A girl I know has been diagnosed with and has been living with GID. Is it a chemical problem. brain problem, hormone or what?
She does not seem to think it is solvable, nor does she seem to be interested in “becoming more normal”. I have known her for about a year, so this is all new to me. I just thought she felt comfortable with short hair and male clothes.
That’s the thing. No one knows. It’s very controversial. Some assume it has to do with hormones or genetic intolerance to hormones: a biological female who feels male either has more androgen, is hypersensitive to it, or is resistant to progesterone/estrogen/etc.
There are others that think it has to do more with forming one’s gender identity, and that it comes from having either too strict or too loose gender requirements. They claim it’s developmental: the child formed a solid gender identity that is in conflict with their perception of their own biological gender.
And, of course, there are those in the transgendered community that believe it’s not a disorder at all.
From what I’ve read, the only real treatment is to change the body, not the mind. I personally am surprised there’s nothing about learning to accept the disparity and embrace it, as that’s the direction I see modern psychology going with this sort of thing. But, if they did that, why would it be called a disorder?
Too funny, I was up all last night watching YouTube and they had a documentary on children with Gender Identity Disorder.
Here’s a link to it on YouTube
As BigT said, the mere fact it’s labeled a disorder causes controversy. Some people feel it’s just a natural variance.
What should be understood that GID is based on the person being “normal” in terms of sexual genitalia and chromosome make up.
It does not apply to people who are intersex, based on ambiguous genitalia or a variance in chromosome makeup
Thing is, that seems unlikely given that there are visibly noticeable differences in the brain between transsexuals and cisexuals.
While I understand the emotional reasons for that, objectively speaking it seems to me the fact that it’s something that needs treatment pretty much by definition puts it in the category of “disorder”.
It simply doesn’t work. Ignoring it just makes the emotionally disturbing effects of the brain/body conflict grow larger and larger. It’s not like, say, homosexuality or left handedness where people function just fine if society just lays off the bigotry. You’ve got someone whose brain is constantly telling them their body is “wrong”, and which is exposed to the wrong mix of hormones to boot.
Yeah, but maybe what was meant is that it would be a lot better if society just accepted it a difference rather than a moral threat or whatever so that people with GID who require treatment of some sort don’t have the additional burden of bigotry.
I am familiar with the disorder through English literature, where it has been discussed–though of course not using the current clinical term–since the ancient Greeks, who considered people who shared emotional and/or physical traits with both genders as being particularly powerful and important.
In India, the Hijiras make up a “third gender,” a term that is becoming more popular in societies that accept the limitations of gendering people who simply do not feel comfortable in rigid sexual and gender roles. The Hajiras enjoy political sanction and popular support, unlike many third- or even fourth- (or more) gendered people from around the globe at different points in human history, including the Inca and indigenous North American tribes.
Naturally, any discussion of gender is hotly debated, especially in the United States, where debates on sexuality (especially homosexuality) are polemical. Ultimately, this discussion can be simplified into a nature/nurture debate.
I don’t believe it was a nurture problem ,with the girl i know. She knew she was not comfortable in womens garb when she was very young. She did not feel comfortable in a girls life .She was forced a few times to wear dresses in ceremonies ,like award shows and she was miserable and did not know why.
She is married to a man. She has no intention to have kids.
I do not know about her sex life. But she is a very nice person . She is getting better quickly at racketball.
I don’t understand the difference between transexual and GID.
Gender identity disorder is the incongruity of biological gender with gender identity.
A transsexual…or, more accurately, a transgender…is someone going through/went through gender reassignment surgery to align their body with the gender they identify.
Transgenders suffer from GID.
Believe me…a boy or girl growing up believing since the age of three that some cosmic mistake had been made in the creation of their body, is truly suffering.
See, and this is where my own bias and ignorance lie: they’re just clothes. It’s an accident of birth that she was even born into a society where men only wear garments which separate their legs. Would she have a problem wearing a kilt? Or a tunic? Or the long robes Cardinals and Popes wear?
I don’t doubt her suffering one bit, I just don’t grok why women, in particular, ascribe gender to clothing. We can wear any clothing we want and it’s all “women’s” clothing!
I’ve got a friend with GID, and I’m afraid I mostly see it as an overly rigid definition of “female” in her own mind. Again, I’m aware that’s my own bias, and the product of my upbringing in which “woman” is a very wide-encompassing term as it relates to clothing, behavior, attitudes and acceptance. We’ve got women race car drivers and women plumbers and women heads-of-state…what is “a girl’s life”, really, anymore?
