculine" seems to be synonymous with "attractive" for men: or at least, if you have the former you don't have to worry about the latter.
The first part is wrong (because so much of masculinity is performative rather than appearance-driven; you can see this in offices, where all the men dress basically alike, but there's no real confusion about who's more masculine), but the second version is right. I mean, better to be a handsome football player than an ugly one, but you're still at the top of the heap.
I mean, just to be clear: attractiveness is the trump card for almost any category: the good-looking, socially adept, but unmasculine and gay musical theater kid is going to have fairly high status (in many schools, anyway). And society in general compresses male attractiveness relative to female, in the sense that a guy of median attractiveness will be judged fine, or even kind of handsome, while any woman not in the top X% will be judged wanting. But I'm not sure that, once you get to decadent coastal enclaves, femme and masculine are quite so salient for judging attractiveness (although I should add here that this may all be changing; I'm old enough that any high schooler who wasn't thoroughly mainstream in gender presentation was an outlier in a way that I don't think applies anymore).
*note, this isn't some delusion that girls aren't bullied; read on.
**for these purposes, read as not-atttrative, not ugly. In general I'm talking about people of ordinary appearance, for apples-to-apples reasons
I think that a problem with these thought experiments is that they're neither achievable nor obviously impossible - they get treated as too real. Like, with that Rawls veil thing, that's obviously not something that is going to happen to you - it's purely abstract. And with "what if I got really sick and didn't have insurance" or something, that is something that could actually happen. "What if I woke up as myself but not my current gender" is never going to happen except occasionally in the movies.
If you were born "yourself but a different gender", you wouldn't be yourself because socialization is so overwhelmingly formative and powerful. That's one reason that not all trans people have the "as a five year old, I just knew" thing that is such a popular way to narrate trans experiences. One might feel like a weird girl or an unsuccessful girl or an unhappy girl, but not connect those feelings with not actually wanting to be a girl, for instance.
I will totally spitball here and say that this may account for some of the difference in experience between trans men and trans women - precisely because women experience more restrictions and are expected to do more to perform gender correctly, I wonder if it isn't more difficult for trans men to distinguish between the garden variety "I feel like I am failing at womanhood because I am not a fashion model who is also in the National Honor Society, a popular Instagrammer who does make-up tutorials and a talented cellist" stuff and "I feel like I'm failing at being a woman because I don't want to be a woman".
This is based on my general sense that while trans women experience far, far more discrimination and social violence than trans men, most of the trans women I know seem to have had an easier time figuring out that they were trans than the trans men I know did.
This is one of the things that I think a lot of trans people wrestle with - what will it mean to be "you" but a different gender? How do you separate out hormones, socialization, performing what you think your gender should be like, internalized misogyny, etc?
the opposite plumbing.
Drain lines instead of supply lines?
I find it easy to imagine body dysphoria in a less gendered(1) way. I've wished I was less pudgy and flabby.(2) Partly so I'd be more attractive in hopes of getting more and better dates, but partly in a less rational sense that my gut and thighs just felt wrong. In an intellectual sense I guess I can imagine that feeling more intense and aimed at my genitalia instead. Not sure if this is introspective enough.
1. Clearly, not entirely genderless, but less gendered than the usual transgendered sense.
2. Not these days so much. These days I'm in great shape, or close enough to it for me. But let's say from age 15 to age 28 I was never quite at ease with it.
65
Conversely, I think in a lot of usage "masculine" seems to be synonymous with "attractive" for men: or at least, if you have the former you don't have to worry about the latter.
Homer Simpson? Sure, there's that one episode where he wears a muumuu, but overall he's a very male character. Or pick almost any sitcom dad at all. None of them are attractive except to the extent that professional actors are more attractive than the average person on the street. But they're defined by being dads, which is masculine.
73.3 and following is great and makes perfect sense to me.
I think it makes sense to elaborate as: if you're not a masculine man, you might struggle with that, depending on socialization, but an identity as a man who doesn't play sports or work on cars or go to Hooters is super-available. If that still feels wrong, then there's a clear alternative. But women at all parts of the femininity spectrum are made to feel that they're doing it wrong, while only a fraction actually are/should be/want to be men.
I will totally spitball here and say that this may account for some of the difference in experience between trans men and trans women
I have wondered the same sort of thing, in a mostly uninformed kind of way.
I fail at being a man, but I'm pretty certain I'd fail even worse at being a woman. So I've settled on being a cis-failure.
Yeah, the gender essentialism aspect of this can seem weird. Especially if you went to grad school a decade too early. Like, I can imagine anyone wanting to do anything with their body in terms of, uh, object choice. Let a thousand genders bloom! But on a gut level I find the idea that one is "in the wrong body" just incomprehensible. (I guess I even believe that in a better society, people wouldn't feel compelled to change bodies on account of gender. ) And to be clear, that's 100% my failure! It's like, our relationship to the world turns out to be structured like a fairy tale, not like some essay in _differences_ from the 90s!
In my own little bubble there are quite a few visible transwomen but no transmen that I am aware of, which is explainable, I think, but still a little weird.
