I don’t know. Supposedly, gay men still feel like men even though they are sometimes the “thrustee and not the thruster.”
I’m just saying, is all…
People who are born with genitals that match their gender (or at least genitals that don’t contradict their gender) are a majority group. A huge majority. You never have to think about the distinction between the two except when transgender issues come up, because the rest of the time you have no reason to. Almost everyone else is like you, so there’s no need to go analyzing it or trying to figure out how to explain it.
But come on, do you really think most people define their gender identity based on their genitals? Do you ever have to grab your crotch to remind yourself that you’re not really a woman? I can assure you, my gender identity was not formed when I looked down at myself one day and said, “Oh, I have a vulva. That must mean I’m a girl!” I knew I was a girl before I really understood the physical differences between males and females. It has always seemed to me that the way most people really think about things is that they have the genitals they do because of their gender (“Of course I have a penis, I’m a boy!”) rather than the other way around.
I don’t really understand what it is like to have genitals that contradict your gender identity. I also don’t really understand what it’s like to be a traditionally feminine woman who likes to wear frilly pink dresses and bake cookies. However, I do know that I didn’t base my gender identity on my genitals or broad cultural stereotypes. So I don’t see any reason why there can’t be people for whom gender and genitals don’t “match” very well.
But in what way do genitals match the sense of gender in the first place? Are genitals part of the gender sense, or are they merely associated with it culturally?
godzillatemple, your claim that there is a lack of concrete evidence for a neuroanatomical basis for gender identity is false. There is evidence; there is simply not yet enough evidence for that evidence to be conclusive. For you to misrepresent this suggests that you are prejudicing the case.
I do not consider myself to be “mentally ill” and reject that label. Please do not apply it to me. The comparison with dissociative identity disorder (DID) is inappropriate, especially since DID (the current name for MPD) is invariably the result of extreme environmental conditions, while all the evidence we have for transsexualism is that it is inherent. Also, DID is curable with therapy alone (and often is the result of attempts at “therapy”); transsexualism, like homosexuality, is not curable.
Your opinion ignores decades of research into sexuality and gender, and in fact appears to be based on nothing but your own experiences. You cannot discount the experiences of others by labelling as “mentally ill” simply because they differ from your own. And I think that this is what you’re doing: you are insisting that your experience, that you do not experience a strong sense of your own gender identity, is the norm, and anyone who deviates from that norm is mentally ill. I find that offensive and ignorant.
Perhaps – but it’s definitely not that way for me. In fact, it always strikes me as ridiculous when people talk about what it means to be a Real Man. I invariably think, “Last time I looked in my pants, I was a real man – this isn’t a complicated issue.”
I don’t agree with godzillatemple that transgenderism is a mental illness, except inasmuch as it’s a condition inside folks’ heads that causes them distress. I prefer a very narrow definition of mental illness, and see no reason to include a person’s self-image in that, especially if there’s a way to resolve the persons’s unhappiness without resorting to such nomenclature.
If a person who’s depressed can become happy by getting a job they like, I see no reason to call their depression a mental illness. If a person who’s transgendered can become happy by getting a body they like (or dressing how they like, or whatever works), I see no reason to call their transgenderism a mental illness.
Daniel
You know in my last test in abnormal psych one of the questions was “How is DID like gender identity disorder?”
The answer was in no way are they alike.
godzillatemple I don’t think that you understand what exactly is needed to make a diagnosis of gender identity disorder. One of the requirements is that the person not be intersexed.
Think about that for a second. In this case the question of whether or not you have a mental disorder it is necessary to make sure that nothing we know right now could physically cause it. If we could test for everything in the brain right now Gender Identity disorder would no longer be considered a mental disorder. Essentially it would no longer exist.
I agree, even sven, that, for all the reasons you mention and more, it would be incredibly disorienting for me to wake up female. I would need a long period of adjustment before I was comfortable with the situation. However, I don’t think your reasons have much to do with a sense of “gender identity”, at least not as it pertains to gender dysphoria.
It looks to me like the difficulties you mention fall into two categories: (1) becoming used to the body and (2) becoming used to how the body is treated by others.
