I’m a straight, cis white guy. I feel lucky that my bits match my gender identity; IMHO, society tends to punish anyone whose bits don’t match their brains.
A few months ago, I was thinking about what my life might be like if those things weren’t in normative sync. I feel strongly male, so I imagined how I would feel if the strongly-male part remained but my genitalia diverged. And that was my a-ha! moment:
It felt more natural to imagine myself with different bits than to imagine myself with a different gender identity. Of course anyone with a mismatch would choose gender over genitalia.
I don’t want a medal for that insight, though cookies are accepted on a case-by-case basis. My real question is:
Is this a cliched cis thought process? Is this like my grandmother deciding the gays were OK after all?
What felt like an insight seems so obvious in retrospect that I’m a little ashamed to ask about this. On the other hand, I’d really like to know about the broader context.
I don’t think I’ve heard a cis person say this specifically. What I can say is that cis people commonly think of being trans as “being in the wrong body”, and often as being uncomfortable with one’s own genitalia. Not all trans people want bottom surgery. I’m pretty comfortable with my penis.
If I follow you, cis people tend to go to “mismatch” when the trans person may experience something much more like “different match.” Is that a fair way to say it?
Oh…maybe I’ve been unclear. I didn’t mean to say that this was somehow the moment I decided trans people were ok. I mean, that’s a given. I was just wondering if my realization that I could relate to trans people a little more than I thought was a trite insight.
And Nava: yes; fair enough. I didn’t mean to be reductive that way, but I see that I was. Cheers.
As for the OP, I can sort of relate although the specifics differ. Where I’m at is, I fully understand and accept the arguments and feelings of trans people from an intellectual point of view. And I also understand both physical dysphoria and gender dysphoria from an intimate, emotional point of view that I absofuckinglutely relate to. As well I have (like probably every single person on this Earth) wondered and fantasized what it’d be like to be the other sex, even lamented that I ain’t no woman - albeit in the most superficial and facile terms, I assure you. I just think tits are awesome and not being able to get fuckdrunk on continuously peaking orgasms is some buuuullshit.
But I still don’t quite grok or really empathize with the step where you get from that to “I’m a woman, akshully”.
If anything I relate a heck of a lot more with NB, queer, third gender etc… feelings because I suppose that, had I been born a little bit later and grown up in a space where that sort of thing was even a tiny bit visible, in a world where I was aware that there exists a subset of mankind that considers it even a little bit valid and there’s a space for that I might just have gone “well I don’t feel like being a man so I’ll just be my own thing, fuck it and fuck y’all”*. So I’m fully on board with gender nihilism.
I do not yet understand “well I don’t feel like much of a man, so I’ll be a woman instead”, because if anything womanhood and woman biology is even *more *alien to my feelings and self-representations and so on than manhood. And don’t get me started on the courage/faith/despair/hail mary passdom it must take to get onboard with surgically fucking with one’s fun bits. Hell I won’t even have a vasectomy on the off chance that maybe shit won’t feel quite the same after…
(more realistically speaking, and knowing who I was and where I come from, I’d have 100% become some insufferable incel instead. Thank Whoever these communities didn’t exist back in my self-loathingest of days… and thank Luck some miraculous girl eventually came along with hands-on empirical proofs and demonstrations of my fuckability. Fuckableness. You know what I mean. Jamais de la vie on ne l’oubliera…)
A Martian biologist would observe that human male and female genitalia look, and to the possessor feel, pretty much the same.
While some people experience gender dysphoria, you cannot reduce it to a simple explanation where they woke up one day and decided they looked funny. The biological and genetic side to it is likely to be complicated, and that is before you even get into the psychological and social environment.
Oh, Martian experts can tell them apart based on superficial characteristics and observations of their behaviour, including sexual behaviour. They can sequence their genes and probe their nervous systems and note statistically significant anatomical differences. But, perhaps due to a lack of shared qualia, they don’t see why any of it is of particular importance, least of all some bits being longer or whatever. A human is a human, right? Hard enough to tell them apart from chimps and birds.
I think the OP’s insight is a very good one for a cis person. I’d say the OP has the basic concept down pretty well.
My analogy of it is wearing shoes the wrong way around, right shoe on the left foot and vice versa. Now there’s nothing wrong with the shoes and nothing wrong with your feet. But just put them on the opposite feet and walk 10 miles. Something is obviously dreadfully wrong, painful, and if it keeps up ultimately damaging to both feet and shoes. Nothing wrong with either the feet or the shoes themselves; the mismatch is the problem. Now imagine the mismatch is not with your feet but with your life itself and instead of walking miles, the pain grinds on year after year with no relief.
Whereas I wouldn’t. I don’t have a strong gender identity. I identify as a woman because I have female bit and have always been treated as a woman by others. But if I woke up and discovered I was a [strike][/strike] man, I’d probably find it easiest to just go along with that. I mean, the body would take some getting used to, I’m sure. But I think that would be easier than being a woman in a man’s body.
So yeah, I get the non-binary, etc. I don’t really “get” trans-gender, on an emotional level. I mean, I understand intellectually that there are people who feel strongly. And I’m happy to respect that – There are all sorts of things that really matter to other people and don’t especially resonate with me, and it’s not as if it does me any harm to recognize someone as the gender they identify with. I even have some trans (and non-binary) friends. But it feels very foreign to me.
Do you think many people would think your position feels very foreign? Do you experience that foreignness reaction all through life? Like trans people do?