I mean, I also think that trans men sometimes find social space as butch women, which on the one hand provides you with a social role and a community that looks positively on your gender performance and on the other hand can really fuck with you if you're primarily attracted to men. And of course, "butch woman" is not much help if you don't identify as a woman.
It's pretty funny to have some of your friends go from thinking it's super cool that you're all gender-transgressively butch and therefore you're their cool queer friend to thinking that you're retrograde and patriarchal and bad because you're a trans man and not a butch woman. Like, it's super awesome to have a friend who is not afraid to wear her hair super short, etc, but that's no good at all if it turns out that they were a man all along.
Yes, I absolutely thought of this, but I also thought about bullying*, and decided it wasn't worth additional discursion. An unattractive** femme girl isn't going to be high status, but is also unlikely to attract a lot of negative attention
I... disagree.
Did I ever tell this playground story here? Copying from an email a few years back, the subject of which was my intensely mixed feelings about my daughter's gender socialization:
"There's a big kids' playground and a little kids' playground. [My then 3yo daughter] rarely goes in the little kids' area anymore; she just wants to swing on the huge swings and go down the big tube slide, and climb in the "spiderweb." When we went on Saturday afternoon, there was a girl there who was probably about 7. She had extremely long blonde hair and a pink frilly sundress, and was carrying two blonde dolls of about the proportions of the American Girls Collection. Her dad, a German dude with a ponytail, was keeping an eye on her along with mom and new baby, but he seemed a little distracted. (They might have come to the park with friends.)
The little girl was hesitant to play much on the structures, especially with two dolls in tow. I watched [my kid] scramble up the slide like a gecko once the bigger girl had gone down. When she came to the top, there was a sort of traffic jam at the tube slide, because a tiny boy refused to go down alone. Once his mom managed to coax him out of the way, there was some difficulty figuring out how the line should go.
I've seen this one man from [other European country whose language I can understand] there with his sons more than once. (He seems to be a hotshot prof at Cal; I once overheard him on the phone saying that he'd turned down an offer to move his lab to Harvard.) He has always been friendly, attentive to his kids, etc. His sons were at the top of the slide with [my kid], and he called to them "Let [my kid's name] go down first!" after catching her name from our conversation. So she went down first, then each boy in turn. He turned to us and said, "it's important for them to learn to queue up, very helpful," and we agreed and life went on.
A few minutes later I looked over at the little kids' park, and the oldest of the professor's boys had cornered the blonde girl at the top of the play structure, along with his little brother. You could pretty much figure out from body language where it was headed. He started pushing her and kicking her. She pushed back a little, but he kicked her much harder, knocking her down several times. Finally the girl took the obvious exit down the slide and, a few minutes later, ran to her father with blood streaming down her shin. He jumped up. "A kid kicked you until you bled? Who was it?" I pointed to the culprits, who were hurrying off towards the family minivan. The dad rushed down to the sidewalk with his daughter; his wife jumped up with the baby and followed. I saw the professor get out of the car, listen, pull his sons out of the car, listen and talk with his arm around his oldest boy. They talked for quite a while, then split up.
It freaked me out something awful. I think in my mind there is some deep, irrational fear that femininity is just an invitation to get beat up, for both girls and boys."
It's pretty funny to have some of your friends go from thinking it's super cool that you're all gender-transgressively butch and therefore you're their cool queer friend to thinking that you're retrograde and patriarchal and bad because you're a trans man and not a butch woman. Like, it's super awesome to have a friend who is not afraid to wear her hair super short, etc, but that's no good at all if it turns out that they were a man all along.
If they're not being supportive, they're jerks, obviously. But the reaction isn't incomprehensible to me if the friends in question are women who find some part of the social expectations around being women oppressive and confining. When you were presenting as a butch woman, you were a member of the same group they were in, acting in solidarity with them to stake out a broader social space in which there were more ways of being a woman. Once you told them you were a trans man, even though you are what you are and they are complete twerps in being hostile about it, there is a sense in which they've lost an ally.
Your self-identification is more important than how your friends feel you could have been in a position to do more social work on their behalf, they don't get to shame you for not identifying as a woman even if it would be good for them to have more butch women around. But I can see them feeling a meaningful loss when they lose what they thought was a butch female friend in exchange for your real identity as trans masculine.
It's pretty funny to have some of your friends go from thinking it's super cool that you're all gender-transgressively butch and therefore you're their cool queer friend to thinking that you're retrograde and patriarchal and bad because you're a trans man and not a butch woman. Like, it's super awesome to have a friend who is not afraid to wear her hair super short, etc, but that's no good at all if it turns out that they were a man all along.
Ooof.
I think I've told the story of how my grandma was so mad that my cousin had never sat her down and Came Out of The Closet to her. All the other liberal grandma friends got to talk about their gay grandchildren, but she couldn't get any liberal cred for hers because he wouldn't formally come out to her.
83: !!!!!
That is messed up. I don't know how to fit it into a larger story, but really messed up.
