No one looks like they're enjoying this situation, to be honest

In Which A Question Is Asked

What does it mean to be a sexual trans person? A sexual trans woman?

Sidenote: I’m looking for my copy of Fucking Trans Women, an awesome e-zine available at http://fuckingtranswomen.com/. I know I bought and downloaded it, but am having trouble finding it. I emailed the site owners, tho, and hopefully they’ll be willing to send me another copy. At the very worst, I can spare another $5 for their great project.

Back on topic, I think being trans and sexual is tough for me (gonna try to use ‘I’ statements in this post, and not make generalizations) in part due to the huge variety of mixed messages I’ve received over the last 27 years. I’m sure I’m missing some categories, but here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Messages about male sexuality, even though I didn’t identify as male
• Messages about female sexuality, which I picked up even though I wasn’t yet presenting as female
• Messages about heterosexual sexuality, mainly from when I was presenting as a straight male
• Messages about queer sexuality, both before and after I came out
• Messages about specifically lesbian sexuality, again from both before and after I came out
• And last-but-never-least, messages about specifically trans sexuality, limited primarily to ‘chicks with dicks’ and ‘she-male’ porn

Again, I want to clarify that this post is going to be about my experiences. I’d love for people to chime in, but I’m not attempting to speak for anyone else, of any sexual orientation, gender identity, personal experience, etc, etc, etc. On the way I may make some wider generalizations about The Trans Sexual Experience, but my goal is much more to bring some clarity to my sexual experience, identity, and so on. So there.

I also think this is a good time to link to the these three posts I did on sex and the effects of hormones, back in late 2009. (Wow, two years ago?) Those used to be password protected, but are now public. Funny how my attitudes on privacy have changed in two years…hopefully posting all that stuff won’t come back to haunt me, but I gotsta say what I gotsta say.

Things I Wish I’d Known

TERRIFYING SEX ED DOLLS

I just re-read all three of those posts, and everything about them still stands as it relates to my early experience with sex and sexuality. Looking back now, I do think I was a lot more awkward than I thought I was at the time. That’s probably true for lots of people’s budding sexuality. But I think I owe my first major girlfriend an apology for what I can only imagine was a mediocre experience for her. I wish she’d spoken up, but I also wish I’d known how to ask what she wanted.

I also wish I’d come to an earlier realization that I don’t like being the penetrator in penetrative, penis-in-vagina sex. I don’t know if it’s the mental aspect of how I relate to my body, or the physical size of my ‘equipment,’ but I’ve never really enjoyed that kind of penetrative sex. I’ll do it, and – to clarify – I enjoy it enough that I’d rather do that than nothing… Mediocre sex is better than no sex, in my mind. I’m not totally sure – from my admittedly limited sample size – that the experience was great for my partners, either.

That’s perhaps the biggest thing I can point to and say “this was a lesson I learned being socialized as male, in a primarily heterosexual society.” I simply didn’t have a concept of sex outside of penis-in-vagina. Foreplay, fooling around, hooking up – there were lots of other ways to be sexual, but only one way to have sex.

Likewise, I imagine my (now mostly faded) hangups about anal sex and anal play came from being told – implicitly by culture, if never explicitly by anyone – that anal play was dirty, unpleasant, something for the penetrator and not the penetratee. That it was gay.

Fortunately, I’ve been honest enough with myself and with my body to realize that A) it’s not tooooo dirty if you do it right, and B) it (at least for me) it feels really good.

There’s still some lumped in baggage I possess, swirling around the ideas I picked up concerning male and female heterosexual, cisgender sexuality – basically my first three bullet points – which I’m going to lump together and call heteronormative : Who is supposed to initiate a sexual experience, how power dynamics are supposed to work between partners, all that stuff above about penetrative sex and anal sex and the definition of ‘real sex.’

As I become aware of those lingering hangups, I try to address them and think them through. Something I think I’ve really managed to turn around is my definition of sex: It’s not a specific act, it’s an experiential thing. My straight friends sometimes laugh when I call them out on this, but in my mind a blowjob or mutual masturbation or whatever is just as much sex (or, at least, can be just as much “sex”) as penetrative, penis-in-vagina, “real sex.”