I dunno. It’s not something I often talk about. I have gotten flack for not being sufficiently feminine. (I was even uninvited from a college rooming group as a result) but that has to do with my external presentation, not with my internal feelings.
I pity that biologist when they attempt to figure out bone joints, physical locking mechanisms, most connector types, and, to a certain extent, how to consume food.
A Martian would note that humans have reduced sexual dimorphism compared to orangutans, for example, but that most genitalia are obviously dimorphic as they must fit into the tab-into-slot paradigm common among mammals.
Generally speaking, when I have talked about similar things with my IRL family and friends, I’ve gotten a lot of “oh yeah, I really relate to that, I feel like that too”. But then, it’s not surprising that my friends feel like me about things, because having a similar outlook on things is why they’re my friends in the first place.
The thing that surprises me about gender identities, is - gender is a pretty complex social structure, with lots of axes representing your attitudes to things like sharing feelings, attitude to assertiveness/competitiveness, attitude to personal decoration, sex, sports, cleanliness/tidyness … there’s a really big list of factors where you can point to a stereotypical “female experience” and “male experience”. It constantly surprises me that enough people find these different factors all lining up the same way so as to be able to confidently “buy the whole package”, so to speak, of a gender identity.
Physical dysphoria, on the other hand, I find a whole lot more straightforward to grok.
I read people talking about their gender experience, and especially women ranting about how men take more space then women, and don’t listen to women, and I feel more kindred with the men being dissed than with the women. (In fact, reading those complaints has helped me modify my behavior to do less “mansplaining” and be more sensitive to the “emotional work” my husband does.)
I identify as a gender-non-conforming women, fwiw.
And yeah, I, also, find physical dysphoria easier to grok.
As a gender-non-conforming female this is how I’ve been able to compare my situation with trans people, and hopefully *empathize *better. There’s a lot about me that is not “womanly”, and that can be a bit socially weird and make me feel bad sometimes, but there’s no pain associated with it. No yearning, no foreignness, no anguish. My issues are purely societal.
Putting thought in to how trans people must be feeling inside to go through what they will go through to actually transition, and contrasting that with how I personally feel or don’t feel about my own gender, has definitely helped me empathize and hopefully better understand. I think it even better helps me understand myself.
Pretty much, yeah. I think (rightly or wrongly) that anyone can relate along those lines, and approach gender issues through a quantitative rather than qualitative lens. I don’t think anybody really 100% conforms to gender stereotypes nor has ever been in awkward or uncomfortable or even harmful positions due to some sort of gap between their experienced reality and societal expectations - if only because gender archetypes and expectations tend to be profoundly self-contradictory or unattainable.
But then again, as I said before, to me that road should/would lead to “therefore gender boxes are unhelpful and toxic, let’s ditch them, all aboard the queer train !!!” rather than “my gender box feels like a constricting prison, the solution is to be in the *other * constricting gender box, try to perform to *those *stereotypes”…
Hell yes. That’s the overwhelming positive to engaging earnestly with the issue and trying to attain a genuine, empathetic understanding of any “freaks” (no disrespect meant or implied) - no matter their specific patch of non-conformity. Because that process also perforce leads you to examine and put into question *why *you yourself are conforming, thereby possibly opening a door to personal liberation and a better life.
Which is also why the freaks are persecuted - many people are *really *afraid of having that conversation with themselves as well as where it may lead them.
I hope none of this comes out as sounding wrong, or as if anyone needs my realizations in order to know who they are. I’m trying to describe the thought process as I think it’s worked in my own head; starting from positions of ignorance.
My reaction, all through my life, to people trying to tell me that ‘girls/women don’t do that’, has been ‘I’m a girl/woman, and I do that, so it must be something that girls/women do.’ My first recollection of this is from some point early in grade school, when a male classmate asked me why I ‘walked like a boy’. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. I was a girl, so the way I walked was the way that a girl walked. (Years later, I decided he must have meant that I took relatively long steps. I was used to trying to keep up with my father.)
My first encounter with the idea of trans people was through a book – I don’t remember the title or the author; but am fairly sure I read it in the 1970’s or 80’s. The author was m to f and she kept talking about her need to be female as if it were all a matter of behavior, or at least I read it that way: she wanted to do what she thought of as female things, not to do what she thought of as male things, and when she transitioned she magically lost the ability to change a tire. I particularly remembered that bit because I was annoyed at people who thought that I couldn’t change one. I thought at the time that it was too bad that she felt she needed to change her body in order to match her perceptions of what men and women could and couldn’t do.
When years later I started reading more from other trans people I decided something else must be going on. Then one day it occurred to me: I have always been entirely sure that I’m female, no matter what I was doing at the time. So somebody else could be equally certain that they’re female, no matter what their body’s doing or appearing as at the time (and, of course, the reverse for being certain that they’re male). I doubt, thinking it over, that my own certainty originated with knowing my physical sex characteristics; when the ‘walk like a boy’ incident happened, I had no idea that boys had different genitals. (It was the 1950’s, and I had no brothers.) And at the time of that incident of course I didn’t yet have breasts, or adult female hip structure and weight distribution, and I hadn’t even heard of menstruation. I’d had a lot of socialization, of course – but that socialization hadn’t made me “walk like a girl”, or made me more interested in dolls than in toy trucks. So that degree of certainty probably came from – whatever the something else is that’s going on.
I don’t suppose that sort of thought process will work for cis people who are less strongly cis, though; and this apparently also varies.