84: Whereas of course as a trans man it's all freedom. And naturally, gender minorities don't have anything in common with cis women, and trans dudes just, like, bro down with the cis guys at the bar. Also, there is nothing even remotely transgressive about being a trans man.
Actually, the women in question liked my gender performance not because we were "in solidarity" but because I performed for them an "expanded" style of being female. They could be completely cisnormative straight women, but because I was there being all transgressive, that proved that womanhood was not limited to long hair and make-up and so on. The resentment wasn't about my no longer being in solidarity with them; it was about my no longer providing cover for them.
And what's more, these same people became deeply uncomfortable and/or confused if I did something that wasn't, like, conventionally masculine. Why, if I was "really" a man, did I wear earrings? (You may have noticed that no men wear earrings.) And of course, I'd be redecorating my bedroom to be more manly, wouldn't I, because no man would want to keep his grandmother's weird little china floral things.
I think it's likely the level of people's attachment to their gender is a spectrum, and that we probably don't notice folks with dysmorphia that have mild attachment because they are unlikely to go through the difficult work of transitioning.
If they're uncomplicatedly assholes, they're uncomplicatedly assholes. You know them, I don't.
And what's more, these same people became deeply uncomfortable and/or confused if I did something that wasn't, like, conventionally masculine. Why, if I was "really" a man, did I wear earrings? (You may have noticed that no men wear earrings.) And of course, I'd be redecorating my bedroom to be more manly, wouldn't I, because no man would want to keep his grandmother's weird little china floral things.
Uggh, that's awful.
89: I guess the nice thing is that being bitter and grumpy seems to stay with me no matter what my gender identification.
But seriously, my experience and other trans friends' experience is unfortunately that a surprising number of people act like assholes if you tell them that you're trans. Not just "maybe not be as awesomely supportive as you'd hope" or "sometimes say things that are a bit dumb" but really actively being jerks. And it sheds an unfortunate light, sometimes, on what underpinned your friendships before.
On another note, I often think that a Miss Manners sort of guide to responding when someone tells you that they're trans/gender-non-standard-in-some-way/etc would be helpful. One thing that I think people don't always realize is that given six months or so, you may actually forget your friend's former name (assuming they change their name) - everyone always gets frustrated because they think it's going to be a horrible chore forever to use the right name/pronouns, but it really isn't.
Nosy question, but I'm nosy. Have you changed your name (socially if not legally), and what was that like? Or have you stuck with your birth name as part of not feeling safe transitioning in the current political climate?
This is kind of interesting. I super-duper strongly *know* myself to be a woman in a way that I like to think is innate, and I would be pretty bummed if I like, grew a dick and also everyone put on glasses that made them think I was a man. But the -thing- I know myself to be feels very separate from any particular characteristics and assuming it were innate, I don't know how I would have figured it out. It's not strongly correlated to my sexual orientation which is medium-straight/lazy, and which I don't feel that attached to. It's not strongly correlated to presentation or appearance, which, excepting leather interview suit, is MODT or tomboy. I definitely have hangups about feeling attractive but that's not related to caring about *looking* like a woman, like hm, would I rather get a worse woman's face, or get a better man's face? Open question!! I'm way more stereotypically masculine in many interpersonal aspects viewed broadly, but stereotypically feminine in discrete interactions. I identify as a parent and a child strongly, but not particularly as a mother or daughter. Like, assuming an unchangeable self, what would have possibly clued me in? Where would I have sensed something was off? If that ineffable womanness made itself known, it wouldn't have been through any obvious channels.
I've not yet changed my name officially. I guess the situation is this:
For some time my job was such that I could not transition. So I figured that for me personally, changing my name socially but keeping my old name at work would just be more upsetting than sticking to my old name.
Then I got a better job! Hooray! Then Trump was elected! Boo!
So I'm really on the fence. I might change my name socially just because it looks like nothing else is going any forrader right now.
Picking your own name from scratch is harder - for me at least - than it sounds. Also, it turns out that people have a lot of weird opinions about names - not hostile or bad opinions, but you'll realize that a name you think is really terrific sounds terrible to them, or that a name that you think is awful is the bees knees with kids today, etc. I think that it's one of those things where soliciting other opinions is probably a mistake, actually.
I've had this open for a while and I'm sure I'm missing stuff especially since I was trying to keep myself from participating here, but Frowner's friends' responses strike me as maybe asshole reactions but really, really common in the experiences of my friends who've transitioned or lived along or crossing gender borders. People who don't deserve and haven't earned any stake in that decision feel compelled to weigh in anyway.
How people talk about all of this is idiosyncratic and personal. (I'm, I don't know, feminine but not femme and in many ways conflicted about it? And queer rather than lesbian but I should probably say bisexual since I've had sex and relationships with men but that feels wrong too. Plus obviously it's also impostor syndrome all the way down.) And so when you go to explain this to someone you fall into shorthand that kind of works but totally violates the analogy ban. Or you write things on your dating profile that are about screening out the kind of people you know won't want you rather than describing the person you are.
If you've had to wrangle with this stuff for yourself or in concert with people you love, I think you know. You don't have to ask yourself about thought experiments. And maybe that's where I'd draw the line, but maybe that's also my privilege as a woman who can pass as straight-looking and sufficiently attractive to attract male attention and all that goes with that. I don't know.