First, category (1):
I think it would be very strange at first, but I’d get used to it. I don’t see that it would be all that different from many other circumstances were things to which I am very accustomed are no longer so. If I ever have a child, for example, I am going to have to get used to many new responsibilities and I’m going to have to lose a lot of old habits. I’m going to have to deal with some bodily excretions a lot messier than a little menstrual blood and it will be a lot more often than once a month.
I would probably miss sex as a male, just like you always miss something you enjoyed and can never have again. But I guess I just assume that sex as a female will have its own charms which, while not exactly replacing sex as a male, will bring new enjoyments in their own right.
Of course I wouldn’t like all these things, but I don’t believe that that has anything to do with whether I self-identify as male. In my experience, many women are also very unhappy with this state of affairs. They have built entire political movements around changing things so that women aren’t treated in the way you describe against their will. Nonetheless, many of these women self-identify as female.
I find my interactions with gender identity to be . . . complicated.
So I see a lot of “Well, if I were in an [other-sex] body, of course I’d think I’d be [other-sex]” argumentation, and I wind up feeling militantly agnostic about it: I don’t know, and you don’t know either. I don’t know if my broad overall comfort with being flagged as ‘female’ and lack of strong caring about it is because I’m in a body that matches my brain or because I’m not strongly gendered and thus don’t care. I don’t know of any way to tell.
I know a lot of people who are genderqueer or dysphoric, and several transfolks. I know a few of them who say they got there through, “Society says women are like X and do Y; I’m not like X and I don’t do Y, so I must not be a woman,” and I don’t know whether that suggests that they’re not strongly gendered, or strongly gendered as something and not able to reconcile that with what their surrounding culture thought that that meant.
I always had the attitude that if I did something, it was the people who say “Girls don’t do that” who had the reality problem. I don’t know if that means I have a strong gender identity as female, or if I took my cue and identification from body shape and considered arguments that missed that obvious point fundamentally flawed.
It’s also worth noting that not all cultures have ‘gender’ linked strongly to ‘sex’. I believe there’s a Caribbean culture where there are two gender roles, but someone of either sex can take up the role generally associated with their sex. (I’m sure women can take up the ‘male’ gender-role, at least; less sure about it going the other way.) And I think it’s an Amerindian culture or culture-set that has three genders, and I desperately wish I could remember search terms to google on that and get more information.
(I know someone who probably knows this stuff; I’ll see if I can import a cite.)
godzillatemple, brief hijack: Not all plurals are disordered.
Well, I actually meant to type “conclusive” instead of “concrete,” believe it or not. Although, to be honest, I don’t see much of a distinction. I wasn’t trying to prejudice the case, but simply state my impression of the current state of things. I should point out, BTW, that all my knowledge on the subject of “neuroanatomy” comes directly from what you and other people have said in this very thread. I had honestly never heard the term before, and was simply attempting to paraphrase your statement that “these studies are, to date, of insufficient breadth to constitute proof.”
Well, not to be any more offensive than I already have been, how many “mentally ill” people recognize that they are mentally ill? The fact that you don’t consider yourself to have a mental illness is not, in and of itself, determinative.
Well, that’s what I get for pulling an example out of my ass. Perhaps one of the other examples I used, such as paranoid schizophrenia, would be more appropriate?
Of course I am basing my opinion largely on my own experiences. That’s why I started this thread to see what other people thought about the subject and find out if there is more to it than I had previously thought. As I mentioned before, I had never even heard the term “neuroanatomy” before, so this is actually a learning experience for me.
And I’d apologize for offending you with my ignorance, but I think I already did that once or twice.
Anyway, if you’ll permit me to continue on with the ignorant insensitive loutery for a little bit longer:
How is this different from somebody who firmly believes that he is the modern incarnation of Napolean, is possessed by demons, or receives telepathic communications from aliens? In each case, why shouldn’t we simply respect that the person knows what is “really” going on inside his own head better than we? Instead of labelling them as having a mental illness and trying to “cure” them, why don’t we simply acknowledge that some people really do get possessed by demons, channel well-known historical figures and/or communicate telepathically with aliens?
OK, I’ll try to reign in the ignorant insensitive loutery from hereon in, I promise.
Barry
OK, but if there’s no real essence of maleness or femaleness, then exactly when does one cross the threshold between one or the other? The idea that it’s all mental strikes me as too subjective, at least for the rest of society’s purposes.
