Kaitlyn, thanks for not blowing up at me. Having said that, I do have to dispute some of the points you make.
I’m not equating gender identity with being masculine or feminine. I’m not really either, although I guess I’m pretty feminine as men go. It’s nothing I spend much energy thinking about.
Furthermore, many people do have very strong gender identities, even though they do not have gender dysphoria. Many many men “feel like” men, and many many women “feel like” women. Me? I don’t even understand what that means. This refutes the idea of gender identity being something ever-existent that you just don’t notice unless you’re gender dysphoric.
As for examples, I haven’t actually given any, because I can’t think of any, because the entire issue is so far from me I can’t grasp it. All I can do is assure you that I, honestly and to the best of my knowledge, would be as happy in a woman’s body as I am in this one.
Finally, I know that what you said wasn’t directed at any poster in particular, but I still feel I’m qualified to respond.
I’m a bit curious as to what would count as an example of having or lacking a gender identity. Would what sex one finds oneself as in dreams be relevant? Whether one wanted to play with the boys or the girls when one was young? Anything other than direct opinions on what one’s gender identity is or is not?
You are obviously not paying attention. Read carefully: you’re still talking about sex roles and masculinity / femininity, not gender identity. Coach Fox in my example is happy being a hyper masculine male, he even seems to revel in it and celebrate it. Stuart is happy being a somewhat feminine man. They’re both happy being men. It has fuck-all to do with how masculine or feminine they are because neither has a gender identity of female. Being feminine or neutral as it relates to sex roles is in no way parallel to having a female gender identity in a male body. They are not analagous, and how a feminine or neutral male deals with that is absolutley irrelevant to how a physical male with a female gender identity deals with her problem.
Second, I’m not “stuck” in any role. I was stuck when my parents made me wear boy clothes and gave me boy toys and made me play sports. I was stuck before my sex reassignment. It’s now that I’m free of imposed sex roles. Read that again, carefully. I’m free of imposed sex roles. I choose the stereotypically feminine role because that’s how I’m happiest. I choose the feminine sex roles because those are the roles that best fit my personality. Nobody has made me this way, it’s just how I am, and how I want to be.
Having a penis and testicles, but undevelooped breasts when you are a woman is anything but superficial. Having hormone therapy and surgery to correct these physical defects is not making superficial changes. These changes were fundamental to my core identity; they were necessary for my mental well being. There’s nothing remotely superficial about having the wrong sex organs.
Can you truly be this dense? Pay careful attention again: I have had the experience of having been both physically male and female. I can say with absolute certainty that I was not happy being physically male, and I am happy being physically female. This is not speculation of any kined, it is indisputable.
Someone who has only the experience of having been physically one sex without a conflicting gender identity to say they’d be just as happy as the other sex is arguing from a position of ignorance.
So gender identitiy is a choice? Do you seriously think anyone would chose to be transsexual if it simply (as you have directly stated) were a matter of choosing not to be? SRS for a transsexual is not a matter of choosing hormones and surgery over another equally viable treatment. Therapy is tried first, to eliminate those who are not right for sexual reassignment, but for many of us there is no other viable, effective treatment.
Adopting certain feminine characteristics, or if you prefer, androgynous characteristics makes either a feminine male or an androgynous male. MTF transsexuals are not feminine males; they are not androgynous males, they are females. Your personal experiences are not not analagous.
As far as I know, I don’t think I’d be miserable in a man’s body. Sure, being a woman is really cool and I wouldn’t want to change, but being a man must have its good points. I’d probably make more money and get more chicks. And I could still be basically the same person when it came to my interests and activities. If I wound up a kind of feminine man, well, so what? It’s the 21st century, I could be whatever kind of man I liked.
However, as content as I think I might be as a man, I know I would not be happy if my male body demanded female hormone levels that it could not produce on its own. I don’t need to exercise much imagination to see myself in that situation. DocCathode explained above why he often participates in threads related to transsexuality even though he is not transsexual. I have a different reason than his – I’ll read anything that has to do with hormones, because I have an endocrine disorder. My sex hormones have thus far been little affected by this, but I know what it’s like when your body wants chemicals it can’t make. It’s miserable. I could go on at length about this, but I think that one word really sums it up. It’s just plain miserable.