For the record, the point of the thought experiment was not to see if I could muster sympathy for trans people. Not necessarily to Thorn exclusively, but Cala, Frowner and Thorn have all extrapolated things along those lines and it's making me testy.
Also, to be extra jerky and self-righteous, I do have a body that makes people think I'm transgendered, so I do have some privilege to gaze-navel-ward about such things.
I really didn't mean it that way, heebie, but I can see why it came across like that. It's just weird to be having a "what is it like to be a bat?" conversation around some bats and Batman? I don't know. I think we're breaking the analogy ban in ways that aren't helpful not because people aren't sympathetic but because it's just not going to necessarily get you anywhere. But I'm not trans, just OPINIONATED.
And I know you have thoughts about this and I'm not trying to stop you from sharing them! Sorry.
(I mean, I'm not comfortable being perceived as transgendered (unless I'm in Austin) so if I'm around strangers I wear prosthetics or baggy clothes. But I still maintain that I've earned introspection-privileges.)
And sorry, I should have stuck to my plan not to comment. I'm super cranky and furious and fragile today and I'm not going to be able to say anything that has meaning to anyone other than me anyhow.
Oh damn. I like it when you comment. I'm sorry for jumping at you when you first ventured in.
I really should wait until commenters are properly hooked before being bitchy.
Noooooo, this was just a rule for myself! My ex is THE WORST and last night my lawyer was drunk-messaging almost to the point of hitting on me and so do I need a new lawyer or what and now I have to go to a meeting because I agreed to be on one little committee in my year of no committees and we're going to get yelled at by a bunch of people for a tax we didn't choose and can't control at all, plus I have a pinched sciatic nerve and the regular three kids no sleep blah blah. I just didn't want to come in here and flail and be in everyone's way but then I did anyway.
Not remotely at the level of new-name-choosing, but maybe it will deflect parts of the conversation into more trivial zones:
I have a feminine first name with an androgynous nickname (say Christina/Chris). I don't identify with the full name at all; everyone who knows me uses the nickname, and has since I was 10 or so. I have a vague sense that "Christina" is my full legal name, as if everyone in this country had to add "tina" to their names by law; also a sense that I was once called Christina when I was little with blond ringlets and flowered dresses, but that those days are long gone and it's a bit embarrassing to be reminded of them. I don't think the androgyny part of this is purely incidental.
More seriously, one of my friends is being a complete dick about another friend's transition, and for independent reasons the former friendship is being scaled back. I guess I can take advantage of that to fume some more about those incredibly shitty comments. WTF, person I trusted? It's true, so much unexpected hostility comes out at times like this. Also I need to write to the trans friend, it's been months.
Thorn, take care. Everyone, anger is okay and probably warranted. Hey maybe it's time for another open venting thread? Has it been three days since the last one?
I liked the name Jack but never had occasion to use it. Feel free.
d last night my lawyer was drunk-messaging almost to the point of hitting on me and so do I need a new lawyer or what
Whaaaaaat?! Good lord.
107: He was extra scrupulously polite today, which I take as an admission of guilt and contrition. His wife will probably be at tonight's meeting, but I'm not going to ask or anything. As long as it's a one-time thing, well, I'm getting a second opinion on wtf I am able to do anyway from a different lawyer friend and can probably throw that in there.
It's not like there's some rule against dating your divorce attorney, is there?
I have a vague sense that "Christina" is my full legal name, as if everyone in this country had to add "tina" to their names by law; also a sense that I was once called Christina when I was little with blond ringlets and flowered dresses, but that those days are long gone and it's a bit embarrassing to be reminded of them.
My name is sort of like this. It's sort of like CrystalGale and people often tell me that I don't look like a CrystalGale, or that it reminds them of some super feminine image (fields of flowers, frex). I have a love-hate relationship with my name. (Plus it's tinged with my family's dogged Jewish self-loathing/assimilationism, which is another thing people comment on. "When I first saw you, I assumed you were Jewish until I heard your name, and then I was confused."
There certainly is for me, though a friend I talked to this weekend said his lawyer asked him out for drinks while still on the record as divorce mediation ended so maybe it's a thing.
110: Have you tried touring as a country music singer?
Oh, how Ah've traaaaaaaaah-ed.
Whatever her name is on Sex and the City married her divorce attorney.
AND she became Jewish in doing so!
Anyway, I think I look like someone with my name should look.
Then we oughta tour together, Hicks.
96: I didn't think you thought that was the point -- but I'm in a field where people sometimes think introspecting is a better way of learning about others than talking to them, so sort of a kneejerk reaction.
I have never once wanted to be a man or wished I had a penis (well, beyond the general desire to see what a penis is like and think of all the things I'd whack it against or stick it in), but I do sporadically have an intense hatred of having female secondary sexual characteristics. It's been the case since I was a small child* that every once in awhile I just get a feeling of intense revulsion/disgust at having breasts and a defined waist. It usually happens after having to wear really femme clothing or things that accentuate my female figure.** I can't totally describe the feeling, but it's the worst feeling in the world, a combination of physical and emotional anguish, and the only way I can deal with it is to put on the baggiest, most gender neutral clothing. If I'm out too long in a really femme outfit (more than several hours), I start getting a panicky feeling, like I'm wearing something that's causing an allergic reaction.