I mean, consider this example: could a person with male genitals fairly consider himself “female” if, let’s see, he/she doesn’t remove any body hair, prefers traditionally male clothing, goes bowling and to monster truck rallies, shops at Home Depot, and otherwise appears to the casual observer to be male? Let’s make it really extreme and say he/she identifies as a lesbian in a male body–i.e., he’s only attracted to women. And yet, the person legitimately claims to have a female identity.
I often wonder how such a scenario would play out in the courts. Let’s say the federal Violence Against Women act were still in force. (It’s not–it was declared unconstitutional in U.S. v. Morrison in 1996.) If someone beat up this hypothetical individual–let’s say with the knowledge that the person identified as female–, could they be prosecuted under the Act?
Or to put it a different way. If someone says they feel pain. How do we know? How are they any different from the people who say that they feel like they are the modern incarnation of Napolean? Should we simply respect the idea that they know what is going on inside their own head?
Hmmmm… OK, so you’re saying that gender dysphoria (or Gender Identity Disorder is currently considered a mental disorder by the medical community, but that’s only because nobody has found an underlying physical cause for it yet? And it is your belief that there is such an underlying cause, meaning that Gender Identity Disorder isn’t really a mental disorder after all?
Assuming I’ve interpreted what you said correctly, how does that differ from any other mental disorder? Aren’t most (if not all) mental illnesses caused by some problem with brain chemistry (a physical cause)? If schizophrenia, for example, can be shown to have an underlying physical cause, does this mean it isn’t “really” a mental disorder? Or is it simply a mental disorder with an underlying physical cause?
Barry
Well, currently the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder requires that there is no physical component. And science suggests that if we could test living brains that we could find a physical component for people diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder.
What I mean is if someone is considered intersexed they cannot be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder. Its part of the requirement of the diagnosis.
Of course such a person could consider himself female. (Although I believe in such a case it would be more proper to say that person considers herself to be female.) I rarely shave, prefer gender-neutral clothing like jeans and unisex tshirts or scrubs, go bowling, and practically live at Lowes. Does that somehow make me a man? What if I was a lesbian with those same habits? Would I be a guy then? What if I had ambiguous genitalia?
Habits, clothes, sexual preferences, and genitals don’t make the man, or the woman. One can enjoy things that are traditionally associated with the other gender without identifying with that gender.
You’re mischaracterizing my viewpoint. I didn’t say that I don’t have a ‘strong sense of gender identity’. What I said was that it was, for me, entirely linked to the body I grew up in. I consider myself to be very strongly female because that’s what body I have, regardless of the fact that most of my interests and personality traits are seen by society as being male.
This especially resonated with me because of the statements that gender is a social construct, something that society dictates. What I have difficulty grasping is the concept that certain behaviors, personality traits, attitudes, what have you, are ‘male’ or ‘female’. Having been called a ‘tomboy’ my entire life and having my own family ridicule me because I was not a ‘proper girl’ was and is entirely about my personality and society’s idea of what a ‘female personality’ is. I have always personally rejected the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘male mind’ and a ‘female mind’ because my mind would very likely be classified as male (and I have been classified ‘male’ by a couple of psychologists who were given nothing but my answers to a bunch of questions and information about what I do for a living), yet I’ve never felt like I didn’t belong in the body I have always had.
I respect the fact that your experiences were different, and I am asking you to not characterize my experiences an attempt to say yours didn’t happen. The “catsix fallacy” is most definitely not the way I view things at all, as I’ve tried to explain to you several times. It leads to the fact that I have difficulty understanding the concept of a gendered-mind, but it doesn’t mean I disbelieve you when you say that’s how you feel.
gt: But why on earth would that be the case? If it really is a matter of “neuroanatomy,” then why would only some people be aware of it?
Why on earth would you expect that everybody ought to have the same level of awareness of gender identity? There are oodles of other subjective perceptions that are physically influenced by brain chemistry but are not experienced at one uniform level by everybody. Think of musical pitch sense, of physical sensitivity to cold or pain, reactions to alcohol, etc. etc. etc.
Why do you think that gender identity has to be something that every individual is equally aware of? Just because you don’t have any conscious “feeling” of your gender identity doesn’t imply that other people can’t.
