Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke
There have been quite a few thoughts expressed, here and elsewhere, about the appropriate uses of transsexual, transgender, trans, and trans*. The separation of sex and gender, while ostensibly default in a number of academic fields and feminist and trans philosophies or movements, is not something challenged only by right wing advocates of trans* oppressive policies. Many non-trans* feminists and many trans* liberation advocates openly oppose the use of these terms as separate. Some of that spills over onto debates about terms such as transgender.
I’d like to attempt to further explain why I believe it is so necessary to separate gender and sex in the first place, and thus at least some of the major reasons why I care about the particular uses of those trans*-community specific terms.
But I won’t.
Not yet, at least.
Here I’m going to post an exercise only, and then, fair warning!, I’m going to censor the hell out of the responses you give: If your first comment does not directly address the exercise, and doesn’t do it in a way that (in my opinionated view) attempts-in-good-faith to actually complete it and consider its implications, that comment and all subsequent comments on this thread will be deleted unless and until you do fulfill this one condition.
Once you’ve made a good faith effort at the exercise, this thread will be as open as any other. Evading my censorious hand will be quite easy, but it will not, on this thread, be virtually automatic.
Exercise 22: For the purposes of this exercise, the concept of sex is indistinguishable from the concept of gender and the expected implications that flow from that, e.g. if a speaker states that a person has a penis, anyone hearing will assume that person is a man and prefers pants to dresses, likewise no listener will be able to understand phrases like “that woman has a penis”, hold.
Under that condition, define “transsexual”.
Previous Gender Workshop entries that include exercises:
Introduction and video exercises
Gender Neutral Object exercise.
Gender binarism, gender naïveté, and confluence.
Definitions of sex and gender and why we use them
Gender Attributions in Practice
If I am allowed ideal surgical techniques, ideal hormone support, etc.
I would say that “transsexual” describes someone who has switched from one to the other.
.
perhaps only during the transition, after that they would be a woman or a man.
Interesting strategy. Thanks, chigau.
Hm. I’d say one whose sex as identified by others at birth does not (or has not) match(ed) their lived reality of their own sex. I suspect this is an inadequate definition based on implications my (cis)privilege prevents me from immediately grasping, so I’m listening to what others have to say.
Without your somewhat-confusing restriction, I’d say a transsexual is someone who feels that their outward genitalia/appearance does not match their gender identity. But if I understand your restrictions and gender and sex must align, then I’m not sure transsexuality could even exist in that scenario.
I have two propositions. The first would be that a transsexual would still be someone who’s body had been altered from something generally classifiable as male, to something generally classifiable as female. In this world, this would also alter gender identity to keep it congruent. The reason this might happen are: intersex people being forced to conform physically, or in response to physical trauma.
Second, we might consider inter-sexed people as transsexual. Not because they are changing, but because the tethering of gender to sex would mean that the fuzziness we now have classifying people as transgender would be pushed to transsexual as well.
So a transsexual would be someone whose sex and gender either changed (usually via surgery), or someone for whom our society could not easily classify.
The more I think about this the less sure I feel. I am so indoctrinated in the “two genders” my mind cringes when I try to sort it out. But…
People are who they are, regardless of any labels or definitions. We are all different from the DNA and up, what might cure one person can kill another. So the whole concept of gender is a statistical one, a case with two peaks. Where we draw the line between these two and how we label the ranges in between is mainly semantics. So I choose “whatever the individual feel is right”.
If “male” or female” is insufficient I don’t know how else to deal with it. I won’t pretend that I don’t find this confusing, but life seems to be that way. Might as well get with the program…
Here, I’m reading ‘gender’ as gender identity, and “sex is indistinguishable from gender” as “gender determines sex” (for the purposes of this exercise). So I conclude that “transsexual” cannot be defined.
@ Rob #7: Yeah, that’s pretty much how I see it. Biology and psychology/identity are two (at least somewhat) distinct topics.
I would say it describes “Someone who desires to change their sex (currently transitioning or not), or has already done so”.
Because even if everyone’s gender matches their sex, there are probably going to be people who aren’t happy with being the gender/sex they were born with. And I think those people fit under the label too, just like we call someone ‘transgender’ even if they haven’t started transition yet.
I don’t think sayamika’s definition works, because isn’t someone’s “lived reality of their own sex” the same as their gender? (Sorry if that’s not correct.) So a person like in sayamika’s definition couldn’t exist under your condition.
Thanks, everyone for putting good work out there. Do feel free to talk amongst yourselves once you’ve made your first comment.
Some things you might choose to discuss…
From Rob Grigjanis:
Or does sex determine gender?
I’m not saying that would change Rob’s conclusion about defining transsexual, but what in sex = gender tells you which causes which? Do we simply prefer “gender causes sex” because of our collective and individual histories with “sex causes gender”?
From Sayamika:
How would it be possible for one’s sex as identified by others at birth to fail to match the “lived reality” of one’s own sex.
Would this require that one literally does not believe that one’s genitals and/or chromosomes exist as they do if one also believes that one’s gender is not what was indicated to others at birth by one’s sex?
How would this definition be distinguished from “delusional”?
From Zeckenschwarm:
There is some good, complex thinking here.
But since sex = gender, does a woman who wishes to forsake dresses, wear tuxedos when going to formal events, and/or play in the NFL count as transsexual under this schema? Why or why not?
Another question: what rationale could or would be articulated to identify oneself as an appropriate candidate for, say, vaginoplasty? If the rationale is based on individual freedoms (e.g. “I don’t have to present myself as an appropriate candidate, it’s my body and I can do what I want”) can that rationale support insurance coverage for such surgeries any more or less than such a rationale currently supports insurance coverage for breast augmentation?
Comment deleted.
While you are free to make similar comments after attempting the exercise, because of specific concerns about how certain exercises were and were not engaged, there is one rule for all commenters in this thread: make a serious effort at the exercise first.
–Crip Dyke
“Some physical traits are usually attributed to one sex, while some other physical traits to the other.
A person in whose body traits from both these pools are present to the point where it becomes socially relevant is a transgender person.”
There cannot be transgender in this scenario. Only as others have suggested a history of gender change in some individuals. Taking it as how the world actually is then there would actually be no such changes due to the lack of desire to change. Further more mode of dress would be meaningless as no one would try to signal their gender.
I need to elaborate that last sentence. There could be no biological ambiguities about sex and observers would not be confused about a person’s sex when looking at them.
F.O. & Dan Dare:
I take both of your attempts as good-faith, but do remember that the purpose of the exercise is to re/define “transsexual”, not transgender.
