One thing I’ve always kind of wondered–how (in general, of course, since everybody’s different) do MTF and FTM folks interact with each other regarding gender identity? As a very tomboyish woman who stays as far away from “girly” stuff as I can, I wonder if there’s ever any kind of discussions between transguys and transgirls about “you had everything I wanted–why on earth would you want to change?” I’d assume there’s a mutual understanding that comes from sharing the “I was born in the wrong body” experience, but does that question ever occur?
I’m not expressing that very well, but I hope I’m making at least some sense :).
Here is a case where my local experience flavors my answer. In our local community the transwomen and transmen in general do not associate with each other. There are no community dinners, no group outings, no meetings at clubs. If you meet a transman IRL and they know you, they turn and walk the other way. I attempted to create a network across the boundary on several times, and have been pushed off quite a bit. In other communities, there is much closer communication and ties.
Nonetheless I do have transman friends, some I talk to almost every couple of days, although they still won’t hang out with me. While there are some occasional joking discussions of “wouldn’t it be great if we could just swap bodies?” “No way, I don’t want to be a redhead!” in general both sides know the pain so well of our dysphoria it’s really kind of self-defeating and depressing to talk about it much.
UnaPersson,no questions, this thread has been very enlightening for me. Thank you for sharing your story with us, at times heartbreaking, but always an example of resilience and courage.
I always perceived you as a woman science type who took a deliberately ambiguous name, and have always enjoyed your posts.
BTW, I like your voice, especially your “tired” voice, so maybe that means you can sort of relax and not worry about it too much.
Una Persson, I’d like to thank you for this thread. I thought I knew quite a lot, but I’ve learnt a tremendous amount in the last hour of reading through it. I thought your voice sounded perfectly female, by the way. Even the boy voice didn’t sound mannish to me; more like Bea Arthur. As someone pointed out earlier, sultry is very sexy! Especially paired with such an immaculate and beautiful appearance.
I don’t want to PM you out of the blue, but I wonder if you’d take on a speaking engagement the next time you’re in London? I work in a college for disadvantaged/disenfranchised young people, and I think they’d be fascinated to hear what you have to say.
I was listening to something on NPR yesterday where the California school law has been updated to let the kids go with the gender identity they choose and some people were up in arms about it. I wanted to ask the “cis are the majority and we should accommodate them rather than make them feel uncomfortable” about what to do in an intersex child situation.
How can we create a “fair as possible” situation when it comes to athletics, where body center-of-gravity can make such a huge difference in performance? I am thinking of the South African athlete who discovered in a terribly public way, that she had this issue.
Why, such a child is mistake and needs to be corrected. Corrected as soon as possible, like immediately after birth so such a child can fit in and be normal!
:rolleyes:
Or such as has been the “common wisdom” for more or less a century. But the intersex people have already spoken volumes about why that approach doesn’t work out so well.
Once again, the biggest problem for the anomalies is NOT their anomaly but how everyone else reacts to it. That applies to the disabled, the intersex… really anyone straying too far from the norm.
I think the “brony” phenomenon is a really good example of the second concept in general, outside of specific transgenderism per se. We reached the point years ago where “tomboys” became normal and women who act somewhat masculine are generally not considered deviant. Tomboys nowadays are not automatically considered transgender - it’s normal to be a woman who wears trousers all the time and works as an auto mechanic. Bronies are fighting the barrier in the other direction - that when a man acts feminine, there must be something wrong with him. When a man watches My Little Pony, it’s assumed by many that he has some fundamental issue.
My daughter watches that show and the themes and stories are not particularly for just little girls.
It’s actually surprisingly not girly.
I’ve caught both my stepson and my husband watching it with her when they didn’t think we would notice.
I lived in Japan for 25 years and my Taiwanese wife taught a class in gender studies at her university.
It’s sort of a hijack to this wonderful thread, so I’ll put it in spoilers.
Concerning Japanese LGBT community:
[spoiler]Warning: Lots of simplification ahead. Obviously, this is something which a lot could be written about.
I “married into” a gay community, as my wife had large number of gay friends before I met her, so I become friends with them as well. Before that, I had lived in Japan for 18 years without personally knowing a single person who self identified as gay.
In general, Japanese just don’t talk about these things. There are very few openly gay men and I don’t know of any open lesbians. There is a district in Tokyo with gay and lesbian bars, but the Internet seems to have hurt business.
There are a number of tv personalities and comedians who are very stereotypical flaming gays, often dress androgynously and will wear some make up. There are also cross dressers in the entertainment world, especially bars. Japan has a long tradition of hostess / geisha type of bar / entertainment, and there is a certain genre which caterers to people who like talking to cross dressers. I would not be surprised if a number of these clients were closeted gays, as it’s completely unacceptable to be out as an ordinary member of society.