Now, since I’m not transsexual myself I don’t really know what it’s like for people that are. I don’t know if they feel bad the way I have, or that hormone treatment with estrogen or testosterone makes them feel better the way treatment with other kinds of hormones does for me. But maybe it is similar. If for some reason some people are born with a brain or body that expects hormone levels that would only be naturally produced by someone of the opposite physical sex, I can see how this would be a big problem for them that they’d want treated medically.
I don’t know that this is the “real story” behind transsexuality, but I think it’s likely at least part of the truth.
Now allow me a bit of frustration on my part. Many posters here are projecting their frustration with other people on me and fail to see differences between what I wrote and what others have written before me. That however is the way the brain works, and it’s understandable (and a lot better documented than the adult stria terminalis).
I have never said that there wasn’t a real problem, or that the issues I mentioned were the real problem and SRS is … applesauce. The very first line of my very first response contained the word viable. I just felt compelled to point out issues that are relevant to the situation of the OP. Issues are bigger in our society than the relatively insignificant number of people that find they can only be happy in a different body. Please, people, learn to deal with non-binary approaches before even computers get better at it.
It was said before that the (‘official’) road to SRS is full of dealing with much more than just with the issues that I mentioned. So why exactly was I so off base? Few people have managed to point this out, though I appreciate there were many who did see my original intent. I’m taking the clumsily worded to imply that I should have been more political in my wording. But I have not taken part in any prior discussions of the subject, and did not expect to be treated as such. That was perhaps my own mistake, but if I always have to be that thorough about researching the board I fear I would never get to posting.
No transsexual needs to feel threatened by any word I say. If they had SRS and are now happy with who they are, does it matter if one day it is either proven or disproven that there was a legitimate physical problem that has been successfully addressed by SRS or not? Of course it doesn’t matter.
Does that also mean repeated denial of the legitimacy of SRS isn’t allowed to piss you off? By all means no! But allow me to be equally displeased when such words are put into my mouth without my consent. I work in only one simple way, and that is according to the banner of the board, whether it is my own ignorance or that of others does not matter.
And while we’re there, please allow me some brief criticism of the cites mentioned above. Correct me if I have fully misinterpreted the scientific lingo, but what I read is that like the brain size for homosexual males, they have found an aspect of the brain that correlates with gender almost perfectly, and that where it does not correlate, in fact the subject was transsexual. However, correlations are not explanations. They are just signs that there might be something to look at. It is therefore that I find the closing sentence in the last quote requiring quite a large leap of faith, that I’m not yet prepared to make.
This brings me to Kaithlin’s point.
Many differences of opinion between people stem from using the same words with different meanings. I think that identity is the problem word here. I think it is incorrectly used. If we use the cite, then what we are looking for is the plain and simple I’m a man’s brain in a woman’s body. That this then is a problem implies that the male brain is physically incompatible with a woman’s body. Then a thousand implications follow, such as that the physical incompatibility can make a person feel unhappy. Identity does not follow from any of this. I read someone saying, not sure it was you, that in order to be happy, the woman within needed to live with female hormones. The sites however only say something about how the two do not affect each other. Does that mean this is untrue? No, just that it is not yet proven.
Now you yourself confuse sex roles with gender identity, and you’ve lost me. You use stereotypical, feminine, sex roles, personality, all in one sentence. This is why I believed and now still do that you are yourself still hung up on masculinity/femininity, and still linking them closely to your gender identity. What I would expect to have been readin is that you would say that you were previously so primitively, fundamentally unhappy as a woman in a man’s body because of the physical incompatibility of the two, that this unhappiness prevented you from being the person you needed to be. Instead, you seem to indicate above that your parents forced you into a certain (male) sex role, suggesting all that I suspect you and other transsexuals would hate me for spelling out.
But this is only so if physically being a man or physically being a woman are indeed fundamental to your core being. At this point, there have been others who say that they do not experience this aspect of them as part of their core being, and I think I am one of them. But at this point (as was rightfully pointed out elsewhere in this pit-thread), we will no longer be able to consider our positions as universal truths without forcing the other into something s/he does not feel fundamentally uncomfortable with. Hajario addresses this issue in his post.