In this hypothetical world, gender and sex are interchangeable, and thus so would transsexual and transgender. In our world, however, transsexual and transgender mean different things, and so I use transsexual specifically to indicate the current concept you are attempting to translate into the language of this new world.
Change or don’t change your answers as appropriate.
Since in this example sex = gender, I’m going to call them sexgenders.
This might be cheating, but you could define additional sexgenders corresponding to people who have the lived experience of one sexgender and many of the physical traits of another. ‘Transsexual’ could be defined as a set of these defined sexgenders.
If I understand the exercise correctly, then in that circumstance to be transgender would simply mean to alter the appearance of one’s body from one sex to another. Since ‘gender is indistinguishable from sex’, a transformation in gender would then have occurred. Appearance trumps inner experience. Actually, I think that historically, one could sometimes ‘change gender’ in the eyes of the world, simply by adopting the clothing which did not match the expected clothing for that body.
The question of for whom gender is indistinguishable from sex was not addressed in the definition. To respect the exercise we are forced to assume that it doesn’t matter whether it’s an outside observer or an individual’s own perception of their sex/gender. But realistically, I think the system assigns preference to external observers.
Damn.
I really thought it was an easy question.
I’m trying to honestly consider the implications of sex = gender and how, were I of such a mindset, I’d attempt to understand “transsexual” upon encountering the term. The further I got into it, though, the harder I found it.
Sex and gender are indistinguishable. From this, does it then imply that people whose bodies don’t perfectly match the physical expectations for their sex (not even necessarily anything dramatic: consider very tall, muscular female people and short, slight male people) are of a different gender than people who do match the physical expectations? If sex is physical traits, then must people with large breasts be of a different gender than people with small breasts? Are there Hyper-Men with large beards and broad chests and tattoos of mermaids on their bulging biceps? Is gender identity the same as gender role, then, so that there are shades of different sexes based on how one behaves?
If so, I’d posit that a transsexual is anyone who (via weight training, hair styling, new clothing, puberty, aging, career changes, medical intervention, etc.) is in flux between one gender/sex caste and another.
If I’m allowed to talk freely now, I would say that this is an abstract though exercise, since inner experience (gender) has always mattered to the person concerned, and we now accept that it should trump the convenience of external observers (for whom it might be easier if sex and gender matched reliably I suppose).
PS – after reading the comments more carefully, I realize I said transgender instead of transsexual, but since sex and gender were supposed to be indistinguishable, I would argue that it makes no difference.
It might (or might not) be useful to define both pre- and post-operative transsexuality. I think we might define a pre-operative transexual as a a biological-social male (or female) who desires* to be a biological-social female (or male), where desires* special kind of desire — perhaps fundamental to one’s self-conception or having a certain kind of biological basis or what have you. A post-operative transexual is someone whose has been transformed via surgery from a biological-social make (or female) to a biological-social female (or male) as a consequence of desiring* the same. Or not.
I feel that people who are seriously interested in this exercise would find the history of sex and gender ambiguities across cultures very interesting. The variety may seem surprising and for me it opens up the question: on what grounds do we think our culture is building an understanding of sex/gender that is ‘right’ as opposed to ‘different’? Or maybe we should be looking for something like ‘fulfilling’ or ‘satisfying’ as opposed to ‘right’?
@Pen, #17:
Good catch, Pen. Thank you. It probably does, but see also my suggestion for engaging Sayamika.
@The Mellow Monkey, #19:
For certain values of “perfectly”, sure. But in our world we manage to lump people of different breast sizes into one sex, so that would be no less possible in this world (nothing in the exercise language restricted the ability of this hypothetical world to loosen or tighten restrictions on qualifying as, say, “female,” merely on the ability to be a woman if one is not female, and vice versa).
===========
For anyone to consider:
Pen is quite on intellectual fire here with the observation on privileged frames and following that up with:
1. Does the inability to express one’s gender separately from one’s sex (i.e. to say one is a particular sex is also to say that one is a particular gender, and vice versa) certainly privilege the outside observer? Could it be otherwise? If it could be otherwise, is it likely to be otherwise (in any culture where it is not possible to distinguish between sex and gender) anywhere in our reality, any time in the foreseeable future?
2. Depending on your answer to #1, does it then follow that the systematic conflation of sex and gender such that one cannot distinguish between the two necessarily creates (or would create) issues of in/justice in this reality’s contemporary US or in the current country and culture you call home?
3. To what extent should the convenience of external observers be considered, if at all, in articulating/defining concepts of sex and gender?
Late to the party, but here’s my effort.
Hmm. I suppose I’d define “transsexual” as a person who has undergone or is undergoing a transition from one physical sex to another. (Granted, this is a “bare-bones” definition that doesn’t get into the social aspects of transitioning, or take into account those who only want to do a “partial” transition, or, or, or, or…)
I’m leaning more towards simply using one’s self-identified gender status for those who have transitioned — once it’s complete, you’re a woman. Or a man. Depending on which way the transition went, and assuming the person in question adheres to the gender-binary model.
…uh… I hope that made sense to someone besides myself.
Comment deleted.While you are free to make similar comments after attempting the exercise, because of specific concerns about how certain exercises were and were not engaged, there is one rule for all commenters in this thread: make a serious effort at the exercise first.
–Crip Dyke
Exercise 22:
To me, saying that sex is indistinguishable from gender would seem to imply that everyone is expected to conform to their assigned-sex stereotype.
I think the term transsexual is generally understood to mean someone changes (or wishes to change) their sex.
In other words, in this scenario, someone who moves (or attempts to move) from one (male/female) category to the other.
I think that equating sex and gender could have different consequences, based on who makes the rules for determining “sex”. For example, if sex is determined by chromosomes, then transsexuals can never truly change categories.
At the other extreme, if sex is determined by gender presentation, someone who defies gender stereotypes (a butch lesbian, for example) might be forced into the transsexual category, even though she may wish to be designated as female.
Any criteria that attempts to divide all humans into male and female will have problems with edge cases, no matter what criteria is used.
I normally think of sex and gender as being separate concepts. When I think of linking them together, I immediately start thinking that one will be subordinated to the other. When I think about that, I am much more comfortable with the idea of sex being subordinated to gender than the idea of gender being subordinated to biological sex. I think this is because I tend to think of gender in terms of a broad spectrum of options, whereas I still tend to think of “sex” as the strict male/female dichotomy I learned about in preschool (even though I know that doesn’t match the biological reality).
So assuming that sex and gender are the same thing, I would say my opinion is a transsexual is someone who personally identifies as something besides what they were assigned at birth. So someone born with a penis, assigned male that identifies as something other than a male would be a transsexual, regardless of whether or not they intend to pursue HRT or surgery.
