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Gender dysphoria is not a behaviour

  • Posted on March 22, 2014 at 8:07 am

I got drawn this week into another of those dialogues about the legitimacy of the transgendered identity. The comparison as so often was between being gay/lesbian (i.e. sexuality) and gender dysphoria, where the former finds agreement between body and mind (identity), but a disagrement with social tradition or culture, and the latter finds a disagreement between body and mind (identity) as well as with culture and society. It’s tough, because if you are trans*, the chances are you also have a sexuality that is questioned by society, including the gay/lesbian part of it.

It’s like being trans* gets you shut out of almost every kind of accepted normality, where anyone except yourself can decide what your legitimate identity is allowed to be. As if society is afraid of your behaviour, perhaps thinking you are unpredictable or potentially predatory. Sometimes I have been treated as intrusive simply for being; there can be a lot of exclusion for being trans*. The worst kind is trans erasure, where certain groups define us out of existence, saying in effect that what we are is only in our minds.

Believe me, there is nothing about being transsexual that is behavioural. In fact, being transsexual need not involve you doing anything at all. It is only about being. Part of the problem is that the trans-spectrum people who are most visible are either the most flamboyant (deliberate) or the most physically disadvantaged (unfortunate). I don’t get noticed anymore, but knowing what I am gets me associated with stereotypical ideas of what I do (or salacious imaginings of what I might do).

There are people who knew me before transition, and who, two years later, still find it hard to stop thinking of me as I used to present. Everything is still a reference to how I used to be to them, which leaves me with the distinct feeling that they can only regard this as a chosen lifestyle. In other words, that this is behavioural, and therefore subject to judgement as to its rationale or authenticity.

What does it take?

I wrote a poem last year about an innocent prisoner being discharged, based on the feelings of what it must be like to be the only person in the courtroom who actually knows the truth. No-one else does, though they have the power to imprison or release. If you know you are innocent, should you be grateful for acquittal by people who were not there, who have made judgements based on external and partial evidence?

Sometimes being transsexual feels like that: others get together to make judgements on the validity of your claim to authenticity, whereas only you can actually know this. Even trans* people make judgements about each other on ‘degrees of transness’, perhaps as self-protection for their own sense of identity, or out of insecurity.

The closest you can get to another is by communicating through some intermediary language, verbal or not, that you hope is shared. In the end you are isolated and insulated, and love is a reflexive verb.

This is where you come to understand, if you haven’t before, just how completely lonely the human spirit really is. No other can climb inside yourself and share your experience. You can become aware of resonance with another, but you know that when they choose to go away from you, they take nothing and leave nothing but thoughts. The closest you can get to another is by communicating through some intermediary language, verbal or not, that you hope is shared. In the end you are isolated and insulated, and love is a reflexive verb.

Oh no, not the trans lobby again!

If there is one thing that those who like to discuss trans legitimacy don’t like, it is the ‘trans lobby’ – people who stand up and object every time to this discussion. How improper! These discussants feel they have more right to say whether transgendered people are real, than transgendered people themselves. Well, I guess if you think we aren’t real, then we have no right. But why are we not real? Because our discussants have only one traditional concept of gender? And if there is one sure way to create a trans lobby, it must surely be to declare that a trans woman is ‘really’ a man, or a trans woman is ‘really’ a woman. Or indeed, that neither are either.

I find it interesting to try to understand where our eager or insistent discussants place those with intersex conditions. Bodies can be very ambiguous, and more than we like to believe, are. Genital/reproductive abnormalities may be as high at 1 in 100, and real ambiguity as high as 1 in 2,000. What, without question, defines a woman or a man, since our discussants seem so clear? It certainly isn’t a complete and clear possession of all the sexual markers, whether organs or chromosomes. XY, with androgen insensitivity, for example?

With such crass disregard for the reality of human physiology, chromosomal, reproductive or sexual, it is hardly surprising that there seems to be a trans lobby that jumps to defence. So I was very cautious about entering this week’s conversation, lest I too be labelled a lobbyist.