Last Friday Night

Friday was a good friend’s birthday. A bunch of mutual friends had dinner, came back to my apartment for some drinks, and went out to a club. Usually I don’t join for that last part (something I’ve mentioned before). But this weekend, for whatever reason, the stars aligned and I was ready to go out. So we all headed down to The Apartment, a bar/club in Chicago near the wealthy Lincoln Park neighborhood. The dancing was kind of ridiculous (as dancing tends to be) but the music wasn’t horribly obnoxious, I had my first experience taking a drink from an ice luge, and was generally having a good time.

I'd like to imagine we looked something like this

Our group was dancing in a little clump, and whenever a stranger would come up and start to dance with me I’d politely (I hope!) turn or move away to make it clear I wasn’t interested. I’m realizing that in and of itself probably would have freaked me out a few years ago, so it’s a sign of how far I’ve come in my comfort presenting as a woman that it didn’t phase me.

But I was a few (more) drinks in and feeling loose when I felt someone’s hands – a stranger’s hands – on my hips from behind.

A pause to say that nothing bad happens. I feel like this story is progressing to the point where it seems everything will end badly, but it doesn’t: I’m not raped or sexually assaulted, my friends don’t abandon me, nothing bad happens. This is just about my processing a new experience, and my emotional reactions to it. So you are absolved from worrying about my safety for the remainder of this story.

We continue dancing, this strange man pressed up behind me. His hands go up and down my hips, and I gently move them when I feel they’re getting too frisky. I’m still facing my group of friends, regularly making eye contact with them and non-verbally communicating that I’m OK. (They kept doing the raised-eyebrow checkin, to which I’d smile and shrug.)

After a few minutes dancing, I decided I was done and turn to the guy (much shorter than I expected, but then I’m already tall and was in heels) and said I was going to the bathroom. He actually asked if he could join, which I think is kind of hilarious, but I declined and we parted ways.

Two of my friends followed me to the bathroom to check on me, for which I was grateful but didn’t think I needed. But then while I was in the bathroom (actually in a stall; I don’t think either of them know this part) I had a mini panic attack. Suddenly, those two big worries I’d pushed aside came to the forefront:

• What if he found out I was trans?
• What did my enjoying dancing with a (presumably) straight cis man mean about my own sexuality?

Questions Beget Questions

The first question is more pragmatic. I was in a very public place, surrounded by friends (including some large men who look intimidating) and wasn’t reeeeaaalllyyy concerned for my physical safety. I could have been emotionally hurt, quite severely in fact, if he’d moved his hands a little too far south and subsequently freaked out. But I don’t think there’s a realistic chance I could have ended up as an other Trans Day of Remembrance statistic. Which feels kind of good, that my friends were providing that (literal) safety net.

The second question is a lot more difficult to tease out.

I'm going to recommend AGAINST performing a Google Image Search on 'transgender sex' with SafeSearch disabled

I have lots of straight, cis, female friends who enjoy dancing with other straight, cis, females. (Some of them were doing so at this bar on Friday.) But no straight, cis, male friends who enjoy dancing with other straight, cis, males except when being silly. But I don’t think simply enjoying male attention inherently “breaks” my lesbianism. At the same time, there’s a different between being ideologically OK with some action, and then finding yourself in a situation where you have to evaluate how it actually makes you feel.

What I’m leaning more and more is that I simply enjoy attention. Period. I’m not sure how to respond to male attention, what to do about it, where I want it to go, but if I’m being honest with myself I do enjoy it. But there’s something scary, for me, to be on the receiving end of it. First is all that trans baggage of physical safety and stories of rape and beatings and death. Something which is also true for cis women in many ways, but I don’t think there’s quite the same cultural acceptance of violence and sexual assault against cis women as there is against trans women At least not so explicitly: You can find talking heads on news stories to cast doubt on the inherent sanctity of a trans woman’s body in a way that few are willing to do (publicly) about cis women’s bodies.

So what do I do with that male attention?

Coupled in with that is my continuing surprise and delight at being perceived as a ‘real’ woman, let alone an attractive one. I’m still so doubting go my appearance, in spite of all reassurances to the contrary, that there’s an aspect of shock that some random dude at a club would want to dance with me.

More importantly, though, is that bullet-point list of baggage from the beginning of this post. There’s still some hindbrain part of my psyche which thinks of me as male, as dancing with “another” man as a (male) gay act. Which is bullshit, and something I was able to drink myself out of believing, when my inhibitions were down and I wasn’t over-thinking every little thing. On the flip side, I’ve invested quite a bit of emotional energy into defining my sexuality as ‘lesbian,’ and while I’ve been recently question that for the more open-ended ‘queer’ I’m still not totally sure what that means for me.