Because the disclaimer may prove useful here: I learned in an environment where “transsexual” was a slur as opposed to an official term or separate category and consider it the same as transgender. I don’t really think any distinction between the two as communities has merit, so I formed my definition with that perspective.
In my personal experience as a transsexual, I’ve thought of gender as something that I can control (my perception of myself) and sex as something that is judged by others based (loosely) on biological criteria. Depending on who is judging, sex may be determined by chromosomes, or it may be alterable by surgery or hormones, or even in some cases a letter from a medical professional.
I think maybe the root of the problem is that our society injects sex/gender (from pronouns to gender-based customs/stereotypes) into all of our daily interactions, when in most cases it should be irrelevant. It seems to me that most of the inconvenience of the external observer is that we speak languages that use gendered pronouns, making it difficult/awkward to talk about someone without knowing their gender. I can imagine a society where gender was a more private characteristic. I can’t imagine the US going down this path anytime soon though.
If sex is the same as gender, and we assume the identification is based on external sexual characteristics, then transsexual would refer to someone who had physically/surgically transitioned from one sex/gender to another. But sex can refer to chromosomes or hormone levels, too. (And any of these could be congruent or not. And all of them overlap. But I guess intersex would still cover some of that.) So if you had hormone therapy, but not surgery, I guess that would still be transsexual? But not completely?
Very confused.
Comment Deleted.All your Crip Dyke is belong to us.
While you are free to make similar comments after attempting the exercise, because of specific concerns about how certain exercises were and were not engaged in the past, there is one rule for all commenters in this thread: make a serious effort at the exercise first.
–Crip Dyke
After working through the exercise, it seems at first glance, that the word transgendered ceases to have meaning. What I wonder about is what label people who choose to identify as some blend of gender/sex would use for themselves? “Transgender” seems like a plausible choice for that case. And also useful for the describing people who are transitioning between genders (as mentioned by others earlier in the thread). Not sure I get to make the choice myself, not being either. But it seems to me that there would be a perfectly lovely word lying around, that could be put to good use in either of those case.
donkane @30
Who wants to know?
wcorvi #25
We really are not joking here.
Why are you?
donkane #30
So, you are new here?
@chigau, #34:
donkane isn’t particularly new here. In fact, I rather think that donkane is an old-timer that only occasionally comments (and never, as far as I am aware, in the lounge or TD). He is an off-line personal associate of PZ and a geneticist.
It may simply be that knowing PZ and that this is PZ’s personal blog, and not being a close follower, he missed my previous posts or just kind of assumed that PZ wrote them…or something.
Honestly, if I hadn’t made a very clear rule to head off certain past problems, and if I hadn’t made that rule both general and clear so I wouldn’t have to fight over corner cases, there’s nothing in particular about donkane’s comments that would otherwise be worthy of editing/deletion.
But I’m sticking to the rules that I’ve laid out so it’s perfectly fair: I’m not going to make one law for friends of PZ who are off-topic but good hearted and another for people who don’t know PZ and/or are judged by me to be mean spirited or carrying the conversation in a direction I don’t want.
I could, of course, declare that this thread is moderated at my whim, but I’d rather not. The blog as a whole is clearly PZ’s. I’m a guest here, so it makes more sense for me, if I’m going to moderate a thread heavily, to set out clear expectations and follow them to the letter. That way I can’t generate any bad blood for PZ with my whims, only my rules, and based on conversation, i understand it to be perfectly okay for me to set out other rules in this thread than apply elsewhere on Pharyngula. It just happens to be that this particular rule is falling hard on donkane b/c donkane seems not to have paid attention to that bit of the original post.
Exercise 22. Transsexual: Someone born male who thinks he is female, or someone born female who thinks she is male.
Transsexual: Expressing sufficient discomfort with assigned sexgender as to necessitate a switch, with as much efficacy as possible given the resources available.
Given the context presented, a workable definition of transsexual would be someone who previously posessed the (anatomical and/or other )signifiers associated with one sex, and now has those associated with another. I’m not sure why anyone would do so in that world, although there appears to be no compelling reason they wouldn’t, either; by definition they’d be happy with the new anatomy, since there’s no distinction between sex, gender, and identity in this hypothetical.
Given this, I would define transsexual as a state in which deviations from the defined polarities exist. This could be biological, physical, psychological, or sociological. For the purposes of the exercise, I conclude the characteristic in question is irrelevant. It’s the “bridging” or “across” quality that matters.
So, there’s my attempt.
Thanks, gmcard, whirl witch, and Dalillama.
It appears that there might be a bit of an inappropriate ambiguity in the original post.
From Dalillama:
I’m sorry for my ambiguity, but it should certainly be assumed that there’s a communicable concept for “anatomy” that is different from “identity”.
The fact that sex and gender are indistinguishable in meaning as words does not mean that the persons in this world literally don’t know body from behavior in any case whatsoever.
The exercise is meant to capture what it is like to live in a world where every time one mentions “gender” one communicates the meaning of “sex” as well, and vice versa. There is no distinction between the concepts of sex and gender. But people still have material bodies, still have behaviors, still have identities.
Is that helpful?
Quick clarifications that got lost because I failed to copy/paste correctly from my text editor:
* Binary implication not necessarily true. In this scenario, men are real men, women are real women, and furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are real furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
* Each categorized sex/gender must therefore have definable traits that are not shared by the other categories. If a trait is shared across categories, it cannot be a distinctive trait, by definition.
* Given that, transsexual/transgender would mean an individual who shares traits across categories, i.e. bridging or crossing categories.
Sorry for the copy/paste error and double comment.
@PatrickG:
You’re fine.
If you are correct about both of these things, can the categories female, male, man and woman be fairly said to exist in this world?
@CD:
Absolutely not, and I don’t think they do. However, given my understanding of sex and gender, collapsing the two together requires defining narrow (artificial) categories from a multivariate reality, to which people must belong, or be viewed as suspect, and treated accordingly.
To clarify quickly, given what we now know about genetics, biological expression, sociological constructs, and so forth, speaking in binary terms limits the conversation. I must say that this is verges on too abstract for me, however.
For instance, I have no objections to fighting for equal pay for “women”, so I guess I do think these terms can be fairly said to exist in this world, in that they more or less accurately describe a population. In this case, “women” refers to people with defined sexual characteristics. Which fairly accurately describes a real societal problem, but automatically brings up the question of “fringe” individuals who don’t meet those defined sexual characteristics (which of course, varies by who’s defining them!). Hence, my definition of trans as cross-category. It’s less of a deviation from a definition, and more of taking on characteristics of a different category (for example, behavior: “This is manly, this behavior is womanly, and a man does not engage in this behavior”).
