Thanks for this, ruadh. My transdaughter ran smack into my feminism, and this helps me explore the crash. Eh, it was more of a fender bender, but still.
I don’t really have a view, I’m interesting what others have to say here, though I am troubled by some notions that run into the limits of what I hope is my expansive tolerance. E.g., there seem to be a large number of MTF transsexuals who genuinely believe in the “cotton ceiling” theory, which, for lack of a more sensitive word, seems insane.
Cotton ceiling is new to me. Googled to get the gist of it.
Virtually all minorities/sub-cultures spend a great deal of time defining and defending their borders. Partly politics, partly identify formation. Gays and lesbians have abandoned transpeople in non-discrimination efforts; some lesbians reject the existence of transmen; radical feminists have been pretty exclusionary when it comes to boys/men (cis/trans). There undoubtedly are lesbians who refuse to be involved with transwomen–why wouldn’t transwomen have a reason to believe this?
Could you expand on what’s hitting the limits of your tolerance?
Well, for example:
Which is a real thing that one can find on the Internet. And generally, the notion that lesbians are being discriminatory by not wanting to have sex with men. This is the sort of thing that makes me throw my hands up and go “okay, reality check.” Like, if you want to define yourself as a woman with a penis, fine, but insisting that lesbians, who are gay women, who want to have relationships with women, are bound to have sexual encounters or relationships with people whom they, with good reason, perceive as men, is basically just mandating corrective rape of homosexuals.
On reading up on the cotton ceiling I did encounter some anger that lesbians did not want to have sex with a person who is a woman but has a penis.
It sucks and the pool will undoubtedly become pretty small for a lesbian woman with a penis, but outright anger that someone won’t have sex with you is taking it too far.
My 2 cents to the OP: that gender performance is still perceived as being performed, however fluid we might know it to be. The genitals are a part of that. So wanting to be part of that performance requires the matching genitals, and quite often (from what I have seen) a very decided performance of other feminine gender roles. It’s part of a larger search for identity, I think. I don’t see a problem with the two things existing at once. You just search for exactly who you want to be, how you want to express that, you experiment a little and hopefully find your niche, your own mish-mash of genitals and gender roles.
There are broad differences, for sure. But between the wide variations between individuals, and the role that society plays in filtering and channeling our instincts, I don’t think you can say any given action (beyond purely physical things like giving birth or having an erection) are entirely male or female. You can speak in terms of broad trends, but if all you know is someone’s gender, what does that tell you about them? It doesn’t really tell you if they are aggressive or kind, independent or extremely social, into parenthood or actively avoiding it, communicative or stolid, a good cook or a good mechanic…basically nothing. You could guess that the women is more likely to be nurturing and passive, but you wouldn’t be absolutely shocked if she turned out to be Margaret Thatcher.
Again, gender identity is different from gender role. You can have butch transgender women, just like you can have butch cis women. You can have fey transgender men, just like you can have fey cis men. The flamboyant guy doesn’t actually feel like a woman, he just likes women’s stuff. The butch woman doesn’t feel like a man, she feels like a woman who likes butch stuff.
Ah, okay, I see what you’re saying. I don’t think anyone is obliged to be attracted to anyone else, much less to sleep with them. I’d just as soon they didn’t walk around saying whole groups of people were icky, but that’s just basic politeness.
My take on trans issues is very much affected by my daughter’s experience. Because she transitioned before puberty, she’ll live the great majority of her life as female. She still has a penis of course but eventually she won’t and because she won’t have any male secondary sex characteristics to live with, she’ll very much pass as female.
Not to get all soppy and hijack this thread, but you sound like such a great mother, helping her transition early and being so incredibly educated and supportive.
I’d be interested to hear more about “My transdaughter ran smack into my feminism, and this helps me explore the crash.” I know it’s a slight hijack, but could you elaborate just a little?
Thank you! We’ve all learned a lot together.
My feminism told me that gender was largely a social construct, that there are no inherently female and male behaviors/modes of thinking/ways of being. I didn’t really get trans people at all, and trans women seemed to me to living out the female attributes that I wanted nothing to do with. I didn’t actually know any transwomen at the time so this was pretty much based on stereotypes.
Some of this–the gender as social construct part–disappeared with the birth of my first child, a son. I swear that kid came out of the womb playing war games. We had a no weapons policy–he just made them with his hands and sticks. My daughter, in contrast, presenting as a boy at the time, wanted barbie dolls and eye shadow at age 3. I realize that kids are exposed to gender norms outside of the family, but still, there seemed to be some hard wired stuff going on.
