No, Catsix you completely misunderstood me. I don’t identify strongly as a woman at all. My brain feels like ‘me’ not ‘womanly me’. My body is what makes me female too, not my brain. We’re similar in that respect, I think.
I’ll try once more, without crapping on too much this time.
You are a woman because of your body, not your brain.
Person X is a woman because of her brain, not her body.
Read the scientific cites given earlier, please. I honestly believe that some people are strongly one gender or another, based solely on their brains. That doesn’t mean all of them are.
There are people like you and I who are only classified as ‘woman’ because of our reproductive organs. Our brains don’t make us women, our bodies do, but that isn’t the case for everyone. That’s what I’m trying to explain. What is true for us, doesn’t hold true for others.
Just as what is true for most people (wanting children) is definitely not true for all people. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people who want children just shrug at us and say whatever, yet there is a small group who just can’t comprehend someone not wanting children. Their brains cannot fathom someone else’s brain operating differently in that way. I’m sure you’ve met people like that. By insisting that your brain doesn’t make you female, so nobody else’s brain could make them female, you are doing exactly the same thing.
I read them, but what I see are hypotheses, not conclusions. Until then, it’s only a belief, and one I don’t share.
Except that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that I’m quite sure other people believe brains make gender, and it’s fine by me that they believe that. I’m not arguing ‘Hey, you’re wrong, I have this absolute proof over here.’
I’m only saying their belief isn’t the same as mine. Kind of like how I don’t believe in any kind of god, but I don’t go around telling Jews or Catholics ‘Hey, quit being wrong. There’s no such thing as god.’ Unless there’s a specific debate going on about the issue at the time, I don’t argue it. I’m not around telling my trannsexual friend that she’s all wrong about her belief that brains make gender. Then again, she doesn’t tell me there’s anything wrong with believing bodies make gender.
I think it’s worth pointing out that my personal inclination towards “I’m female because I have girly bits” doesn’t and can’t point out anything about the structure of my brain. As far as I can understand it, transexualism is a massive case of neurological squeaky wheel – only transfolk are really equipped to notice that there’s a potential for glitch there, because if there isn’t a glitch, the seams are entirely invisible.
I don’t know if I’d feel “Of course I’m female because I have girly bits, and would be male if I had boy bits” if I actually had the boy bits. It’s entirely possible that this same brain/personality/whatever would find having the boy bits a bizarre cosmic mistake for which someone deserves a mighty chewing out, if I actually had them. It’s also entirely possible that this same brain/personality/whatever would say, “Of course I’m male because I have boy bits, and would be female if I had girly bits.” I can’t know. I can’t even test it like I could test what it was like to have unglitched serotonin cycles.
I’m not comfortable being sanguine about whether or not my personal sense of gender is based in the evidence of my gonadal material, because I can’t test the theory. I can speculate about what it’s like to have a different wheel in my perception of myself when I’ve got machinery that runs so smoothly I can hardly find the wheels at all, but I can’t know whether or not it would squeak. When I speculate, I can come up with several different theories, and they all seem pretty close to equally plausible from what I know of myself and what I know of the science.
Well gosh. I’ve been trying not to say this throughout the thread, but your beliefs are wrong. They go against all scientific evidence. While I respect your right to feel or believe whatever, keep in mind that your uncomfirmed hunches are based on the same kinds of common sense theory that made us think leeches were good for sick people, keeping the windows open would let in evil spirits, and that evolution is “just a theory” that is just as valid as six day creationism. If your going to dismiss science, there is not much I can argue with you about.
I really really like you, catsix, and that makes it hard for me to figure out why you are so insistant on refusing to even consider that your nifty beliefs don’t deserve automatic respect just because you have them.
Experiment of nurture: ablatio penis at 2 months, sex reassignment at 7 months, and a psychosexual follow-up in young adulthood.
It’s interesting to read because the patient developped a girl gender identity, although she exhibited many masculine behaviours.
They also compared their case to the Money’s one.
Why does this make Charlie not a transgendered individual?
I know a FTM who is bisexual and loves both women and men.
**
See, this confuses me, because my research gave me the exact opposite impression. I have read many court cases involving people who were, to me anyway, obviously transsexual and who did not identify as the opposite gender for social or economic reasons.