I will say that trying to write these comments has brought up all sorts of, what, associative thinking. For instance, I found myself thinking that “women” automatically refers to people with reproductive capacity, which is clearly not true — even in the binary man/woman view. I include that to indicate that I’m not sure I’m at all clear in my comments, but then, I’m fairly used to that.
“Define “transsexual”.”
A person who fits a certain gender type but who identifies as another gender type.
As I understand it, sex is a biological term and defined by the presence or absence of certain traits (ignoring for the moment what traits exactly) where gender is a psychological or sociological term and defined by how a person identifies him/herself and what roles he/she plays in interaction with others.
I would say that transsexualism is where sex and gender do not match, but the exercise explicitly forbids that. So sorry, I cannot answer the question. Hopefully this is still valid as a first reaction.
rietpluim
Absolutely. I never discourage “I don’t know” answers. You’re clearly making a good faith effort.
Hm, my understanding of transsexual is someone who has a disjunction between their gender id and their bodies sexual characteristics. They have then had some surgery to make their bodies better represent their internal model of themselves. In your definition that couldn’t exist, they wouldn’t have that disjunction. So the impetus to change sexual characteristic would be gone?
Maybe in your definition it would be a bit like the people in Ian M Banks Culture, they change their bodies sex all the while. Decide to have some children then go back to a male body. Although it would be rather restrictive, you couldn’t be a male bodied woman or vice versa, you would have transitioned your sexual characteristics and gender – hence a transsexual. It would have to be that frictionless for people to do it with no dysphoria I would think.
If sex is indistinguishable from gender, I guess the first question would be which is controlling?
Is gender always defined by biological sex, so that a person with a an XY chromosome set and a penis would always be considered male (by everyone, himself included) and XX, vagina, would always be considered female? If so, Then I would think the word transsexual would probably refer to someone who doesn’t neatly fit into the gender binary, although I suppose in such world, there might not even be a concept of a disconnect between gender and biology, and the word transsexual might not even exist.
However, if we’re talking about the reverse case, where a person’s own perception of gender would be controlling, we’d have a world where a person who perceives himself to be male would always be considered a man and a person who perceives herself to be female would always be considered a woman, regardless of chromosomes or genitalia. In that case, I would think that the word transsexual would refer to a person where there is a disconnect between an individual’s chromosomes & genitalia vs. their perceived gender.
It took me awhile to see what you were getting at with the question, because I got hung up on trying to figure out what it means to “be a man.” I’m assuming that what you mean is that anyone born with a penis is considered a man. In the hypothetical does that mean that there are no cases where brain chemistry/hormones/genetics are fluid?
I would say that because biology is messy, and even in a world where male==man, there would still be a continuum of feelings and developmental differences; you would still have people who feel that they are not male despite having a penis. A difference in hormones, brain chemistry, or other developmental factors would put people on that continuum. I would assume that in your hypothetical, there would still be men who are attracted to other men, men who would be attracted to men and women, and other combinations. So I guess in that case, transsexual would broadly encompass anyone outside of the strict binary. Closer to its Latin meaning of “to cross”, so trans would be anyone who crossed the border between the binary male man/female woman. Maybe?
I don’t know what it means to me a man. I was born with a penis, I present as someone who was born with a penis, I self-identify as some one born with a penis, and I am attracted to people who outwardly present as being born without a penis, which as I understand it makes me a cis-male. But I don’t do many “manly” things. No football games for me. No beer, no hunting, no muscle cars either.
If I used the wrong words, I apologize. Biology is not my strong suit, nor do I always know the correct word usage for gender identification. Language is fluid and I’m slow on the uptake.
I can’t because of the way you set up the exercise.
I personally DO think that Judith Butler makes a hell lot of sense in her analysis of those terms.
They are human made concepts that are imposed on bodies and people and that are clearly not sufficient or particularly correct.
So is the term “transsexual” that for me relies on the two terms “gender” and “sex” being different. I therefore cannot logically process from “sex=gender” to “transsexual = “?
Newtonian physics: Quite adequate to describe a whole number of phenomena but ultimately not correct.
I’m with Giliell; I cannot imagine a way in which this word would apply in a world where sex=gender, because I don’t know enough about how “sex=gender” works in the posited world to figure a way in which someone would have the disconnect I felt that led me to transition. So I guess I’m a “don’t know” answer.
That is, “is sex set as equal to gender, or is it the reverse?” appears to me to be an unanswered question (Giliell’s comment @51 is the only one I’ve read before commenting, and that because it’s above the comment box where I’m typing). This might well be a limitation in my understanding of the situation, rather than because it’s ill-phrased or anything.
Well, in my language (Norwegian) there is only one word, so this seems perfectly natural to me (“nature” meaning “culture”, as usual…): someone who feels that the “box” they were originally put in (not a box obv., more like one of two slightly overlapping clusters) is not the right one/the one they want to be in. E. g. a man who feels, decides, for whatever reason (1. none of my concern 2. I’ve had people describe/explain this to me in widely differing ways), that no, this is wrong, I should be a woman. HRT & surgery would then be methods they might decide to use, to achieve that goal. And since I define “man” and “woman” in the same fuzzy family resemblance and/or prototype based way as I do “chair”, that’s perfectly doable. You’d be in one category, change some things about yourself, and then you’d be in a different category. “Transsexual” would then mean someone who did, or wanted to do, that.
Recently I happened upon a word for us that I personally like better: naturalized. Those who have transitioned or changed citizenships should have the same rights, protections and respect as those born where or the gender they are.
Comment NOT Deleted, at my whim, because it happens to contribute something important to the conversation that I don't want lost.However, please note: while you are free to make similar comments after attempting the exercise, because of specific concerns about how certain exercises were and were not engaged in the past, there is one rule for all commenters in this thread: make a serious effort at the exercise first.
–Crip Dyke
I’ve used immigration as a metaphor for transition before, and certainly it had its echoes of my experience as an immigrant, leftover1under. That is to say I agree.
transsexual: where one person’s sex doesn’t match other people’s definition of the person. You can only be transexual in an environment in which other people are telling you you don’t haven’t assigned yourself the correct sex.
Under these conditions wouldn’t transsexual then equal transgender? The literal meaning then would be one who has crossed or changed either one’s self-identification and/or one’s physical properties (identification by others).
I don’t know that that changes the reality of anybody’s situation. Just because the terms are the same that doesn’t mean one still can’t feel one way while appearing another or change either of those. I mean, it may change stereotypes or harden some of them or generally just mess with the discussion, I don’t know, but the essence of the situation, that one’s internal identity and external appearance are not one in the same, or were not at one point in one’s history, that doesn’t change.