That Whole Surgery Thing

Then there’s the final bit of this post’s title: Surgery. I’m still doing my research, but have basically narrowed down my selection to Drs Bowers (San Fran), McGinn (Philly), and Brassard (Montreal). I’m moving right now to schedule consultations with all three.

But what does surgery mean? There’s a part of me that – only somewhat jokingly – thinks that I’ll feel permission to slut it up, with my major worry of being ‘discovered’ as trans inverted up inside me. There’s exploration many people do in high school and college that I feel I missed out on.

At the same time, surgery becomes one more terrifying (and awesome and exciting, but also terrifying) ‘virginity’ to lose, both metaphorically and literally.

So, returning to my initial question, what does it mean to be a sexual trans woman? Hell if I know. I think it means all of this: this discovery, this forging my own path. Not only do I not want to follow a prescribed path to my sexuality, I don’ think there is one. There aren’t enough trans narratives to feel like I have the ability to find many ‘just like me’ role models out there. That isn’t to say I haven’t drawn from the experiences of others. Whipping Girl, Yes Means Yes, The Ethical Slut, How To Get What You Really Really Want, Cunt; these books (and authors) have all heavily impacted how I think of myself as a sexual being.

But I think I have to find the rest of the way myself.

Not the kind of race I mean

I was recently having a conversation with a number of artistic peers, discussing the impact of our personal and community histories on our art and artistic process. I don’t remember who the question was raised by, but the group consisted of a mix of racial/ethnic/gender/sexual identities, making for good conversation.

In general we all agreed that our various personal and community histories – of religion, race, ethnicity, language, geography, class, sexuality, gender, and so on and on and on and on – played a factor in how we approached creating art. While it was a great conversation, and fodder for more discussion, I’m less interested in that than in something which happened after.

During the conversation, I said, “It’s been interesting going from presenting as part of a strong, privileged group – white, heterosexual, male – to an oppressed group: queer, trans, female.  I try to both be conscious of and artistically honor that oppression while being aware of the privilege I still do posses.”

Then, while giving someone a ride home – who identifies as black, female, lesbian – she turned to me and said, “Your comment really surprised me, since I don’t think of you as white.”

What?

She continued saying that my olive complexion doesn’t meet her idea of ‘white’ness. And it’s true. At various points, I’ve been thought to be Hispanic, American Indian, India-subcontinent-Indian, Pacific Islander, Italian, Arab, and – most humorously – ‘ethnic looking.’ (I shit you not. By a photographer wanting diversity in a high school photo shoot. She didn’t intend for me to hear.) My mom jokes that, when she came back from summer vacation when I was young and we spent every day at the beach, the (very dark-skinned) custodian at her school would come up to her and say “You could be my daughter!” I’m not too pasty even in the dead of winter.

But not white?

The friend who said all this felt that, in some ways, the more old-school way of looking at race was more accurate. Race, she said, is more of a subdivision of culture and geography than a huge lumping together of sort-of-similar skin tones. So, she concluded, Jewish people weren’t white.

There is certainly historical precedence for her opinion: “among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, white Hispanics, Slavs, and Greeks.” But she didn’t mean that I wasn’t white in  racist way, as a justification for discrimination, just in an observational way.

It reminded me of a story I heard at a storytelling conference. A black woman was talking about her experience as a voter’s rights activist in Chicago in the 1960s. She apparently pissed off the the wrong people in the Chicago machine and  so her dad said she had to leave Chicago for a little while: white people were out to get her. He was going to send her to Israel to stay with some friends, because “Jews aint white.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about all this for the past week, particularly as I just finished the excellent book Constantine’s Sword, which covers the 2,000 year relationship between Judaism and the Catholic Church. Hopefully that’ll be the subject of another post one of these days.

But back to race. Googling “are jews white” doesn’t offer much help. An interesting take on genetic information. An essay from Majority Rights, a site which “discusses various issues related to the preservation of Western culture and the ethnic genetic interests (EGI) of people of European ancestry.” I do, however, like “Jews and the Problem of Whiteness,” which discusses community relations between Jewish and Black populations through the lens of race. From that essay:

As Lerner points out, Jewish whiteness “is the privilege to renounce one’s Judaism. By and large the way to get into this system is to take off your kippah, cut off your beard, hide your fringes; in other words, to reject your entire cultural and religious humanity.” I seek to empathize, here, as my previous discussion of the sociological passing of blacks should indicate. Nonetheless, the Jewish option to be white, however difficult, has been exercised widely.