*My sister and I would play house and pretend to be pregnant adult women, with socks for breasts and pillows for our pregnant stomachs. I would always develop these feelings of revulsion after playing like this with my sister.
**Even if I don't feel terrible when I'm out, if I've worn a dress and heels and makeup when I get home I feel gross and have to take it off immediately.
125: It's a setup, Moby. Don't let her talk you into testing how it works!
Picking your own name from scratch is harder - for me at least - than it sounds. Also, it turns out that people have a lot of weird opinions about names - not hostile or bad opinions, but you'll realize that a name you think is really terrific sounds terrible to them, or that a name that you think is awful is the bees knees with kids today, etc. I think that it's one of those things where soliciting other opinions is probably a mistake, actually.
On the first part, as my pseud might suggest, I couldn't identify more. I don't even like my name, and never have, but choosing another one? Ugh. My business is in my own name, and when I call for restaurant reservations undercover, I use my dad's name because I can't even deal with coming up with a fake one.
On the second part, I think pretty much every parent can identify. It's insane how invested people are in the name choices of others. It's funny: compared to that, most forms of social policing are positively subtle. OK, that's not quite right, but the degree to which family, friend, kind stranger, and asshole stranger alike all feel free to comment inappropriately on children's names is breathtaking.
Going back to privilege, I'm an attractive feminine blonde woman, and I wonder if I'd have been accepted for gender bending or being generally eccentric as a teen if I weren't.* In middle school I shopped mainly in the boy's department, and in HS I wore my brother's clothes, to the point of wearing a suit and tie for formal events. (I did wear skirts and dresses too sometimes, mainly all from Eddie Bauer.) I had long hair until I chopped it off at 16, and then continued to give myself a horrible bob for the rest of high school. In high school probably the aggressive androgyny kept me from getting all that actively hit on,** but I was never bullied or made fun of and no one ever assumed I wasn't straight. In a weird way, being hot but weird probably made it easier, because my weirdness meant I wasn't a threat sexually to the mainstream popular girls, but my hotness meant I wasn't *actually* a threat to the hierarchy.
*This is Portland in the 90s, so baseline gender conformance is really different when most people are shopping at REI.
**I did have confused guys question me in the "why do you choose to aggressively downplay your hotness" sort of way, or tell me I looked like a librarian in a porno.
I... disagree.
So you feel like Chiron's experience in Moonlight is pretty common for ordinary-looking femme girls? Because it is for effeminate boys, whether they grow up gay or straight.
126
I'd go around dick slapping blue mailboxes. I can't imagine how satisfying it would be to hear that hollow metallic thwap and feel the cool metal against your dick. Don't try to convince me otherwise because I won't believe you.
Nothing to do with gender presentation, but man, am I not looking forward to the name-changing process. Looking forward, by sometime in the future I will want to have dropped the hyphenation, I'm not regretting the decision to use the divorce to change my name back. But the new SS card, and passport, and drivers license, and credit cards, and business cards, and email address at work, and nameplate for my door and everything I've forgotten, as well as relearning how to sign my name and answer the phone, is going to be a super hassle.
Moby, the best feeling ever would be to stick your dick in a cheese grater. Mmmmm-scritch-scritch.
129
And now I have to kill you.
But sympathies to all those who need to pick new names. I hope that the political and social climate will become stable and supportive enough to make it safe and welcoming. And I'm sorry about all your dick friends.
131, 133 Looking forward to your respective ideas about cleanliness and cold weather.
Another option would be to stick them in pudding. If I had a dick, I would stick it in pudding.
138 to 135. Sorry, inbetweeners.
Someone is now contractually required to say "If I knew it was going to be that kind of party...", right?
I suppose it was me.
I've thought about what woman's name I would want if I needed to pick such a name for myself. (I think in the context of what I'd do if virtual reality ever gets good enough to the point where one could really try out different bodies on a temporary basis.) One obvious choice is the name my parents picked for me if I were a girl (in fact, for whatever reasons they were really convinced that I was going to be a girl and so weren't very serious about the boy's name they'd chosen and ended up picking a different boy's name for me after I was born). I was pretty sure that name was Raca, but somehow I had never looked up what the name means before. Apparently it's hebrew for "worthless", which WTF parents? I mean they were at sort of peak intense christianity at that point (selling all they had and giving money to the poor and whatnot) and so I guess I can see why they'd come up with such a crazy idea. But still... Maybe I misremembered? Anyway even before reading up on that, I'm still pretty sure I'd pick the name Anna instead. There's no real reason for it, and I'd probably be happy with any reasonably common but classic name where I either already knew 0 or more than one person with that name, but I'm still pretty sure that's what I'd pick.
My parents would have named me Andrew.