I don’t think…
Caveat: I’m new to this blog and this topic. I have a dear friend I’ve known for almost as long as we’ve both been alive and she fairly recently began HRT, had her legal gender changed, etc. I fully admit to my naiveté. I’m here because I’m trying to learning and hopefully flush out any biases I’m as yet unaware of. I want to support her, and everyone really, as I think being able to realize oneself to the fullest is a beautiful thing. Well, unless one is a bigoted, closed minded, jerk, but that goes without saying.
@opie #56
That’s what I was thinking too. Succinctly put.
Opie’s comment raises a question with this:
Given that your audience can’t tell the difference between sex and gender, does that mean doffing top hat and putting on a pillbox would make one transsexual?
I don’t think opie or most of us would want it to, but which matches (or mismatches) would make one transsexual if some matches (or mismatches) do not?
Moreover, say that a mis/match is a qualifying one. Nothing in opie’s original comment gives an idea of the length of time that mis/match must persist (or be expected to persist) before the definition kicks in. It kicks in the moment there is a mis/match of the appropriate kind …and ends the moment that ceases to be true.
In our own cultures here in this real world, do we intend transsexuality to communicate something temporary, a state of being that is negated by certain responses/changes? Or does it persist?
While a frequent (nearly daily) reader, I’ve only recently focused on these gender workshops and I’m fascinated. I will go back to the beginning and start there. Hope to catch up and participate soon.
@foresme, #57:
Yes. one was selected over the other to communicate which this-world concept you are intended to communicate. Once *in* that world, however, the residents of that world would assume that the definition you lay out for transsexual will apply to the word transgender.
Thanks for your contribution & I hope that helps.
@ser, #60:
Please note that comments are closed automatically by the WordPress programming after a thread has been open a certain amount of time.
I hope you still get something positive about doing the exercises for yourself, even if some of them are from threads to which you can no longer contribute publicly.
@59 Crip Dyke
As far as I am concerned, “transsexual” is a term created by and for the community. It can mean whatever the community wants it to mean. It is a term that implies a whole number of things. But it is my understanding that when the term is used by a member of the community and directed outward, there is always an implied (albeit mild) “fuck you”. “Fuck you and your inadequate taxonomy for human sex and sexuality. I’m acknowledging the fact that I don’t fit into one of your categories. You may use the term transsexual to describe me and consider it my acknowledgement of your ignorance.” *smile*, *nod*. So I think it is a term that has been forged primarily in the tension of our culture. Though I’ve not thought too deeply about this, it might be a preferable culture that didn’t require the need for the term.
I do not know if I should even say anything at all.
It seems to me that the question has a lot of political social implications that are not stated or defined specifically and we are asked to offer our own definition. I find it way too charged to even try to define sex and gender as used here let alone transsexual.
As I understand sex is defined by xx or xy chromosomes generally with other combinations possible with “extra bits” like xxy. There is the outward expression of the genetic state in genitalia along with other secondary characteristics in varying degrees of expression,
gender is culturally defined as to what is related to what is of one sex or the other and as such is to a large part a construct (influenced by the understanding of the biology). What people do and why they do it is as varied as there are people doing it.
To try and define the terms in this social/political discussion my self seems impossible. I have no way in hell of enforcing any compliance with any definition I might come up so it is easier to ask what is meant by the the terms as used by the user as they individually use them because they are all different.
uncle frogy
I haven’t looked closely at the other responses, so this may be a duplicate:
Two definitions:
1. Someone who in their heart of hearts does not believe that the sex that they are seen as (by themself and those around them) correctly describes who they are.
2. Someone who fits definition #1, but also is taking steps to change their body and/or behavior so that the sex they are seen as more closely fits their sense of who they are.
(Do I get a gold or silver star sticker?)
Now I’ll go back and read all the other responses and see how stupid I feel when I’m done.
Didn’t read the comments before I answered, as that would feel like cheating ;-)
@CB #4:
See, that’s the sort of definition I find confusing. I “identify as” a woman because, and in the sense that, I’ve been told that’s what I am – based on what my external genitalia look like, I guess. That seems to be all there is to it, for me. Other than that, it’s only important because it makes people assume a lot of incorrect things about me, treat me in ways I don’t like, expect things of me that I’m uncomfortable with. I need an extra step for that definition to make sense, something like “…someone who has a strong inner sense of being a man/woman/not quite either/… and…”
@Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden, #10:
No, just a woman who wishes to forsake dresses, wear tuxedos when going to formal events, and/or play in the NFL. She’d only be transsexual if she really, really wanted to be the type of person who is expected to wear tuxedos and not dresses, and have that type of body.
The way it works here w/breast augmentation (or cosmetic surgery on ears/noses or similar) is that if it’s just because you want it, you have to pay for it, but if you can convince your doctor that it’s an actual problem you need help with for the sake of your emotional well-being, the state pays. And if someone feels that their genitalia are completely the wrong shape, that’s probably a pretty significant problem. It doesn’t matter if other people are perfectly happy being flat as a board/having ears that stick out(/not having a vagina), what’s important is that it’s important to you. At least, that’s how it should work. You may have to spend some time arguing and/or looking for the right doctor.
@Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #23:
Interesting/difficult question. Not sure, but probably yes. Trying to imagine a world where that isn’t the case makes my head spin.
I really don’t see how that could possibly work, not as long as we’re still physical beings meeting and communicating with other physical beings. There’s just one of me, everyone else is an outside observer, if the way I see myself doesn’t match what they see they’ll just ignore my opinion.
Yes.
If words are supposed to be a means of communication, the convenience of outside observers is very important. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bunch of words that have little or no function and a bunch of concepts/phenomena that don’t have names. Which would last maybe .5 seconds, before people started making up new words to describe the things they actually care about, in ways that make sense to them.
Having read through 52 comments, the question seems to be maybe a bit different from what I first thought. If all you’re asking is “what would it be like, if language was like that?” then the answer is very simple: it IS like that, here. Sex/gender=kjønn. Woman=kvinne, female=kvinnelig (or if not-necessarily-human, hunn/hunkjønn; hun=she), man=mann, male=mannlig (hann/hankjønn; han=he).
In light of the clarification at 40, amend my previous to “Has or seeks the identifiers of another sex” and delete everything after that.
Yes.
Hypothetically, I suppose; assuming a culture that had both an adequate number of sex/gender categories to cover everyone’s internal state and universal access to necessary resources to ensure that the two categories matched in all cases. It might still privilege the outside observer, but it’s not as obvious.
Depends on your values for likely, I suppose. And also foreseeable future. It’s not intrinsically impossible, anyway. Even if it’s possible, I’m still not certain it’s desirable (the intrinsic conflation of sex and gender part; I’m totally on board with universal access to sufficient necessary resources to ensure that anatomy/presentation match internal state).