That’s a good summary of why the idea of my not being white kind of surprised me. The history of Jewish oppression is absolutely a history of racism, of othering, of bigotry. It shares lots with the racism which impacts people of color. But I have at least somewhat adequate passing privilege (how I hate that term!) as white. Part of that, admittedly, has to do with geography: how I’m perceived as white versus Jewish would probably be different in different parts of the country, and of the world. My mom and my brother have both talked about living in smaller communities where their Judaism was strange or exotic. My dad has told me about going to civil rights marches in Chicago’s northern suburbs, where families had signs on the lawn reading “No dogs, blacks, or Jews.”

It seems like the ‘whiteness’ of Jews depends on perspective. That makes me remember a page from my high school year book. The editors had surveyed students from different Chicago-area high schools and asked them what they thought of Evanston, a very diverse community, and its high school, which has a huge range of student academic achievement. Everyone north of Evanston (generally more wealthy suburbs) saw Evanston as “ghetto” and dangerous. Everyone south (generally less wealthy, in Chicago proper) saw Evanston as rich, white, privileged.

The idea of racial identity changing with geography is fascinating to me. That, growing up in Chicago, I’m white. Growing up in Generic Small Town, I might not have been perceived as white. Or identified my own race as something other than white. And how much identity depends on other people, as a reference for ones self.

I’ll leave you with this chart:

The post is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, Suzan begins by saying…

I’m an old fashioned lefty.  I’m not something because I identify as that thing.  Claiming to identify as without being seems to me to be an odd construct that doesn’t fall much in line with my existentialist line of thinking.

I am not a woman because I identify as a woman. I am a woman even though I was assigned male at birth because of having been born with something that the best term for still seems to be “transsexualism”.  I had sex reassignment surgery that made me female.

It’s an interesting question, to be sure. Perhaps the interesting question, when it comes to identity politics: when does someone become part of a certain group? (Race, religion, gender, ethnicity, whatever.) Is it a declarative process? “I identify as X, therefor I am X.” Or is it a tautological of identity? “I am X because I am X.”

Both views present certain difficulties. For example, I can identify as being a redhead all I want. My hair will remain stubbornly brown. But I also identify as Jewish, even though I don’t practice Judaism or believe in a monotheistic deity. In one case, identifying as something doesn’t make me that thing. In the other case, it does.

But I could use my hair color identity to just as easily say “I can identify as a woman all I want. My gender will remain stubbornly male.” (Indeed, certain people do make this claim about why trans people aren’t “really” their stated gender.)

Suzan has similar thoughts:

Usage of this semiotic ["identify as"] carries several other subtexts, including: If you share that one trait but do not embrace that identity (in this case transgender) then you must be self -loathing.  You are in denial and an antagonistic separatist, particularly if you defend not embracing that “identify as” semiotic.  Refusal to identify as is therefore grounds for assumption of hostility towards the group one refuses to identify as.

She’s concerned with being labeled as “transgender,” regardless of her own identification as such.

To be honest, I come from the other side of the issue  of using “identify as.” That is, I consider myself a woman because I identify as one. I suppose I would go a step further and say I identify as a woman because I am a woman, but that again gets into the circular definition of “Women are people who identify as women.”

Which, I think, is where my objection to Suzan’s dismissal of “identify as” as an important concept comes from. There’s – to me – no objective definition of what it means to be a man or to be a woman. The only way I can definitively answer the question “Is Person X a man or a woman?” is to ask them myself. I make socially appropriate assumptions, as much as I don’t always like being expected to do so, but I can’t know for sure without a conversation.

Suzan again:

If I say I am post-transsexual it doesn’t mean I am beyond all concern regarding the subject or all concern for those going through transition.  It means that for me those experiences were all so long ago and when dredged up are subject to new interpretations based on the many years of experience since.  The requirement that I “identify as” is alienating as it negates the passage of time and the experiences of life after SRS.

And here, I think, is the ultimate issue at stake in this discussion: How does one define transsexual? Is it, as I think Suzan would argue, “An individual who currently feels a disconnect between their expressed and internal gender and wishes to undergo medical treatment to correct said disconnect”? Or is it, as I tend to use the term, “An individual who has ever felt a disconnected between their expressed and internal gender and has wished to undergo or has already undergone medical treatment to correct said disconnect”?

