The transgender issue is a hard issue to talk about. It is hard because as I often argue, it is incapable to exist in our society without internalizing racism, sexism, classism, etc. It seems even more challenging to understand and wrap one’s mind around the idea of multiple genders or the idea that someone’s gender might not match their sex.
The first time the trans issue really came onto my radar was my junior year in college. I was at the University of Washington in a Queer Literature class in 1998. One of my class members was a lesbian and her partner was in the process of transitioning. She was a lesbian, she loved her partner, but what does it mean to be a lesbian dating a man? If she keeps dating her partner, but still identifies as a lesbian, isn’t she essentially telling her partner, regardless of what you do to your body, you will always be a woman to me? If she stays with her partner then, does she have to then redefine her sexuality? And what does she have to redefine it to?
This is probably when I began calling myself queer. I like the idea that my identity is based on me and not always tied to who I’m dating. I think about the idea that if I fall in love with a man (bio or trans) that I would not lose a community that is a huge part of my life.
Hearing about my classmate’s experience, I also tried, for the first time, to wrap my mind around the idea of whether I could date a man, because I’m fairly certain that the only way it would become an issue is if a woman I were dating realized that she was really a he (and given that I tend to like women who are a little more on the feminine side, this really isn’t a strong possibility, but I still think it’s an important question to think about). In all honesty, I don’t know that I know what the answer is, I fear that it is no. I hate the idea that I could love someone but not be able to be with them because of their gender identity. But there is so much embodied in gender identity that is important to me. Gender is more than body parts (although the body parts are incredibly important for the enjoyment of sex). Gender is about the way we interact with the world. We have gendered knowledge, gendered experiences, etc. and I have a hard time imagining that anyone raised in a male body that transitions to a female body would be someone that would truly understand those experiences that share those experiences. With as much as I love being female, I also think it would be hard for me to be with someone who hated being female so much that they felt the need to transition.
But here’s the thing, as much as I am a lesbian, I am also feminist. I want us to eliminate the gendered difference in the way we treat people. I don’t want to think of boys as liking trucks and girls liking dolls. I want us to take out the value that privileges male over female. I want men to be able to wear dresses and easily and comfortably as I wear men’s button downs without it ever having to be a question of whether they were born in the wrong body.
What if we achieve all this, will it end transgender identities? If sex doesn’t influence your gender expression will there be a need for transitioning genders when your gender doesn’t match your sex?
I don’t have the answers to this. A friend of mine has a daughter how was trapped in her male body. There is a story on NPR about their experience. http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=2&prgDate=5-8-2008 If there were no social expectation/stigmas on how boys behave and dress could she have existed in her male body and have been okay? I don’t know. I also don’t think the answer is universal. Maybe there are some people who would not feel the need to transition if we didn’t have such rigid gender stereotypes. But I also think some people would still want to transition. The girl in the story seemed to have an incredible need and hated the way her body was beginning to betray her as it started to become more male.
I was in a queer poetry class when an adult classmate wrote a piece about his transition and he described the way that when the hormones filled out his face and bulked him up he finally looked into the mirror and recognized himself. He finally began to recognize himself. That comment, the realization that people who don’t identify with their sex assigned at birth essentially see a stranger in the mirror was particularly powerful.
I cannot imagine what it is like to not feel at home in my body. Even when I’m a bit unhappy with my weight or my back due to my back problems, my body always feels like my own body. It is for this reason, that despite my concerns over the polarization of gender that I worry are embodied in trans issues, I am fully supportive of people being able to have personal dignity and feel at home in one’s body. I hope that the drugs won’t have negative effects down the road, for that is one of my biggest fears about the transitioning genders, especially at young ages.
Listening to the NPR story above, makes me more intrigued by the idea of transitioning at earlier ages. If someone knows at a young age that they do not fit with their birth sex, why shouldn’t they be able to transition earlier. If they transition earlier and live in the world with which they identify, I know that I would see them as somehow more genuinely of that gender. And let’s just be honest, there, I think that trans men wouldn’t be as welcome as I feel like they are in lesbian spaces if we didn’t somehow see them as not quite male. I think we may see them as a better version of a male, one ideally less likely to express unconscious sexism.
I think early transitioning could change our community. Right now F2Ms fit fairly comfortable in the lesbian community. If this is because we see them as former women as much as (if not more than) we see them as male. They also have a better understanding of what it is like to be raised as a female and potentially treat us with a different kind of respect and equality then biological males. If these same men transitioned at 3 or 10 or 15, they would not be socialized in the same way, and I wonder whether they would be as welcome in our communities. I’m not saying that this is a good or a bad thing, just something that could happen. I also think that in the same way people still come out of the closet in their 50s and 60s, you will always have people who transition later in life, because not nearly all families will be as supportive as my friend’s family and not all children will be as strong as their daughter to be able to understand what is wrong and be able to insist it be changed.
Okay those are some thoughts for now. I believe my thoughts will change as I and we as a society learn more about transitioning genders and have more opportunity to see the long term effects and experiences for people who transition at all the various stages in their lives.
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