Actually that doesn’t really depend on my answer to #1; I’m pretty sure that there’d be at least some issues of justice in the hypothetical I posited for #1, which is why I’m not convinced it would be the best plan. It’s mostly a sort of intuition, though, hence the lack of detail; I’d have to think considerably on the matter to come up with specifics.
Pretty much not at all. The ‘pretty much’ is because I feel that it is/would be (to a certain extent this exists already, but it’s not as widespread as it should be) helpful to have a defined (inasmuch as such things ever are) set of courtesies for navigating things like pronouns etc., which is at least somewhat for the benefit of external observers who don’t want to know what their feet taste like.
Having now read the comments, my favorite definition is amrie’s @53.
I’ve been having a hard time with these exercises, and even more with the comments, because a lot of the concepts don’t really make sense to me. For me, sex is anatomy — for most of my life, I’ve figured that my having an unambiguously male anatomy means I’m a man — and for me, that’s _all_ it means. I have no idea what it means to “feel like a man” or “feel like a woman.” I just feel like me, (except that most of the time I feel like I’m not really me, but just pretending.) And all that stuff that everyone else seems to think that’s supposed to come along with having that anatomy, well, I’ve learned that it’s a big deal for them, and I’ve learned that stuff (just!) enough to (mostly) keep out of trouble, but I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.
Transition, for me, is less a matter of being my “true self”, whatever that is, as it is a matter of changing a particularly ill-fitting suit of clothes for one that hopefully doesn’t fit as badly. (It would be nice if it were actually _comfortable_, but that’s probably expecting too much.)
In this context/slightly alternate reality, the best definition I can come up with is “a person who has changed, is in the process of changing, or wants to change, their anatomical sex, to the extent [currently] feasible.” I’m specifying “anatomical” partly I don’t want to exclude people who are neither XX female or XY male , and partly because we don’t (yet) have the ability to change chromosomal sex.
OK, if I recall correctly, “sex” refers to the objective biology and “gender” refers to the subjective cultural nonsense arbitrarily attached to (and often conflated with) the objective biology.
And if I interpret correctly, this question asks me to presume the cultural nonsense is indistinguishable from the objective biology and define “transsexual” under those conditions.
I don’t think I can do that. If that assumption were true, it would presume either that “femininity” is a measurable physical trait that can be found in elevated levels on a dress or that humans are hermaphrodites (or otherwise lacking in such dimorphism) and one’s physical genitals are chosen by culture. Either way, a universe in which that premise is true would be so radically different from our own that trans anything would not be a meaningful concept in it.
Did I get that right? I’m not sure what you mean by “to be male is the same thing as to be a man.”
@Jake Harban:
Try reading my clarification at #40.
We’re trying to change what language means to make it more difficult to communicate. We’re not hypothesizing a universe with different physical laws or different biology or different psychology. Linguistically speaking, none of your audience will see any difference between saying someone is male and saying someone is a man. Either one could be used alone, but it would imply both masculine behaviors and male sex organs and secondary sex characteristics.
Thus definitions like opie’s at #56:
run into the problem that changing your clothes can cause people to fit this definition because your audience doesn’t understand the distinctions you might want to make using the word “sex” instead of “gender”. My sex, as understood by these people with no idea of separate words for sex and gender, might not match other’s definition(s) of me if what in our reality’s language we would call gender expression did not match other’s definition(s) of me.
The challenge is to imagine the same types of people with the same types of experiences as those types of experiences and people we describe as “transsexual”, and make those people and their experiences intelligible to folk who literally have never imagined that such a thing as a feminine man could exist, much less a female man.
I don’t know if this is Crip Dyke’s point, but “folk who literally have never imagined…” includes > 90 % of the people in the world I live in — i.e., USA in 2015.
The problem they have, and the problem I have despite being trans (AFAIK), is that the sex/gender distinction doesn’t really say anything to them. It’s word games. The problem is to get the experience across. For 99% of the people out there, it’s like trying to explain what ultraviolet looks like.
I’ve been reading a lot of TG fiction, and getting the experience across to totally non-trans people is a common theme. One of my favorite stories in this line is Shoes (by Heather Rose Brown.) Except, for me, it’s a lot worse than what the story describes. Having a male body and having to live in a world that insists on treating me as male is like wearing shoes that don’t fit at all and give me blisters and bunions but all these years I’ve just assumed that that was what walking around felt like. “You mean, it’s possible to stand and walk and not have it hurt???”
Just to burble a little more (because this comment thread isn’t long enough :-) ):
“Folk who literally have never imagined” includes a lot of trans folk, too.
Up until I read Zinna Jone’s “That was dysphoria?” post, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea, either. You grow up not having words, not having concepts for what you experience, because in the world you live in, it doesn’t exist. You just feel weird and you don’t know why and you can’t explain why, even to yourself. And then one day, someone brings you some odd-looking things and says, “try putting them on your feet.” And you say, “those are shoes??” And they say, “try them on.” And at first, it feels weird, but after a while, you realize, your feet don’t hurt.
Yes, there are people who say, “I knew I was really a girl [or: really a boy] when I was four.” But there are plenty of us who didn’t figure out what was going with us on until much, much later, and only with the help of people who could put our own experience in words (or stories, or whatever) that made sense to us.
@Crip Dyke 72:
My apologies. Despite internet etiquette to read the whole thread before posting, it seems like cheating for these exercises so I try not to.
So wait. Are you asking how to explain the concept of “transsexual” to someone who has not mentally and/or linguistically distinguished sex and gender before? Because I’d say something like: “It refers to a person who actively rejects or passively fails to meet the cultural conventions and expectations assigned to their gender.” If I had time/room for more than a dictionary type definition, I’d start explaining the distinction between biology and culture.
Warning: I will now commence some ignorant prattling like a foreigner who barely speaks the language trying to tell the locals how they ought to do something I don’t know how to do myself.
It seems to me, odd person that I am, that explaining the difference between biology and culture should be fairly easy. I suspect that the average person can be convinced at minimum that the top hats of your example are not inherently gendered outside of our culture’s belief that they are. (Deeper notions like men’s “superiority” will be harder to excise.)
However, I find it beyond confusing when gendered terms are doubled to refer to sex and gender (biology and culture) alike. If we’re just talking about language and understanding that the actual concepts don’t change no matter what we call them, then “I’m a feminine man” is something I could probably understand without too much effort; “I’m a man with some attributes/interests traditionally regarded as feminine” spells it out in full clarity, but “I’m a woman” sounds like a self-evident absurdity. “I want to be free of gendered culture” or “I want to be able to do things considered feminine” is a request that sounds entirely reasonable, but “I want to live as a woman” is a sentence I couldn’t even parse until you started these threads.