You’ve completely mistaken me (for which, on my part, I will not call you dense, as it’s a common experience and I’m used to it). You said this:
You reacted to me saying something along the lines of “I would be equally happy in a female body”. But if SRS made you happy and it works the way you describe it to work, then I should be able to prove or disprove my point equally by undergoing SRS myself. Would I still be happy, then I surely hope that I would have proven my point. Woud I be unhappy, I would be inclined (after of course excluding other factors), that you were right. By which I implied that if you say that there is no way to prove this, then you are denying the effect of SRS and it cannot have helped you. Have I made myself any clearer?
I have conceded already in my second or third post that undoing a gender identity that is forced upon you may in fact be harder than SRS, or even impossible by any other means than SRS. But I remain so far unconvinced that gender identity is a birthright. Identity is something very complex, in which gender can definitely play a role, but I do believe that this role can vary to a great extent.
I do wonder if we can find something of a meeting point here. Not that we have to, I just wonder if it is possible. What if I were to say that SRS can in some cases be the most effective treatment for gender related identity issues, whether the underlying issues are mostly physical or whether they are mostly mental, and in the meantime continue to learn more about both so that we can more clearly identify individual cases?
Other than agreeing with Arwin, I haven’t seen anything offensive in what you’ve posted, and you’ve since
Not really. There can be people who strongly identify as their physicals sex and people who don’t have a strong sense of gender identity because their gender matches their sex. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Of course, a person without a gender identity would be indistiguishable from one with a gender identity that goes unnoticed because it matches their physical sex, so we may be just using different language to describe the same phenomenon; a distinction without a difference.
Not really; I know of people who do, in fact, consider themselves non-gendered, i.e. they do not consider themselves as having a gender, not male, not female, not anything, as opposed to a person who identifies as a man but has no strong emotional attachment to it.
I disagree. As I said, I believe I’d be just as happy in a woman’s body. Someone with a male gender identity, whether or not it matched their physical sex, wouldn’t say that.
I don’t feel threatened by you, I feel offended. I’m very near the end of my sexual reassignment.
It is when people with attitudes like yours get into a position where they can affect the treatment of transsexuals that a threat is created. Putting up more obstacles to the acceptance of transsexuality and access to treatment for it is not a threat to me, as I’ve already gone most of the way through the system, but such attitudes are a threat to people like me who have not yet entered the system.
I had to offer evidence to a gender therapist, psychiatrist, endocrinologist, and most recently SRS surgeon that I had a “legitimate physical problem” as you put it. Count those up, and you’ll see three medical professionals and two mental health professionals who all agree that I have a “legitimate physical problem”. What level of proof do you require that my problems are legitimate?
Nobody needs to put words in your mouth. You did this yourself. You said in the previous thread, “[C]hanging your gender identity can be done by breaking down mental barriers.” You suggest above that transsexualism may not be a “legitimate physical problem”. If you now want to claim you were not questioning the legitimacy of physical sexual reassignment, you are contradicting yourself.
It took me a few times reading that, but I think you understood the study. Women’s brains have a different physical structure than men’s. MTF transsexuals have brains that are physically the same as women, and the one FTM had a brain structure that was physically the same as men. There was a 100% correlation.
Absolute proof. Nope. Strong evidence that MTF transsexuals have female brains? You bet. It doesn’t require a leap of faith, it requires accepting the best scientific evidence available. You want to dispute the evidence or the conclusion? Fine. Provide a cite with evidence to counter that which you dispute.
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Many differences of opinion between people stem from using the same words with different meanings. I think that identity is the problem word here. I think it is incorrectly used.
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Gender identity as it is being used here refers to one’s innate sense of being male or female.
Actually, it does. The MTF transsexuals in the study had brains that were physically the same as natal female brains. There was a 100% correlation between their gender identity–female–and the physical sex of their brains. If you want to dispute this, you need to provide counter evidence.
That was me, and it is true. My mind works better under the influence of female hormones than it did under the influence of male hormones. I am happier with female blood chemistry than I was with male.
Nope, you misunderstand. The cites say that there is no indication that estrogen therapy created the female structures in the MTF brain, ie, the brain of a MTF transsexual is already female before any hormone therapy occurs.