I don’t feel particularly female, perhaps because there’s no contradiction between my mind and my body. I still don’t really get what my daughter feels. I just know that she has blossomed since she transitioned, and that all of the stuff that didn’t used to make sense about her now makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense, I see what you mean. Thanks for explaining. And phew, what a journey this must’ve been 
We’ve been very lucky with family, schools, and doctors. I’m on a couple of discussion boards with parents of trans kids and it can be a very rough journey indeed.
Some of what I read here makes me weep.
On this board you mean? Sometimes things I read here leave me feeling very discouraged (recent threads about how reporting rape should be really hard on victims :dubious:), but overall I see so many people trying to understand so many things. I know I try, and I learn so much here. We don’t always succeed, and sometimes hashing it out has unpleasant sides. But I appreciate the effort everyone makes to fighting ignorance and opening up to having their own fought 
I think the mistake many people make when suggesting that gender is entirely socially constructed and performed is that they are not making any distinction whatsoever been internal gender identity and gender expression.
The clothes we wear, the hobbies we are interested in, the way we talk (testosterone creates a marked difference in the pitch of a person’s voice, but many many cis males for example have a vocal pitch within the female range. we almost never confuse them for cis females based solely on this factor, though, because much of how we determined gender via voice is based on how someone speaks rather than the pitch of their voice. Men tend to speak from their chests, women generally don’t.), and other things make up our gender expression. The culture we live in has decided that watching football, or wearing makeup is masculine and feminine, respectively. But being interested in football doesn’t make a man, a man. I am certain you know too many men who could not care less about sports, or any other particular masculine interest, to think that.
When you are specifically discussing transsexual people (and not anyone else that falls within the gender variant spectrum) the reason why simply acting however feels natural to them, and changing their internal definition of “woman” (to use trans men as an example) to include their own identity is that there is a persistant feeling of body dysphoria. That their external sex, including both primary and secondary sex characteristics, are wrong. Even if society changed so that nothing was classified as masculine and feminine, and gender was completely neutral, you would still have transsexual people.
I concur.
You’re right, of course. I’ve seen people on this board struggle to get their minds around the idea of what it means to be transgender.
I think what will happen–I hope what will happen–is that more trans people will come out, especially young transpeople, just as gays and lesbians came out. It’s harder to demonize or trivialize people you know.
Thank you, Una Persona. As I said, I’ve admired and appreciated your posts on transgender issues.
I admit to finding the “cotton ceiling” concept a bit icky, sort of like the hetero male “friendzone” thing, but comparing it to corrective rape is going too far (and is particularly insensitive given the sexual violence that trans persons themselves are regularly subjected to). It’s about changing perceptions of trans women within the cis lesbian community, not about compelling anyone to do anything.
I think Transsexualism is compatible with the theory that gender is (mostly) a social construct. For instance, I have no problem with a transmale biological female feeling like he is a man, but still loving the hell out of pink, fashion, pretty dresses, wants to stay home to take care of the kids, and cook for his spouse. That is, a biological female who wants to be biologically male but fulfill societal gender roles that women traditionally fulfill in our society.
Don’t, necessarily, think of transsexualism as a desire (it’s a bit stronger than a desire, but that’s the best word I’ve got) to fulfill roles of the opposite sex. Think of it more like wanting to be thin, or have different hair, or better teeth. It’s a bit more fundamental and psychologically troublesome than that (IMO), but if you accept that gender roles are fundamentally arbitrary, that doesn’t stop someone from feeling like they don’t want the body they have.
That said, a lot of (most?) transsexuals ALSO want/feel a need to fulfill the societal gender roles of their internal sex and be outwardly recognized as such (feel a need to be called the proper pronoun etc), but the concepts aren’t fundamentally incompatible.
It’s about thinking lesbians should want to have sex with them. It’s about transsexuals believing everyone else has an obligation to cater to their delusion.
It’s not a “delusion”, it’s a physical difference in the brain. Reality is what it is, and not all the conservative outrage in the world will make their lies into truth.
I realize I downplayed it a bit too much with this. It’s not just like “wanting” to be thin. Most people want to be thin. It’s more like the people who have severe issues when they’re not thin. You know, the anorexics, the people who curse themselves out in the mirror, who cry when they step on the scale. It’s still not a totally fair comparison, but I want to correct the accidental downplaying I did.