One Utah

Allow me to begin at the most basic.

Gender identity is broadly defined as one’s sense of one’s self as male or female. Most human beings’ sense of gender identity corresponds to their physical gender. People with vulvas/vaginas identify as female, people with penises identify as male. However, gender is a far more fluid concept than most of us imagine - it is polar, yes, and most of us arrange ourselves at one pole or the other but in between those poles exists a group of persons for whom gender identity is more complicated. The simplest construct is realizing that for some persons their gender identity is not the same as their biological gender. These individuals face a relatively complicated choice - will they or won’t they honor their innate sense of gender identity. That can mean choosing to identify and live as their gender identity. Gender reassignment surgery is expensive and potentially risky. As I understand it, even after the surgery, individuals must continue taking hormones the rest of their lives.

The concept that a person might claim a different gender than their body demonstrates strikes at the very core of ideas of self, at the most basic conceptual and experiential ways of seeing and understanding the human animal. What, one might ask, is more intrinsic to self than one’s gender - what component of self is more basic than being male or female? And to suggest that that core aspect of identity is not so fixed as we suggest is to introduce radical uncertainty into an area that most of us truly never even think about. Most people, I would dare to suggest, literally never give thought to the notions of gender - we simply accept that there is male and female and nothing else.

The terminology is in flux right now - as our medical and scientific understanding of gender changes so does the terminology. Transgender persons might identify as transman or transwoman - indicating someone who has gone through the actual reassignment surgery, as does the term transsexual. Transgender can refer to a perosn who identifies as transgender but still lives according to his/her physical gender, who lives as a transgender person without planning for surgery or as a person who is preparing for gender reassignment surgery. Some transgender persons use the term cisgender to refer to non-trans persons.

Here’s the problem: Despite having done reading and study, I just can’t wrap my head around it. I get it at an intellectual level. I even get the emotional pain that transgender persons suffer - I can imagine what it must be like to feel that your body is not your body. But I just can’t wrap my head around it the way I can racism, sexism, ageism etc.

This passage seems to get at the core of my problem here:

Cissexual privilege is the privilege of having a body that matches the sex your brain expects. Cissexual privilege is the privilege of having a body that matches what society expects. Cissexual privilege is the assumption that your sex, your gender are superior and more valid than trans people’s sex and gender, that you have the right to tell trans people who and what they really are, what their motives are for transitioning, to deny that their most basic realities are false because you cannot imagine how they can be true. Cissexual privilege is the sense of entitlement that tells you that you have the right to discuss my genitals at any time and then claim I’m the one bringing genitals up all the time. Cissexual privilege is the belief that you can declare what “being a transsexual” really is because you’ve thought about it a lot after rejecting what actual transsexual people and the entire medical profession have said about being a transsexual person. Cissexual privilege is the insistence that you have the right to shift the meaning of what trans people say about ourselves so that you can then use the reinterpreted arguments as easily destroyed straw men. Cissexual privilege is the attitude that you can interrogate and criticize everything a trans person does even though it’s no different from what a cis person does simply because the person is trans, and thus her sex and gender are not as valid as yours. Cissexual privilege is what makes you think that you can berate trans people for reifying gender roles and reinforcing the gender binary while at the same time remaining comfortably ensconced in your life as a man or a woman. A trans person claiming to be a man or a woman is doing it wrong but you claiming to be a man or a woman is only natural.

It’s that final sentence that strikes for me at the heart of the issue, the sneaking suspicion that somehow transmen and transwomen are doing it wrong when it comes to gender.

I feel like one of those white people who knew it was wrong to be prejudiced against black people and tried not to be but inside they couldn’t get rid of their prejudice. So I find myself being overly solicitous, overly nice but inside I’m just not comfortable. And I don’t want to be that person.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

As I learn about transgender issues I can’t help but wonder at the ways in which the exception radically proves the rule. That all the fluidity, all the uncertainty about gender implied in the various groupings under the trangender umbrella - whether its trangender or genderqueer or butch/femme or crossdressers or intersexed - ultimately point to the fixed nature of gender for the overwhelming majority. Which is when I begin to stumble most. Isn’t that attitude the key sign of prejudice? Believing that the different defines and validates that not different.
Gender is so very intrinsic to most people’s sense of self and sense of identity. Male and female are biologically determined but the very existence of transgender persons suggests maybe it’s not so much biologically determined and if its not then maybe just maybe our own gender is more fluid than we think. So I struggle. I don’t believe we should discriminate against transgender persons, I don’t accept claims that transgender persons are inherently mentally ill. But somehow I can’t get past my own stumbling block on the issue and I’m not prepared to see myself as an ally of the transgender community.
The ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) died because of a debate over the inclusion of transgender in the bill along with sexual orientation. At the time, there was a minor debate in the gay community over the question - does the “T” belong with the GLB? Was it just added because there was no other place for it? Is the GLB community at large supportive of adding transgender to the mix? If so, what are the reasons? If not, what are the reasons? If the “T” doesn’t belong, then what are the costs and benefits of removing it? If it does belong, what are the costs and benefits of keeping it? The discussion quickly got ugly.
I’ll conclude with a final thought: even in the most liberal confines of our nation, the issue is far from clear. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is one of (possibly the largest) womyn’s music festivals in the world (from descriptions is sounds like a female only version of Burning Man, IOW, **yawn**). That organization has adopted a “only women born women” policy - deliberately and intentionally excluding people who identify as women but who were born with male bodies. It’s a regular brouhaha each year as the transgender community tries to make a case for anyone who identifies as women being included and the organizers simply turn them down flat. For transgender persons, its flat out discrimination. For the organizers, the issue is settled. But it comes every time the festival happens. It is a debate about ideas so essential, so fundamental to self and society, that I suspect that will never be truly settled or resolved.

This entry was posted Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 6:58 am and is filed under American People, Civil liberties Infringement, Evolution, Human Rights, Privacy, Religious Fundamentalism, Sex, Society, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.