[quote]
Now you yourself confuse sex roles with gender identity, and you’ve lost me. You use stereotypical, feminine, sex roles, personality, all in one sentence. This is why I believed and now still do that you are yourself still hung up on masculinity/femininity, and still linking them closely to your gender identity.
[quote]
I was responding to your assertion that I was somehow “trapped” by societies sex roles. I’m not trapped because I freely choose to inhabit those sex roles. If a lesbian could have been a 50’s housewife, that would have been the perfect sex role for me.
Primitively?
I was profoundly unhappy to the point of near suicidal depression because my physical body did not match my internal gender identity. I felt female, but had a male body. This conflict caused the problem. The scientific evidence seems to indicate that I likely have a female brain, and this is the source of my female identity. Provide a cite with contrary evidence if you want to dispute this.
They tried to force me into a male role. It didn’t take. This likely had some influence on how feminine I am now. But it didn’t create my essential female identity. I have always known that I was female, and what’s more, I told people this when I first understood how boys and girls are different.
Despite everything my parents tried to do to convince me that I was male, I knew different.
Please offer up your interpretation of how my childhood influenced my gender identity so that I can compare it to the interpretation I and two different mental health professionals arrived at.
Being physically female is fundamental to my core being. I tried being a man. It didn’t work. I tried being a feminine man. It didn’t work. I tried wearing women’s clothes. It wasn’t enough. Nothing I did made me comfortable and happy in my body until the hormones started to take effect.
I feely accept that there are people whose gender identity is not a strong part of their core being. I offered up a possible alternate explanation above, which I see is flawed, and I withdraw.
The only person who has tried to generalize from thier own perspective to others who are different from them is you. I certainly haven’t tried to generalize from my personal experience except as it relates to other MTF transsexuals, of whom I know several, both in person and online, and who tend to report very similar stories as regards their gender identity.
The existence of people with no strong gender identity does not prove anything whatsoever about transsexualism.
Are you willing to undergo sexual reassignment to prove your point? If not, the entire paragraph above is moot.
I have indisputable evidence that, for me, sexual reassignment did what it was supposed to do. I was unhappy with the conflict between my body and gender identity before; I no longer am.
You have a feeling you would be just as happy female as you are male. I don’t dispute this. What I do dispute is that this feeling has anything whatsoever with transsexuality.
You’ve been provided both anecdotal and scientific evidence that gender identity is an innate quality in transsexuals. Please provide some counter evidence if you want to dispute this.
I agree that sexual identity can vary to a great extent. People whose gender identity is weak enough that they’d be content as either sex, or whose gender identity matches their sex are not relevant to a discussion of how best to deal with people with a strong cross-sex gender identity.
I agree that there are gender identity issues that are not best treated by sexual reassignment, and whats more, I have been saying this all along. It is only when you start saying that transsexualism can be simply treated through therapy by breaking down barriers that we reach an impasse.
Transsexuals have a physical disorder that has only one effective treatment, and that is some degree of sexual reassignment.
Well in that case I deeply apologize and have to highly commend you for your extreme patience with me.
But is this really what I am doing? I do not think so, but I can appreciate it can feel that way. Rather I am hoping that our discussion is helping to increase the understanding of transsexuality, and I have never, not once, stated that SRS doesn’t have a place in our society. But I do also appreciate that the points I have originally raised will be completely irrelevant to someone who is going through the system. But if you want to increase acceptance of transsexuality, you will have to allow other people around you to go through parts of that system with you.
The following is not bragging, I hope you appreciate this. In my social circle, I am the person who people often come to if they have problems, of any kind. Also, I am usually the first person to come to the defense of anyone who is unjustly perceived as deviant. I am also the first person to question things that are considered normal. Your patient discussions with me (and this board in general) are helping me be that person, and I want to take this moment again to thank you very much for this.
I don’t. I have never questioned the legitimacy of your problems, and the very first sentence I wrote in reply to the original OP states this.
Selective reading is putting words in my mouth too. I said it can be done, but not that it can always be done. If there was any confusion about this in the first post, then I have repeatedly stated explicitly in several posts afterwards that changing your gender identity (or even doing away with it) may not always be an option, no matter what the underlying cause.
