This has been tickling my brain for a while and I haven't been able to find any satisfactory discussion about this issue with the specific questions I have in mind, so I thought I would ask if anyone here could give me more insight into this problem.
Let me start by outlining a few assumptions.
1. There are no inherent differences in the way male and female children think or feel. The differences we tend to recognize as gendered are basically culture induced.
2. Even if there were such inherent differences, we couldn't possibly know anything other than our own experiences. This is simlar to the philosophical problem of color. Basically, you might see red the way I see green, and vice versa, but since we're not in each others heads, we can't possibly know.
If either of these are the case, particularly if number 1 is the case, I don't see how someone can consistently claim to be transgendered. If there is no difference in the way men and women typically feel, and gender notions are basically a culture construct, how can someone think that they should be a member of the opposite sex? What defines sex at that point other than genetics?
Secondly, given that number 2 is the case, even if a particular person had a given unpleasant feeling, how would they know that that feeling should be associated with being the opposite gender? The only way I can see this manifesting is through a desire to do things that are traditionally part of that gender role in society. But if we think those constructs are arbitrary in the first place, they can't be inherently part of a gender "feeling". I'm assuming we don't want to equate sexual desire of a particular gender to this feeling, because that calls into question whether homosexuality can exist separately from transgender notions, when I think everyone agrees that they can.
If we want to claim that either sex or gender exist on a "spectrum" as I've seen some people claim, then what are we even talking about in that case? I can't fathom a system that doesn't recognize at least distinct sexes, because it would lack any frame of reference and everyone would simply be humans that are arbitrarily attracted to other humans with no distinctions. Even if we allow for sex but try to eliminate gender, I don't see how we can start talking about a "spectrum" because we have no basis for defining what constitutes "maleness" or "femaleness" outside of sex organs. Again, we have only a system where people are attracted to other people, simply on the basis of their genetics. Given that I still don't see how it accounts for feeling that one is a "member" of the opposite sex, since that can't be defined in our system as anything other than the sex organs that one is born with.
I can't be the first person to have this sort of mental disjoint so I appreciate anyone's explanation of how this is problem is commonly understood by feminists or where my thinking is mistaken.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Questions about Transgender theory given Sex-Equality.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/10854
I have certainly thought about this and I in no way have an answer for you, but I think I can illuminate a few things.
Sex on a spectrum- You are assuming that people either have a penis or a vagina. Most people are this way, but there are a surprisingly high number of people who are intersexed. People run the gamut from chromosomal "abnormalities" to bodies that don't recognize certain hormones to just ambiguous genitals. So I think that explains that? If I understood you properly.
Gender on a spectrum- It seems like you kind of understand this but maybe not? One end would be the most stereotypically feminine ever and one end would be the most stereotypically masculine ever. Of course it all goes by what gender roles a person fulfills. (This is not caused by/correlated to biological sex but often matches up.)
So hopefully I helped a little although I don't know what to say about the actual body of your post.I'm interested to know what people who are smarter than I am think. :)
Thanks for your reply.
I was just mentioning sex on a spectrum as an aside and it actually doesn't really have any import to the main points I'm making.
I do understand the idea of gender on a spectrum as you described it. What I was suggesting is that there are two different and opposing views. The one you described, and the one that most feminists I see on this site try to espouse, which is exactly that those stereotypes are not true or helpful.
I'll give a more complete answer to some of the things afb says below.
I don't think this is exactly the perfect reply to your post, but you might find it interesting: http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/abolishing-gender/
It speaks, I think, somewhat to your first assumption. Because I think that assumption is problematic.
When you said: "...even if a particular person had a given unpleasant feeling, how would they know that that feeling should be associated with being the opposite gender?" I'm cis, and far from the most well informed, so I can't speak really to how a trans person feels, but I think what you wrote is not at all correct.
But yeah, I think check out the link, if you haven't read it before. It's called "Abolishing Gender". The whole blog really is great.
