(Note: I spat this out in a single draft, so please forgive any massive errors in grammar. Also, while I've spent a lot of time reading about this stuff, I'm still, at best, a layman when it comes to the academic topics of gender and human sexuality, so please forgive anything I say which is wildly outdated or simply false information. I tried to present facts and commentary as truthfully and plainly as I could, and I feel like I got most of it mostly right, though I'm open to correction from those who have studied any of these issues more comprehensively than I have.)
Okay, so I don't usually bring up gender issues on this blog, but a friend of a friend (who seems like a very nice person... let's call her Chris) is in a situation where the guy she's dating (who we'll call Pat) has informed her that he feels like he might be a transgender woman.
Now I'm going to stop here before going any further and talk about pronouns, just so we are clear. The English language kind of forces you to assign gender to people when talking about them in the third-person. It makes life kind of rough on all the transgendered, non-gendered, multi-gendered and otherwise-not-binary-gendered people in the world, and it makes things almost as rough on somebody who wants to be a supportive ally and suddenly finds words they've used with confidence their entire life to be a minefield of potential faux pas.
So I'm going to make this fairly simple: Whether they are transgendered or cisgendered, if somebody is unambiguously presenting themselves as one or the other, you can usually be confident that it's the gender they wish to be addressed by. Somebody with a full beard, probably goes by "him." Somebody in a flower-patterened dress, probably goes by "her." If you are unsure of whether to address somebody as "he" or "she", politely ask them, and then respect their wishes. See, that wasn't really difficult at all, was it?
Anyway, in the case of Chris's boyfriend, he has told her that he feels he may be a transgendered woman, but at the moment is still going by male pronouns (so far) and so that's what I'm using here.
Pat's revelation was quite a pill for Chris to swallow, as she (I believe) identifies herself as a heterosexual woman, but is now discovering that the love of her life may in fact be female. To further complicate matters, after a disastrous experience of coming out to his mom, Pat has decided to forgo (or at least delay) any ambition of transitioning and instead of publicly identifying as female wants to present himself as androgynous.
If that's what he really wants, it's a totally valid choice. Even if it's not what he really wants, but the way he feels he needs to go (if only for now) in order to function within his family and within society, that's also a totally valid choice, and his to make. The truth is that, even as far as we've come, there are no "good" choices available to the young transsexual, only choices that are "less bad" than others. It's a pretty goddamn tough row to hoe.
To the vast majority of people reading this, gender isn't really something you have to think about that much, beyond what sex-specific outside social pressures you may have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. You were probably born with reproductive organs which match your chromosome pair, and those organs probably developed your body with secondary sexual characteristics which match them, and you probably have a general sense of identity which at least mostly conforms to your body, probably present yourself to at least a certain extent as that gender to the outside world, and are probably mostly treated as a member of that gender by other people. Oh, and you most likely have a sexual preference mainly for members of the opposite gender.
Note that paragraph was filled with "generally" and "probably." Not only are there exceptions to everything I just said, but NOBODY conforms 100% to absolutely all of that stuff on the same side of the ledger. Biology is messy, and when you try to draw solid dividing lines anywhere things get very complicated, very quickly.
To talk about gender in a way that even allows me to begin to explain transsexualism, I need to define some multi-word terms. The English language (or probably just about any language) does not deal with deviations from the binary model very well at all. And why should it when most people do, after all, mostly fit close to one end or the other of that binary spectrum in most ways? For the vast majority of people, the definitions of "male" and "female" you were given when you were a toddler are good enough for getting by in the world nearly all the time. So let's get into the complex and messy world of how gender looks to those who don't fit the simplified model very well. There are actually (at least) 6 ways one can look at gender & sexuality, and any one of them can potentially be "mismatched" from any other one:
1. Sex-Selective Chromosome Pairing
2. Assigned Sex
3. Gender Presentation
4. Gender Role
5. Sexual Preference(s)
6. Gender Identity
1. Chromosomes
You were probably told in Junior High biology about the "XX" vs. "XY" chromosome pair. That the mother's ovum always provides an "X" chromosome, and the father's sperm provides another that pairs with it. If the chromosome from the father is another "X", you get a girl baby, and if it's a "Y", you get a boy baby.
