I agree with Eve (as if I know what I’m talking about – but I think I do). There is a huge difference between lessening or doing away with gender roles and feeling that you are physically not reflecting the gender you are inside.
My question to Eve, Kaitlyn and others who have had gender reassignment: Did any of your closest friends or relatives “know” that this was imminent, or was everyone completely blown away? I would think those closest to you would have at least an inkling that there was something amiss.
My point being that the fiance may not be as shocked as you might think she’ll be. But I’m asking because I really don’t know if pre-surgical behavior is altered to the point that no one…not even those you bare your soul to…can tell. Anyone care to respond?
You are wrong only insofar as you imply that this is possible for everyone.
Indeed, my reading indicates that it is very important for people to be certain of the nature of their gender identity issues through supportive psychological discussion. Though less so, it used to be the case that anyone who deviated from the man/woman gender binary (including gay people, to some extent) were considered out-and-out transsexuals, sometimes even encouraged to have SRS.
Nowadays, of course, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction, with extremely – many would say excessively – difficult roadblocks in the way of trans people who, in the end, are good candidates for medical intervention such as hormone therapy and/or SRS.
The idea that gender identity can always be changed by breaking down mental barriers fails to consider how intensively this is attempted, without success, in the case of transsexuals. For a large number, the only way to live a healthy life is to have SRS. For others, it is the best way.
Society needs to get over a whole buttload of its issues with the gender binary and with its implicit (and often explicit) idea that one can only be a man or a woman with everything that that implies. In the end, though, I believe that this will have little bearing on whether or not transsexuals are transsexual.
Returning to the OP, it sounds like you’ve got your shit together and your friend is very lucky to have someone like you to rely on. I imagine your friend will find it very useful to have someone close, to be comfortable with when trying out ideas and exploring gender identity. Transition (crossliving, hormones, and/or surgery) may turn out to be the best option, and then again it may not; it’s important to remember that your friend’s identity isn’t somehow less important or the associated issues less complex, if transition turns out not to be called for. (In many ways, they might be even *more complex in this case, as society is really not set up right now for people who identify differently from man or woman.)
Sorry, but that’s bullshit. You don’t have a strong sense of gender identity because you don’t have a strong sense of gender identity, not because your parents let you grow your hair out and didn’t use the words “masculine” and “feminine” around you when you were a kid. I imagine the vast majority of transgendered people were raised within the stereotypes of their birth sex, and yet that didn’t alter the gender they felt most appropriate for themselves. Kaitlyn’s folks could have made her go out for football when she was a kid. That didn’t make her a man when she grew up. My parents could have made me wear a dress to school everyday. It wouldn’t have made me grow up to be a woman. In fact, for the most part, my parents raised me to be a boy, and yet I have about as much of a fixed gender identity as you do.
I’m not saying that nurture has nothing to do with the situation at hand. But it’s not nearly as cut and dried as you are presenting it to be. There’s a lot more at work in transgenderism than culturally imposed gender roles.
I should clarify that I say the above as someone who’s in the process of dealing with his gender identity through a psychological process. I’m privileged in that my gender issues are of this kind, because they’re infinitely less logistically difficult to deal with.
I’m genderqueer, but I don’t have transsexual impulses as such; most of the process involves figuring out what it all means and how I can best live in a way that is comfortable for me.
However, the point is that if things were different and I were transsexual of the type for whom SRS is indicated, the experience of the transsexuals I know and the relevant scholarship I have access to indicate that I could readily do all the psychological processing in the world – much of which would no doubt be helpful – but I would still be transsexual and I would still require SRS.
Transitioning with hormones and SRS is vexing, difficult, expensive, very very time-consuming, hazardous to health, and often hazardous to physical and social safety. It should definitely not be done on a whim – and it isn’t.
Yep. I agree. And since we’re in Anecdoteland, I’ll add that my upbringing was very, very similar to Arwin’s, if not scales tipped in favor of “boy” things. I had to fight to get a doll, and never got a Barbie. It was Erector sets and footballs for me. And I was (and am) a girly girl. Pitched a fit if I had to wear pants. Wanted tights on at all times. My very carefully enlightened '70s feminist parents had their hands full with this Little Princess.