Society creates disorders

Part of the discussion we trans folk are presented with, is: what if society were so accepting of transgendered identities that we would not even consider surgical reparation or correction? It is a fair question, because any parent of an intersex baby will want to know what to do. Intervene, in order to avoid the dreadful uncertainty of growing up without definition? Or risk surgically defining the baby in a way that proves to be wrong? Maybe we, as a society, can get over this one by being simply honest about physiological birth differences. But what about transsexuals? Is this just a different case of intersex? Can I imagine a society that is accepting enough for me to say I really have no need of intervention, hormonal or surgical? For some of us, I really do believe that dysphoria has no other origin than our innate sense of being. For others, not – but for me, I know the sense of not being ‘right’ has not been planted by nurture or social interaction. Who would go through the social trauma and physical struggles, if there were an alternative? Is it just that society is so unkind to us, and so unaccepting?

Here is a parallel that I keep coming back to: what if society were so accepting of, say, a deformed limb that could, through surgery, be straightened?

The same social argument would apply: ‘surely there is no real need for corrective surgery or treatment; there’s nothing wrong with a limp or the inability to run.’ Well, it’s fine for the one without the deformity, but highly presumptive that the other might not genuinely prefer to be able to run.

Much of the time, our discussants on our legitimacy are gay or lesbian, who have seen a revolution in the UK over acceptability of their sexuality as innate. Look what they went through in the past, and look how society is now! Surely we can just calm down and be different, like they are? And here is the difference between LGB and TQI: we don’t want to be different. We feel our normality is there, in the gender we feel ourselves to be. Most of us don’t want some halfway house, some different, either hated or exalted status. We know we can’t alter the way we were born, but we can do our best to put things right and leave it behind. LGB people don’t do that; they live it. LGB people need each other for intimate relationships. Transsexual people do not. If we have any togetherness, it is only because we’re better at understanding each other.

So I don’t believe that I have a cultural disorder. Something congenital and off the normal distribution mean, yes, but more than a matter of social convention. My ‘condition’ hasn’t been created any more than the case of the deformed limb. So when I read non-trans people questioning my validity, I find it somewhat arrogant. It isn’t for anyone else to decide another’s legitimate identity. Perhaps there is an enormous clue in people born with intersex conditions. No observer can say what their gender is, only they themselves. They may naturally feel strongly that they have a binary identity, or indeed none. We all have this. You can lose all your physiological markers through illness, disease, accident, surgery, and still you would know what your felt gender is. That’s what it feels like for me.

Gender is indeed intriguing and fascinating, and I know what gender I am not. But to imagine that my identity is up for debate without knowing this from the inside, is a tad presumptive. And remember, always, especially if you are gay or lesbian: sexuality is not like gender.

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Phoenix

  • Posted on March 14, 2014 at 11:24 pm

I sometimes wonder whether I’ll run out of interesting thoughts for this blog and be really stumped. But life moves on and I’m aware as I do, that I may be able to draw others along in my wake. This week the day finally came and went that I had my first surgical consultation at the hospital where I shall go in a few months to be completed. It was so absolutely wonderful to be there, talking about procedures and schedules, knowing that what I need is finally, actually going to happen, with lovely people who want the best for…

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Can you imagine a trans partner?

  • Posted on March 1, 2014 at 8:46 am
  • If you’re gender queer and move in circles where others like you find relationships natural, go celebrate!
  • If you’re a bit older, trans* and don’t have others to find intimate relationships with, you go celibate.

I feel a need to discuss why this is, without a long diatribe, and without tying myself in knots (which is easy). Is it simple after all? If you are cis-gay or cis-lesbian (OK, so you just hate labels!, I simply mean not trans*) – then you can seek out places where lesbian and gay people find each other for relationships. But that’s where the T in LGBT parts company. As a result of being trans*, maybe you are lesbian or gay in your found gender. But unlike cis-lesbian and cis-gay people, you don’t need other trans* people to express your sexuality. Trans* is not a sexuality, but rather can give rise to fluidity and change.