But what you probably were not told is that it doesn't always work out that way.
One of the most common exceptions is a condition called Androgyne Insensitivity Syndrome. Sometimes an XY fetus's body does not respond, or only partially responds, to the programming of male hormones. In cases of complete AIS, what you end up with is a very feminine-featured woman, complete with functional ovaries and womb. In partial cases of AIS, the woman might be infertile or very tall or have an unusually high sex drive. In addition to physical development sometimes not matching the mandate of the chromosome pair, a recent emerging hypothesis (though there is a lot of science to be done) proposes that sometimes neurological development, and as a result gender identity, might also mismatch as a result of hormonal signals not being received as expected.
So while the chromosomes usually indicate a person's sex, they don't always. I told you biology was messy, right?
2. Assigned Sex
Most of the time when a baby is born, the doctor or midwife looks at the genitals and says "it's a boy" or 'it's a girl" and fills out the paperwork accordingly. And nearly all the time that conclusion is correct. Exceptions are incredibly rare. But there are exceptions. In addition to those who will turn out to be transgendered (which I'm getting to, I promise), there are those who are born with both sets of sex organs, or ambiguous organs, etc. It used to be that doctors were under incredible pressure to "make the call" so that the child could live a "normal" life as whichever gender the doctor chose, including surgical removal of the genitalia which looked less likely to develop. These days, opinion is shifting with regards to how best handle such situations. In a world where people are less hung-up on gender, perhaps a kid can grow up "normally" in modern society without determining right away (if ever) whether that child is male or female.
3. Gender Presentation
This is one you might be tempted to call a social construct, except there are people who, to the very core of their being, need to present as the opposite gender, or at least not completely as the same gender, as their assigned sex. While this commonly falls under the umbrella term "transgender", it does not (necessarily) mean that the person is a transsexual. You all know a woman (probably more than one) who HATED to wear dresses as a little girl, keeps her hair short, and perhaps even has masculine manners of speech, posture and movement. Men with a drive towards feminine presentation (including mannerisms) are less likely to display it to the broad public due to fear of ostracism and abuse, but it does work both ways.
I could have my friend Esme, who is a professional drag queen as well as a human sexuality prof, write an entire novel on the stuff I'm touching on here. In fact, she probably already has done so. At the very least, some very detailed academic papers.
Not all (or even most) people who refuse to apply common gender presentation norms to themselves are transsexuals, however most transsexuals frequently go through a phase of experimentation with gender presentation while they figure out who they are.
4. Gender Role
Now this IS a social construct. Some of it may have a little to do with evolutionary biology & psychology, but for the most part ideas about divisions of labor or dominance vs. servitude between the genders is largely the result of outside social pressure. In modern society, a great deal of this pressure has relaxed. However, oddly enough, there IS a great deal of social pressure on transsexuals to go along with gender-normative roles in order to establish that they are a "real" member of their target gender. A transsexual woman might feel pressured to conceal her interest in sports, for example, or a transsexual male might be uncomfortable showing nurturing behavior towards children.
5. Sexual Preference(s)
Human sexuality is a complicated subject (again... biology - messy), but there are a few things sexologists have worked out that we can be fairly confident are true. Among them three important points as it relates to this discussion of transsexuality.
- Sexuality is not a choice. "The heart wants what it wants", as the saying goes.
- Sexuality is not entirely determined by biology nor environment, but by a nebulous matrix of these factors and more, including body chemistry, early erotic experiences, etc.
- Pretty much everybody is a little bit bi.
