This morning, I was electronically flipping through the St.Paul/Minneapolis journal quotidien and stumbled upon an article about an old law banning cross-dressing. The law is being struck down. Good thing, that! It’s not like it’s being enforced, but they would like it off the books (politicians, that is.) Good for them!
Anyway. Here’s my… question?
Bolding mine.
Differently gendered people? Aguh? That was a new one, to me. Is this commonly used? I mean, what’s wrong with transgendered? Or other now-accronymed naming schemes that are all inclusive?
I mean, yeah, I’ve seen “differently abled”, and “differently skilled”, and all that… but differently gendered? I’d love to hear what the 'Dope LGBT community thinks about it
That’s a new one on me. Oh, I HATE “differently abled.” Loathe it. Despise it.
I know there are people who truly feel that their gender doesn’t fall along traditional lines. “Differently gendered” doesn’t immediately grate on me, except for the obvious links to various forms of PC-speak. At least these people ARE different.
Feels like the author was just feeling oogy or something. Strangely enough, the “a transgendered person” bugged me too Maybe I’m just weird that way. My reaction was: What, there are women, men, and “persons” in this world. Yes. Persons. Those are differently gendered.
I’m amused more than anything else.
whiterabbit - I work with disabled kids - differently abled drives me batty. Anyone here ever seen the hilarious animated series called Quads ( http://www.animationworks.com.au/quads/intro.htm )? I will never forget the lead character (who is paralyzed from the neck down) exploding at some feel-good therapy session… Calls the social worker a “cripple-loving misery vampire”… and ends the tirade by saying "I’m not differently-abled, I’m freakin’ paralyzed!
Oh, I dunno. It changes every five minutes, it seems. I prefer “transgendered” to “transsexual,” but I have been told even I am using that incorrectly!
Of course, I am old enough to have seen “colored” become “negro” become “black” become “African-American” and now back to “people of color.”
Well since the quote uses transgendered I would take differently gendered to be someone not yet transgendered. So having not had reassignment they are still nominally male whilst really female. I think.
It’s just a little semantic juggling trick. Some folks believe and hope that coming up with a new name for themselves will ease their trod-upon status. Nothing to get upset over. When you hear a person use “differently” to label himself, you know the person is not only trod-upon, but proud of it. This is not always useful information.
I probably haven’t done much enlightening, here. I’m hoping you feel a little less endarkened, though.
When did the return to “people of color” happen? I thought African American (without the hyphen) was the current usage, followed by “black” now and then if there was a need to again refer to race.
I don’t see the need for a different label. What’s wrong with transgendered? And “differently gendered” should logically mean “a person with gender different from the norm”. Well, the normative human gender is “female”. Does that mean men are “differently gendered”?
If a transsexual is someone who has the physical body of one sex and the brain chemistry/mind of the other, then I am no longer a transsexual. I’m a former transsexual. Still transgendered or not? I dunno, this is all too confusing. I need a cup of tea.
Hm. The way I have seen “differently gendered” used as a term on other message boards, it’s usage isn’t so much parallel to transgender, but rather to genderqueer (the difference nominally being that transgender/transsexual people are transitioning from somewhere within the M-F binary to somewhere else within the M-F binary, whereas genderqueer/differently gendered people don’t feel they fit within the binary…)
I have no issues with it as a term if it doesn’t become part of the “divide and conquer” strategy and the border wars that are currently plaguing trans* communities (if there are such a thing).
Differently gendered encompasses more than just transgendered people. It covers people who have a body that doesn’t match their mind’s gender (for lack of a better way of putting that), people whose body once didn’t match their mind’s gender but now does, people who are uncertain as to their mind’s gender or who switch back and forth, people who believe that their mind’s gender is neither male nor female but something else entirely, people whose physical body can’t be definitively identified as either male or female, and probably some other stuff that I haven’t thought of yet.
Eve, as defined by the dictionary, both the terms transgendered and transsexual include people who have undergone surgery to change the sex of their body. However, usage is constantly changing, which is why differently gendered is used to provide the broadest possible interpretation without offending anyone (although that strategy never works).
Further adding to the confusion is that there are a number of transsexuals who do not identify as transgendered, for a couple of reasons: 1) transgender suggests outside existing gender roles, and they do not consider themselves outside existing gender roles, except for having been born with the wrong body for the one they have; 2) they don’t think of themselves as changing gender, but rather as changing sex to go with their existing gender; and 3) they feel as though ‘transgender’ has been used to subsume and euphemise them.
As for me, I’ve started to tentatively identify as genderqueer, in that I’m a boy, and everyone thinks i’m a boy, but a lot of people think I’m doing it wrong, and I want to acknowledge pushing the envelope to some extent. I like that “genderqueer” lets you do that without identifying as transgendered, which I think would be misleading; I’m definitely still in the gender where I was put, just a highly atypical example of it.
Hmmm, if “differently gendered” includes people who do not think their brain corresponds to a gender, them heck, I’m “differently gendered.” I think the concept of gender roles is sort of silly. But if people want to think of themselves as having a brain chemistry/mind/spirit/whatever as being “different” from their body, so much the better.
I’m not saying that any of them/you consider this to be the case, but it would be sort of funny if some of these people were to describe themselves as against the traditional conception of gender roles, since it seems to be an acknowledgement of them, at least insofar as they describe themselves as trans/differently gendered.
Ludovic, we had an extensive discussion over in Great Debates recently on the difference between intrinsic gender and gender roles. Rejecting gender roles doesn’t mean that your intrinsic gender is neither male nor female.
“Black” and “African-American” are not synonymous. The former is a physical description. The latter is a cultural description. It’s like “White” and “Irish-American.” To my knowledge, “black” has never been considered offensive.
What did happen is that some people became a bit paranoid, and used the word “African-American” as a substitute for “black,” which produced such nonsense as calling Ethiopians or black Englishmen African-Americans.
Maybe I’m just weird that way. My reaction was: What, there are women, men, and “persons” in this world. Yes. Persons. Those are differently gendered.