Corimelaena sp. The Twisty Hemiptera Department, May 26, 2007.
I adjourned to the bug paddock to snap this foto after throwing a copy of Newsweek across the room. It’s the May 21 issue, the one with a picture of a baby on the front. The baby is wearing a half pink, half blue wunzy. “The Mystery of GENDER,” it says. “THE NEW VISIBILITY OF TRANSGENDER AMERICA IS SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE ANCIENT RIDDLE OF IDENTITY.”
That’s why I bought the magazine. This ‘ancient riddle of identity’? What the hell is that?
Alas. Like all Newsweek articles, this one sheds no light whatsover on anything, ancient riddles of identity or otherwise. Its several thousand words could have been boiled down to “There are transgender people around.”
Here’s a howler, though: “Actively expressing the feminine in me has helped me grow closer to God,” says some godbag who has been brainwashed by patriarchy to think long hair and bras are an “identity.”
Ay yi yi.
The rest of the piece pretty much deals with how weird it is for the binary-minded when people cross over to the dark side and want to play sports. It turns out that Renee Richards, famed 70’s-era trans pro tennis player, is no exception to the “all old people are bigots” rule. A septuagenarian, Richards opines “God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity.”
Whereupon I threw the magazine.
NOTE: I shouldn’t have to say this, but that’s what I thought the last time, so: I will not admit bigoted anti-trans crap into the comments section.
Ah, Newsweek, a possibly not at all adulterated piece of crap.
*THIS IS THE VOICE OF PATRIARCHY, TWO IS THE MOST OF ANYTHING THAT THERE CAN POSSIBLY BE. ONE OF THE TWO SHALL BE BEWIENERED THE OTHER OF THE TWO WILL BE DESCRIBED AS THE ABSENCE OF BEWIENERED*
I don’t know what the voice of the patriarchy sounds like, probably like Darth Vader on the inside but some sort of folksy grampa on the outside.
Does this website constitute a piece of bigoted anti-trans crap?
http://www.questioningtransgender.org/
Just wondering.
Everything makes me think of Firestone, these days. I think nuclear families serve up bigotry with a childs first solid food, then they park the little ones in front of the teevee for a second helping.
Oh, Newsweek. Always ready to feed into a fucked up system.
My feelings on the existence of transgender people* is this. The fact that some individuals are transgendered is proof that the patriarchy sucks. Granted, it’s possible this understanding is incorrect, in which case please correct me, but in a post-revolution world everyone will be able to feel comfortable in their body, no matter where they fall on the gender continuum, because dual genders themselves will be a thing of the past.
I guess this is born out of my impression that most transfolk have made the decision to transition because they feel that they do not “fit” as members of their birth gender, or because they feel more at home with the qualities of their non-birth gender. Please, please correct me if this is a wrong assumption. But if we didn’t force people to choose in that way–but choose ONLY WHAT YOU CAME OUT AS, dammit, so not a choice at all–then people wouldn’t feel like they needed to, you know, choose to become a different gender, they could just express themselves as they felt comfortable regardless of genitalia.
So, in sum, IBTP for Newsweek.
* Not that they asked for my opinion. I feel as though I might legitimately be offending and/or stepping on toes with this, so please understand that I have had limited opportunity to learn about this first-hand and am genuinely seeking correction if I’m just being a flat-out dumbass.
If this thread is supposed to be about bigotry, then I wonder why people who question transgender are held up, apropos of nothing, as the primordial bigots.
I think it’s the one the Sphinx told about “I walk on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three at night, what am I?
Louisa, the most recent (I think) post here on trans issues resulted in a rather surprising comment thread. A lot of people thought it was surprising in the not-so-good way. Twisty hadn’t been able to mod for a few days at that point, so I think she’s just making a preemptive strike this time.
wait. holdupasecond.
you mean long hair and bras AREN’T an identity?
crap.
back to the drawing board…
oh, yeah, wait. what about skirts?
lipstick? SURELY lipstick must be the font of all identity. right?
no, wait, i think it’s shoes. definitely. shoes. ok, c’mon, are you SURE it’s not bras?
on a more serious note, wren, totally.
with the caveat that i don’t think there’s really any such thing as “the one you came out as”.
if i dye my brown hair red, does that make me Transfolliculared?
what if i don’t actualy go through with the dye job, but i just “feel” like a redhead trapped in a brunet’s body? how does “dyeing the carpet to match” factor in?
ok, in all seriousness, i’ll stop thread hogging now.
That branch of transgender politics which seeks to reinforce binary sex roles is at odds with that branch of radical feminism which intersects with the Twistolution. It is the position of this blog that femininity and masculinity, as well as “woman” and “man,” for that matter, are synthetic constructs imposed by the dominant culture to bolster a class hierarchy that favors dudes. It is not the position of this blog that transgender people are subhuman. Everyone does what they gotta do to survive. It’s war.
I think Louisa might be familiar with that situation, but if not it was pretty bad. The link, though, that Louisa provides at least has a lot of info about the debate that was going on, and with which I think a number of commenters (myself, maybe others) had no idea had been raging for quite some time. So it was not clear until the very end of a horrible thread exactly where everyone was coming from. I don’t think this is an argument that anyone can win. One side demands inclusion and another demands space with which to be comfortable in light of patriarchy not providing said space. A definition of “no win”-
hm. i just realized that my above joke-ish-ness might be interpreted as being anti-trans. which i’m not, and in fact what i meant to convey was the opposite, that since i don’t see sex/gender as being an innate and rigid binary (or even rigidly connected to each other), and that i most certainly see gender as a completely social construct, i don’t think it should matter overmuch who decides to identify as what, how they do that, and what it should mean to both them and the world around them.
and that goes for myself, too, woman identified person that i usually kinda sorta am. (i mean, what does that even mean?)
I don’t know what the voice of the patriarchy sounds like
I like to imagine it sounds like a Vogon. You know, the kind of voice best suited for bellowing orders and issuing threats and that kind of thing.
Precisely, Pinko. I don’t propose to become embroiled in another fucking referendum on transgender politics. This is not an argument, and it is not about winning. I don’t give a fuck who uses what bathroom. The condition of perpetual conflict among the oppressed is a central feature of patriarchy. My main point is that Newsweek is lame. It’s a whole magazine about nothing.
