So he’s not doing it all for the Cookie?
This is an official moderator instruction for you to knock off the font changing going forward.
Sorry. No. I posted in haste.
Well, he does have a… you know… magic Johnson, right?
Good one. (transition to a different channel) (Whyever won’t this place, like Jezebel, give us the ability to star posts? Would save a lot of steps in terms of quotes and gratuitous replies, I think.) Anyhoo, is the reference to God snark? (I’m hoping so. 'Cause if there is an omnipotent being, I cannot imagine (S)he/It would have any concern or direct involvement in the development of news channels or remote controls. Same goes for many things, from those who believe X is a “miracle” or “God’s will” v. chance or possibly fate or self-fulfilling prophecy. (I firmly disbelieve that there’s an omnipotent being looking out for X person’s needs-wishes over here, whilst disregarding or failing to notice that Y person over there deserves divine intervention far more than X needs, say, the sink to suddenly start draining (when in imminent danger of overflow) or not skidding on the ice into an embankment, a benign v. malignant diagnosis, etc. But I digress …
I don’t know why you think it weird.
I read the thread. I have nothing interesting to add or say which I haven’t posted prior.
Can someone explain to me the difficulty in understanding the issue? Someone with a woman’s brain is trapped in a male body. She’s always felt like a woman, but has to face the fact that she is not only perceived by others as a man, but her body is constantly telling her she is male through how it reacts with her male hormones. She’s constantly wondered if the external reality is right and she is wrong.
None of this seems hard to imagine for me. Have you never pretended to be something you aren’t, or never been told by people that you are broken and wrong to feel the way you do?
I get this intellectually, and don’t struggle feeling sympathy and passionately arguing for and fighting for the rights of trans folk.
But I have no idea what it means to “feel like a woman.” If someone said “I feel like a woman trapped in a male body” as a description, I would think “I know that’s bad because you’re telling me that’s bad.” I would not think “I know that’s bad because it must be horrible to be a woman trapped in a male body.”
Many people give no fucks at all. But it’s a very good thing because there are many people struggling with the same issues and his coming out may prevent them from killing themselves, among other things.
Regarding comments about hostility towards transgender people -
I was at dinner last night with 8 people, most in their late 40’s or older, and about half of a conservative/religious bent. The subject of Bruce Jenner came up, leading to a rather spirited discussion…that mostly focused on the question of when to start calling someone “she.” The two sides were these - one group said that now that he’s identified herself as female, we should be calling him “she.” The other side said that we should call him “he” until he says it’s time to switch. I was in the latter camp, as seems to be the case with most of the major news coverage I’ve read. GLAAD issued a “tip sheet” confirming the same.
The point is, nobody seemed to have any trouble accepting that Bruce Jenner is a woman or showed any hostility toward transgender people. They were just enjoying debating the pronoun thing because they didn’t have a lot of experience in that area and wanted to get it right.
A telling side conversation I had with a guy sitting next to me, whom I would consider to be the “conservative” type:
Me: So, what pronoun do you think we should use when discussing, say, his Olympic achievements?
Him: [slightly exasperated] She’s a she, so you’d say “she.”
Me: So you’d say SHE won the MEN’S decathlon?
Him: [really exasperated] Yes! She won the men’s decathlon! What’s the problem with that? 
I am by no means underplaying the amount of hostility that is still out there, but the times they are’a changin’.
What we really need for that sort of discussion is a non-offensive way to say “action taken when this person was still his/her physical birth gender and had not yet undergone transition to brain gender” without it also requiring that many words. Like, a new sort of pronoun or something. Not gonna hold my breath, though.
I personally don’t think a new word is necessary. Everybody present understood that there may be a transitional time between when someone “comes out” as transgender and when they make the actual switch to living as the new gender, and that Bruce Jenner is currently in that transitional period. The fact that he’s willing to share his story while he is transitioning is helping everybody understand it.
The only issue was confusion about whether you should switch when the person says that they’re transgender or whether you wait until they officially say “from now on, please refer to me as 'she '” The people at dinner were happy to call him whatever he wanted. They just didn’t all know what that was at this point. “He’s a woman” honestly doesn’t sound incongruous to me when used in this circumstance.
I think Broomstick was only talking about that aspect of your conversation that covered things like “Bruce Jenner won the Men’s Decathlon in 1976 when she was 26…”
I wasn’t elected spokesperson for any relevant contingent, certainly not transgender people (with which label I don’t even identify), but let me take a crack at it.
A) First off there are the physiological differences. I’m going to assume you know about them and don’t need them to be itemized. Anyway, I’m guessing you’re basically like me: your body doesn’t feel foreign to you and it’s hard to imagine how it could. Not all transgender people do, in fact, feel any different about that themselves, but some, according to their own testimony, DO. That is to say that, without reference to one single behavioral pattern, one single personality attribute, one expectation or role or anything of that social sort, their body feels as wrong to them as we might feel if we woke up tomorrow with our hands at the bottom of our legs and our feet at the end of our arms. Now, awareness of the existence of the other (primary) human sex is impossible to separate out from the social, so I’ll grant that feeling one’s own body to be just plain wrong requires an additional jump to get to “it should be that, instead”. So there’s at least some limited social element at play even here, but essentially some transgender people are saying that their physical body just feels morphologically wrong. Wrong the same way that you feel when you try to sign your name with the incorrect hand (to borrow from someone else’s analogy).