I really think I must have the name wrong. Jesus directly says you're not supposed to call people Raca! But what name could I possibly be confusing that with? I guess I'll have to ask them.
One of the women we interviewed for our graduate program last week was named Sydney. I'd like to believe that her parents named her after Neve Campbell's character in Scream, but she's graduating college at the expected 21-22ish age, that makes her too old.
My name has a clear female equivalent, but I'm not sure I'd want it, if picking a woman's name ever became an issue.
but if she's graduating at...
I think I remember Mom or Dad saying once that if I'd been a boy, I would have been thrown into the seething mass of Matts. They were really committed to hypercommon names.
When did finding out the sex become common? Younger than me, but I don't know how much.
Weirdly I think I have THREE friends who legally changed their first name for reasons totally unrelated to gender. One who has always gone by a nickname and hated her given name, and always wanted to change her name to a different name that's associated to the same nickname. The other case is weirder, she'd already made up a last name for herself that she'd legally changed to, but then when she got married she wanted to take his last name but keep her made up name and so changed her first name to incorporate part of her last name. This was all kept a surprise in the run-up to the marriage (to the point where the ketubah had pieces of paper covering the name). The third one decided for reasons that are somewhat unclear to me (we were no longer close at this point) to change her first and last names to new ones that she had been using in online role-playing games.
When did finding out the sex become common?
Circa 1990. Jammies' mom was featured on a news story for finding out the sex of his youngest sibling, 1989.
Or actually, the technology was being featured, and she didn't want to know the sex. But the nurse doing the test said, "Would you like to know? I can see really clearly," which gave it away.
His youngest sibling was born in 1987, but they didn't want to just look at the genitals because that was when everybody started to worry about child pron.
My sister had a very realistic baby doll that came wearing a non-removable diaper. She decided he was a boy and named him Galore. After about 6 months the diaper fell off and we found out Galore had a vagina, but decided he was still a boy anyways.
I hope somebody made the obvious James Bond joke.
Thorn, the one thing I remember from my fancy law school legal ethics class is that you're not supposed to like, actually penetrate/be penetrated by your client but pretty much anything else is a-ok. For example, as the professor informed us, courts confronted with the question have decided it is ok for a lawyer and his client to have a threesome with the same woman, as long as they're not doing dick-related stuff directly to each other.
154 is news you can use! I'm sure if I just tell him I'm not into that sort of threesome, we'll never have to have an awkward conversation again. (And I'm making it sound somewhat worse than it was, I'm sure. But "I hope it works out, u guys deserve it" is not particularly encouraging coming from the person I'm paying to work things out in my favor.)
There are respectful lawyers who let their clients know that they will not be participating in any common threesomes until the case is resolved or at least the jury sent out.
Buttercup is Sarah Palin!
I thought Buttercup was Robin Wright.
Have a lot of houghts about the OP but no time and also nothing is as important as expressing full-on support for trans people who are only at the beginning of at least four years of hate and oppression heaped on them. But this:
Also, it turns out that people have a lot of weird opinions about names - not hostile or bad opinions, but you'll realize that a name you think is really terrific sounds terrible to them, or that a name that you think is awful is the bees knees with kids today, etc.
Fuck a lot of people's stupid opinions about names excepting parents choosing for their children.
My mind is still entirely blown by buttercup's desire to whack her hypothetical dick against a cheese grater. OUtside of rule 34, it's almost certain that there is no man alive who thinks that physical (as opposed to metaphorical) dicks should be banged against any inanimate object.
It makes me wonder if I have similar strange fantasies of what I'd do if I had breasts (for some reason I've never much thought about what it would be like to have a vagina, but I'm pretty clear my uses for one would be obvious and conventional, although, I hope, exciting). But, no. I wouldn't want to do anything with them. I'm just puzzled as to what the hell they would feel like and what it would be like to have something on your chest that complete strangers wanted to look at all the time. This has not been my experience of a penis.
154: "have a threesome"? As in simultaneously, rather than sequentially, screwing the same woman? And this came before a court? If I were a lawyer I'd find that completely inspiring. I would spend my life trying to work the precedent into an argument in some ostensibly unrelated case.
On the surprise metric, I can say I'm always surprised and a bit uncomfortable when I'm placed into markedly masculine roles but would probably be more surprised and uncomfortable if I were placed into a markedly feminine role by another person's assumption.
And this came before a court?
It did (see beginning par. 56, though the whole thing is quite a story).
I should feel bad for just assuming it was New Jersey, but I don't.
162.1: Now you know why they call it The Nether.
Oh, God, that link from Potchkeh is completely wonderful. Attorney Inglimo is a real piece of work. The story about how one client fired him because, acting in a divorce case, he screwed the client's wife, and when the client understandably fired him for this, celebrated by getting the ex to take part in a threesome almost trumps sharing the drug dealer's girlfriend, which is what brought us here. Note that the dealer complained that Attorney Inglimo was too stoned to function during the trial ...