Also, that thyreocorids are pretty. That bug is only 1/4″ long, but look how fabulous it is. Your garden is full of’em, but who can shed light on the ancient riddle of a burrower bug’s identity?
What? There’s no burrower bug ancient riddle?
“A septuagenarian, Ricahards [sic] opines ‘God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity.’”
I don’t know whether all godbaggery will be tossed to the heap from the get-go, but I’m going to go ahead and fight God with Rabbis.
There is one Jewish mystical interpretation of Genesis that claims that the first earthling was in fact hermaphroditic. Sort of. It was an earthling with a penis and and earthling with a vagina that were attached back-to-back. This didn’t do very much good. While it is often interpreted that God took Adam’s rib and formed Eve, the word translated as “rib” can also mean “side.” In this interpretation, God just split the thing in half so they could face each other.
If you regard all this as a bunch of baloney anyway, then I guess it’s not of much interest.
I wonder if I might prevail upon you, the opoponax, to avail yourself of the shift key? As a favor to me? I don’t ask for much. And besides, all the other kids are doing it.
Twisty, you got it right in one.
A lot of the trans/queer activists I know aren’t interested in usurping women or anything like that, mostly not even interested in being a “woman” or a “man,” only interested in being comfortable in their own skins. Which is I think something we are all interested in.
I can see why feminists might be angry at trans people for “defecting from femaleness” or “attempting to co-opt femaleness” when the focus is on externals and not internals. But it seems like the issue for the site linked above is that trans people can never truly transition, that is, once you have been raised as a man you have privilege and cannot ever understand women (or “be” a woman) and similarly with women — you are just masquerading into a man’s world slavishly, and will never be accepted as male.
I do accept some of this way of thinking. I don’t think that the ultimate answer, the thing that will fix gender problems, is simply to enable trans people to switch genders and eliminate prejudice against them. More important is to eliminate the gender dichotomy all together. Have female sex organs, want to behave any way you please? Great. Just don’t be oppressive. Have a good time! Have male sex organs, want to behave any way you please? Great. Just don’t be oppressive. Have a good time!
I don’t believe, of course, that even if the gender dichotomy were abolished there wouldn’t still be some people who felt they were wrongly sexed. I don’t see what’s wrong with those people attempting to alter their biological organs. It seems to me that at that stage, altering one’s genitalia and taking hormone therapy would be more of a cosmetic change than anything. It would be like choosing to get breast reductions because you are made uncomfortable by your large breasts, or like choosing to get a tattoo (though obviously more extreme than either). At this point the question wouldn’t be about gender identity; it would be about whether you think drastic elective surgery is okay (I think yes; there’s plenty of reasons people think no; it’s off-topic to argue right now).
But ultimately all this boils down to is that trans people today are, as far as I can tell, caught in a difficult bind between male and female, possessing some of the privilege and some of the un-privilege and a whole lotta anger directed at them and a whole lotta anger coming from them. As you say, Twisty — we’re all just trying to get by.
There’s an ancient riddle about how to tell the two sexes, genders, or whatever you call them, apart in the thyreocorids.
Whenever you pick one up to try to inspect it, it leaps out of your hand and runs away.
Wouldn’t you?
Could a bug that has not been visually inspected be considered to have a gender? Is the gender of all thyreocorids then only a will o’ the wisp?
Ahhhhhhhhh … sleeping pill kicking in. G’nite.
no exception to the “all old people are bigots†rule
But old people are an oppressed class! That’s a gross generalisation! No different to hating on blacks or kids or gays!
I kid. The straight white dudes who run this damn world are all fossils. Oppressed? My birkenstock! Not that I think the younger ones would do much better, mind (insert ellipses here)
“God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity.â€
Now make my miserable day and tell me she referred to God as “He.”
But she’s right. Half of us were put on this earth to blow shit up and watch porn. The other half of us were put on this earth to be blow-up porn. What’s gender got to do with it? Oh, Everything.
TF,
I was wondering if at some point you might recommend a bugly tome, perhaps a Field Guide as it were for the identification and perusal of bugly personae/entities.
More on the topic, I think I understand the argument about women’s only spaces in terms of dealing with the existing environement of dudely encroachment on everything. With the patriarchy smashed we might easily imagine unisex restrooms. with the patriarchy in place, we might NOT imagine unisex restrooms as being a viable solution (forgetting for a moment that boiling down this issue to bathrooms is highly reductionist).
Everything after this point are my thoughts trying to understand arguments/issues in this debate. I am not telling anyone how they feel, think or argue.
Actually I can’t make myself clear enough to be understood, so I’ll save it to the clipboard.
And here I was thinking they’d actually done an article that talked about the not insignificant number of people who don’t fall into binary categories either chromosomally or anatomically. Facts that might lead one to think that division into two (or any other number of) gender roles is arbitrary in the first place, regardless of whether we allow people to switch? I suppose I have unreasonably high expectations.
““A septuagenarian, Ricahards [sic] opines’[…] ”
Jesus fuck, I got [sic]ed! And here I was so smug about spelling ’septuagenarian’ right.
As for the ’sort of’ hermaphroditery of the primal human earthling, Shakes, I find it extremely interesting, and in fact, much more compelling than the rib myth. If only God hadn’t clove them! Imagine the agonies we’d have been spared.
On a related note, I heard on the radio today about the first documented case of parthenogenesis in sharks. The dude said that pretty much everybody except mammals has been seen to do this.
But I guess that’s a whole nother post.
The child of one of my cousins is transgendered. It was obvious in photos of family events over the past few years, but the topic had never come up. I simply assumed that everyone was aware.
So, recently, my mom comes to me in a concerned/whiny/tsk-tsk tone and tells me that our dear J was changing genders and everyone was so upset and that her sister, the grandmother, was just so upset and no one knew how handle it, or how to act around J now that J was D.
I resisted the urge to call my mother a concern troll. When the tip of my tongue had stopped bleeding I told her that it wasn’t about her. I told her that since it wasn’t about her that there was nothing to handle and that she should act exactly the same way that she had always acted. Keep sending birthday and holiday cards, only now address them to D instead of J. Keep calling and shooting the family breeze, but now address my cousin as D instead of J.