Now I’m not going to claim my ability to understand stuff is reflective of the general population. I’m oddly idiosyncratic in a number of ways. I hate the term “identify as X” regardless of context. (“I identify as X” sounds to me like “I’m not X but wish to receive the benefits (and not drawbacks) of X membership anyway; I suspect my hatred comes from over-exposure to white people claiming they “identify as” First Nations.) I’m also extremely averse to the idea of treating something as part of my identity on principle; it feels like letting an idea own me instead of the other way around and I know I’ve seen far too many people declare that they reject an obvious fact or a clearly good idea because it’s not consistent with their “identity.”
But I can’t help but ask— is there a particular reason that you or the trans community or a random dude named Clarice specifically use those doubled terms? How come you discover you’re a “man” instead of a “woman with some masculine aspects?” How come you “live as a woman” rather than “disregard gendered rules?”
If you feel like banging your head against a wall, you can try explaining what it means to “identify” as a gender. It’s doubtful I’ll ever understand but hey maybe you’ll get lucky?
OK ramble over.
From Jake Harban:
It’s best not to make rules that are literally impossible to enforce. (How would I know you read the thread unless you told me?) Thus there’s no “rule” against it, but yes, the exercises are more productive if you don’t read ahead.
Yes. It does seem like it should be easy, and there are ways to do it competently. It’s not impossible at all. But it is tricky. Trans* people aren’t taught how to conceive of gender as something that can be separated from sex, or at least not until recently, and very few of us as a percentage even now.
No, we invent it. Nearly every single one of us. And along the way, we make mistakes. Some of those mistakes become familiar and comfortable. They are our mistakes. We own them. Even if using one’s own personally-invented language doesn’t communicate to our audiences certain things about one’s experience, the use of that personally invented language still communicates self…and even more importantly, autonomy.
Using them is a powerful experience, and an experience of power:
After so much confusion in understanding, “Just what am I?” Having a set of words that one knows mean me provides the safety of certainty. When someone asks us, as too often happens, “What are you?” We don’t need the person initiating this verbal attack to deeply understand our experiences. Rather, our most important and immediate need is to assert our personhood.
And, of course, with those for whom it matters, we can go on to, “start explaining the distinction between biology and culture,” as you say. The people we love come to know that when we spout whatever shorthand with which we’ve made peace, with which we’ve identified, we really mean everything we said in hours of difficult conversation. All of it. At once. Even the contradictory bits. And suddenly, even though our idiographies can’t serve the purpose of broadly educating the public or changing the culture, the fact that those we love do understand our shorthand statements is mistaken for evidence that those shorthand statements really have the power on their own to communicate who we are.
This becomes a reason to cling to our personal languages, even though without those hours, without the motivated efforts of someone who cares enough to want to do the hard work of learning someone else’s way of thinking, these statements can’t possibly transmit the ideas we wish to propagate. Worse, because these are personal languages, and because there are so, so many of us, all of us end up insisting on truths that appear to conflict, to contradict the truths expressed by others.
And yet there is so much similarity in experience. Most of the apparent contradictions disappear when we take the longer path of muddling about for hours until we stumble onto phrases that each of us can understand the same way. But the common phrases I find with my best friend won’t be the common phrases that best friend finds with their new sex partner, and so on.
What is missing is an actual language with which to express our experiences. Without that, and without the teaching of that language to all the children that might, someday, feel the need to express or understand trans experience, we sever not merely the social connections that are necessary for some great liberation movement, but the connections that are necessary for one trans person to feel known to one half-way decent friend.
On the topic of seeming to be easy, and yet…not. This definition of transsexual offered by Jake Harban:
nimbly avoids the pitfalls of sex/gender conflation by basing the definition on assigned “cultural conventions and expectations”. For those who don’t understand the distinction between “sex” and “gender” it literally doesn’t matter whether those conventions and expectations are assigned to bodies or cultural roles or psychological identities. If they don’t understand the distinctions between “female” and “woman” then they will understand the same expectations to be applied to having (genital) labia and ovulating as they do to “persons named Cindy”. That person wouldn’t expect to find someone who ovulates wearing a tux any more or any less often than that person would expect to find someone named Cindy wearing a tux.
Nonetheless, an essential part of transsexual experience is dissociation from one’s body. Whether this is subjectively perceived as voluntary (as some do) or originating subconsciously, with choices only about how and when we communicate the experience of dissociation, it is undoubtedly part of the transsexual experience. Yet this internal conflict with one’s own body is not represented in your definition.
And so it’s a good definition of something (and we should thank Jack Harban for such a good illustration of how to sidestep the linguistic and conceptual confusion we’re struggling against)…but is it a good definition of what we here understand as a transsexual experience?
Yes. Yes, “I’m a woman” does sound like self-evident absurdity to those who don’t carefully distinguish sex and gender. Given this, is it any wonder that transsexual experience is frequently understood as the experience of “a man who wants to be a woman or a woman who wants to be a man”?
And you cite good reason to be suspicious.
There are some reasons why the phrase has become common. In psychology it has the clear meaning of “when I think to myself about myself, X is how I refer to my relationship to the category of being (race, gender, etc.) under discussion”. This is an operational definition, and a clear one (as operational definitions must be). It serves a good and useful purpose. It gets used in psychological literature and can be counted on in certain contexts for a precise meaning that actually has significant utility. Gender, An Ethnomethodological Approach imports this sense of identification into anthropology and simultaneously provides a good background of it’s usefulness in studying the psychology of gender.
But it’s utility in a specific frame isn’t the only reason it became popular. No, though I have no research, it’s my opinion that it became popular in part because it’s a much more conservative way of framing things than “I am a man” or “I am a woman”. As trans* folk deal with the great fears involved in coming out, it is both easier to defend “I identify as a woman”. I mean, who could challenge that? It’s a description of your internal choices of reference. They aren’t in your head, they can’t make any substantive argument that it is not true that you identify in a certain way. So it feels more defensible, in case the conversation goes that way.
But it’s also less aggressive in the sense that it does not tell other people that their perceptions are wrong. In US culture, and many cultures around the globe including the cultures of the vast majority of people alive, to be wrong about someone’s gender is to be wrong about something that one is supposed to get right every time simply to function in society. “Whoops, I married a man on accident when I thought I was marrying a woman!” just isn’t supposed to happen. To the audience of your coming out statement, “I am a man” is too-frequently heard, “You are wrong about my gender.” That, in turn, is literally heard as an insult to the audience’s intelligence and basic social skills and basic social knowledge.