And that, as far as I see it, is where the problems start. Not that you aren’t lesbian or gay or bi or even hetero, but that society in general doesn’t actually really believe your gender. Therefore your sexuality, not being based on cis-binary definition, is also in doubt. You may have everything going for you as a genuine, nice, kind, loving person, but What are you, really?

Your decision on what I am really, has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you.

What do I mean by this? If you can accept me as a woman, and only as that, then it is easier to accept that I am hetero, lesbian or bi. Not a bed of roses, maybe, but at least we know where we stand. A lesbian woman will feel safe, as would a hetero man. A hetero woman or a gay man will say no, on the basis that they can’t imagine contravening their sexuality. Or perhaps it is just that attraction could never happen.

If you knew or remember me presenting as a man, it seems we are all at sea. Somewhere in your mind I am not really a woman, though certainly not really a man either, just something indeterminate with infectious potential to make you lose your bearings. That means I cannot be lesbian, I cannot be gay, I cannot be hetero, and therefore you cannot imagine what a relationship might mean. To preserve your doubt about what I am really, I have to be none of the above. It’s almost like Schrödinger’s cat; I am OK so long as you don’t try to really find out! Losing your doubt about my gender can hit your sense of sexual identity hard, if it isn’ what you originally thought. And then you might think of me as the only woman you could physically love, but a friend might as a consequence think you are lesbian, or suddenly not (perhaps even betraying the cause), just because you have gotten close to me and they doubt my gender!

So what do you do with a trans person, who might possibly seem attractive enough to get close to, or intimate with?

First off, you must accept that another’s gender is not your decision, or up to your definition.

Second, you must decide whether your capacity for love of another human being is defined by your idea of what sexuality is.

Third, decide whether a person’s social gender history actually changes you, or whether it only changes your preconceptions.

Fourth, decide whether you know yourself well enough to stand up to what other people think and say.

Only then are you on firm enough ground to entrust yourself and gain a trans partner’s trust, because the voice in you and the voices of others will otherwise go on asking: what are they, really; what are you, really? Most of us never have to be bothered enough to even think of these questions, so being faced with a trans* potential partner is a demand you may prefer to sidestep.

What you think I am affects your definition of yourself.

If you think I make you a lesbian, or gay, and that matters to you, please understand that it is the result of your beliefs about cis-binary sexuality, not because I might harm or damage your reputation or self-esteem. I probably only want to love you …

Summary

It is confusing. What I am getting at is that loving relationships for trans* people are hard to find because people have a fear that some kind of indeterminacy about our gender affects their sense of their own sexuality. It is an extra demand. Only people who can get over that, and find a security about themselves, will realise that loving us is no different from loving anyone they might get to like.

Meantime I feel in utter limbo, because in my generation, finding a new love seems impossible; the doubt: ‘what do I think you really are’ is always present. Just another aspect of what it feels like to be transsexual. I hope it helps.

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It ain’t natural!

  • Posted on February 15, 2014 at 8:58 am

I live on the south coast of England, and last night felt scary. The sea is half a mile away, the wind was not, and I could hear stuff moving above my top floor flat ceiling. Rainwater has been leaking since I moved at the start of November, and there hasn’t been enough let-up to get anything properly fixed. I have just discovered this morning that the worse of two leaks let water in and under my laminate flooring. I’m relying on the central heating pipes to dry it out, because I’m not sure about lifting small areas of laminate. It has been an unwelcome start to my new living space, but it has been quite exceptional and sustained bad weather.

It ain’t natural.

Well, of course it is. It’s what the jet stream does when warm and cold sea and air patterns change, and they always do. I need no further convincing that human-released carbon deposits are changing our climate and will continue to do so. And yet I still selected a top-floor flat! This is nature, doing what nature does, and we have fed it the wrong diet. It’s got wind.

Today things will begin to die down, and if it dies down enough, we may see on the news instead, stories of snow and ice in the U.S. Things that are out of our idea of normal are scary, and we wish they would just return to the way we thought they were.