Most transsexuals I've met, unsurprisingly, fall closer to the middle of the hetero-bi-homo spectrum than most people do. There are a number of reasons for this, though not all of these are in play for all transsexuals. Among them:
- Social pressure to explore "opposite" sex relationships both before and after transition
- Hormone therapy changing body chemistry, which may affect pheromone reactions
- Only some people find transsexuals to be suitable sexual partners, and which people do so will change as they go through transition, so sometimes the desire to be desired from among a limited pool of options may override physical sexual preferences, especially if those preferences were not all that strongly felt to begin with
So if you ask a transsexual person if they are "gay" or "straight", don't expect a clear and simple answer. There are some with very rigid sexual preferences, but in many cases you'll just get a resigned shrug to indicate, "that's far too complicated to get into right now."
Or in my own case, when somebody asks me if I'm gay or straight, I often respond by asking if that's a proposition. :)
6. Gender Identity
Okay, here's the biggie. The thing that puts the "trans" in "transsexual", and often the hardest thing for cisgendered people to wrap their heads around. But I'm going to try to 'splain it if you're willing to work with me a little bit here.
Human beings, from childhood, are prone to perceiving an extra-corporeal self. Religious people might call it their "soul" or "spirit", and even many non-religious people (like me) regard "soul" as a useful metaphor for this abstraction of the self which our busy brains are hard at work constructing. Each of us are capable, through personal reflection, of noticing a lot of things about our souls. We have dispositions, preferences, attitudes, temperaments and beliefs. Many of these traits of our personalities we now know to come partly from brain chemistry and even from parasitic infections, but we've only begun to understand the smallest amount about what makes one person altruistic yet short-tempered, while another might be selfish yet gregarious and fun-loving.
One of the traits of this "soul" is gender. To demonstrate, let's do a little thought exercise together. You've probably enjoyed a sci-fi story or two by now in which a person has their consciousness transferred into an android, or a computer, or an artificial body. Imagine with me for a moment that mad scientists were to download your entire mind into a computer network. You could communicate and interact with the outside world through terminals and networked robotic systems, but you would otherwise be a disembodied spirit; a literal "ghost in the machine." Under these circumstances, even if you knew you could never return to your original body, would you still perceive yourself as being the same gender?
Now let's take things a step further. Let's say the mad scientists who put you out on the net are getting tired of you wrecking havoc with traffic signals and watching people change through security-system cameras in locker rooms, so they offer to give you a new android body to inhabit. The transfer is complete, and this new body turns out to strongly resemble the opposite sex from your original. Maybe even perfectly resemble the opposite sex. Would you not still perceive your "soul" as being a member of your original sex? If you could afford the repairs, would you not want to modify your new android body to resemble the sex you see yourself as?
This is transsexuality in a nutshell. The only difference is that a transsexual person does not have a physical memory of inhabiting the "right" sort of body. Only a knowledge of the soul, which sometimes takes a
very long time to come to terms with (trust me on this one), tells the transsexual that "hey, wait a minute. This body doesn't match my true gender."
A transsexual is not somebody who has had surgery nor even somebody who necessarily will have surgery to reshape sexual organs. A transsexual is a soul of one gender in a body which resembles the other. Simple as that.
There is a strong tendency among those who don't understand how deep this goes to think that the best possible therapy is to teach the transsexual to "be happy" with living in this mis-matched body. But go back a couple paragraphs to that thought exercise. Would you consider that a particularly viable option? For an entire lifetime? Or would that feel like a sort of prison?
Correcting the body to resemble the gender of the soul is as simple as correcting any other physical birth defect. For modern medicine, it's not even particularly difficult. "Correcting" the soul to resemble the body... Well that's a kind of murder, isn't it? You're destroying the person to build another in its place.
Now I could get into the specific neuroscience breakthroughs concerning how and why we think transsexuality comes about. It's fascinating stuff. But the fact is it doesn't matter. Transsexuality can already be defined well enough as a state of the soul's existence. Not sexuality, not roles, not appearances, not behavior, not sex organs, not chromosomes. Identity. The soul. That part of the self which defines the self. Or as YHWH supposedly said to Moses, "what I am is what I am, are you what you are or what?"
I'm paraphrasing, of course.
-T