Also, this bit: Attorney Inglimo admitted that he had used cocaine occasionally since becoming an attorney, although he said he wasn't sure whether the substance shown on the June 2002 videotape was really cocaine. He claimed that it may have been flour or salt. P.K. and K.K. testified that the substance was indeed cocaine and K.K. stated that she had used cocaine with Attorney Inglimo on other occasions. The referee also found that P.K. and K.K. were clients of Attorney Inglimo.
After all that, he was only suspended for three years.
I identify quite strongly with being a woman and always have (i.e. with being a girl when I was one). As a kid I had long hair and some pretty girly dresses but otoh I wore trousers a lot in the winter, more than other girls IIRC, most of which were my brother's handmedowns. Since my teen years I've always seen skirts and dresses as "dressing up" and generally prefer trousers. When I started out as a solicitor's apprentice I felt obliged to wear skirt suits to "claim" my professional status but nowadays I wear trouser suits to work 95% of the time. It's not so much the skirts I dislike as the tights and the painful shoes. College and early 20s I wore very non-femmy clothes but I did use a fair bit of makeup largely to cover up acne. When my skin improved I hardly wore makeup except for going out and other than for work dressed in jeans/tshirts/fleeces/ lace up boots etc. As a shortish, not-thin person with noticeable boobs/hips/bum I didn't ever look androgynous and also I had very long hair. In my early thirties when I became single after a long relationship I got a bit more into clothes etc. which were less neutral. Nowadays there are times when I would find it most relaxing to wear totally neutral clothing but if I dress like that I somehow feel it looks stupid on my now fatter self in a way that a slightly more femme version doesn't. Dowdy instead of unmarked.
I bet snorting salt or flour is a thing in Wisconsin.
I'm sitting here in what I wear every single day, which is pretty androgynous - jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt, short hair, never any make-up - but that has nothing at all to do with how strongly I identify as female. Something Heebie mentioned in another thread about pregnancy ultrasound made the connection for me, in that I have never been so freaked out in my life as when I discovered I was pregnant with a boy. I came out of the ultrasound room panicking wildly: "Oh my god, there's something with a PENIS in there!" Until then I think I'd perceived the baby as an extension of me, and so naturally as a girl.
166 is just terrific. It's always good when you can sense the author of an opinion desperately struggling to keep a straight face.
I saw it, but haven't even had coffee yet.
1166, 169...
Have they filled all of the Assistant Attorneys General posts at DOJ?
Wow. Inglimo is an interesting case. I wonder if he got his license back and what he is doing nowadays.
He's moved on to the hard stuff, confectioners sugar.
162
Mailboxes, not cheese graters! Even I can tell that a cheese grater would be painful.
For people with more imaginative fantasies than NW, if you had the opposite genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics for a day, what would you do with them?
In addition to mailboxes, I'd whack trees, and stick it in pudding. Maybe also a watermelon.
176: Still plenty of slots open!
Not to mention the no-confirmation "beachhead" appointees we just learned about.
and stick it in pudding.
I thought that canonically you used an apple pie.
There's a very narrow range of orbits which a planet can take where it isn't too cold for a penis to maintain an erect state or too hot for it not to be scalded. These are Class M (for "member") planets.
162 I'm sur I emember a Twilight Zon episode where a particularly sexist man was turned nto a oman. The internet has so far failed t eval it's name/date/plot.
So, the keyboard fix didn't work?
179: It partially depends on what else, if anything, changes. Is my wife and/or daughter in town? Is it a normal workday for me? Do other people perceive the difference? How well do my usual clothes fit? Would I be an androgynous woman or very visibly feminine?
If we account for certain potential problems, I could have a lot of fun with and/or learn a lot about gender roles in our society. If it's just a Gregor-to-Gretchen-Samsa situation, I'd probably telecommute or call in sick (or rather, e-mail in), stay in the house all day in sweatpants, and cry, cry,... and cry.
187
All normal life responsibilities and relationships are suspended for the day, so sex with others wouldn't count as cheating. I never thought about anything besides the feeling of my dick hitting a mailbox, but I suppose you can look however you want to look. Either the opposite sex version of yourself, or completely different.
I'd probably also have sex with a woman, just to know what sex felt like from the man's perspective.
Tiresias was completely silent on the mailbox thing.
187 cont'd.: Sorry to be puerile (I know that comment wasn't that bad but I might be a lot more puerile if I wasn't currently at work) in a serious discussion and stuff. All I'm saying is, imagining a switch for just one day, and just a switch of primary and secondary sexual characteristics and that's it, only leaves room for one kind of experimenting. If I still have to deal with real life, I could probably stay home. If not, I own shirts that are probably baggy enough to hide the change.
I'm mainly interested in knowing if men fantasize about having a vagina, would they be interested in sticking lots of different things up there?
The women I've talked about this with have ideas about what they'd stick their imaginary penises in, but I don't know if men would fantasize about the reverse, given the option to have opposite genitalia for a day and no consequences.
191: I'm not reading this thread because it seems apt to be A Disaster, but does this question mean that this previous thread has been linked? For the record, I still maintain that I was right in every particular in every comment I made (including the one in which I despaired that the one who most seemed to understand my drift was bob), and anyone who differed was, at least to that extent, wrong.