I don’t understand why this should cause such a ruckus.
Love the bug! More bugs like this, please!
If only people could learn to be more accepting and treat each individual as a person. I really don’t understand why people are so threatened. Just let people be whatever they are.
But, Twisty, m’dear, that would be succumbing to peer pressure, now wouldn’t it?
Though I agree, and in my heart I’m ready to make nice with the world of capitalization and just play it by the book, already (like I already do, by the way, in my professional life, of course). but oooh, it’s just so much faster this way.
Also, I happen to like the way all-small looks in typewriter fonts (a la your ‘Blame the patriarchy here’ box).
But for you, Twisty, I will see what I can do.
(what if I started using the german Method of capitalizing all Nouns, instead?)
Oh, and Shakes:
When the earth was still flat
and the clouds made of fire
and mountains stretched up to the sky,
sometimes higher,
folks roamed the Earth, like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms,
two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering out of one giant head,
so they could watch all around them
as they talked,
while they read.
And they never knew
nothing of love.
It was befo-oh-orrrrr…
Turkeys also engage in parthenogenesis, I believe. How cool is that?
There’s an interesting article in this month’s Scientific American on the genetics behind sex determination and the politics of and prejudices against “intersex diagnoses.” Scientists and medical researchers are working to eliminate the popular misconception that intersex individuals are unusual or bizarre. I think the larger implication of this kind of work is the eventual eradication of prejudices against all “non-traditional” genders.
Screw Newsweek. If you’ve let your subscription to SA lapse, at least pick up this month’s issue.
bugs are pretty.
I remember a conversation I had with a friend when it came out a classmate of ours in high school who was born a woman and had a girlfriend was transgender. My friend asked if the classmate and her girlfriendi were still lesbians, or if this made them heterosexual. I was so frustrated because I didn’t know how to explain to her what the problem with that question was. I still can’t seem to put it into words. The question just doesn’t make sense to me.
girlfriendi = girlfriend
But it won’t let me edit it.
Pinko Punko, if I may: I use Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Insects. It’s an affordable, basic guide with gorgeous photos and lots of information. It’s not particularly useful for species identication, though it ha been a good introduction for a beginner interested in entomology.
Oh, and Pinko Punko, your comments often make me want to do a little jig of delight. So, thanks for that.
wtf has left us a pretty little goodbye note on “The (new) page of consent” thread, with a special message for cathy and LYMC.
It most certainly is. I love bugs, too, and your photos are gorgeous. I know I read as a child that something like 98% of all insects are female, so I’ve always felt sympatico towards them– especially spiders, who are always led gently outside at my house. Mosquitos, however, get squished. Also, the fleas on my cats die horrible deaths. (Probably. I’m not sure how that stuff works.)
Much agreed. Twisty, this blog makes me pine for a macro lens more than anybody’s Flickr photo set ever has.
Tangentially, I have a gorgeous 3-yr old son. He has longish hair and fine features, so he looks really androgynous. I’ve found that people have no problem in asking if he’s a girl or a boy - a societal shift of the past ten years (when I worked as a nanny) from people assuming a child was one or the other, and addressing them accordingly.
(But I always want to ask them, “Why does it matter?”)
I hate that myth about the hermaphroditic people being split apart; it seems to me to promote the idea that women are dying to have any given man shove his dick in them and see if it fits.
Ah, skimmed. We were talking about a different sort-of-hermaphroditic-double-human.
“That myth” also includes a man/man being and a woman/woman being, in the Platonic version, anyway (and in the song). Also, at least in the cartoon sequence from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, they were back to back. It has nothing to do with anyone penis fitting in anyone’s vagina.
It’s a metaphorical “fitting together”, not a physical one.
Though I always sorta had issues with it because it doesn’t really find room for either bisexuality or non-monogamy. I love the idea that there is some other half of me out there, but unfortunatly no matter how lovely an idea, that doesn’t make it true. Also, am I a woman/woman, or a woman/man? How will I know? Or are bisexual people just not sure of which they are until they find who they’re looking for?
I try to console myself with the fact that it’s just a story, for goddess’ sake. And a relatively nice one from a feminist standpoint, when you compare it to all the other creation myths.
I saw the cover of the Newsweek in question, and decided not to open it, because I knew that it would piss me off. Last year, Newsweek sent me 6 months of unsolicited free issues, one of which dealt with how “feminized” education wasn’t responding to boys’ needs to jump up and down every three minutes and “unfairly rewarded” girls for being more studious.
At one point in my life, I did subscribe to Newsweek. Of course, that was the point in my life when I also susbscribed to Cosmo. I’m feeling much better now, honest.
I have a post in moderation which probably will be irrelevant by the time it clears.
Gah. I read the same article this morning, got about a third away through, and gave up in disgust.
It seems so often that the only time we appear in this sort of press is to give some hack the chance to espouse Louann Brizendine-ish garbage about how innate gendering supposedly is. But then again, if they actually gave trans activists a voice, they might just have to confront this nonsense for what it is.
Binary sex assumptions are scientifically incorrect. There are QUITE A FEW people born on this planet whose sexual “identity” has to be “assigned” at birth by, for lack of a better word, authorities.
Silly me (seriously) I had thought that hermaphrodites born nowadays were left that way. Sadly, no: they assign a sex to these children and socialize them as the sex that the doctor or whoever picked. They usually pick whatever sex is easiest for them to surgically fake.
Often, this assignment does not “take”, and the child grows up more or less completely freaked out. (I read of a very sad case where a young boy had his weiner chopped off in a BOTCHED CIRCUMCISION. Figuring that he would be a total loss as a MALE if he didn’t have an enormous cock, they assigned him to the female sex and surgically created girl parts for him. Because he was still genetically male, this did not work out well. THis young man is now an activist trying to get doctors and hospitals to quit assigning sexes to babies, and quit performing surgery on them when they are too young to consent.)
There is nothing at all new about there being individuals who do not fit the binary sex model AT ALL.I don’t mean to imply that any transsexuals are more transsexual than others, or more deserving of sympathy or anything. I only offer this as evidence that gender is NOT a binary and never has been.