Then again, I specialize in gay history and you are more likely to come across such things in there.
As I mentioned earlier, many of these people are included in gay histories as being gay cross-dressers. Like John/Eleanor Rykener.
What’s interesting to me, is how a lot of these people would have gotten away with it had it not been for meddling in-laws, death, illnesses or other things. I imagine that there were many transsexuals who passed without notice.
I think the reason why people think there are so many of them suddenly today is that more of them are being open about it. Kinda like how my Grandparents don’t believe there were many gay people until recently.
Here’s a question for those who say that transgendered individuals shouldn’t “pretend” to be the genders they are not. What if the individual naturally looks the opposite gender?
I bring you the case of High Priestess my fiancee. High Priestess or Shiki, as she is also know, is a biological male with naturally large amounts of estrogen in her body. Because of this, she only has to shave once a month and she has very a feminine figure. She’ll be dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans and people will say “miss” and “lady.” She naturally looks like a girl.
Guys have thought she was a girl before only to find out that she is naturally male. Luckily, none of them have cared about this so far, but you can imagine my concern that sometime she might be the victim of violence.
That reminds me of the thoroughly awful TV movie Island City. In that movie, terrible mutations have caused monster children to be born, who grow up into morlocks and destroy civilization and things. These mutant children supposedly result when two people belonging to different “DNA groups” mate. To prevent any new monster babies from being born, everybody is required to wear and display a colored bar representing which of the four DNA groups they belong to. Sexual relations of any kind between people of different DNA groups is strictly forbidden – even with contraception. (Personally, it sounds like a piece of anti-miscegenation propaganda. Bleah.)
I apologize if this question has been asked before, but if it hasn’t I wonder if you could address it.
If someone becomes a transsexual (i.e. has the full operation) does this always imply that they were previously gay and are now straight? IOW, suppose a man becomes a women, will it be true in all such cases that he was previously a gay man who has now become a heterosexual woman, or are there men who are heterosexual men but become lesbian women (meaning that they felt like women in ways other than attraction to men)?
May I just say that I might be uncomfortable about transgendered people, at least around them, because I’ve never really known anyone, that I’m aware of, in real life who was transgendered?
And I’m a very shy person in real life. That’s all.
IzzyR: No, transsexuals identify themselves as the gender which the operations change their outward appearance to be, i.e., a FTM feels that he was always male and a MTF feels that she was always female.
Whether or not they are gay (and whether or not they are gay before/after the operation) is an entirely different kettle of fish.
IzzyR, sexual preference and gender identity are totally distinct. Many transsexuals are asexual prior to surgery – the idea of having sex with those wrong bits is anathema to them. Others have meaningful, but strained, sexual relationships prior to reassignment. Still others are sexual addicts.
What Ethilrist said it right. There are two issues involved here…
Gender identity: What gender you think/know/believe yourself to be. Transgendered people have a problem in that their identity does not mesh with their current sex.
Sexual orientation: What gender you have a strong emotional, sexual, and/or social attraction to. A MtF transgendered person may be attracted to men, but does so from the mindset of a straight woman. When considering the sexual orientation of a transgender person, it must be considered from the standpoint of their intended gender.
That said, there are a lot of links between the gay and transgender communities because many transgender do come out as gay before realizing their gender identity conflict. Also, there are gay transgendered people, but they would appear to be straight pre-op. Its all so very fun and probably requires a chart to really get your mind around.
Ive known a bunch of transgendered, and lesbians, and my experience has been that they are very easy to get along with. I thought perhaps that since they know I accept them, they seem to be more than willing to look past all of my faults.
I would guess that you DO know some transgendered, but you just dont know it. The ones I know, dont open dont open up to most people - so how would you know?.
Nitpick: The correct term is “post-op transsexual”. A person who feels that his/her gender is the opposite of his/her physical sex, but has not (yet) had surgery to correct it, is still transsexual – he or she is, however, referred to as a “pre-op transsexual.”
The first sex-change hermaphrodite I dated said that, when she first realized she was a woman and had mistakenly been living as a man for 36 years, she was still attracted to women. She figured that she’d probably end up as a lesbian after the surgery. However, after taking estrogen for 6 months, she suddenly started to notice men. She has now been post-op for a good 8 years, and was bisexual at last count.