Suzan’s definition places primacy on the currently lived experience of the individual. There are good reasons to do so, and I find it difficult to tell someone, “Well, you used to feel this way so you have to have labels XYZ.” At the same time, I don’t consider “trans” to detract from my ultimate identity as a woman. “Trans” for me is an adjective, not a noun. I’m a trans woman, yes, but I’m also a Jewish woman, a white woman, a tall woman, and a host of other adjectives.

So, in the end, Suzan has every right to drop the label or the identity of “trans” from her concept of her self. But – at least for the foreseeable future – I’m going to keep that label, and I don’t think it makes me any less of a woman, or Suzan any more.

Hi. I’m Violet. Rebecca has been kind enough to let me have some of her blog space for a guest post, and let me dip my toe carefully into the world of writing for a wider internet audience. Identity-wise, I am a twenty-something white currently-abled trans-female-spectrum genderqueer and sexuality-queer tomboy geek engineer. Except to the extent I’m not. But this post is about identity labels, so bear with me. Rebecca has previously posted about identity labels as keywords here, which I think is awesome, and I wanted to add another different (and geeky) way of looking at them to the discussion. This post is adapted from something I wrote more personally last year.

By “identity labels”, what I mean are nouns and adjectives that you use to describe people — “woman”, “man”, “goth”, “punk”, “masculine”, “feminine”, “trans”, “queer”. These things are useful for communication. Labels can function as a shorthand to tell people about what your life is like. They allow people with attributes in common to find each other and compare notes. I use them a lot.

The problem is that they’re wrong. Or, rather, not quite right. Any time you have an identity, it comes with a pile of stereotyped behaviors that any given claimant of the identity might or might not share, and it tends to reduce the perception of the claimant down to those stereotypes. Oops. (Rebecca, in her keyword post, also got into the possible confining nature of labels imposed by others.)

Now for the geeking out. Don’t worry — if you don’t speak math, I’ll give an example in pictures below.

I often view labels as vectors in some huge or infinite-dimensional vector space. Given a set of labels — say, {male, female} or {straight, queer} or {gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, questioning, ally} or whatever — finding out how you identify is a process akin to estimating the projection of your personal self-vector onto the subspace covered by the basis of labels in the set. Of course, that basis is never orthonormal; that would be too clean. It’s not orthogonal or normal at all. It’s just a mess of huge-dimensional vectors that you have to try to match yourself up against, throwing away all those components of yourself that aren’t in directions available to you in that basis. Worse, the self-vector is a function of time. The way you project on to a certain set of labels changes over the course of your life, sometimes even non-continuously. Even the identity labels change over time. Does being a goth mean the same thing now as it did fifteen years ago?

For an example of how my thinking about labels works, people sometimes ask me “are you male or female?” What they mean is usually something like this:

Pick either the male dot or the female dot. Okay, that doesn’t really fit me at all. I certainly don’t fall exactly on one of those dots. How about another picture, where there’s a continuum between male and female?

Hmm. Still not all that great — in this model the extent to which I am female is exactly the extent to which I am not male. I don’t think there’s actually a single coordinate that describes my place on a line for this — what if I am some amount of both? So then you can imagine this picture, an orthonormal basis for gender:

This is better, but I still think it is more complicated than that — “male” and “female” are culturally understood as at least somewhat opposed — being male does have something to do with not being female. So this picture is somewhat more accurate:

But that’s just my identity put in terms of binary gender. Binary gender isn’t a good system for capturing a whole lot of parts of my identity (or anyone’s, I am guessing). There are whole dimensions of identity that have nothing to do with concepts of masculinity or femininity, and exist off the male/female plane, like this (The disc is there to help you picture the three dimensions. In my head there are more than three dimensions involved here, but I don’t think I can draw that.):

In most modern culture, asking about someone’s gender limits your question to the male/female plane, but it’s not evident to me why that particular plane has to be that special. For example, in a lot of situations my geekiness is a lot more important than my projection on to the male/female plane. I’ve even answered the question of “what gender are you” with “I’m a geek” before. And some people’s genders might be completely orthogonal to the male/female plane, which makes answering the gender question in a societally understandable way even harder.

I’m surprised I can do more than just stand and stammer when people ask me the “male or female” question. Those are useful labels to have around, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I find it important to keep in mind that those categories are not mutually exclusive, and they completely miss some dimensions of gender identity. The same goes for any other set of labels you care to pick.