(to clarify, when I said that quote wasn't correct, I meant that I don't think trans people have an "unpleasant feeling". To my understanding, it is a hell of a lot more certain than this, but I'm with Aimee in looking forward to the replies of people who know more than me)
okay! so! I tried to find an article to reply to your post that was a better fit, and I have a better one I think. I very much suggest that you read this : http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/transphobic-tropes-4-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cmy-theories-are-more-important-than-your-experience%E2%80%9D/
especially:
"But this “gender is not real” thing is almost always used to ONLY illuminate the falseness of trans genders... See some feminist and queer theorists approach trans women by applying different rules—a cis woman’s identification as woman is unquestionable, but a trans woman’s identification as woman is incomprehensible because gender doesn’t exist."
and
"This notion of an ontology of gender—a category of being “male” or “female”—is one that cis people buy into as much as trans people. The difference is, our identification is constituted from the start as illegitimate."
again, the blog really is great and I've learned a lot from it
Thanks for the links. Those posts are very informative, and actually have just convinced me that this is indeed a mainstream issue in the feminist movement and how it wants to be understood by trans individuals. It sounds from that blog as though this is currently still a debate and there isn't exactly a consensus.
I have an intuition on the matter, but I'll need to do some more thinking before I can decide anything concrete.
So, I would just like to start by saying that I am not transgendered, but I have studied it quite a bit and known quite a few people who are.
afb: Nice link, I think it makes several very good points. Here's what I have to say on the subject, both from an academic standpoint and based on personal conversations I have had with my trans friends.
A.) Just because gender is culturally socialized doesn't mean that it isn't "real" to the people who live it. We see posts on Feministing all the time about (and from) people who have real feelings and base real actions on the expectations built into their gender.
B.) While gender is a social construct it is still an unavoidable fact of human life. Every human culture that has every been known to exist has had gender. The quantity, roles, etc may change but gender always exists.
C.) Many cultures have more than two genders. Often (not always) these cultures are less patriarchal and restrictive than our binary gendered society. Sometimes third gender or trans options allow people who don't conform to the primary standard genders to find an accepted place in society.
D.) While gender is a "performance," it is heavily based on a person's physical presentation, and we live in a very gendered society. Even though we might not want it to be, gender is very important to us. To be accepted in our society a person needs to be very clearly male of female.
E.) There are many, many transgendered people who are not transsexual, meaning that for many trans people surgery is not the main issue. For others it is.
F.) For people who are tanssexual, that is for people who need surgery, hormones, the works, there is generally a strong feeling that something is "not right," which starts very early in life - definitely by puberty. For some people it is not only about gender but also about their actual physical sex. Their body actually feels wrong or foreign, similar to the way a gay person raised in a purely hetero society might feel (for lack of a better example).
G.) The second point of the original post actually sounds more like an explanation of trans identity that a question of it. We can all only know our own experiences and our own feelings. Trans people are not trying to emulate another's feelings, they are trying to match their exteriors and experiences with what feel true within themselves.
Sorry it's so long, I guess I had a lot to say.
Thanks for your response.
I'm not really arguing with what you're suggesting in points A-D. All of these issues are still very real and definitely relevant. What I'm interested in is more of the longest term consequences of what I think of as two different views that seem to be contradictory. So for the sake of this consideration, I'm just assuming that the two paradigms I'm interested in have been satisfied, and seeing if I can make the results make sense.
My argument isn't really worried about E. I'm worried more about the fact of trans identity than the particulars of the person.
For F and G I'm not sure you got what I was trying to illustrate in point two. It was a very brief example.
Basically, even if someone feels that something is "not right" or that their body is "foreign" they shouldn't really know how to interpret that, or that it's related to gender. It is impossible for someone with a completely normal penis to think "this should be a vagina" because s/he can't possibly know what that would feel like either. Maybe the penis itself feels wrong, or something feels wrong. But one can't know how a person of a different gender feels because they have no frame of reference.