Sure, I can change a lightswitch, rewire a lamp or spackle with the best of 'em. I grew up helping dad renovate houses. I can read a map in, drive a manual transmission up a steep hill in a traffic jam and slop hogs. I’m the one who puts together all of the “Some assembly required” toys and gadgets. I fix the virus infestations on the computer. I also garden, sew, cook, bake and am a room mother at school.
Skills have squat to do with gender identity. Yes, we can all learn to change the oil in the car. We can all play with dolls, and we can all raise the children. Yes, I offered dolls to my son to play with (he liked to play “traffic accident” with them and run them over with his trucks) and I plan to offer trucks to my daughter (who may decide she likes them as makeshift strollers for her dolls.) But encouraging a wide range of interests and skills is not what creates a gender identity or lack of it.
Rather androgynous resume aside, I’m every bit a woman. I feel “like a woman.” I answer questionaires “like a woman”. I read body language and have intuition “like a woman,” whatever the frell that means. It never, not even once, occured to me that I might be a man, toolkit aside. (And yes, I was born with and continue to possess a fully functioning woman’s reproductive system. Which also has frell-all to do with gender identity, but I’ve ranted about that in other threads.) My parents’ trying very hard to give me a gender neutral identity was a complete and utter failure.
And neither was plastic surgery. Once. Count the people who now discovered they could not live without bigger breasts, fuller lips, and so on and find themselves in a private clinic. We live in a world where tv-shows like Extreme Makeover are the low-budget tv-series that pay for expensive feature films and series. Not that I am saying that everyone takes the short road to happiness here, not in the least. I just fully agree with matt_mcl’s words that it should definitely not be done on a whim, and point out how to avoid getting caught up in the expressway.
Now be careful, Eve, Kalhoun, and Miller, I started with this sentence, which is important to remember: “First of all I’d like to say I greatly respect people who go through such issues, and I fully recognise this as a viable problem.” Other than that, applesauce and bullshit are empty words that are not going to do to me what this board is dedicated to doing.
Thankfully matt_mcl raises a valid point. “You are wrong only insofar as you imply that this is possible for everyone.” This has got me thinking. Because first of all many societies don’t allow the mental space to break down mental gender barriers, and even those that do it more than most often require one to have a strong personality (I know this from experience). In fact, I am currently of the opinion that the last 10 years have seen more reconstruction than deconstruction being done on the gender barrier. And second of all, it has been shown very often that some concepts, if not learned from a very young age, are very hard to change. It may well be that it is all in all easier for someone to undergo SRS than to deal with these issues, or that it may even be the only way. It’s just that my lifelong (ok, so that’s admittedly only 30 years) experience has shown me that the best way to explore your own identity is to question any barriers you face. Those that disagree with me are welcome to convince me I’m wrong by giving me examples of what barriers they have questioned in their lives.
Finally, Miller said: “I’m not saying that nurture has nothing to do with the situation at hand. But it’s not nearly as cut and dried as you are presenting it to be. There’s a lot more at work in transgenderism than culturally imposed gender roles.” These are true words, but your comments on what influence the parents have (who can be an important influence, but not very often stronger than the influence of the rest of society) do not really question the issue - the issue is whether they forced roles into your system, not what role, or how. I very rarely meet people who’s parents even thought about this issue, let alone actively try to not constrain someone’s gender identity into one of the two set roles.
If people are interested we could perhaps try to start a new topic (maybe in great debates?) on the whole issue of gender, and together have a stab at challenging a few things. Like kids toys.
In the meantime, I wish Strangelove the best of luck, and can only add to the chorus that he’s a great friend to have.
I would venture to say that on the very contrary, they were perfectly successful because they allowed you to become perfectly happy in your own body. Like I am in mine. Only I still have this nagging impulse to replace your ‘woman’ with ‘human’.
You’re assuming that the nature of transsexuality is “issues” that could conceivably be “dealt with”; i.e. that it’s entirely based in psychology and not at all organic. However, that is not something that has been proven. To the contrary, some evidence suggests that many transsexuals show brain structures that are similar to their target sex, not their assigned sex.