Actually, there was a lot more going on behind the scenes in that particular case — the decision to raise him as a girl wasn’t actually made until he was about 2 (an age when most toddlers are already acutely aware of which team they’re supposed to be playing on and what that means), and the doctor in charge of the whole thing was massively insane, and, well, a ton more completely outrageous stuff was also going on. People paint that case as a sort of proof that obviously our minds know our true gender which cannot be altered by surgery and is thus totally innate. in reality the whole thing is much more complex. The only obvious truth is that the surgery should never have been performed.
Also, the man in question died a few years ago, either from psychological trauma related suicide, or from some completely unrelated and very unfortunate other thing (cancer, car accident, I forget).
the opoponax: It was suicide. The man you’re talking about was David Reimer.
“I read of a very sad case where a young boy had his weiner chopped off in a BOTCHED CIRCUMCISION.”
25 years ago some white/right wing neo-nazi group sent me a news-clipping of this or a similar story in an effort to keep me from having my son circumcised. I was so disgusted I almost had him cut.
V- thanks, that is really very sweet. That book sounds like a good start.
I see it listed on this bibliography page from “Field Guide to Field Guides”
I hope that link works, it is from a Google book search. I see that spiders got the shaft from Simon and Schuster. I used to have the Audubon guide to North American Butterflies, which was quite good. I just noticed they have a field guide to weather, which for some reason is cracking me up.
In a world where gender is prescribed according to a whip-strict and arbitrary binary division of humans, and that the practice of “masculinity” or, even more emphatically, “femininity” requires a considerable and sustained performance, all that surprises me is that more people don’t consider themselves transgendered.
All femininity is drag. The cisgendered woman who practices the art of femininity - blonde extensions, boob implants, mascara, lip-plumping injections, whatever else you can think of - is fundamentally not that different to the transgendered woman anyway, as far as I’m concerned. I practice a fair few aspects of femininity myself, and would feel very hypocritical having a go at transfolk for indulging in the same. We’re all on the losing end of the patriarchy stick.
Madeline:
I do. Because there wouldn’t be a “wrong”. There might be people who decided to modify their genitals or other features, but that would have nothing to do with conforming to a “correct” identity as Man or Woman. It is quite different to change your body because a whim to do so strikes you, versus changing your body because society has shamed and intimidated you into doing so. It is for this reason that I am not bothered when my friends get tattoos. I would be bothered if they got plastic tits.
This is exactly the reason why so many women have learnt to parrot the “It’s my choice!” line: because it would be possible, were there no patriarchy, to modify yourself in any way you choose freely and without political implications. At the moment, it is not - and so all of us, trans and cis, are stuck in the same crap boat.
One side demands inclusion and another demands space with which to be comfortable in light of patriarchy not providing said space. A definition of “no winâ€
One of the important things here is to be clear about what is meant by inclusion (or exclusion) and space, and also to recognise that if two people or sets of people have conflicting demands then some precedence must be given to those wanting to be left alone as opposed to those *not* wanting to leave others alone.
The inclusion/exclusion thing is important because there is a big, big difference between
1) I want some occasional escape and chill-out space with other people that share [whatever defined characteristic]*
and
2) Because of your NOT-[whatever defined characteristic] I want to see you discriminated against in wider society in terms of education, healthcare, legal protection, and so on.
People, women, who are saying 1) get accused of saying 2) even though their beliefs are the opposite to 2). And the accusers say that in order to prove that those women are not saying 2) they must not be allowed to create their own space as in 1).
So the discussion becomes impossible, because even though in theory it should not have to be a no-win situation, in practice it turns quite nasty.
* [whatever defined characteristic] can get tricky though, because the question is: defined by who ? If everything we are is only a social construct then why not all muck-in together all the time ?
“25 years ago some white/right wing neo-nazi group sent me a news-clipping of this or a similar story in an effort to keep me from having my son circumcised. I was so disgusted I almost had him cut.”
The kid isn’t to blame for the psychos. I’m strongly anti-circ and strongly anti-nazi. I feel sorry for that kid with the botched circ, it clearly didn’t occur to them that the problems were caused by having your genitals cut up and the attempted gender binary.
“Binary sex assumptions are scientifically incorrect. There are QUITE A FEW people born on this planet whose sexual “identity†has to be “assigned†at birth by, for lack of a better word, authorities.”
It’s a tiny percentage, about 1 in 1500. Binary sex does exist. Every human being on this planet has two biological parents, one female and one male. It’s fundamental to our initial existence as humans.
Intersex doesn’t really have anything to do with the trans debate however and some intersex people are offended by their circumstances being brought into an argument that really has nothing to do them or their experiences.
all this makes me think of a news story i overheard a few days ago about a great new test they’ve concocted where at 6 wks into a pregnancy you can know the sex of the fetus. Human rights folk are worried that this will cause a rise in the aborting of “girl” babies since most want “boys”…
on a lighter note, they joked that this test will allow parents plenty of time to paint the babies room pink or blue.
holy crap…theres so many problems with this my head starts to spin.
but its a sobering example of the very real dangers of this ridiculous gender binary crap as well as the assumption/dictation that our sex organs predetermine our gender expression.
sad sad humans.
delphyn, I agree that intersex and transgender are distinct issues, but I also think that they exist on a continuum related to gender and are considered by many to be “unnatural” (I hate that term by the way), which is why they are, rightly or wrongly, lumped together. I think it shouldn’t be a matter of shame to relate one to the other (or to any discussion of gender)–but that may just be wishful thinking.
(As an aside, the Scientific American article says that 1 in 4500 births are intersex and that 5 sex reassignment surgeries are performed daily in the U.S. (not all on infants I assume).
“God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity.â€
What??
That would seem to imply the invisible sky pilot only intended for there to be 1 gender.
So, ok..fine. I can deal with that. There was only 1 intended gender. We all start out as female….so male would be the fuck up, right?
I disagree Virago. Intersex is a physical experience related to sex, it doesn’t have anything to do with gender (gender meaning the artifical cultural constructs that our society has created around male and female). The intersex people that I have heard objecting to (not being ashamed of) having their experiences co-opted in arguments about transsexualism, are objecting to two quite different experiences being seen as similar or as part of a continuum, as you are doing here.