Many identity labels can be used as nouns or adjectives, but others can’t. A hypothetical article that said, “Lesbians polled at the Health Center said XYZ,” wouldn’t raise my eyebrows, nor would “Lesbian women polled at the Health Center said XYZ.” (Other than being a little awkward, since ‘lesbian’ implies ‘woman.’) (But lets not get into that again!)

At the same time, saying, “Blacks polled at the Health Center said XYZ” seems awkward and dated. Using “Jews” or “Italians,” though, doesn’t seem problematic. (I’m picking examples pretty much at random, here.)

What about “transgenders” versus “transgender people”?

My default is to use “transgender” as an adjective: “Transgender individuals polled at the Health Center…” My retroactive justification for this is because I think of being trans as huge part of my identity, but using “transgender” as an adjective conveys that it is only one part of a larger individual. At the same time, that concept could be expanded to any identity that can function as a noun and an adjective, but I don’t have the same emotional reaction to hearing some identities as nouns (Jews, gays and lesbians, etc) as I do to others (transgenders, blacks).

Making things more complicated, I’m realizing that I’m more OK with “transsexual” as a noun than “transgender.” I’m not thrilled with either, but saying , “Transsexuals polled (etc)” doesn’t bother me as much as using “transgenders.”

I’m just not sure why, or what (if anything) to do about it. Is it the type of issue that’s worth bringing up? I feel hesitant correcting people when there is no reason I can identify beyond my own linguistic discomfort, and I’m not even sure if anyone else feels the same way.

1. I like sex, and being sexual
2. I identify as a woman
3. I was assigned “boy” at birth, and still have ‘boy bits’
4. Women can’t have ‘boy bits’
5. But I like sex…

(Rinse and repeat…)

Basically, is it OK to enjoy sex, even if your body isn’t what you really want it to be? Or, you have issues using your body in the socially/culturally expected way?

My answer is enthusiastically, “Yes!” I don’t know if it’s because of the liberal community I grew up in, the supportive people I’ve dated, or the overriding fact that I really like orgasms, but I’ve never really been drawn into that type of circular reasoning. I think a lot of that has to do with whether or not you can separate your own genitals from your gender identity. It’s all well and good to say, “Yes, in theory, people with incongruous genitals and gender identities are “really’ their identified gender” about other people, but can you apply it to yourself?

To put it more bluntly, why does a penis need to be a male organ? Why does a vagina need to be a female organ?

I’m speaking entirely of your own perception of yourself (and your partner’s perception, if applicable), not what society says or how you see your body in an ideal world. I’ve become more and more interested in looking into surgery for myself, although I’m certainly not ready to make any commitments, so I’m not saying I want the genitals I have.

But I can certainly enjoy the genitals I have.

This is a situation where I think the Ask Professor Foxy on the subject is pretty applicable, but I don’t think it needs to only apply to people who identify as trans. It’s possible to be uncomfortable viewing yourself as “the woman” or “the man” while having sex, even if you still identify as a woman or a man.

My understanding is that there’s a disagreement in the trans community over whether individuals who have transitioned can/should still be labeled as ‘trans.’ (Of necessity, I’m using the term ‘trans community’ to include men and women who do not believe ‘trans’ is an appropriate identifier for themselves.)

Specifically, one poster left a comment about how to refer to trans individuals, saying, in part:
You can use “trans” if you want, along with “transsexual, transgender, FtM, MtF, trans men, trans women, trans community, and transgender community,”

However, another poster came at the issue from the opposite side, and replied with, in part:
The proper way to refer to a woman who transsexed is woman…..period. If you absolutely must use a modifier, woman of transsexual history. “Transgender”, as the previous poster is well aware, is considered by many if not most of us in that place a deadly insult…..like the “n” word for someone black. Please, do not use the word “transgender” as an all inclusive umbrella term.

It certainly sounds like all involved agree that, when referring to an individual, you should use whatever description they feel is most appropriate. However, when referring to ‘the trans population,’ it becomes a sticky issue because each perspective is somewhat mutually exclusive – either it is ‘the trans population’ or it’s not, it’s the ‘population with a trans history.’