Since that's the case I only see two remaining options. They recognize their desire to be the opposite sex because of their desire to line up with many of the gender stereotypes of that sex, and interpret that as a desire to be that sex. If that's the case, then there is a problem with the non-inherent gender assumptions of mainstream feminism. The other possibility is that they are deciding that their feeling is a gender feeling arbitrarily or for some other non-inherent reason. If that's the case, then as afb's article points out, the whole concept of being transgender is basically rendered meaningless.
The conclusion is that in any case, either transgender theory or mainstream feminist gender theory must be flawed in some respect. The two seem mutually exclusive.
As someone who IS trans I can try to answer your questions for you. The best analogy that I can think of is of phantom limb syndrome, where someone who has lost an arm or a leg in an accident can sometimes still "feel" the limb, or even pain in the limb. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it gets the idea across.
Trans theory has it that when we're born, not only do hormones affect our physical body, but it affects our brains as well; that our brains are effectively "mapped" for a body of one sex or the other. As a point of clarification, this is not to say that a female brain is predisposed to our cultural idea of what "feminine" things are, nor the male brain for what is "masculine. This is strictly limited to the body. All human fetuses start out female and hormones during pregnancy will either leave it or change it as things go along. In the majority of the cases, when the body (the sex) is masculinized so is the brain (the gender); and if the body is not, neither is the brain. However, that is not always the case, as there can be variations. This can manifest in the body in intersex conditions, or in the brain in cases of those who are transgender.
Basically, for someone like me who is MtF (male to female), the brain expects to have a female body and rejects the male one. You postulate that, never having had a female body, I couldn't know that I SHOULD have one. You are presuming that what we know of our bodies comes exclusively from what we learn in life; that we don't have a basic and instinctive knowledge of our body from birth. Science itself is starting to find otherwise, something many of us who are trans already knew: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/10/27/2401941.htm (The article is good, even if the image accompanying it is horrible).
There are many many levels of this, which is something I don't really have the time to go into. There are some trans people who don't transition at all (out of choice), there are some who do, but don't have any surgeries, and there are those who have SRS. Of those, trans people can be gay, straight, butch, femme, masculine or feminine. Again, this isn't about interests, personality, or how we are on the gender expression spectrum in a particular society. This has only to do with the sex of our bodies. As is said so often, sex is between the legs, gender is between the ears.
I'm not sure I like the analogy of phantom limb syndrome because you have had your limbs, you know what they feel like, and then you miss them. If people who were born without a limb then complained of "feeling" it, the analogy would be great, but that isn't my understanding of the idea.
As far as I can tell, the gist of what you're claiming is that you have a feeling, and that you know that that feeling is related to gender. How do you know that that is the feeling? What does it mean to you to feel like a woman? If it is not related to being attracted to men, or to sex organs, then to what does it relate? How do you know that that is a gender feeling, and not some other feeling?
My partner is TS, and what Pirate Cap'n Lady is describing fits her experience. My partner not only feels like her penis is a weird alien growth that shouldn't be there (and always has, even when she was three or four years old), she also has a "phantom vagina". Basically, when she's half-asleep or sometimes when aroused, she feels sensations she describes as feeling her vagina dilating, something brushing against her labia, etc. Again, these sensations have always been there. I'm not sure whether people born without limbs feel that the missing limbs should be there or sometimes report sensations in them, but you seem to be operating under the assumption that they DON'T, which bothers me.
Incidentally, there actually is another neurological condition in which someone feels that a healthy organ does not actually belong to their body-- it's called "alien limb syndrome". This would relate to a defect in the body map in which the offending limb is no longer "mapped" to the body. It generally occurs after a brain injury.
The idea of the existence of a body-map (in general, not specifically in relation to trans people) is well accepted among neurologists. They have actually located where certain parts of the body are mapped in the brain (Oliver Sacks has written some stuff on this that's pretty accessible, but I forget in which book). The body map idea is the best explanation for why the more primitive (nonconscious) parts of the brains of amputees and such still expect the missing limb to be there. The existence of the body map (which again, is scientifically accepted) seems to point to there being some a priori knowledge to how the body should be configured, as it is built in neurologically (the way a sense of balance is) and not culturally determined. In short, it seems that assumption two in your original post is not entirely correct, at least inasmuch as you limit "our own experiences" to what the body experiences as opposed to what the brain experiences.