Once patriarchy is smashed gender will no longer exist. Women, men and intersexed people will however.
I think that, as a physical manifestation of sex, no, intersex doesn’t have anything to do with the social construct of gender. But I have also read accounts of individuals who have undergone an arbitrary assignment of sex as infants who must later deal with the psychological ramifications of that physical manifestation (which we all do really), and that does have to do with gender. When the physical doesn’t “match” the psychological in these individuals, it is related to gender issues.
Yes, it’s true that gender will no longer matter one day, but to get to that day, we must necessarily begin examine how and why we (and others) conflate sex with gender. I believe that it means examining how and where sex and gender interact on all levels.
I hope it’s not a matter of co-opting arguments, but rather relating one to the other. (But again, that might be wishful thinking.)
“When the physical doesn’t “match†the psychological in these individuals, it is related to gender issues.”
The problem with relating that argument to trans is that with intersex people there is a physical manifestation of why the physical may not “match” the psychological. In trans there is no such pathology (if that’s the right word, not sure if it is).
I don’t think it’s possible to extrapolate from the experience of intersex people that sex must at its root be psychological and thus if someone “feels” they are the wrong sex they must be correct and it is their bodies that are mistaken.
I wrote a lot before I realized I was getting off track. All that schtuff will be posted here shortly.
Now for some random replies to this thread:
Shakes:
And I just read girlfriendi as something from Old Norse, and parsed it [masc nom sg]. Ye gads I’m a geek.
AND:
pheeno, I just had a vision of an old, bearded, slightly transparent dude with no teeth in 1920s flying goggles riding astride an antiquated, dilapidated, likewise slightly transparent biplane. He was having a hot old time, I can tell you.
Now for the actual comment.
I let my adventurous nature out for a romp yesterday morning when I told a 16-yr-old male that I was baiting sexists on YouTube. It was a good exercise in Feminism 101, of course. It was an actual conversation, which surprised me to no end, during which the other conversant kept trying to justify things he’d been socialized into believing AND integrate them into the thing that I had said was so contraversial, saying “women are equal to men”. We got into the issue of gender politics, and this little tidbit came up:
And the light bulb that went off, just now, was that gender socialization == brainwashing. We’re being brainwashed now, and have been for centuries. What I was describing was not brainwashing, but allowing people to be who and how they are, with no outside interference from *anyone*.
That, of course, is utopia, no place in the world as it is.
And what I’m actually doing is trying to un-learn the brainwashing I’ve already experienced, the things that I was taught that deluded me about the things I am privileged to, the way I ’should’ be, the ‘fact’ that I ‘am’ a ‘woman’. I am Me. I am Human. But beyond that, I deny anyone else the delusion that they have some sort of say in who or how I am.
For it not being that easy, IBTP.
And I get the prize for Jumping the Gun: Forgot to post the link to the rest of my ruminations. Here it is, in case you’re interested.
Delphyne and Virago -
Just a few thoughts to add:
1.) virtually all intersexed people are raised within a gender binary and probably identify as an “intersexed man” or an “intersexed woman”, rather than an “intersexual”. Some of them don’t find out they are intersexed for years - for example, a woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome may be raised as female and find out when she’s a teenager that she has XY chromosomes and no uterus.
2.) A lot of intersexed disorders are mostly “cosmetic”, like being born with non-patriarchy approved (ambiguous) genitalia, and many intersexed people are able to have children. AFAIK, the odds for some of the chromosomal disorders are not as good (XXY or XO for example), but then again there are non-intersexed people who also can’t have children.
3.) I think it’s actually kind of hard to draw the line when assigning sex, because there’s even a lot of variation of hormone levels, shape/size of genitalia, etc. within the non-intersexed population. I read that baby boys (and I think this was mentioned upthread) will be assigned as girls if their penis is not x length and if that’s the only criteria, why not make it x-1 or x 2 length?
So I avoid derailing the thread, isna.org has a lot of info about intersex issues.
Nightgigjo:
I like “girlfriendi” as a masc. sg. nom., but it’s too bad it’s (grammatically) weak.
I wonder how much of the day-to-day binary-enforcing silliness we could avoid if we spoke a language that didn’t have gendered personal pronouns, like maybe Finnish.
http://www.earthlife.net/insects/classtax.html
This Web site has a lot of great information about insects, including a pretty comprehensive set of links to other sources on the Web. For anyone interested in insect biology–anatomy and physiology–the classic text is “The Insects: Structure and Function”, by R.F. Chapman. The book is beautifully written and illustrated. (I would provide an Amazon link, but I think a second URL will get this post spam-filtered.)
And just to indulge my pedantic compulsions: spiders are not insects. Spiders, like insects, are in the phylum arthropoda, but they are arachnids (as are scorpions, ticks, and mites).
pheeno wrote
>….so male would be the fuck up, right?
Genetically that’s right. As we all know from watching too much CSI females are XX and males are XY. The Y is an X chromosome with 1/4 of it genetic information missing. The male is actually an evolutionary derivative of the female organism. That rib story reversed it because prehistoric males needed some way to justify their arrogance and domination of females.
Not to continue to interject science, but the XX = female and the XY = male is being questioned by researchers even as we speak. Turns out that it may be certain genes–not whole chromosomes–that determine sex. The manipulation of these genes produces XX males and XY females.
There may be more to the function of these genes than just the formation of sex-related organs, as many are expressed in the brain long before gonads begin to form. The implications of this are: Yikes.
Catherine, you said what I meant much better than I did. Thank you for replying - I slipped into terminology that is often used now, but which would not then be appropriate or applicable.
Of course, in birds it’s the females who have heterozygous sex chromosomes and males who have homozygous ones; males are ZZ and females are ZW. It just gets weirder from there. I love science.
I also love that photo: the beetle as cabochon.
I think it’s interesting that we have here a recurrence of the category versus dimension debate that seems to go on in every field of study. Categories are too restrictive and don’t acknoweledge the fuzziness of the boundaries (there is no such thing as an absolute category) while dimensions can account for lots of variation but don’t give us that neat sensation of knowing that a certain group share similar traits and therefore ‘belong’ together. It is a very big debate in mental health at the moment where the categories that exist just don’t match the science. For some reason the instinct to categorize persists though.