As for the rest of what you say, are you contending that families in which the parents encourage the children to ignore gender norms show a lesser incidence of transsexuality? Because if so, I could really use a cite for that.
I think part of the reason why the trans/genderqueer community on this board is in such a snit over what you’ve said is that you’re basically asserting that your theory is more valid than their experience, regardless of how you try to dress it up. That is a very good way to piss a trans or genderqueer person off.
(FWIW, my family was like this, more or less (mom was a doctor, both parents cooked, my brother and I were both encouraged to be intellectual, and most of our toys were gender-neutral, such as Lego, books, and Sim games). My brother, though hardly a big machista, is more or less gender-typical. I am genderqueer.)
Incidentally, it’s absolutely ludicrous to compare cosmetic surgery with SRS, but I’ll let one of our transsexual members discuss that.
Yeah, and I wanted to mention, if transsexuality were only about gender roles as opposed to gender identity, there would be no such thing as a butch transwoman or a femme transguy. There are.
(Of course, since a lot of mainstream thinking about transsexuality is still stuck in a place where all a transwoman is, is a boy who was so femme that he decided to turn into a woman, a lot of transpeople have to put on gender roles that are associated with their gender of identification when those roles are obnoxious to them – in many areas, you could get disqualified as an SRS subject if you are a butch transwoman, or even a lesbian one.)
Strangelove, I am also in New Mexico. I don’t know where your friend is, but if s/he is here, I know a competent counselor who can help and won’t charge much. There are a number of transgendered people in Albuquerque if your friend would like to talk to somebody who has or is going through this. Email me if you want local referrals.
Jill
First, I agree with you on a couple of points. I think a gender neutral upbrining in which children are fee to choose what sex roles they want to play is the healthiest wasy to raise a child, and I applaud your parents for giving you the freedom to choose which masculine and which feminine sex roles you wanted to explore. You sound as if you are quite secure in your sexuality, and you probably have your parents to thank for this to a great degree.
Second you’re confusing two definitions of gender. Gender is often misused to mean physical sex, and I’m glad you didn’t make that mistake here.
In the grammatical sense, and in general usage, “gender” refers to whether something is masculine and feminine. The barrier between masculine / feminine is what your parents helped you to break down, and again, I applaud them for doing this and you for recognizing that you don’t have to exist within the narrow confines of what society defines is appropriate for your physical sex. We would all better off it all people were allowed this same freedom.
Here’s where your argument breaks down.
Permit me an aside for a moment to make a point by making reference to the tv show, Coach.
Coach Hayden Fox is talking to his daugher and son-in-law, a sensitive mime named Stuart. Stuart says he believes that women are 51% female and 49% male, and men are only 51% male, and 49% female. Coach Fox relies, “I pretty sure I’m in the high 90’s, Stu.” What they’re really talking about is masculine and feminine, and they’re both right about themselves.
I haven’t worn pants of any kind, inside or outside the house, in over a year. I’d have to check to be sure, but I think that, other than my jogging tights and sweats, I may not actually own any anymore. I am in nearly every way you can imagine, a walking, talking stereotype of femininity, and what’s more, I thoroughly enjoy this. I choose to be this way, because this is how I am happiest. To quote Coach Fox, I’m pretty sure I’m in the high nineties.
But that doesn’t make me female, it makes me feminine, or more accurately, they set up a situation in which you were free to chose or find which roles best fit you.
I’m female because there’s something inside me that tells me that having a male body is wrong. I’m female because there’s something about my mind that works better in a body with high estrogen levels. I have a female gender identity that has nothing whatsoever to do with any sex roles or socialization society imposed on me.
In an ideal society, if I had been free to simply choose to be a very feminine man, I would still have chosen to seek sex reassignment because my gender identity did not match my body, no matter how feminine I dressed or acted.
No, your parents broke down the barriers between masculine and feminine.
There’s no way you can know this. You can speculate, and there’s no way to disprove such speculation, but there’s no way to prove it either.
I can assure you from personal experience that you are way, way off base here.
Agreed. There are people who present with symptoms similar to transsexualism who are not actually transsexuals–gay men and fetishistic crossdressers, for example. Sex reassignment is not appropriate for these people because they are not transsexuals.