Both of these types (flaming gays and cross dressers) have traditionally been referred to as okama, which is why there is confusion about which term refers to what. As posted above, drag performers and transwomen are now called “new half.” Biracial people are called “half” which is why it’s “new half.”
There are a very few number of transgender people in Japan. One of the most famous is Ikko (52), a transwoman makeup artist and TV personality. She’s famous in Japan and Korea. Another TV personality is Ai Haruna. Both are treated as curiosities, and seen as “cute” by women. Never once in a conversation with a Japanese man did the subject come up, so I don’t really know how they really feel.
There is one Japanese politician, Aya Kamikawa, a transwoman counsel member of Setagaya, Tokyo (my former district) and the sole open LGBT politician in Japan.
In my wife’s classes, she would often have one of our friends, an open gay (but not flaming :eek:) Singaporean come and talk to the students. This would often be the first LGBT individual that the students would have seen in person.
Anyway, I don’t know if this is useful or not, but I hope it can point you in the right direction.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. You can PM me and what I don’t know my wife may.[/spoiler]Your voice is absolutely fine. I like all of them.
As for the voice, I don’t need to remind you, a scientist, that we hear our own voices differently than when they are recorded and played back, and most people don’t like how we sound.
I desist my voice, which is very high voice for a man. I grew up as a loner at school with a lot of issues, including a brutal, abusive father and the absolute last thing I wanted to be was a man. I’ve always been attracted to women and never to men, so there wasn’t any question of sexual orientation, but I didn’t really identify as a “boy” in when I was young.
I didn’t play sports as a child and it wasn’t until college that I found out I’m not completely unable to play. I’d never have been gifted but probably average.
It wasn’t until I had children that I started to strongly identify as a male, specifically as a father.
As I write this, I checked how strongly I identify by asking myself a few questions.
Are you a father?
Are you male?
Are you a man?
Do you like women?
Do you like men?
For questions 1, 4, and 5 I’ve got an immediate, no hesitation response of “yes,” “yes,” and “no.” There isn’t any doubt within myself.
For 2, a very slight hesitation and then “yes.” Sort of like being asked if you filled up the car with gas yesterday. “Let me see, yes, I did.”
For 3. I really have to think about it. It’s almost like I have to figure that one out each time. OK, I’ve got the right sex organs, I’m tall, good upper body strength and was able to father a number of children, so I must be a man. Too many issues with my father and cruel older brother to be really comfortable with thinking of myself as a man.
However, I added a new question.
Are you a woman.
Immediate response. “No.” So that’s not in doubt.
Interesting. I had never though this through before. Have you seen situations such as mine before?
I really respect you for the courage to open up and have this thread.
If I’m there are not busy dancing, sure. I tend to only visit the Smoke about once a year, however.
That’s not exactly what AB1266 says - kids aren’t allowed to just choose their own gender. They have to present and maintain a consistent gender identity. OK, AB1266 itself is oversimplified; there is precedent already in California for how “gender identity” is defined, so if you look at AB1266 in vacuo, then in seems “scarier” to folks than it really is.
I have written a 13,000-word research article on the history and future of transgender and intersex athletes, including an extensive medical review, which is being published on the Transas City website. Parts 1-2 of 8 are up, and over the next month the rest will.
In terms of intersex athletes, we as a society should not abuse of them like the case of South African 800-meter runner Caster Semenya. She was treated like a criminal by the International Association of Athletic Federation (IAAF), who reputedly lied to her to get her to take a chromosome test. While she and her team fought with the IAAF over their demands for proof she was a woman, the world press demonized Semenya as a “shemale” at best, and a man committing fraud at worst. While the full information on Semenya’s physical condition has never been released, unconfirmed reports are that she is a true intersex woman with internal testes and no uterus or ovaries. Semenya did get her own back – she has since racked up an impressive array of wins in international competition, and in 2012 not only was she chosen to carry her country’s flag at the Olympics Games in London, but she also took silver in the 800-meter event.
Body center of gravity remarkably doesn’t seem to come up in almost all sports where the debate rages. Generally the primary complains are “male bone structure” and “male muscle”. These arguments are false or misguided at best, and it’s too massive a topic to reproduce here. I will wait until my entire piece and its citations are published, and then point to it. Page 1 is on here: Cross-Training - The History and Future of Transgender and Intersex Athletes.
There’s been some discussion on gender roles in general, and this is the area of questions I’ve been thinking about. I’m sorry, I’m not able to express myself the way I want right now, but I was wondering about the general acceptance of changing or non-traditional gender roles and how it relates to general acceptance of transgendered people. If it is parallel or directly related.