Your original question about what really determines gender identity—if it’s not sexual orientation or culturally conditioned gender roles, then what is it?—was a good one. Other posters have now answered it by pointing you to discussions of neuroanatomy: specifically, to studies indicating that the area called the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminals is different in male and female brains, and that in transgendered individuals, this area tends to be gendered differently from the gross anatomy of genitals, etc. In other words, to some extent it seems to be indeed possible to have an anatomically female brain in an anatomically male body, or vice versa.
That is the sort of evidence that inclines many people to believe that gender identity awareness (including gender dysphoria) does indeed constitute a perception of a genuine physiological reality, unlike unsubstantiated convictions about being in touch with aliens or channeling Marie Antoinette and so forth. If you’re going to ignore this line of argument in favor of merely repeating variations of “well, how do I know it’s not just a delusion on your part?”, you do lay yourself open to the suspicion of having already made up your mind on the subject.
In case you haven’t, though, allow me to chip in with some more of the anecdotal evidence you said you were looking for. I’m a non-transgendered, biologically-XX heterosexual female with a strong sense of gender identity as a woman. It’s not “about” my sexual orientation, and it’s not “about” societal gender roles, although of course all those things are woven together in the whole complicated picture of being a woman. But if I lived in a celibate community where we all wore the same unisex clothes and shared the same unisex bathrooms and did the same unisex jobs and used the same unisex etiquette and forms of address and activities (sort of like the Shakers but with cooler outfits, I guess), I would still instinctively feel that the other women were fundamentally “like me” in a way that the men weren’t. It’s just one of the groups I fall into: I’m one of the short ones, the blue-eyed ones, the English-speaking ones, the female ones.
In other words, being “in” or “having” a female body feels normal and natural to me. Would being “in” a male body feel abnormal and unnatural? Like you, I think there’s a lot about me that transcends what sex I am, and there are a number of gender stereotypes that I don’t fit at all. So would I just shrug my shoulders and go on with my life as a man?
I can’t tell for sure, of course, but I don’t think so. Heck, I even feel a little uneasy when someone else on the boards mistakenly refers to me as “he”. I’ve noticed that a lot of other people are also very prompt in correcting such mistakes. And surely gender identity is about as irrelevant on this board as it’s possible to get, right? (At least here in GD; maybe those flirts in MPSIMS feel differently. 
) We’re not having sex or assigning household chores or comparing upper-body strength; we’re simply arguing about our knowledge and opinions.
Why do we care about whether some jackass in cyberspace uses the correct pronoun in referring to us? I don’t think it’s because we’re maladjusted or less intelligent or delusional or mentally ill; I think it’s because gender identity is a genuinely important part of who we are. Just because I can’t put my finger on any distinct emotion or sensation and say “There! That’s it! That’s my feeling-like-a-woman feeling!” doesn’t mean that my awareness of gender identity isn’t valid.
godzillatemple, would your opinion of my “mental illness” be altered by the fact that both my psychologist and my psychiatrist have written letters attesting to the fact that I am not mentally ill? Are you smarter and more knowledgeable about mental illness than the director of the well-regarded Kinsey Institute?
There’s a big difference between “concrete” and “conclusive”. The evidence for a neuroanatomical basis for gender is concrete. It’s just that we don’t have enough of it yet to conclusively say, “This is the explanation. No other explanation makes sense.” At best, we can say, “This is the most likely explanation, but we can’t rule out other possibilities yet. More research is indicated.” That doesn’t mean the hypothesis is unsupported, just that it’s not supported to the extent required to make the proclamation.
Scientists, by and large, follow a progression from hypothetical to somewhat supported theory to well supported theory to conclusively determined fact. The theory that gender is neuroanatomically based is, at this point, somewhere between “somewhat supported theory” and “well supported theory”. I have faith that it will eventually become “conclusively determined fact”, based in part on my personal experience, in part on anecdotal evidence from other transsexuals, in part on the objective evidence we do have, and in part on collateral findings in other areas of neuroanatomy that suggest similiar explanations for other “conditions” once thought to be strictly “mental” in origin.
While I do not expect you to accept my belief as fact, I do expect you to acknowledge that my belief is grounded in fact, and further I expect you to reject theories that are inconsistent with those facts.
