A liberal's discomfort with trans-gender

[hudebnik]

Unlike some people bothered by the trans-gendered, I wasn't raised in a "Mad Men" world, and I don't pine for it. I was raised in the feminist backlash against a "Mad Men" world: we watched "All In the Family" after dinner, and I nearly memorized the album "Free To Be You And Me". I was brought up to believe that your physical sex should have no bearing on your choice of toys, occupations, social and economic roles, clothing, etc.

Which leaves me puzzled when I hear of people who decide they "should have been born male" or "should have been born female". Why should it matter, for any purpose other than excretion and sex? (Two activities in which, combined, I expect to spend perhaps 1% of my life, leaving 99% for activities that have nothing to do with the shape of my sex organs.)

I took Home Economics in junior high school, because I liked cooking and wanted to do it better, and because I didn't know much about sewing but thought a competent person should. I knew I would be teased for it -- I already got a lot of abuse, and accusations of being "gay", for the twin crimes of being small and smart -- but I thought it was the right and brave thing to do. If I were in junior high school today and made the same choice for the same reasons, would I be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and advised to consider hormone treatment or even surgery? If, furthermore, I were exploring my teen-aged sexuality and found some attraction to other boys, would that seal the diagnosis? I certainly hope not!

When trans people win the battle to change their sex and be accepted in society as their new sex, it tells me we lost the war: your physical sex does determine your role in society after all. The trans movement seem to me to be working very hard to escape from prison... so they can check themselves into a different prison, when I would have preferred to raze both prisons to the ground.

To use a different metaphor, gender reassignment strikes me as a hardware solution to a software problem. I have a spreadsheet program and need a Web browser, so instead of installing a Web browser, I change the CPU to one which interprets the instructions of a spreadsheet program as those of a web browser. It just seems terribly inelegant and inefficient.

Mind you, I'll fight vociferously for your right to declare yourself male or female, and be treated as such; see here and here. But I'm deeply disappointed at your need to do so.

Comments, particularly from transgendered people and their loved ones, are welcome: I don't understand the motivations, and I really want to.

Comments

[siderea]

I concur with metahacker that this was a bit cringe-inducing. While, like him, I'm willing to grant this comes from a place of well-meaningness, to me it comes across as far less earnestly curious than it does fighty. You sound indignant about what you believe of transgender people, much of which is false.

I'm just going to quickly run down a list of bunch of things in your post which are erroneous and their corrections. I'll include some rhetorical questions I'll indicate with "Consider:". I am not asking you to answer them here, but rather to provide you with some questions to contemplate over time, with which to challenge yourself.

I'll start with the fun and funny one, because shame on you of all people for missing it:

Why should it matter, for any purpose other than excretion and sex?

Last night – I kid you not! – I ran into an old friend from my friend's list whom I hadn't seen in years, and discovered them now sporting a beard and large biceps. "There's been some changes," he said with a shy grin. He then invited me to a concert this weekend, where he was singing in the chorus. "I'm singing bass."

We are reminded of our own gender identities every time we open our mouths and hear ourselves speak; we are reminded of how other people see us. I had a patient who was a cisgender woman with a two pack a day habit, and a tendency to be addressed as "Sir" on the telephone; she did not find this funny or irrelevant, she found it humiliating, and it was probably her single greatest motivation to try to stop smoking.

My points here:

(1) The physicality of masculinity (and femininity) are not limited to genital structure and function! In fact, it's often the secondary sexual characteristics which are of critical emotional interest to transgender people of the sort you've been talking about. The horrified-fascinated cisgender majority is terribly interested in what's in transgender people's pants, but transgender people are very often more interested in what's under their shirts – and on their faces and in their gloves. Consider: completely aside from gender identity, i.e. what someone "is", is it reasonable/comprehensible for someone to deeply want to have, purely for reason of strongly held aesthetic convictions, a male/female voice, male musculature, female breasts, female/male facial structure, female/male skin texture? If so, is it not sensible that someone might want to "be" the sex not assigned them at birth because that is the sort of body they very strongly want to have?

(2) Gender performance is not only an issue for transpeople. Cisgender people – most of them – who are misgendered by others find it uncomfortable at best, and often find it provokes strong negative emotional reactions, especially when it happens a lot over time. Gender performance is both for ourselves and for others; when we receive feedback from others that indicate their perception of our gender performance is not congruent with our desired or intended gender performance, that feels dismaying. Consider: Have you had experiences being mistaken for a woman? (Not including any time when you were in costume attempting to portray being a woman.) If so, what was it like for you? If not (and as a cisgender man, it is unlikely you have), what do you think it would be like for you to be chronically randomly addressed as "Ma'am" and "miss" by store clerks and police officers, to have coworkers invite you to women-in-tech and girls-night-out activities not as an ally but as someone assumed to be female? Would you feel the need to change your gender presentation in the hopes of reducing the frequency of that mistake? Would you feel you had an obligation to others to do so to reduce their distress at the awkwardness of having to correct/disabuse them?

[continued]