Thank you for that website, LouisaMayAlcott. Very interesting stuff. But then, I’m considered a piece of bigoted, anti-trans crap in some circles.
Mar said,
So am I, I suspect. There was some discussion of that old thread at Pandagon recently, and I went back and reread my posts. I still think that knitting and crochet are separate, distinct, equal, and able to live together in peace an harmony. IBTP that we’re fighting.
Hey, Mar
So am I
:-)
I know spiders are distincto from bugaboos, but I can’t as well try to identify a generally creepy crawly without nature’s full palette illustrated, and at my fingertips, and somehow portable. I presume this imaginary field guide will need to be carried in Twisty’s unobtainable or Platonic ideal of a bag, because 100,000 or so crunchy critters are not gonna fit in a slim, revolutionary pamphlet of bug Blame.
Su writes: I think it’s interesting that we have here a recurrence of the category versus dimension debate that seems to go on in every field of study.
I’ve never heard the argument framed this way. Can you elaborate on this idea?
In my experience, the “hard” sciences support both categorizing and dimension modes of thinking. In fact, good science requires both. But “hard” science has little to say about gender, really.
In re: the identification of spiders, insects, bugs, et cetera.
I recently saw a commercial for a cellular phone that one can point in the direction of an unknown piece of music and the phone will identify the song. (I need this feature, why?)
And: We don’t have this kind of technology for insect identification, why? Oh, right, probably because we’re in the midst of a mass extinction event and the technology couldn’t possibly keep up with all the disappearing species.
For useless technological advances and mass extinction, IBTP.
Pinko,
One of the bug vs insect dealios is does it or does it not have a thorax. Most county extension offices have tons of info on your friendly neighborhood crawlies. Sometimes they can refer you to an ent. that gives intro talks for the local gardeners.
I bet they have that technology in STAR TREK WORLD
“…i don’t think it should matter overmuch who decides to identify as what, how they do that, and what it should mean to both them and the world around them.
and that goes for myself, too, woman identified person that i usually kinda sorta am. (i mean, what does that even mean?)” opoponox
I know, I know. You were born with a womb. This does seem to matter overmuch on this planet and you will be treated accordingly whether you chose to use it or not, or even identify with it.
“I know spiders are distincto from bugaboos, but I can’t as well try to identify a generally creepy crawly without nature’s full palette illustrated, and at my fingertips, and somehow portable.”
Arachnids have eight legs, insects six.
–ttcc
A few months old, but still relevant to the issue of transgender issues in the press. From AngryBrownButch:
An important victory was recently won in the struggle for trans rights, specifically around health care […T]he City of New York is obligated to pay for the sexual reassignment surgery of Mariah Lopez, a young trans woman of color who was denied this important and necessary medical care while in the care of the NYC foster system. The City is constitutionally required to provide adequate medical coverage for all children in its care, and SRS is a medically approved procedure, one that is often necessary for trans people.
The links to the articles are amazing; talk about transphobia in the press.
When I teach biology at the local community college in this conservative town, I particularly enjoy introducing topics like intersex phenotypes and sex chromosome trisomy in my usual low-key monotone. Someone usually pretzelizes their brain trying to fit the biological reality into the grotesque confines of their definition of normal. Fun to watch! And I take it as evidence that I have planted a seed that may help open a mind.
Not long ago, I read an article by a transgendered scientist who gave a talk shortly after his “she-to-he” transition. During the talk, a colleague, unaware of the situation, turned to another colleague in the audience and commented, “He is so much better than his sister.”
IBTP. Long live the twistolution!
Hi virago- I was thinking about certain controversies in evolutionary biology like the Wallacian line/zone where there is a change of fauna types (marsupials below the line/zone). For years there was a to or fro about where the demarcation between the two fauna types was. People really wanted to pin it down to an exact grid reference but the harder they looked at the boundary the fuzzier it became. What happened was a lurching from one perspective to another. Science certainly supports both approaches I was just thinking that it seems very difficult for people to maintain both approaches in one concept simultaneously. This may be woolly thinking on my part but its been on my mind as the DSMV is likely going to undergo a radical shift to more dimensional approaches.
Hmm. I may very well come off as transphobic, though I don’t think I am, but I have a transgendered sister (mtf) and the male privilege she retains drives me absolutely fucking crazy, to the point where most of the time I really, really, want to strangle her. She very much conforms to the sexbot stereotype (tall, very skinny, always in high heels, makeup, frilly sexy clothes) and will criticize me mercilessly because I don’t. She has no clue at all about feminism and probably doesn’t think there is any need for it, and will not listen when I try to explain. An example of her attitude: she thinks catcalls are complementary, and doesn’t get (though I have explained it) that they are actually threatening.
I sometimes think that the Gods have given me the most deliberately annoying sibling to teach me some profound lesson or other, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.
Oh did I mention she works in porn?
No one I talk to gets why she drives me so crazy. They all assume I’m just uncomfortable with her because she’s trans. Which is not it at all. Please, someone out there tell me they understand what I’m talking about!
(Apologies if I’ve “jacked the thread”; I’ve been quietly going crazy here for some time and this was the first relevant thread I’ve seen in a friendly forum, so it just kind of came blurting out.)
i’m guessing that all of the above are not because she is trans, but because she is clueless about feminism.
there are many women in this world, born as women, who are equally clueless.
I should have said that I was thinking about categorisation as a necessary prerequisite for discrimination and that came up because I remembered that homosexuality was only removed from classification as a mental disorder in 1973. Psychiatry has a pretty murky history as a tool of oppression and genocide. Some eugenics laws, inspired by the desire to keep the population free of mental disorder existed right up until the 50’s and later in places like Denmark and Finland. I was wondering in my convoluted way whether the move away from a system of classification (the DSM) that emphasises discrete categories is partly inspired by realisation of how these categories and the process of categorisation in itself have been instrumental in causing great harm. The science itself has actually never given support to many of the categories that currently exist, and yet they have persisted for a century. Don’t want to derail the thread though- going back to lurking and learning.
Of course, I mean, that’s obvious, and yet, A-HA! –It is my assumptions about her that are driving me crazy. The assumption that if one is going to go through all that, and purposefully choose to be a woman, that one would naturally get a clue in the process. Alas, this is not necessarily true. So.