Do you have a google alert for "Tiresias"?
||
From FB:
Proud daddy moments today! [Kid 1] and [Kid 2] both got medals for being second and third fastest in their grades!
I am totally not being a jerk and squabbling with my friend about quantifiers and implied parentheses over there.
|>
Why not? It's unnecessarily confusing and could be fixed so easily.
Plus, the kids who got the medals for being fourth fastest in those grades probably have a valid reason for complaining.
191: I can think of three different things. OK, four. Number four is a banana for the record. With more time, I'd probably experiment more with people, either sexually or socially.
192: Not before this. Thanks. That thread is surprisingly unfamiliar. My first thought is, how did I miss that? But after looking into it a bit, that thread was two days after I got my appendix out, so no shit I wasn't thinking about sex at the time.
That's a good illustration of why you need to do sham surgeries in studies. If you compared a guy who just got his appendix taken out with a guy who hadn't had any surgery at all, you might think removal of the appendix produced a temporary loss of libido.
198
Two of the other three are a speculum and a baby's head, right? To get the full female experience.
My fantasy has to involve people immediately down for casual sex with male me, so that makes it even more of a fantasy. Or I guess you could fantasize your partner also reverses sex, so you'd be having sex with them but you've switched parts.* (I've thought about that too.)
*Apologies for the heteronormativity.
Wow, and I had been pretty sure the professional ethics of don't touch each other's dicks thing was a false memory.
If you were born "yourself but a different gender", you wouldn't be yourself because socialization is so overwhelmingly formative and powerful.
Yeah. This is where my imagination always gets bogged down. I have no idea who the male-Witt would be, because so much of who female-Witt is was/is affected by interaction with other people.
I often used a male pseud (or gender-neutral skewing male) on the Internet in the '90s, and I remember how safe and protected it felt. But that wasn't about wanting to be male, or even trying to make people think I was male. It was just about avoiding getting hassled. (And it worked remarkably well.)
I remain surprised by how personally threatened so many people are by anything that questions "innate" gender and/or sex. I don't know what it's like to be trans, I've never had an extended or deep friendship with a trans person, but it seems pretty straightforward to put together various baseline progressive values (human rights are important for everyone; people's self-identity should generally be trusted and respected; if it's not about you don't make it about you; etc) and arrive at the understanding that trans people...are people. Who don't threaten my life or well-being in any way; and who deserve the same rights and protections as any of my fellow humans. And yet we see these really appalling reactions sometimes by allegedly left-leaning non-trans people, as recounted in this thread.
there is no man alive who thinks that physical (as opposed to metaphorical) dicks should be banged against any inanimate object
Dude, there's like a whole body of medical literature about the crazy injuries ER doctors have seen come in because some doofus thought it would be really sweet to turn the industrial belt-sander at work down to LOW and use it to masturbate.
It's good to know somebody is using PubMed.
Natilo, you're right. How could I have forgotten one of the first things I ever clipped from the internet, about a man who ripped off his testicles with a belt sander and then tried to repair the damage with an industrial stapler?
But I maintain that was an attempted rubbing, not banging. Portnoy fucked his family's dinner, sure But he didn't bang it against anything
How could I have forgotten...
SOME OF US HAD MANAGED TO DO SO ENTIRELY SUCCESSFULLY UNTIL ELEVEN SECONDS AGO THANK YOU
Surely you've healed a bit by now.
So very late to the party on this thread, but hasn't some of the recent research indicated that inclinations to trans-hood are in part driven by a hormone imbalance vis-a-vis what that person's physical brain is expecting to receive? That is to say, someone with physical sexual characteristics of one sex whose hormone output (testosterone/estogen) is in line with their physically expressed sex but not with what their brain needs. Anecdatally I've heard a trans man explain that once he started receiving testosterone, his depression cleared up and he felt normal in a way that he had never felt before. I don't know that this affects any arguments about gender/sex essentialism one way or another, but if there is at least some evidence of an underlying physical cause as at least a partial explanation for the underlying cause of transism, it seems to me that we should at least be able to make some headway to broader cultural normalization in a parallel to the "born this way" arguments that have impacted public perceptions of homosexuality in recent decades.
That said, I long to live in a world where people can just be/act however they want without assholes forcing them to conform to an arbitrary social norm.
THAT being said, social norms do certainly grease the wheels for those of us who find it easy to conform--I'm pretty comfortable as a cis-gender straight male and it's a lot easier for me personally when I can signal what I'm interested in and read signals in return just by following the broad dictates of society. There should be no shame in reading signals wrong (although I do feel at least a twinge of shame and embarrassment when I get shot down), but when the menu of options for what is acceptable broadens exponentially, the potential for miscommunication/misunderstanding goes up. Doesn't a lot of resistance to LGBT/feminism/racial/class issues arise from the conservative's mindset that CHANGEBAD?
research indicated that inclinations to trans-hood are in part driven by a hormone imbalance vis-a-vis what that person's physical brain is expecting to receive?
That's super interesting. Like a hormone deficiency, where there's some biologically desirable set-point.