Do trans people who have gender-neutral names ever decide to stick with their original name? Or is changing your name considered a major step that trans people choose to take even when their birth name doesn’t make it necessary?
On the opposite side, are there trans people who decide to defy convention and stick with their birth name even when it doesn’t match their gender?
Common sense tells us that it ought to help - claims were made during the “metrosexual fad” that gay men were benefiting from residual good-will as yuppies started wearing pink shirts and drinking nonfat goats milk lattes.
I guess a difference has to be made between transgender and transsexual persons here as well. A host of MMA-watching flannel-wearing women wearing jeans and driving F250 trucks certainly makes it easier to accept a transgender man. But it’s doubtful (to me, my opinion only) that any new “sensitivity” in the male population as a whole to non-rigidly traditional male gender roles has helped me or my sisters. I really don’t know; my single opinion cannot carry much weight here I think.
Good question. You would think that most of them would want to keep it. I can tell you, once you are a working professional with credit cards and jobs and professional organizations and benefit cards etc. it’s a nightmare to change your name in all of them. I think I posted earlier I’ve done more than 120 places, and I’m still not done.
My experience is that most transwomen and transmen will at a minimum modify their name into a new one. I think it’s rare that they keep the same name unaltered, as it can lessen the mental reinforcement in people from their past that the person’s gender has changed.
FTR - the most difficult place to change my name? Frequent flyer/traveler programs. OMG, who the hell do they think they are, the NSA? The Hilton Honors frequent lodger program was the worst of the worst. They demanded everything but surgical records before they would change my name and/or gender, and one person on the phone was even hinting they might want to “take a quick look.” :smack: It took nearly two months to get it done. I should have just got a new card, but I had a lot of points on it. Good grief.
Very, very rarely. The Prime Directive of being a transsexual woman is that Thou Shalt Do Your Best to Live and Work as Your New Gender, With Minimum Disruption. A person who shows up fully transitioned as a pretty woman at work but is still called “Stan Grabowski” is going to bring nine kinds of hell down on themselves every day. I struggle to think of a single transsexual woman I know who has done that, and I only know of a couple of transgender women or men who have. And one of them is so highly mentally unbalanced I don’t think they fully understood what they were doing.
Una, I gotta admit, I’ve been avoiding this thread because I didn’t know what to expect. I got about 20 posts in on the front page and am amazed at your strength, courage and intelligence. And, well, I have to admit you are a lovely woman.
I don’t have any questions yet. I need to catch up the rest of the thread at some point.
Not gender-related but I’ve been looking into changing my name. The whole kit and kaboodle is 8 words in my birth certificate but, due to different government bodies deciding to abbreviate the firstname (four words in b.c.) in different ways, now my passport, national ID and driver’s license don’t have the same words under “firstname”; neither version matches the one I give when I introduce myself, or in my cards. I don’t even want to do something akin to going from “Jennifer” to “Ke$ha”, just from “Jennifer Marie-Louise” who in some docs appears as “Jennifer” and in others as “Jen M-L” to “Jen”.
The court wants club cards and the like to show proof that I ask people to call me “Jen”. What do clubs and the like ask to see to copy my name from?
Una, I want to join the chorus of “thank yous” for opening yourself up in this thread. Before this, I had what I thought was a tolerant attitude toward transsexuals - something along the lines of “It seems pretty extreme to change your whole body because you “feel” like you’re the wrong gender, but if it makes them happy, why should it bother me?” Until I read your post # 122, it didn’t “click” for me - you know, everyone has feelings, everyone deals with feelings, right? Until you wrote that post, I’ve never “gotten” any sense of what kind of pain transsexual folks are in before they’re properly treated.
Some in this thread have suggested you write a book about your experience. I disagree. When you can convey emotion this powerfully, you should write a song.
Thanks, Fierra, for pulling this gem back from the brink.
What, then is “particularly for just little girls”? And why? I think the real answer is far more restricted than obvious answers.
E.g. there are occasional mentions on South Park that many of the male characters read Nancy Drew. In one episode, Eric Cartman tries to make an analogy between the boys’ current situation and a scene in a Nancy Drew book. While Kyle objects to the totality of Cartman’s argument because it is boneheaded and illogical, none of the boys make any comment indicating or hinting that boys reading Nancy Drew is in any way inappropriate and no additional time is spent discussing it. You would think that, considering the enmity between Cartman and Kyle, if Kyle or one of the other boys did consider Nancy Drew fandom to be a point of shame for boys, he would have used it against Cartman. Since he did not, it seems to indicate either that South Park boys do not consider it deviant, or they are all fans themselves.