Another small event this week that has nonetheless swept the world was the announcement by Facebook that it is changing its gender markers for personal profiles. It seems not as of today to have reached UK Facebook users, but it will. The tide washes in and people who identify as anything other than male or female are feeling enfranchised and recognised. It can be a huge release not to have to choose between two things that you feel you are not. Imagine if you had to decide between ticking brown hair or blonde? It isn’t dissimilar. People who have traditional ideas of gender and no personal problem with the binary, have also protested.

It ain’t natural.

But just like the weather, of course it is. Nature is what is, not the way we think it should be. This small strike back at the way things actually are has also been forced. We have fed this shift by storing up resistance for too long, with our insistence on the apparent simplicity of labelling people male or female so we can sort the sex thing out and what is allowed and what is not. I am grateful for all that the lesbian, gay and bisexual movement has achieved on rights and social acceptance. They are getting there in a way trans* people are not quite. People used to see LGB couples in the street (they still do), holding hands or kissing, and probably imagining what do they do in bed?!

It ain’t natural!

Really? Two people simply expressing love for each other as they feel most fitting? They probably aren’t doing what most of these observers imagine anyway. Well not like that. Facebook this week has pressed the case once more, whether for commercial advantage or social good hardly matters, that what human kind is, is natural. Offering 56 categories instead of 2 may seem over the top, but when facebook.ru reaches Putin-land (I do hope so!) it will once again be saying that people are what they are, that sex and gender are social constructs as they stand. We are not all they same – but the heteronormative model?

It ain’t natural!

I probably shall not change my marker. I don’t need to say I’m trans, though I don’t hide it. Statistics of incidence of intersex (between 1 and 4 per cent of the population), of male to female transgender (1 in 4500), and of female to male transgender (1 in 8000) may seem surprisingly high. It is only a surprise because of systematic erasure. We don’t like to talk about the anomalies in the standard model. So let’s take the opportunity to feed climate change on LGB and especially the quite different T. Being transgender or transsexual happens.

It’s natural.

 

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Why words let us down and become oppressive

  • Posted on February 9, 2014 at 10:30 am

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Maybe it’s because I have worked writing, editing and proofing technical documents and research reports all my career. What is in our head finds words so that we can share our thoughts. The trouble is, the words are also in our heads, and got there first, and carried meanings that may be precise, but equally may have been misunderstood already when we learned them. Or they may be imprecise words, from a time when understanding in society was not as rich as it is now. There are many reasons why my meaning for a word may not quite be another’s. Then there are specialist meanings: when a word in a legal context, for example, means something more particular than in regular use.

Who owns a word and it’s meaning? I wrote a blog back in July 2012 (Semantic Hegemony, if you know what I mean) that still reads quite well, if you have time. We all think we mean what we say, but often offend when it leads to unintended misunderstanding.

Conversations of this ilk have, this week, included the legal definition of ‘bedroom’ in the context of the ‘bedroom tax’ (for non-UK readers, this relates to housing benefit to cover rent on a property deemed to have surplus space, assessed as the property having a non-essential bedroom). There is no legal definition. In an empty property, the room may be regarded as a bedroom. With a bed in it, it certainly is; but put a dining table in it and it isn’t. However, sleep on your sofa, and your lounge is a bedroom.

The words that tax us most in trans* land are still ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, not least because in a simple, neat world there are only male and female, and each only feels sexually attracted to the opposite. This underlies almost all social and cultural thinking, globally. Anything else is an interesting (or repulsive) deviation. It also underlies the idea that a trans* person changes their sex or gender. We do need to speak of change, because it is an enormous change to present for part of your life one way, and for the rest as something different. But the change is a perceptual one; we do not change sex and we do not change gender. The only problem is a social one, that led us in the first place into having to live a particular way until we were able to assert our authentic selves. That derived from identification-by-genitalia, itself fraught at the fringes.

And all in a way that repeats once more the limitations of language. Our words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are not fit for purpose. By using these words in the ways we think we know what they mean, we cause discrimination. By discrimination, I mean we distinguish one from another, make something different by exception: this is that, and this is other, so that it can be treated differently, less privileged and unequal.