The body map idea also explains why TS people feel a great deal of relief when they medically transition (hormones and secondary sex characteristics are altered to fit their identified gender) and are often still in significant psychological distress if social transition is complete but medical transition is incomplete. For example, my partner blends in (or "passes") with cisgender females and most of our acquaintances have no idea she's trans. People react to her as they would a cisgender woman, and she is able to express her identity as a woman. However, the feelings that she should have a vagina and that her penis is alien have not diminished at all.
If you would like to read more about the body map as it relates to trans people from a biological perspective, I would refer you to the book "Whipping Girl" by Julia Serano, who is both a trans woman and a biologist.
I assume that you mean well and are simply interested in the subject of what it feels like to be trans, but it comes across like you're essentially challenging trans people to use their experiences to refute an academic theory. This is something that drives my partner and her trans friends crazy-- actually, I wonder if the reason you haven't gotten more responses from trans women (there are plenty who read feministing) is that they're tired of interacting with gender-studies majors who dismiss the way they experience themselves and their bodies. Instead of listening and considering that they may be accurately describing their perceptions, these people come in with certain assumptions and then challenge trans people to explain why their perceptions do not fit these assumptions.
I've always wondered about this too! However, I've never had the time to properly articulate it and always end up being called a transphobe (which I'm not) on this site. I've always been curious about this dichotomy and the respectful dialectic that can emerge from it.
http://www.illdoctrine.com/2008/07/how_to_tell_people_they_sound.html
This video is about race, but I think it could speak to transphobia too. It is about how to strategically tell someone "what they did and what they said was unacceptable". But I think we can also see if from the other side, to realize that even if we don't think as ARE transphobic, we can still SAY transphobic things and deserve to be called out for it. Our intentions are irrelevant when it comes to whether or not our words are respectful.
I'll leave a comment based on my experiences as a partner to an MTF trans woman. L identifies as transsexual, as she takes hormones and is post-op, even though she doesn't have the same intense feelings of bodily dsyphoria that most other transsexual women describe. She began her transition 8 years ago not because she felt like she was born in the "wrong body", but because she was more comfortable in the social roles and spaces that women tend to occupy in our culture. In other words, being understood and treated as a woman was a much more comfortable social space for her to occupy. I feel that her transition neither reaffirms nor contradicts your points #1 and #2. The differences in the ways that men and women are treated in our culture are very real, and she prefers to move through the world being treated socially as a woman.
This does not mean that L is a gender-normative woman by any means. She is a lesbian who works in a male-dominated field (environmental engineering). She spends most of her time working outdoors with drillers and environmental contractors, wearing a hard hat, steel-toed boots and a field coat. She has to deal with misogyny in varied and subtle forms: for instance, she frequently gets told that she should "smile more" while on the job! She got where she is today (as a strong, gender-nonconforming woman) by working her way as a woman through grad school and her early career in a male-dominated field. L was an ardent feminist before she transitioned, and her experiences of misogyny post-transition have only reaffirmed and strengthened her dedication to fighting patriarchy.
In my numerous relationships with MTF friends and acquaintances, I have found the stereotype of trans women as exaggerated male fantasies of hyper-femininity to be completely false. I think as non-trans women, it is presumptuous for us to question trans women's very right to exist, and rather we should look for strategies to align ourselves with the trans movement to work together towards fighting gender injustice in all its many and diverse forms.
Hey all,
Great points from the posters above. I wholeheartedly recommend that you check out Julia Serano's work. I think the first assumption we need to question is that there is no inherent difference between men and women apart from socialization. While it's easy to pin a theory on the notion that *all* gender is socialized, it doesn't jive with how a lot of people feel -- socialization aside. Some of us love to wear lipstick, or construction boots (or both!) Is this because we are socialized to like these things? Or because we just do? Does it really matter, as long as we feel comfortable in our own skin?