That’s my understanding of the general disagreement, and how it played out in this discussion specifically (at least, as a very brief summary). For my two cents, I do I identify as a trans woman, and am not uncomfortable with the term, and I don’t know many trans individuals who feel differently. From my perspective, ‘trans’ is a modifier of the designation ‘woman,’ and does not supersede it. Likewise, a friend who is diabetic could be a ‘diabetic man’ without his diabetes canceling or nullifying his identity as a man – my identity as trans can exist, for me, without nullifying or obliterating my identity as a woman.

-R

One of the common refrains throughout the book (paraphrased) “I don’t understand it [being transsexual] but I accept it.” For exapmle, from page 243: “Like a lot of feminists, I’m generally suspicious of what people mean when they say they have ‘a woman’s brain’ or ‘feel like a woman,’ but transsexual people are content after they transition, feel they’ve fixed something, and while I’ll never understand it, I’ve met too many people now who have given up too much to transition to doubt what is going on is legitimate.” I have a huge amount of respect from anyone else who is able to see something outside their own personal experience of the world and not say “No, no one can feel that way because I don’t feel that way.”

That said, one passage from close to the end of the book jumped out at me and I did want to ruminate on it.. From page 251:

The feeling that I am supportive of Betty’s transness only for the sake of the man I met creeps up on my now and again. Betty worries that out of love for him I “put up” with her. If she gets to the point where she has no male left for me to connect t, there is a chance I will wake up one day and realize I am not in love with and feel no loyalty toward her. This is why when a trans person uses that “but I’m the same person” argument, I want to say, “Well, I sure as hell hope not,” because we had better not be dealing with all this crap without its effecting any real change. That’s the point, that the trans person’s change will be enough to make living in the world easier and more comfortable for him, whether that’s done through crossdressing or transition.

In an earlier post, where I mulled over the origins of ‘self’, I mentioned a Boylan quote that I think is also relevant here:

Above all, I wanted my friends and family to know that Jenny was not a stranger, that she was someone they already knew. It was a puzzle, though – if Jenny was so very much like James, didn’t that mean she was not really female? And if she really was female, didn’t that mean that she was someone unknown? That I could be both unambiguously female and, at the same time, the person they had always known seemed impossible. Yet, it was an impossibility that was largely true.

I guess I agree with Boylan and Boyd, even though the two quotes seem express somewhat mutually exclusive viewpoints. That is,  I agree that second-wave feminism was on to something with the ‘radical’ idea that an individual’s personality/worth existed above and beyond gender. (At least, that’s my understanding of a primary tenant of second-wave feminism and why it’s what people most commonly think of when they’re imagining ‘man-hating feminism’: second-wave feminism was of the bra-burning ideology.) (And it’s at this point I wish this blog could do easy footnotes…I’m such an academic geek.) And, in that respect, I side with Boylan: I’m transitioning to ‘become’ female, even though though the ‘core’ of who I am isn’t going to change: my sense of humor, political ideology, interests, friends, etc, etc, etc, won’t change. (I know I’m sidestepping the problematic use of the words ‘become’ and ‘core’ with air-quotes…they’re not strictly relevant to the point I’m trying to make and I’ll be happy to chase my tail trying to nail down better words some other time.) But I also agree with Boyd that the whole damn point of this endeavor – hormones, therapy, hair removal, figuring out how the hell to use makeup, buying a whole new wardrobe, etc, etc, etc, – is to present myself as, interact with the world as, and (most important to me) think of myself as a woman. That is, I wouldn’t be doing this if I wanted to come out the other side (no pun intended) the exact same person as I started.

As always, navigating the middle ground is difficult. I obviously disagree (well, I hope it’s “obviously”) that “biology is destiny,” that we’re “only” our sex or our gender, that men and women are “fundamentally” and/or “irreconcilably” different, all of that bullshit. But I’m also compelled to disagree with the concept that gender/sex/whatever-you-want-to-call-it isn’t important or a major factor in some (I won’t say ‘all’) people’s personalities and/or views of themselves. Now, I don’t think this is actually what Boylan (or Boyd) is saying: I’m taking each of their views to a ridiculous and unreasonable extreme to make a point.

But it’s difficult to meld Boylan and Boyd’s perspectives and say, “I’m transitioning to change something fundamental about myself. But don’t worry – nothing fundamental will change.” And, in the end, that is how I feel. I want to reassure the people who love me that I’ll still be the same person after all this time and energy and money and and tears and sleepless nights; that they won’t lose the ‘me’ that they love. But I also want to reassure myself that the whole point of transition is to make a transition. That is, literally, to move from one place to another.

Hopefully, I’ll get there in one piece.

-R