She does not want to become a man. She seems to wander in a limbo between the sexes, some ways a girl, some a boy. I don’t think she thinks there is a gender mistake because neither one is quite right for her. It has to be very confusing.
Maybe gender influences personality because we think it does, like Dumbo’s feather. I have some personality traits that people generally think of as female. Why I don’t know. The thing of it is I don’t think I’m less male because of them. I’m male because of what’s in my pants.
I’d like to believe the things that define me for the better are irrelevant to that.
The current umbrella term for someone who feels they don’t fit neatly into the classic male/female binary is genderqueer. You might want to read up on it - it seems to me from reading your posts that she isn’t bothered by her gender identity, but that it disturbs you.
Wrong, she wrote a book on it. I would never have paid attention to it if I did not read the manuscript . She knew I would not judge her . But it is far enough outside my understanding, that I am trying to figure out what she feels and thinks. I am trying to figure where such a problem will take her.
I never heard of GID until I read the manuscript.
The book deals a lot with abuse she has received from strangers and casual acquaintances. One chapter covers a lot of online abuse she got when she defended a gay person and described her own problems growing up.
There’s a lot that goes on.
First of all you can be a masculine female or a feminine male and that’s fine as long as you’re comfortable in your body and fine with your body parts.
A tom boy is a girl who likes to do “boy things” but is perfectly OK being a girl.
Transgendered do not feel like this. They are not comfortable with their body.
You also have to rule out intersex from this group. This are people who have ambiguous genitalia or have chromosome oddities, because of course they are not going to feel right with their bodies as there is something, for lack of a better word, wrong with body parts themselves.
The OP’s friend will not feel comfortable with society as a whole, but will eventually come to terms with this on her own terms. In the mean time there are lots of support groups, both online and in real life, where people with similar feelings can talk to each other. This assures them they are not alone nor unique.
I think the primary problem is with having a body that does not match your brain. I had a transgendered friend, and it’s hard to capture the loathing she felt for her penis- it was a foreign, alien appendage that felt completely and totally wrong, every day. She told me she felt like she was poisoned in the womb, and that the way her body grew was a birth defect.
The stuff that goes along with it- clothes, gender roles, etc. are not bad in and of themselves, but they are bad because they remind you and pigeonhole you into that thing that causes you so much pain.
Imagine if you were white, and you suddenly became a black person- which for whatever reason made you deeply uncomfortable and upset. Even on good days, when you managed to just be yourself and not worry about your mismatched identity, when people put on Hip Hop music or helpfully steered you to the “black” hair products, you’d probably be catapulted back to reality and all the pain that comes with it. Eventually, over the course of years of having these things forced on you, the products themselves would become symbols of your pain.
Leaving aside the issue of “suffering” in this thread it’s important to note something.
Transgender is an adjective. It is not a verb. People are not transgendered. It is not a noun, so it can’t be made a plural. People are transgender, they are not transgenders.
More specifically, people are transgender women or transgender men. Transgender isn’t some nebulous third gender or other.
If we’re going to talk about the topic, we need to do so accurately, especially in GQ.
I wish this matter were that simple, that it could be neatly wrapped up in one line of text. What I dislike about the word *transgender *is that it has no clear definition. Different people with wildly differing attitudes about gender use it to mean all kinds of various things. Also, the usage of it by cis people is often noticeably at variance from how trans people use it (for one thing, trans people themselves overwhelmingly prefer to say just “trans”.)
The reason I replied to this is there are tons of people out there who do use the word transgender to describe just what you said: third gender, neither man nor woman, or both at once, or somewhere in between, or as a near-synonym for genderqueer. I simply avoid using the word at all, since nobody ever really knows what anyone else means by it. The term may be useful as an umbrella for a coalition of disparate groups of activists. But it actually tells you nothing at all about any given individual.
What you described—a trans person is either a man or a woman—used to be called “transsexual.” It still is, at least by transsexual men & women themselves. But for the general public, it’s gotten subsumed into “transgender,” which like as not is being used to mean something different. I quite suspect this is because Americans are all squeamish about the scary bad word SEX. Anyway, lots of trans men and women, who are unambiguously men or women, feel left out by today’s usage.
This is true, but at least we can get the basic part of speech correct, and the most standard usage. I don’t find any “man, woman, transgender” construction to ever be encouraged by trans people.
Trans people?
That’s true, but I don’t think that’s because of other trans people.