Ugh. I've been sitting on this post for days--wanting to gather the courage, knowledge, and strength to write it. Five days have passed and I feel no different, only grumpier and more writing-angsty than ever. So, whether this post sucks or not, I have to write it.
The topic of transgender has only very recently crossed my radar. I was raised in a world where there were only two acknowledged genders--I can't remember when I first heard the word transgender, but it was in the last few years only. Homosexuality and alternate lifestyles weren't on my radar either growing up, and if they did become visible, they were used by those around me as an excuse to belittle, abuse, and bash other lifestyles. I went to a white, privileged middle-upper class private school, so once again, my horizons were narrow and I saw little diversity of any kind.
I can tell you that I have felt different my entire life. I didn't really know how I was different, just that I was, and not even knowing there were options when it came to gender identity and expression, or lifestyle choice just made me try all the harder to squeeze my very non-squeezable self into the boxes provided for me by family and culture: female, white, Christian, good, and so on.
Parallel to these cultural constructs hemming me in on all sides, was my own personal journey. At age 11 (just barely), I started bleeding, the second girl in my grade to get her period. And you know what's sad, I was pissed that I wasn't the first. I wanted to win at everything, even bleeding, even woman--whatever that was. Well, sure enough, I started to "win" in that department a lot faster than I, or my parents (who were horrified at my sudden extreme womanhood) would have ever wished. That same year, in fifth grade, I went practically overnight to a curvaceous, sexy woman with wide hips, C cup breasts, a period, and acne. Oh god, the acne. If someone wasn't staring at my chest, they were staring at my hips. So I was painfully, and obviously thrust into womanhood with a big bang and an ever bigger chest. A part of me liked all the attention, though. It made me feel powerful to know that I could command the room with just my body. I was proud of having curves and bigger breasts than my flat-chested friends. I was a woman, never mind that I was 11 years old.
I remained at about a size 6 to 8 with C cup breasts until high school, when several extremely unpleasant things happened. I broke up with my boyfriend (or did he break up with me, I can't remember), my parents separated and soon divorced, and my twin sister and I were left largely responsible for my younger, 4 year old sister, while my parents tended to their wounds.
I soon dropped out of all social life except for homework and school activities, choosing instead to spend time with my sister rather than hang out or party. I also began experiencing "situational depression," began attending entirely pointless therapy, and started to eat. I ate to comfort myself, to stop the pain, and to stuff the waves of emotion and sadness that I felt back inside where I could control them. I started to gain weight. A little at first, but by the time I graduated high school, I had intimate relationships with Walt Whitman and Catullus and Emily Dickinson, and chocolate, not with friends or partners. I was a size 18/20 at the time my senior photo was taken.
I also noticed a small amount of facial hair appearing as I gained weight--thicker sideburns, mustache, and hairs on my chin, which was concerning, but I was already too ashamed of everything about myself to bring this up with my doctor. What if something was wrong with me? What if I was really a man? (Help! Pass the chocolate!)
In college, I gradually lost weight again--finding an environment where my kind of weird was normal and not having access to much food dropped me down to a size 12-14, and in general, I was happy, in relationships and so on. And as I said before, being weird wasn't anything out of the ordinary at St. John's College, so if I was strange, I didn't notice. What did start occurring, however, was that I began to realize that my behaviors, socially and romantically, were largely quite different than those of the other women around me (though less so than out in the world--Johnnie women are a different breed altogether). I was bolder in pursuing ideas, passions and dreams than the average woman. I was more aggressive in the bedroom and in pursuit of sexual and romantic partners. I tended to initiate the beginnings and ends of relationships. And if someone tried to bring me down by challenging me (in the bedroom or out), I took it as a call to get better, and to kick more ass. I also asked out and pursued just as many guys as pursued me. I found out that men found me sexy and terribly intimidating, which was all quite baffling to me.
Since graduation college six years ago, I have experienced pregnancy and childbirth, as well as a significant amount of weight gain and loss. The facial hair increased, as did my, at this point, nearly insatiable libido. The father of my child was an extremely aggressive, dominant and abusive human being, who refused to allow me sexual or personal dominance in my life, and in the nearly 4 years since leaving that situation, I have uncovered a massive amount of knowledge about my identity that had been buried for 14 years under cultural indoctrination, abuse, and simply a lack of knowledge about different ways of being.
Since being in a healthy, nurturing relationship with my current partner, I have discovered the following about myself: I am a bisexual, polyamorous, gender-queer person and I have poly-cystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). For years, I have fantasized about having a penis, but have never wanted to give up my female body. This has never been out of sense of woman-hatred, or love of patriarchy, or any such nonsense, but rather a desire to experience life from a male perspective, both physically and emotionally. What is it like? What are the fears, pressures, and joys? And what does it feel like to make love from the other side? To be the penetrator rather than the penetrated?
I love being extremely feminine and curvy (see?) but inside, I feel like a man. I am strong-willed, risk taking, impulsive, eager, driven, and approach sex and relationships like a dude. I have an insanely high sex drive, and prefer multiple partners and a variety of sexual and intimate love-styles. Still, I didn't know what transgender always was. I just joked about how I was more like a man than a woman, but it didn't matter since my body was more woman than most. I've struggled when it comes to dating and pursuing a woman because I don't operate in that push-pull, hot and cold sort of way. I'm like, "do you want me, or not?"