Trans people come from many backgrounds, having been reared by parents who may have been tolerant of their gender experimentation as a child or by those who may have tried to beat it out of them. The truth -- for many people -- is that a specific gender identity or expression just *feels* right. Serano writes a lot about this and posits that the "truth" about gender probably lies somewhere between biology and socialization.
As the partner of a transsexual woman, I find it downright offensive when theorists question the very nature of her identity based on whether it conforms with their purely intellectual theories about theory and queerness. Let me tell you, the trans people I know who have had to fight against oppression and for proper treatment by the medical profession and society at large could give a rat's ass about whether feminists think they should have a right to claim their gender identities. For some, it's a matter of life or death.
Don't you think it's strange that instead of altering your framework to account for and include the ways trans people experience their lives, you keep your assumptions as your starting point and demand that trans people fit their lives into your assumptions?
"1. There are no inherent differences in the way male and female children think or feel. The differences we tend to recognize as gendered are basically culture induced."
How do you know this? you can't possibly. If, as I think, people are born with a brain sex which makes them naturally pick up the gender cues associated with that sex, your point about gender and culture is perfectly met; it just doesn't match the physical body.
Speaking personally, I'm just myself, and I feel more comfortable expressing that self in society as a woman. Despite the difficulties of being trans in a transphobic society.
Your implicit proposal, that trans people are not REALLY the sex they claim to be is, as others have said above, transphobic. Maybe I am lying, although you'd have then to come up with a motivation as to why trans people would go through the risks, pain and loss that they do. Or you could just believe, as you do with cissexual people, that their brain sex is what they claim it to be. You would find it offensive if I suggested you weren't really a whatever you think you are? You don't expect it though, you speak from cis privilege.
I've had to answer a lot of questions as an FtM, a surprising number of them involving what lesbians do in bed (And I was never in the lesbian community), and responding to affronted cancer patients or those who know people suffering from cancer. I've not had any surgeries, and am only pondering top surgery for now, but there is an assumption that trans people are getting useless surgeries, which invalidates those who are required to get surgery for other medical reasons.
As for the thing about not having any frame of reference, I believe that this is not entirely accurate. The human body is not so very different for either sex. I have had both vaginal and anal intercourse, and while there are differences between the two, they feel remarkably similar. Additionally, on testosterone, the clitoris grows. While it doesn't become a fully-fledged penis (and surgery to have such a thing is often disappointing and far too expensive), with enough time there is enough there to gain some understanding of how it feels.
The differences among the sexes are far greater than the differences between the sexes.
I am the sort of trans person who is pretty much comfortable in my body. The main thing I had wanted was hormones, because something simply felt off. I started taking them a little over a year ago, and things have changed dramatically. I am much more calm and happy, though I am going through what is essentially puberty. I do feel strongly that there is something missing with my lower anatomy, but I do enjoy what I have to the extent that I can. So for me, the idea of having a sex change is no artificial construct without any frame of reference. I know what pressure feels like on the clitoris, and can recreate to some degree the feeling of penetration. It isn't a perfect match, but it does offer some idea.
Furthermore, are you sure that people can not desire something they do not have, without knowing all the details therein? A transwoman might want a vagina and have no idea what it would feel like to have sex with one, but does this make her desire any less valid? I am not sure how it does make things any less legitimate. If she goes into surgery knowing that it won't fix everything, that she may change her mind about it, etc, then where is the harm?
Also, I happen to be bisexual and polyamorous, in addition to being an FtM. One might think that, because I am into everyone in almost any possible way, this is somehow connected to my gender, or that I can't distinguish genders. But I find gender to be an interesting thing, whether or not it is a social construct. It is a way that people express themselves. It is a thing people do and live. Additionally, people are discriminated against for gender or perceived gender, and there is still a grand lot of prejudice against anything which is at least somewhat female. This will happen whether there is an androgynous society, or whether genders are hard and fast.
Lastly, I wonder what you think of the butch/femme dichotomy. I hear a lot of feminists complain that trans people have it all wrong, while lesbians who follow ideas of butch/femme are perfectly within reason.