No one likes to be thought incompetent at basic tasks. By sidestepping the issue of whether or not others’ perceptions are “correct” about you in any particular sense, a trans* person gets to sidestep the possibility of insulting someone loved (or someone in an important relationship, like a thesis advisor). This, in turn, minimizes the possibility that the person will feel forced to attack the legitimacy of your coming out statement merely out of a defensive reaction asserting, “But I am competent with basic social knowledge, with basic social skills, with basic observational skills. I am actually as intelligent as I’ve always thought of myself.”
Minimizing defensive and hostile reactions is frequently a priority for trans* folk coming out. Though these coming out statements are only rarely made to an audience that has a grounding in psychological theories of identification, by assisting in minimizing these reactions, the language of identification helps improve relationships with others and even manage our internal experiences of fear about those relationships, and often about abandonment or vulnerability to those who know us (potentially too well).
I’ve tried reading as few of the other comments as possible, but it’s hard when you’re scrolling through so many.
In any case, I’m leaning towards a ‘undefined’ answer, too.
Because is it the biological sex that trumps the socially-perceived gender, or is it the other way around? Yes, as pointed out above, we’re very good at putting all people with breasts into a single category, but those lines can be rather fluid, too (women with ‘boyish’ figures, men with large breasts), so where’s the cut-off? Does the buck stop at having a penis, for a male-man? Or do the breasts make xir a female-woman? Or is it the clothing that are placed on top of these attributes?
I’m trying to think about this, but I keep going around in circles. At first it seemed rather simple, as ‘someone born assigned male, who identifies as a woman (alternatively, assigned female at birth but identifies as a man)’, but there’s so many other fluid possibilities that the term then must apply to those too (as they ‘transcend’ sexuality/gender, therefore transsexual because they’re not in any of the available, individual categories). So… circles. Because which is the main identifier, if sex = gender – is it the sex, or is it the gender? How can it be either, if sex = gender? It’s not polite to ask about a stranger’s genitals, but if they’re presenting as a female-woman, but are really a male-man, how else am I to know? Ask? But then they day they are a male-man, yet their social gender presentation is female-woman… so, eh?
(This is pretty binary thinking here, I understand that… but I can’t really articulate the thoughts that follow up on this… like I said, circles all the way down. Also, I may be conflating a lot of different and separate things here. I’m just not sure.)
@Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden, #72:
Now you’re adding another pair of words… Being a feminine man or a masculine woman does’t seem odd at all, to me. Aspects of a person’s behavior or appearance (plus lots of other things, almost anything, really) are labeled “masculine” or “feminine” depending on whether they’re considered suitable for men or women in that culture at that moment in time. Sure, some of those “feminine” or “masculine” characteristics are just exaggerated biological sex characteristics (people with XY chromosomes tend to have more body hair than people with XX chromosomes, so having absolutely no body hair whatsoever is super feminine), but most of it seems completely arbitrary to me. It’s like a weird game with constantly-changing rules I don’t understand, or see the point of, except that sometimes you get punished if you break them, so you can’t just ignore the whole thing like I’d prefer.
@Crip Dyke 72
Not reading other replies before posting may not be a “rule” rule but I try to anyway, hence my missing your earlier comment.
Thanks for explaining about how even trans* people have to learn about the sex/gender distinction. I sort of suspected as much— my being relatively free of gendered assumptions during the first few years of my life was a quirk of my upbringing (and the way my brain is wired) not applicable to must people regardless of their circumstances.
I certainly appreciate inventing language that works for you; I have my own dictionary of idiosyncratic terms I use only amongst my immediate social circle. However, because I tend to be paranoid of being misunderstood, I never consider using such terms among people not “in” on them. (Parenthetically, this also means I’m always a bit on guard when I have to make a distinction between “sex” and “gender” rather than between “sex/gender” and “gendered attributes/gendered culture/etc;” to me, “gender” has always been a convenient word that means the same thing as “sex (n)” but can’t be mistaken for “sex (v)” so if I were made King of Language, I would avoid repurposing that specific word even if I had to invent a new one for what you call “gender.”)
That said, I generally DO distinguish between sex and gender, and a penis-owner saying: “I’m a woman” sounds/ed absurd not because I don’t distinguish the two but because “woman” sounds like the language of sex rather than gender. In fact, the phrase “woman assigned male at birth” bothers me particularly because “woman” (the objective term) is applied to the subjective cultural aspect, while “assigned male” (the subjective term) is applies to the objective biology. It sounds backwards; like it should be “man assigned female by culture.”
I do understand the use of “identify as” to mitigate the gut reaction of “I can make basic observations” even if I don’t know the experience myself. (Since I actually don’t have the same level of ability to “read” people, I’ve been forced to take mistakes in stride and although I don’t often misjudge someone’s gender, I suspect a person I’ve never met correcting me on their gender would be less unpleasant than a person I know very well having to remind me who they are.)
However, I think I’m missing something with regard to disassociation. Are you talking about, like, a distinct sense that your body is wrong because you were born with the wrong set of genitals? (I’ve heard the term “gender dysphoria” for that.) Is that separate from the cultural stuff? Separate but overlapping? Separate, but the cultural stuff can cause it and/or the other way around? (Eg, if you don’t fully distinguish sex and gender on an unconscious level, then being told your preferred activities or personality traits are “girly” makes you think you should have a vagina because to you, sex and gender are the same and/or if you feel you absolutely should have been born with a penis, you start to adopt activities and attributes that are considered “masculine” for the same reason.)
I can think of many ways I’d like my body changed but I can barely imagine what it’d be like to disassociate from it. (Unless I already am; thinking of yourself as basically software, your brain as the badly-designed hardware running it, and the rest of your body as a meat puppet that acts as its life support system and mechanism for interacting with the outside world is the default condition, right? It can be hard to tell.)
Off doing other stuff/arguing with other people on the internet.
To my part in the discussion WAAAY above: My bad. It’s a semantics/definitional issue. I took the statement “sex is indistinguishable from gender” to mean that gender and sex were therefore defined by the person rather than their genitals. I would be more comfortable with that definition than the opposite way around, ie the genitals taking the lead and a person’s gender and sex being then immutable without significant medical intervention.
I’m a bit idealistic maybe?
Hi Crip thanks for the clarification at 40.
I had taken the exercise to be that gender was actually locked to biology. An interesting provocation in its own right.
From your clarification l understand you to mean that there is no concept of gender really and anyone that would identify as trans in this world is living in a nightmare where their sense of self cannot be expressed.
So transexual would be a person suffering from some strange and inexpressible delusion from the point of view of others.
Am I getting there?