Once again, that’s not the core truth for each and every transgender person (and totally doesn’t apply to me) but it’s a big part of how SOME people “feel like a woman”. The male body parts just feel morphologically, physiologically WRONG.
B) Now let’s examine the social. This should be more familiar territory.
First, a generalization. In general, and without proclaiming any “prescriptive” stuff about how boys or girls should be, but just doing “descriptive”, there’s a set of characteristics that involve personality, behavior, priorities, desires, methods, ways of thinking, and so on that a large percent of people over a long stretch of years have associated with the two (primary) human sexes. You may or may not agree with those generalizations but I am going to assume, once again, that you know about them. And that, furthermore, you know (and expect) everyone else in the surrounding culture to know about them, and you expect them to expect everyone else THEY encounter to know about them. Against that general backdrop, there are people who try not to project those generalizations onto each male and female person as they encounter them, and there are people who do so with zeal and determination, with many many others sort of falling somewhere in the middle.
Now, a scatter plot diagram. Click me, since we can’t embed images on SDMB. Think of orange as representing male-bodied people and green as representing female-bodied people. (I am once again omitting possibilities other than the primary two sexes, so this is STILL an oversimplified generalization).
It’s also an oversimplification insofar as it is using left to right to indicate masculine to femininine as if they were polar opposites like north and south. It’ll do.
Notice that there is overlap. Of course there is, we all know that although there seems to be a general tendency (described above, the generalizations to which i referred) for males and females as overall populations to exhibit these differences, some males exhibit more of the male-associated traits than others, some females likewise for theirs, and yeah, overlap exists, and you’re nodding, you’ve seen it all your life, yes?
So stick your imagination into the experience of one of the orange dots way off on the right. That would represent a male-bodied person who is not merely less masculine / more in a feminine direction than most of the other male-bodied people, but actually less masculine / more feminine than a substantial portion of the female-bodied people in the diagram.
What is “identification”? Who does this person see as “people like me”? Perhaps he looks down and takes not of morphological configuration and says “I have boy parts, I am obviously a boy” some of the time, but some of the time he reacts to those same observations that the generalizations generalize about and says “I am like the girls. People like me are girls. Boys are people who are not like me. Well, except for the body part”.
That ^^^^ would be me. I don’t have the “born in the wrong body” thing so I don’t present myself as a female, don’t describe myself as “transgender”, don’t wish for a surgical intervention, am not transitioning “M2F”. Being male isn’t wrong, I’m just an outlier. But it is true and has historically been true and, therefore, has been a huge factor in how I’ve seen myself and where I’ve seen myself as fitting amongst others, that the people who are like me are girls. I’m a male girl, or male woman if you prefer. The “male” part isn’t wrong (in my case) but my body has not defined for me what group I considered myself to belong to. Always been proud to be like this and irritated and ashamed of being thought of as a man or boy. Even after I outgrew the general dismissive hostility towards boys as stupid animal-creatures in need of leashes (or snakes snails and etc) and have had male friends who were definitely cisgender men, I don’t want people to see ME as if I were one of them.
Getting back to the more conventionally transgender, IF, on top of my social location in the diagram, I also felt my body to be entirely wrong, that would be compelling reason to seek transition and to proclaim that I’d been born in the wrong body and that I am (not merely “feel like”) a woman.
Hope this clarifies or sheds some light.
Great post. Thanks. I hope this will lead some of the haters/puzzled people to a bit more understanding and empathy.
Exactly.
If I did, I’d be happy too!
Agreed.
This is where I just can’t follow the leap. I’ve generally fit in very well with both men and women. People who are like me are sometimes men and sometimes women. Or I’m an outlier amongst both. That doesn’t make me think “I’m a female boy/man.” It makes me think “I’m an outlier.”
(I was going to attempt an analogy, but it was going to be SUCH A TERRIBLE ANALOGY that it would destroy everything. Possibly including the universe. Best that I don’t try.)
I absolutely would never deny the existence of really, truly trans folk, or their absolute right to dignity, respect, and self-determination. I just don’t get the descriptions you and others provide. Not getting it doesn’t impact my ability to give a fuck, though. I give a fuck.
I’ve never felt strongly male or female, I feel no need to prove my masculinity for instance. I guess I lean masculine in dress in behavior, no way could I waste all the time women do on that stuff. If I woke up tomorrow in a female body I’d probably end up looking like a butch lesbian in short order.
Never been attracted to men, could not see myself having sex with a man.
But I can’t believe anyone would go through the trouble of transitioning, I can’t put myself in the head of someone who feels strongly like one gender.