Someone (the address labels are coyly cut out) in the ecologically aware presumably progressive academic office I pass through routinely keeps leaving Newsweek among the reading material in the outer office. I usually bury it under the Indyweeks. After looking at that stupid pink and blue baby “Mystery of Gender” cover for a week, I snapped. I ripped the label off my “Texas Observer” and plunked it down on top of the pile (burying Newsweek as per usual).
This morning the T.O. was gone, but so was that disgusting Newsweek. Hopefully one of those highly qualified academics took the T.O. home to ponder the difference between real journalism and regurgitated prejudice.
(Thalia, intriguing anecdote - don’t mean to hijack your non-hijack!)
http://www.logoonline.com/shows/dyn/gender_rebel/videos.jhtml
Here’s a good documentary about people who don’t fit into the gender boxes.
Most people just don’t “get” the concept of genderqueer. It’s like talking to a brick wall. The binary gender system is so deeply ingrained in them.
“I wonder how much of the day-to-day binary-enforcing silliness we could avoid if we spoke a language that didn’t have gendered personal pronouns, like maybe Finnish.”
I wish. Oral Chinese has one singular human pronoun and no noun or verb genders whatsoever, but is full of spectacularly woman-hating expressions like “buy a chicken that can’t lay eggs” (marry an infertile woman). Gender binaries are just as just-so here in China as they are in the States.
Hi Thalia. My experience is probably not all that like yours but my dad is trans. I found it interesting the way you called your sibling your sister and talked about her using the word she whereas I haven’t been able to abandon the use of he so easily when talking about my dad, and consequently, still think of him as a man. I suppose it’s because you can’t swap the concept of father for mother quite so easily as brother for sister. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I just wanted to say I can relate to your position in certain ways. In my own experience, as a feminist I find my self questioning whether my attitude of indifference/tolerance towards his lack of feminism would be different if he were my mother, and concluding that I’d probably judge him more harshly or get more upset by it even though I know that’s bias against my mother, as a biological female. On the other hand, I question whether I might be biased against my father, as a mtf because there can be a feeling that this is a person who has deliberately opted to adopt the female role as opposed to being forced by society and has summarily begun upholding the very things I feel insult women such as myself. I really don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about this sort of thing as a feminist. It mixes up all my ideas about what it is to be a woman and I can no longer trust my own opinion or experience when it comes to this topic.
When, on the other hand, I have given up on the idea of either parent, but especially my mother, becoming a feminist. She of the “You look like a man when you don’t shave your legs”, as i step into the car in a skirt, tank top, ballet flats, and shoulder length hair.
It’s interesting. I have 3 brothers, none of which are particularly pro-feminist. I wonder how I would feel about this fact if any of them turned out to be trans. One the one hand, intellectually I know that people are who they are, and you can’t change them or expect more from them just because you share some genes. On the other hand, I’ve wanted sisters my whole life, and it would be disappointing if we couldn’t share feminism. At least my stepsisters give lipservice to it, while generally being of the “empowerful” novice blamer type.
Thalia and Layla: fascinating stories, and I know a couple of people in very similar situations who would say very similar things. I also know some who wouldn’t, though. The opoponax hits the nail on the head when she notes that many cisgendered women are equally clueless about feminism. There’s sometimes an added layer of irritation for people in your position, though, because of the sense that surely someone who has thought about gender and identity deeply enough to start transitioning really ought to have encountered some feminist thinking on the subject?
I think that’s true, and I think where a lot of anti-trans feeling among some feminists comes form is the sense that some transwomen can be incredibly conservative about gender issues and expend their political effort in propping up binary gender roles (which, as distinct from binary sex, presumably everyone here could agree don’t exist). Few feminists want the ranks of women swelled by yet more airheaded girly girls, perpetuating silly and outdated stereotypes.
But, if we’re going to be charitable about it - and I think we should be - it’s important to remember that transwomen, like all women, gain acceptance and approval by conforming to socially prescribed femininity. And that, even if they start out accepting diversity, they are stuffed through a medical-industrial complex that sets out to brainwash them out of it. There’s a comparison to be made between the transwoman and the religious convert: those who are required to create and prove their new identity are always more likely to adopt extremist behaviour than those who have lived with it from birth. Transwomen have something to prove: hence, there’s a lot of eyelash-fluttering and rejection of feminism as a hairy-armpitted backslide. Again, transwomen are only a tiny minority of the very large number of women who behave like this anyway.
Moreover, there are plenty of transwomen - just as there are plenty of ciswomen - who are more intellectually sophisticated than that. If you’re interested, have a read of this excerpt from Deirdre McCloskey’s memoir. She’s a transwoman and a distinguished economic historian. The excerpt makes plenty of thought-provoking points, but the section that is particularly relevant here is the bit where she was interviewed by a psychiatrist who was assessing her gender identity. She was pressured to lie so that her experience conformed to DSM guidelines on the definitions of gender identity, including claiming that she had “always felt like a woman in a man’s body” and “hated” her penis, neither of which statements reflected her real feelings. It’s an example of how transwomen are forced into a closely strictured performance of femininity by the medical and psychological system that deals with them. http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/pubs/gender/dee.php
I strongly suspect that what irks Thalia is not only the lack of feminism and the blanket assumption that female=patriarchally feminine, but the unexamined male priviledge involved in trying to enforce ‘femininity’ on others.
It’s understandable, as said before, no ‘winners’ in this. But I also suspect it’s harder to deal with when it’s “family” and therefore inescapably in your face.
Chris Clarke stole my Sphinx joke. People have already picked up on Shakes’ ‘God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity’ reference to the mystical interpretation of Genesis, and how neatly it mirrors Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, which, among other things, describes what I call the happy ball-people (sexually integrated beings who were also, for some reason, round: hooray, opoponax, for the Hedwig verse*).
See what happens when you leave town and computer access? All the good jokes are taken when you get back.
One more tidbit from spirituality and religion, where this ‘riddle’ has long been explored better than Newsweek does it: many indigenous cultures have a completely blasé, or even particularly honoring, reaction to variations on ‘Two Spirit People’ who are neither/both male and female.