But once I read Jennifer Finney Boylan's account of raising her children through and post the transition process, I knew I had hit on something. Of course, it scared the shit out of me. But I deeply related with JFB's accounts of her identity, and of simply feeling different inside than the ay you are outside. It isn't about judging which gender or body parts are better--it's about a deep knowledge of which ones you feel you should have, and that sometimes what you feel is quite different than what you were assigned at birth. JFB didn't want to be a woman because she felt that women were superior, she just WAS a woman. As simple as that. Are you going to judge a man and blame him for not being a woman, or accuse him of being anti-feminist or anti-women just because he has a penis? Not all men are bad, and not all women are good. One thing we all are is human.
At the recent AASECT conference, I attended all the sessions I could on the transgender experience, including one particularly powerful one on adapting sex education to be inclusive of trans experience. I plan to write up an account of this session in a future post, but just to quickly sum it up--changing our language around sexuality is extremely important. We can no longer refer to sex as between a man and a woman, nor can we assume that all women have vaginas and all men have penises. MOST women have vaginas, but not all. MOST men have penises, but not all.
Around the time of this conference, I received results from my endocrinologist. I had made an appointment with my local endo to discuss my irregular period, facial hair, and struggles with weight gain, despite the recommendation from my PC that "everything was fine." And guess, what? I have PCOS. Folks with PCOS have cysts on their ovaries that cause increased production of androgens (testosterone) and inhibit ovulation, cause weight gain, and facial hair growth. And, not surprisingly, most trans FTM folk wither have PCOS before transition (increased androgen leading to male ideation), and then, those that do not have PCOS often develop it from testosterone treatments.
So all this is to say, that there is a huge variety of gender identity and sexual expression in this world. You may look at someone and assume a certain gender. Take me, for example. Breasts, hips, curves--feminine in body and dress. However, my hormones tell a different story, as does my self-defined gender identity (my "affirmed" identity). We need to start thinking beyond our genitals when it comes to gender and sexual identity. It's also beyond time to start making assumptions about behavior or belief structure based on this supposed M or F identity determined at birth by what's between our legs. There are more "masculine" women, such as myself (and perhaps Cleopatra or Elizabeth I, I like to think), and more "feminine" men and a whole range of everything else in between. We need to give our children and each other choices when it comes to who they are, how they feel, and how they choose to express themselves. Why does gender even matter so much? How about just human?
And to answer the recent question of a friend:
"What's your take on trans men, though? I am very conflicted about how to think about women who transition to the male gender, because to me that seems like it's saying "I cannot be a woman because
women are X and I am not that" - which is a very limited way to view women. It's also effectively "passing" - buying into the male power structure, rather than resisting it. Men who transition to the female gender are fundamentally disenfranchising themselves: not so, the other way round. It seems anti-feminist and even anti-woman to reject female-ness and all it connotes in favour of joining the boys' club."
I think it's important to identity some the assumptions, and perhaps, prejudices that are at play here. For one, you seem to hold the belief that it is better to be a man than a woman, or certainly that there is some value in the struggle of being a woman in a society that does not always value female-ness. There is also the assumption that a person chooses to transition from female to male because she is dissatisfied with her role in society. While I can see how it might look that way on the outside, most trans folk aren't attempting to make a larger societal statement with their transition. They're just being who they are and who they've always been. Transition is just about making the outside consonant with the inside. A trans man IS a man, and has always been a man--or perhaps, developed into a man at puberty. It isn't so much about choosing to be someone else, as choosing to be oneself fully, inside and out.
Furthermore, I have great respect for transfolk and genderqueer people because, often, they have had to do a lot of inner work to discover who they are and figure out how to manifest that in the world. Can you take a just a moment and imagine what it would feel like to be born into the wrong body? To be you on the inside, but a chimpanzee or a giraffe on the outside? How would you express yourself? How would you let others know that you were really human, even though you appeared giraffe-like?
In my experience, most transfolk are incredibly gender respectful and tend NOT to stereotype others based on appearance, gender, or societal roles as a result of what they had been through. So to your concern about a trans man opting out, or joining the "old boys" club--that seems highly unlikely to me. Again, I would challenge your assumption that a trans man going through transition is attempting to make a statement against women, feminism, or anything of the sort, but is on a very personal journey to make one's insides match the outsides (damn pronouns!)
I think that transfolk offer us an incredibly opportunity to see humanity beyond the gender binary, and to appreciate a wide variety of gender and cultural expression. If anyone is going to get us beyond the limited idea that feminism is just for women, and all men are evil, its a person who has been both genders, or who chooses to live a life somewhere in a gendered no-man's land, as both man and woman. Please, do everything in your power to allow others to define their own gender identities and advocate for transgender rights, sexual education, and more. Trans people are still the at the highest risk for suicides and bullying in the United States, and they are one of the greatest gifts we have been given.
No comments:
Post a Comment