Surgery is one of the last steps of the process. Dealing with the issues is the very first standard of care for treatment of people presenting with transsexuality.
They are much, much more than just touched upon. Have you undergone gender identity counseling? Are you a gender counselor? If not you’re speaking from a position of ignorance here.
You say here that you are perfectly happy in your own body. This means that you do not have a gender identity that is at odds with your physical body. Transsexuals do.
You were socialized to be able to choose and discover how masculine or feminine you wanted to be and which sex roles you wanted to embrace or deny. Transsexuals are often forced into sex roles directly opposed to their innate gender identity.
Your personal experiences are so much different from those of people seeking help for gender identity problems that I fail to see how your personal experiences are relevant.
My parents chose not to see what they didn’t want to see.
My brother, best friend, and wife all knew or strongly suspected for quite some time, as did store clerks and people I happened to jog by waiting for the bus, and pretty much anybody who was ever in the same room with me for more than five seconds.
My wife was the one who encouraged me to beginning therapy.
I want to start of with that I really want to thank you for your response. I fully understand that I have been and am running the risk of being, well, strongly disliked by some here. As matt_mcl said:
"I think part of the reason why the trans/genderqueer community on this board is in such a snit over what you’ve said is that you’re basically asserting that your theory is more valid than their experience, regardless of how you try to dress it up. That is a very good way to piss a trans or genderqueer person off. "
You make very interesting points, and despite the above I still would like to challenge some of them.
My parents went further than that. The way I’ve been raised, is that Coach Hayden Fox likes sports. Stuart likes mime. They both have a penis. Simple presumptions but it makes the world a whole lot easier to understand and live in. A world where humans are humans. What has confused people is a correlation between gender (in the sense of XX / XY) and social roles. My take is that people are easily confused. There doesn’t have to be any correlation and they will still believe there is a connection (take many religion/superstitions - offer a lamb to the gods and the next harvest will be bountiful).
So following this to where you say " To quote Coach Fox, I’m pretty sure I’m in the high nineties", you are in my admittedly strongly deformed view at the very least there still stuck on very old-fashioned concepts of gender identity. Of which I consider the following comment an example:
You do have a point here
You are correct, I did mean masculine and feminine. To increase my understanding, however, I also investigated the physical differences between male and female, and these often also turn out to be even more superficial than many people still think. Sometimes it allows me to make such a typo.
[quote]
There’s no way you can know this. You can speculate, and there’s no way to disprove such speculation, but there’s no way to prove it either./quote]
That last clause cannot be true, because then the concept of SRS would be pointless, even to you.
My parents also taught me to challenge their beliefs. I continue to do so continually, as well as my own. That’s what discussions are so great for - contrary to what many people having discussions think, on a board like these we are not there to challenge someone else’s belief, but we help each other challenge our own beliefs. Sometimes this only strengthens them, other times it breaks them down.
But so far, this is one I have only ended up feeling stronger about. That’s probably partly what made me post more in this thread than just the standard ‘good luck on the difficult road ahead’. I wanted to offer a little bit more - my reply is to Strangelove, not to his friend, and the questions his friend and perhaps also he himself will be facing are similar to the discussion we are having now.
I do not have a gender identity that is at odds with my physical body, because I have chosen not to have one. That does not mean other people don’t try to assign me one sometimes.
Again, I must stress that I was raised to refuse the labels masculine or feminine.
Sometimes differences are more telling than similarities. At the same time, I wonder how many here, transsexuals or no, have gone to school wearing make up, self made clothes, and having long hair, at the age of ten. You can probably imagine I wasn’t the most popular kid to hang out with for a while there.
It would be nice if it were just a matter of making a long story short. I think it would be useful for you to pay attention to the people’s stories here that make it clear that it’s a more complicated story than you know.
We all receive fierce cultural indoctrination regarding gender roles from practically every fiber of the world around us (even those whose parents encourage their daughters to play with tractors and their sons to wear dresses). And yet, even with all this pressure and the strong possibility of being abandoned by loved ones or cast out of communities, in every society on earth human beings seem to fall on a continuum where gender identification and/or sexual orientation are concerned. It may even be biological and most probably does not have anything to do with indoctrination or parental brainwashing at all.