I also think that you lack a meaningful understanding of mental illness, but that too is not surprising: even in the medical fields, mental illness is not well-understood, to say nothing of among laypeople.
(Additions on preview)
ResIpsaLoquitor, we could go a long way by eliminating as much gender-dependent law as we can. There are very few legitimate reasons for the law to be gender-aware, and quite a few of those are using a legal construction of gender as a proxy for “capable of bearing child”, in which case we can substitute the actual characteristic for the proxy.
As to your Home Depot-shopping hairy bowler in an Oxford shirt: I know two people who are pretty close to that (neither is an exact match, but they’re close enough). One was born female, the other was born male. Both claim to be female. Why should I disbelieve either one of them? What good does it do for me to disbelieve either one of them? Why should it matter?
godzillatemple, one of the requirements of a mental illness is that it not have an underlying organic cause (this is by definition). If there is an underlying organic cause, it is an organic illness to be treated organically. Thus, for example, if you are depressed because you have hypothyroidism, you are not mentally ill; rather, you have an organic illness with neurological sequelae.
As we discover organic causes for more and more illnesses and conditions previously believed to have been “mental illnesses”, those conditions are being dropped from the roster of mental disorders. Recent advances in neuroanatomy and neurochemistry have brought much light to this area.
It is my belief that we will eventually recognize that most transsexuals are actually intersexed in that they have a congenital defect in sex expression (which is the exact definition of what it means to be intersexed), specifically in that portion of their neuroanatomy that determines psychological gender. Once we make this recategorization, the vast majority of individuals now diagnosed with “gender identity disorder” will be recategorized as intersexed, an organic condition. This won’t make them any more or less disordered, but it may change the way people perceive them. For some reason, our culture treats those with birth defects differently from those who have mental illnesses, even though both should be fully deserving of our compassion and care.
Well, as to you, I suppose it wouldn’t matter, as you’re a member of the transgendered community and have no problems accepting these issues, you yourself having experienced them. As this thread should illustrate, however, a large number of people don’t get them. Much of the world operates from the “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck” perspective–particularly males (whatever THAT means for this discussion), who tend to have a surface-oriented view of the world.
In other words, if the bowling, Home-Depot shopping, bearded, XY-chromosome lesbian with male sex organs tells someone that he/she is a woman, the response, by and large, would be “Dude…but you’re a dude.” As CrazyCatLady pointed out, at the very least, it’s going to affect our language…which is going to affect how people interact. I imagine you’d be offended (or, I might wager, extremely offended), if someone referred to you in the male third person. How much more awkward and more difficult would it be in my hypothetical?
In other words, without a clearer sense of exactly what gender is, this kind of confusion that the OP raises is going to persist.
If I could kidnap you and take you to a parallel universe where you have exactly the same body you have now but socially and culturally it is understood to mean very different things – for the sake of simplicity, let’s say it is understood to have all the implications and connotations that the opposite sex has in our own world – what do you think that would be like?
How about, say, 25 years’ worth of it?
Can you visualize yourself staring at the stars some night and really really wishing you could just go home?
Well, except that nobody is claiming that musical pitch sense, of physical sensitivity to cold or pain, reactions to alcohol, etc. etc. etc. are defining aspects of one’s personality. Gender identity, on the other hand, is alleged to be a fundamental part of defining who somebody is. Ah well, I guess if I can be guilty of using a false (comparing Gender Dysphoria to Multiple Personality Disorder), so can other people 
As other have pointed out, that’s not what I’m saying. I do have a conscious feeling of my gender identity, based on the fact that (a) I am equipped as a male and (b) I am attracted to females (and yes, I realize that gay men also feel that they are “male,” but for me personally, my attraction to women is one of the key reasons for feeling like a male).
What I am not conscious of, however, is any sense of “gender identity” that exists apart from my anatomy and sexual preference.
Well, I personally don’t find the statement that “to some extent it seems to be indeed possible to have an anatomically female brain in an anatomically male body, or vice versa” to be particularly compelling. But I am willing to say that my opinion could certainly be changed in the face of more definitive (or “conclusive”) evidence.
I’m not ignoring it. As I said, I simply don’t find it sufficiently compelling or conclusive so as to justify changing my mind. My mind is not irrevocably made up, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion on the subject, or that my opinion is worthless.
Barry