Ok, I’m glad that we have the same understanding. But in the scientific circles I have dwelt, and most of the people I have discussions with, such small numbers will fail to put much weight in the scale. There are good scientific reasons for this too, and therefore I could use this scientific research to convince some, but not all, and not myself. As you say yourself, it is far from absolute proof.
I don’t have to come up with evidence to refute something that isn’t there. Accepting the best scientific evidence available is in this case almost as valuable as having none. Not only are the numbers being too small (have you any idea how statistically insignificant the MTF/female brain correlation is in this study?), what isn’t there in the study is evidence that having a female brain correlates with a female gender identity, it doesn’t reveal what a gender identity is, it doesn’t prove it exists at all, it doesn’t say anything about why people with this same binary difference have stronger or lesser senses of gender identity (if any), it doesn’t say anything about how this part of the brain interacts with certain hormone environments, and so on and so forth. Like Socrates, I consider true wisdom knowing what you do not know.
However, that also means that you can then better evaluate what you do know. Currently, what the five professionals agree upon is that SRS is likely the most effective way to deal with whatever your problem may be, no matter what the underlying cause. From how I understand such general procedures, the mentally oriented professionals will discuss aspects like whether or not there is a reasonable non-medical alternative to SRS that could help you and the severity of your current condition, and the physically oriented professionals will determine things like whether or not there may be other medical indications adversely affecting your wellbeing. The five of them will add up their findings and together determine the course of action. Am I far off?
Yes, I think (also from the rest of your post) that we have this clear now, including our mutually recognised differences.
Already discussed above.
No that is how I understood it too. Just that the study doesn’t say anything about that someone with a female brain will be happier with a female blood chemistry. But if anyone knows a researcher with some funds to spare and time to kill, I think we can formulate a great deal of excellent research subjects that would provide a lot more light on this complex issue.
But this does seem, to me, to conflict a little bit with the comments you make below about your parents forcing you into a male role.
Again, as above. The scientific evidence does no such thing. To me, it raises more questions than answers, in fact:
“tried to force me into a male role” “It didn’t take” “when I first understood how boys and girls are different” - can you see what I’m getting at? The next quote sums it up?
I will accept this invitation, with the disclaimer that I barely know you at all. Based on what I’ve read so far, I would offer that your parents and your environment taught you very strongly that there are very specifically outlined roles, one male, one female, for people to take up, and that since you were male, you should take up the male gender role as defined by your parents. Evidence that I take for this, are the words I quoted above, about how you ‘have always known’ that you were female. This indicates that from a very young age, you had a strong understanding of what being ‘female’ is, as opposed to being ‘male’, so much so that you would actively tell people, which is fairly extreme. Someone who would not have been indoctrinated by a strong difference in roles, living in an environment where such roles were not actively imposed, would not at that age have been able to even recognise such roles enough to identify him or herself with one of them, let alone so strongly that he or she would actively tell other people about it.
Saying that the imposed role “didn’t take” strongly reinforces this. You assert that this is distinct from your gender identity and more likely only responsible to your femininity. Since all this is playing already at a very young age and with such strength that you became actively conscious of this, I would offer the possibility that your innate predispositions (through natural levels of happiness and sociability hormones such as serotonine and dopamine, their creation levels and imbuement rates, natural sensitivity to sensual stimulation, etc etc) gave you characteristics that strongly overlapped with what in your nurturing environment would be considered feminine. But because your nurturing environment had a strong and rather binary concept of gender roles, they forced you into a role based solely on your appearance that did not suit you at all. That you were forced into the male gender role will then very likely have strongly reinforced your innate preferences/characteristics that were and in your world probably still are largely considered feminine.
Because of the strength and intensity combined with the young age at which the events you described occured, your gender identity, your sense of being a female, is extremely strong, so strong that I do not believe any amount of therapy could overcome your sense of being in the wrong body. That impression seems to agree with what you say here.
It is like the thread that wonders why so few people change their minds. The way our memory works, we connect our knowledge to existing knowledge. Knowledge that we first acquired and that is strongest within out, will get huge amounts of different knowlege attached to it. Overturning one of these core concepts affects such a big part of our memory (which is paramount to our sense of identity) that it is in many cases nigh on impossible.