I have been struck this week by minority assertion. The obvious examples have been in Russia, where activists have been arrested and beaten for singing their national anthem under a rainbow flag. There, under recent law, being anything other than heteronormative is lumped together as predatory, along with paedophilia. It is absurd, as well as cruel and barbaric. Activists are people who assert that non-heteronormative, non-binary states of birth are part of the normal and expected diversity of all human life.

I was struck also by a speech by an Irish drag queen (self-defined as a gay male, rather than transsexual) about institutional homophobia. In the link above, do watch and listen, do also watch senator David Norris at the end of the article. The core message is that every time one of us born not fitting the simplistic, religion-enforced, model expressed by the words sex and gender, is set aside in any way, we are being oppressed. Because one person is one colour does not entitle them to diminish someone of another colour. Because one person has four working limbs does not entitle them to diminish another with anything less. Because one person is a man attracted exclusively to women does not entitle him to diminish another who corrected their social situation for anything different. Because one person is a government minister, or priest, or lawyer, or religious leader, does not entitle them to diminish another who has a different take on life.

Inherent sex, sexuality and gender, by any definition, are not the domain of an elite to define a meaning that separates out anyone whose genitals or gender identity don’t fit their personal or cultural view. Anything else is oppressive.

This week also saw a spat on CNN between Piers Morgan and Janet Mock (if you’re unclear about either, get Googling). Both are public figures, one a journalist full of ego and self-justification, the other a very successful advocate for young trans* people who is working against social exclusion, othering and bullying. Why should a young person come to prefer suicide to life in the face of social attitudes perpetuated by ignorance and intolerance? If those doing the bullying had not been brought up with the cultural expectations of sex and gender being so unrepresentative of reality, they would not be bullies. Bigotry is very simple: the need for certainty combined with an inability to learn and understand. Janet Mock knows this place well, and was interviewed about the launch of her book Redefining Realness. What she didn’t know at the time was that the broadcast would be captioned ‘was a boy until age 18’, and that Morgan would treat her throughout as a man-become-woman with complex (implied, deceptive) sexual relationships. The result was acrimony and insults from Morgan on Twitter, and a panel on Morgan’s subsequent show to discuss whether Morgan was a victim of cisphobia.

In all three cases, Sochi, Ireland and CNN, the whole point is that those in a dominant role can sit around and discuss any other group, and make decisions about them, without listening or learning. This is abuse. White people may not sit around deciding the identities of those of any other colour. Roman Catholics may not sit around deciding the fate of abusers or the abused, without listening and learning and acting with justice. Men may not sit around discussing by themselves the rights and equalities of women; this is oppression too. Heteronormative senators or ministers may not sit around deciding the fate and rights of gay or lesbian people and their relationships. Journalists, panelists and experts may not sit around deciding the fate and rights of non-binary conforming or trans* people, without listening and learning that this is not a behaviour.

One other statistic I came across very recently: 61% of transgender people refused medical intervention attempt or commit suicide. That’s higher that the 46% of trans* people in general.

I don’t want to appear ‘one of the oppressed’ because I don’t personally feel that, and this may seem a bit of a rant. Nevertheless, anything that makes me feel that I have to assert the validity of being trans* in society is oppressive. When I came to consider suicide, it was out of the realisation that to be authentic, to be a woman with a trans background, in all likelihood would mean the end of any committed intimate relationship for the rest of my life. My feeling and horror in those dark hours was that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was neither a man nor a woman, and was therefore excluded from the privileges of either. And the reason? ‘Sex’ and ‘gender’ have simple meanings, don’t they? And therefore I am not really what I say. That upsets everyone stuck with hetero and binary. I have become likeable, even lovable, but untouchable.

If I don’t have to tolerate someone for being cis, why do I need tolerance for being trans? If I don’t need to be accepting of someone cis, why do I need acceptance for being trans? Am I waiting for a gift? I do feel accepted, which is a whole lot better than being tolerated, but often it is on the terms of the other. Is this a form of oppression?

I shall leave that with you, without judgement, because we still all need to think about this one a whole lot more.

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