Here, Twisty, have a parthenogenic dragon to go with the ants, bees, snakes and frogs, et cetera.
* re: the opoponax’s “it doesn’t really find room for either bisexuality or non-monogamy†– I always thought Aristophanes’ speech including “Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon…†dealt directly with the children of the sun and earth (pining, reuniting, etc.), leaving the children of the moon without much explanation or direction, and therefore free to make up anything we wish.
Nice bug.
There’s a great big icky ball of stuff here for me re: privilege and existing hierarchies and/or power disparities (the dominant paradigm, etc.)
I have been acquainted with many trans folks who appear to have embraced the idea that the way to reinforce their trans nature is by emulating the very worst parts of the gender binary. Similarly, I’ve had many queer acquaintances who basically have accepted heteronormativity as their personal savior, and put all of their time and attention into reinforcing those roles.
Thankfully, however, I do have trans friends and queer friends who *don’t* do any of that. Those are the folks I choose to spend time with, as life is too short to hang out with people who make me even crazier than usual.
This has been a long road. From ‘you don’t do feminism the way that I do’ or ‘you don’t do queer the way that I do’ and figuring out where I’m at with all that, yeah, it’s a mess, and having to sit down and mull over whether this means that I’m transphobic or homophobic, and what I want to do about that–and in the end, what I’m left with is this: I don’t like it, and I’m never going to like it, when an oppressed class emulates the behavior of a privileged class in order to cope with their oppression. And there’s a whole other ball o’ resentment I’ve got going on here about mainstreaming, but I’m not going to rant that rant today.
Basically, Thalia: I hear you and I feel your pain. I’m glad you love your sister, and I’m sorry she chose to be a femmebot. That sucks big-time.
Layla,
There are lots of reasons why you feel that way, having everything to do with the relative power of male and female voices, and what even females are allowed to perceive as feminism.
Compare the relative powers, for instance, of pro-porn “feminist” vs. anti-porn feminists in public discourse.
You have to be able to think things through for yourself, and realize whose interests are benefitted by the pressures you feel to silence yourself and your instincts.
Much of the work of 1960’s and 1970’s feminism has been undone by males having re-written the definition of feminism to serve (very effectively) their interests. They have done this with pornography and abortion and classism and just possibly (you will have to figure this out for yourself) the issue under constrained discussion here.
Virago:
I know people who love this idea, because they are often driven mad trying to remember the name of a song. I saw a commercial the other day touting how great it is to have access to the internet over your phone, because you can identify man-eating plants before it is too late. I presume the same handy technology could be used to identify insects– although it’s not quite as simple as that music feature.
I haven’t read the Newsweek article, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t mention a sports columnist in the LA Times, Mike Penner, who is very publicly transgendering to Christine Daniels. He introduced the process, here:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-oldmike26apr26,0,2709943.story?coll=la-home-headlines
And she is maintaining a blog about it, here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/womaninprogress/
Hmm. There is a growing atmosphere of mutiny on this thread. I wrote a trans-friendly comment, but it’s stuck in moderation.
The idea that there is a clear binary sex division is codswallop; exangelena’s comment above is spot on. I would also dispute the idea that the proportion of intersexed people is one in 1500. The research (eg Anne Fausto-Sterling et al, “How sexually dimorphic are we?” American Journal of Human Biology 12 (2000)) suggests it’s more like 1 in 100, and a friend of mine who is a paediatrician and spends her life delivering babies concurs. If it’s 1 in 1500, we’re talking about 4.4 million people. If it’s 1 in 100, we’re talking about 66 million people. That’s about the same number of people that are redheads, and in their case we have realised that their existence proves that hair colour is not set on a linear scale from platinum to black, and that they are not weird genetic freaks but a perfectly normal variety of human.
If your model of how sex differentiation works excludes millions of people, it’s obviously faulty. The results are not wrong if they don’t fit the model. The model is wrong if it doesn’t fit the results.
And the issues of intersex and transgender are linked, not least because the mutilation so often foisted upon the intersexed in infancy creates traumatic gender identity problems for them later in life. Furthermore, while the existence of intersexuality proves that the binary sex model does not work, it has not yet been shown whether gender dysphoria or transsexualism is another dimension of this, i.e. something “inbuilt” but invisible, or whether it is a response to one’s environment. Until there is more evidence available, it is judgemental to assume that transgender people are merely making some sort of frivolous lifestyle choice rather than embarking on a sincere search for belonging. Some of us may find some transpeople’s conservatism difficult and unpleasant, but then again I find anyone’s conservatism difficult and unpleasant. There are plenty of transpeople who aren’t prescriptive about gender.
Finally, I do not for a minute think that the fact that I have been, by most available definitions, a woman since birth, means that I get to decide who joins the group “woman” and who does not, and who gets to use the pronouns “she” or “her”. If we’re going to start laying down membership rules for the female sex, there are all sorts of people I’d rather not share it with. Funnily enough, though, I don’t get to make the rules, and nor does anyone else.
How come I keep ending up in moderation? Not accepting the transsexual model is a legitimate radical feminist position.
What is the transsexual model? Why are some of you lumping all transwomen into this assumption that they are all either trying to undermine feminism or patriarchs trying to invade woman-only spaces? It is so ironic to hear this kind of blatant stereotyping in a forum like this. I’ve been through the surgery. Since I was able to form my own coherent world view, I have been a feminist, though I may not have known the word at the time. And I haven’t become some girly-girl wearing skirts and heels and tons of makeup trying to seduce men into taking care of me because I’m so feminine and weak that I just need a big strong man to think for me. I have met transwomen like that and it’s annoying as hell. I have no idea what “trans-politics” are, but what I’m reading here sounds alot like the alarmist bullshit republicans love to spout about the gay agenda. Patriarchy exists and it loves nothing more than to instigate in-fighting among people who should be working together. And they do it because it works. I was hesitant to post any reply in this thread, because I’m not usually very outspoken and I don’t like to talk about transsexualism because I don’t want to pretend to speak for anyone else, and I don’t really understand my own feelings about why I am what I am and have little confidence I could express them if I did. But after some of the comments I read, I finally had to. My two cents…
Thanks for your input, Mireille. Well said!
“What is the transsexual model?”
The id