You just withdrew a point that was a generalisation to others of your perspective. Apart from that, I think we both have misinterpreted each other. I have read in your posts statements that I could not but interpret as affecting more than just your own position, and you have probably done likewise. For instance:
Nor does it disprove anything, or does transsexualism say anything about the gender identity of non-transsexuals. Yet it was suggested in this thread that transsexualism is not an issue because something you do not feel isn’t necessarily not there. In other words, I am happy in my male body, because I have a male gender identity, even though I do not think it is there. I am personally not interested in going further into this matter, but do you see how our perceptions of ourselves maybe even involuntarily affect the self-perception of others?
No, because:
All I was pointing out was that you cannot say you cannot prove this. But this is a moot point. However,
There is no difference. You say it yourself anyway:
And that brings me full circle in this post. I never said this as I’ve pointed out. So we do not reach an impasse, at least not yes.
I think the rest of this post sufficiently makes clear in how far I agree with this last statement.
And in case you have by this time forgotten, not unlikely as this post is becoming huge, I’ll galdly repeat and stress that I have to highly commend you for your extreme patience with me and am extremely thankful for helping me develop my thoughts and understanding. I can only hope that the pleasure is at least partially mutual, even if I imagine that part is for you rather small at the moment.
I should point out that my parents never tried to “force” me into a male role (so far as I know). I never felt obliged to “act male”, except that after I was raped (at age 14) I started trying to act “more male” because (to me, at least) it was not acting male enough that got me raped.
As an adult I tried many of the same things Kaitlyn did to try to accomodate the discordance. Sorry, but there is no way that therapy can successfully deal with this issue (and I have the backing of the psychiatrists who work in this field on that). Nor is there any way you can try to pin that on my upbringing (as Arwin has tried to do with respect to Kaitlyn) because it doesn’t apply in my case and yet I’m still a transsexual.
Huh yeah I’m FTM and I had a very laid back childhood too when it comes to gender roles, for me there were no meaningful differences between boys and girls, I was able to play/act as I wish, my parents didn’t repress ou encourage me either way.
The physical difference were surely not important too in my eyes, after all, how often do you interact with your friend’s genitals?
Didn’t stop me recognizing myself as transsexual when I was 11/12yo and not changing my mind since then (I’m 22) and physically transitionning one or two years ago.
And it bears repeating, there are many butch transwomen and femmy transmen, heck I’m one.
Arwin: Rather than construct a point by point response, I think it would be helpful to make sure I understand your basic ideas. Let me see if I can summarize my understanding of what you’re trying to say. Correct me if any of this is a misinterpretation:
You believe that there are no inherent psychological differences between males and females, and those that do exist are constructed through socialization.
Because gender identity is socially constructed, children who are raised in a gender neutral environment will not develop a gender identity, or at least will not develop a strong gender identity.
Because gender identity is a social construct, it should be possible to treat gender identity dysphoria by breaking down the mental barriers created through socialization.
I developed a strong female gender identity because my parents tried to socialize me male, and had they raised me in a gender neutral manner, this would not have happened. Because my “natural” gender identity was gender neutral, I rebelled (psychologically) against the identity my parents and society tried to force me into and adopted the opposite one.
People who very strongly identify with certain sex roles do so because they are stuck in a mindset induced in them by society. Transsexuals have somehow been socialized into developing a gender identity that is at odds with their physical body.
Sexual reassignment is appropriate for strongly developed gender identites that are the opposite of their physical bodies, regardless of how that disjunction developed…
Have I summarized your main points correctly? If not please correct or restate them so that I can respond to your actual message, and not some misinterpretation of your message.
Whatever the cause may be, there are people who have a strong gender identity that is the opposite of the sex of their physical body.
These people should have access to the medical and surgical treatments needed to treat their condition. These treatments are necessary medical treatments, not optional cosmetic enhancements.
They should be referred to as the sex of their choice, and free to live as that sex.
They should recieive equal treatment under the law in employment, education, housing, and social roles, including marriage and family.
They should be treated with dignity and respect as human beings without regard to their sexuality.
