NM. Didn’t read slowly enough.
Again speaking only for myself… I’m well aware that becoming gendered (at all) is something that happened to me over time, abstracted from my ongoing experiences. I can readily imagine that if I’d been in an environment in which people had not made a huge honking big deal about me being like one of the girls instead of being like the other boys, it would not have ended up being a big identity factor me. But they did, and it was, so I did, if you see what I mean. I didn’t have the opportunity to just casually be a male child who happened to be more like the female children my age; I had to react and respond to people contemptuously and angrily shoving this fact in my face as if it were a misbehavior. My reaction and response, contrary to expectations, was increasingly to take pride in it and stare back at them and say “yeah, so?” and thus it became part of how I thought of myself and I became gendered.
I had trouble understanding genderqueer, agender, bi-gender, non-binary transgender persons, etc. until I sat with a group of them at my university for two hours and talked to them, heart-to-heart directly. I felt like I had an epiphany - it suddenly became understandable when I saw on their own faces the seriousness and heard with their own voices the problems they faced.
So I received an education, and realized I had been ignorant. I now very much appreciate and support genderqueer and non-binary transgender persons. Some concepts are easier to grab and more concrete IRL than online. In fact I’m going to invite some of them as guests on my radio program in a couple of months, so I can try to have them explain to and hopefully educate my listeners.
I think there is a disconnect here. I know the seriousness and the problems. What I do not feel is what it feels like. So, using phrases that assume I have a frame of reference won’t get me any closer to what it feels like.
I don’t need to know what it feels like to be an ally and supporter.
I think exactly the same thing: Who fucking cares?
I think it is something people can sympathize with but probably not empathize with so easily.
This makes perfect sense to me.
I get that you’re not speaking for anyone else, but thanks for the insight into your journey.
It always seemed to me that the same process is how cisgender boys and girls get gendered as well. The chorus of kids would have made a similar big honking deal about any other boy acting more like a girl and not enough like a boy, and they also see what happens to boys like me, so they learn and they internalize it. And perhaps participate in the shaming chorus.
I understand. For me, I could put myself in that place to some extent because, well.
I think sometimes we might culturally focus too much on empathy and not enough on sympathy. There are times when it’s going to be hard for some people to really put themselves in the shoes of someone else. But we should all be able to say, “You are hurting and I want to help heal the hurt.”
The best I can do is generalize. I’ve suffered from some forms of unfairness, and so I can apply my feelings of rage, helplessness, sadness, and desperation to others and their issues.
This was what led me to join NOW back in the 1970s. As a male, women’s issues don’t affect me directly…but they affected my mother and sisters, and I could see the need for change.
So…yep! We may not feel it immediately, but we comprehend it, and can be allies.
To be honest, I think Jenner is off his rocker as are others like him but since this is a social gathering, I would have just gone along with the flow and not turned this into any kind of debate since a social gatheirng is neither the time or place to get into debates. Especially one which might make some people mad.
So really, I wouldnt take this casual, almost accepting discussion as some sort of affirmation of transgender issues. People often never totally tell their true feelings in public.
Except on message boards, when they say things like:
On the subject of empathy, have you ever met and talked to a real, live transsexual person face-to-face? Just curious.
I’m another person who sympathizes with and supports transgendered people, but can’t quite emotionally understand it. I was raised believing that gender was just a social construct; that there is no real reason for girls to wear dresses and boys suits, for girls to like pink and boys green. In my mind, the ideal society is one where there is no social distinction whatsoever between men and women. Now, to be told that there are male brains and female brains is a little . . . disconcerting.
I’ve heard transwomen talk about how they always had maternal feelings, etc, etc. Can’t a man have maternal feelings? I’m a girl, and I have no stereotypically “female” traits. If I woke up tomorrow as a man . . . I’d be massively freaked out for, say, a couple months, but I imagine in the end my life would go on pretty much as normal.
Of course, I’m always supportive and would never intentionally misgender people or anything like that, but there is a little voice in the back of my head questioning this sudden divide between genders.
Is it outside the range of possibility that there are people who aren’t as strongly gendered as others, just as some people are more strongly on one end of the hetero/homosexual spectrum and others more in the middle?
I don’t see why it’s impossible that some people are so strongly gendered that if they’re in the wrong physical body they’ll go to extreme lengths to gain a body that matches what they’re brain tells them is correct, and others for whom it may not really matter, people that, if they woke up one day in a body of the opposite sex would successfully adjust to the situation. Some of the extremely gendered people have the good fortune to be born into the correct body, and some have the misfortune to not be. Meanwhile, all the other folks who are somewhere in the middle don’t stand out because they’ve adapted to their situation. They wouldn’t even be the genderqueer ones, just people who are happily adjusted to their circumstances who, given different circumstances, would also be OK.
Just a wild thought.
That’s been pretty much my own opinion on the issue for some time now. Like homosexual relationships, transexuality seems to be one of those issues people seem to dig their heels in over and I’ve never quite understood why.
I have no particular issues with my own gender though I would deeply love to experience what life is like for ‘the other side’ out of curiosity as much as anything else. But barring some singularity style technological advance that’s not going to happen.
There was actually a discussion about Bruce Jenner at work today, it was heartening to see that in the mixed group of males and females the general opinion seemed to be that what he is doing is very strange but good luck to him (the stumbling over which pronouns was the most heated part of the discussion!).
And this is the same group of people who roundly laughed at another girl the day before because she stated she believed in evolution… (I walked in during the middle of that one and by the time I realised what was happening it was over, sorry, I failed to heroically fight ignorance on that occassion).
That wasnt my point. My point was that in social gatherings a person is more likely to start debates over some issue. For example just this weekend I was at a sporting event talking with another Dad and he made a slight remark about a religious faith I just happen to have. I didnt confront him on it.
Just curious. Is Jenner changing his name?
Also does such a person get their official ID changed like their drivers license and other ID?
Also lets say someone has done this change and goes by a new name (say Chastity to Chase as in Cher’s daughter/son). Someone calls them up on the phone and unknowingly says “Hi, can I speak to Chastity?” What would the person (now Chase) say?
I think most people who change their name get it legally recognized. It’s not that hard of a process, though it is kind of a pain- married people do it all the time.
How someone reacts to being called a previous name? That’s all individual. When people call me by my maiden name, I don’t worry about it if it’s not someone I need to talk to regularly. For friend, I just correctly them-- “Haha, it’s Ms. Married now!” Sometimes it takes a while to get though. I had a friend who changed her name for (genuine, reasonable) religious reason and our cohort never really switched until one day she sat down with us and explained why she changed and why it was so important to her.
There was a belief for quite some time that gender was 100% a social construct, but after some extremely unsuccessful attempts to raise kids as the other gender for various reasons, we have since discovered there is another piece of the puzzle, and that piece is somewhere in the brain.
It’s important to point out that gender identity is not about stereotypical gender activities. You can be a transgender effeminate man, or a transgender macho man. You can be a transgender girly girl, or a transgender tomboy. Gender norms and gendered activities is just this whole different scale that is separate from gender identity.
Basically, there are five things that relate to gender- chromosomes, physical presentation, hormones, social norms, and gender identity (in the brain). All of these can have ambiguities or mismatches, all of which are accommodated in different ways. We might, for example, give someone with ambiguous genitalia surgery, or give someone with under active hormones hormonal treatment.
There seems to be something really important about gender identity, in particular, that makes mismatches there really hard to live with. Just like the other kinds of mismatches, we have a limited but useful set of tools for making things a bit better.