Seeking understanding on trans* people?

[Ms. Carolynne]

I think it's possible to be something (trans in this case) and not realize it, which is what most here are driving at. It's also possible to be mistaken.

 

Not long ago, I might've told you I was a cis-male. That wasn't accurate, but I had a lot of repressed thoughts and feelings which I didn't understand. I've had these feelings since I was about 5, but I had no clue what it was, so it hadn't occurred to me until later in life.

 

 

As for the contradictions between various theories, they probably aren't all correct or complete. Maybe there's a bit of truth between them.

 

I don't believe gender is socialized (not entirely anyway), gender roles I believe are (they have proven to change throughout time and between cultures), but I believe gender to be moreso psychological and biological.

 

 

[Taylor Lilith]

2 minutes ago, G1P0 said:

I don't believe gender is socialized (not entirely anyway), gender roles I believe are (they have proven to change throughout time and between cultures), but I believe gender to be moreso psychological and biologi

This is what my exhausted brain was trying to put into words. There are scholarly journals everywhere saying I'm a woman and exactly what I say I am but gender roles are ever changing. I was sitting here thinking "Where's the lie" but there wasn't one. I was just tired. 

 

Thank you ❤️

[Calligraphette_Coe]

1 hour ago, Alllan53 said:

My point is that, nonbinary people aside, people are either a gender, or they are not. Either is fine, but you can't do both. I'm not asking what people thought you were, except insofar as that is a possible way to define gender. If we go by what a person identifies as, then that would contradict the "always gender X" idea, because how people identify changes, which is inconsistent with the idea of having a true, static gender.

Here, read this. It's an essay called 'The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind'

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/issue-essay-line-dawkins

 

To be sure, because it involves reproduction and sex, the idea of 'a line in the sand' gender isn't going to go quietly into the night, but maybe, just maybe, it will be as Max Planck once said:

 

Quote

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Maybe this idea of absolute gender needs to be retired.

[Taylor Lilith]

11 minutes ago, Calligraphette_Coe said:

Here, read this. It's an essay called 'The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind'

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/issue-essay-line-dawkins

 

To be sure, because it involves reproduction and sex, the idea of 'a line in the sand' gender isn't going to go quietly into the night, but maybe, just maybe, it will be as Max Planck once said:

 

Maybe this idea of absolute gender needs to be retired.

I've never read that before. It's beautiful. 

 

Also Planck was probably correct. Too bad I've met so many people younger than me that spout the same transphobic bs as the worst 80 year olds. The notion of absolute gender will die when I'm not alive to see it. 

[Calligraphette_Coe]

5 minutes ago, Taylor Lilith said:

I've never read that before. It's beautiful. 

 

Also Planck was probably correct. Too bad I've met so many people younger than me that spout the same transphobic bs as the worst 80 year olds. The notion of absolute gender will die when I'm not alive to see it. 

I often wish I could hop on a spaceship that travelled at 99.5% of the speed of light and come back here 500 years later in their time, just to see if the seeds that some of us planted sprouted into beautiful trees. But I think even we've seen some progress. Look at miscegenation laws and support for them-- BOOM, gone in one generation thanks to Loving vs Virginia. Look at gay marriage... it may still fizzle, but in just 20 years we went from the Defense of Marriage Act to Obergefell vs Hodges- BOOM, another one bites the dust.

[Taylor Lilith]

7 hours ago, Calligraphette_Coe said:

I often wish I could hop on a spaceship that travelled at 99.5% of the speed of light and come back here 500 years later in their time, just to see if the seeds that some of us planted sprouted into beautiful trees. But I think even we've seen some progress. Look at miscegenation laws and support for them-- BOOM, gone in one generation thanks to Loving vs Virginia. Look at gay marriage... it may still fizzle, but in just 20 years we went from the Defense of Marriage Act to Obergefell vs Hodges- BOOM, another one bites the dust.

I was honestly expecting much worse when the Cheeto in Chief tried to make the Trans Community his test case for stripping minorities of rights.  I and many other people got demolished when Title IX changed and things got much much worse afterwards. Oddly enough America gave Trump the finger and even comments on Facebook became more accepting than they had before he tried to use us as his test monority. 

 

I expected much much worse but it didn't happen. I've met 15 year olds spewing conservative hatred like the best of them but things still have the capacity to get better quicker than I expect them to. 

[Guest]

In my experience as a nonbinary person who identifies as trans, I feel like I was always myself and just didn't realize it until this past November. When I was a little kid, I was never very modest around other afab (assigned female at birth) people, and I was fairly girly. I slowly became less of a girly girl as I got older, and when I hit puberty it was like someone had flipped a switch, and all of a sudden I wasn't comfortable being undressed in front of anyone, not even my mom or my doctor. I also hated being naked even when I was alone. I didn't understand why, so I stopped changing in front of people and ignored it. This past October, after I had started learning about transgender people in my school's GSA, I started feeling vaguely uncomfortable and disconnected from the interaction I had been having any time someone referred to me as female. I didn't feel strongly male, so I started researching nonbinary identities, and eventually settled on demifluid, which for me means that I'm mostly agender but also partially genderfluid. I'm in the process of socially transitioning to nonbinary, and I plan to get a double mastectomy one day.

[Sally]

Trump has ordered that trans people be kicked out of the military; it's now happening.

[Guest]

Just now, Sally said:

Trump has ordered that trans people be kicked out of the military; it's now happening.

We also can't use the bathroom we identify with sometimes

[Alllan53]

On 7/17/2018 at 11:02 AM, Sally said:

Trump has ordered that trans people be kicked out of the military; it's now happening.

How is that relevant to the topic of this thread?

[To Each Their Own]

On 7/15/2018 at 7:26 PM, Alllan53 said:

This might sound transphobic, but I assure you that I am not attempting to attack anyone's world or self view, I'm just trying to improve my understanding. If I cause offence, I deeply apologise. To be clear, I am not in any way saying that people should not be treated as the gender or whatever they identify as. If you identify as a woman, then you should be addressed and treated as a woman, regardless of what you were assigned at birth, and symmetrically for men.

 

I have heard the argument that trans-men were "always" men, even before they were "out". But I'm confused: when they were born, they were more or less biologically women. They were treated and socialised as women, and if you asked them for at least a reasonable amount of time they would have identified as a woman, although they likely had uncertainty and issues. So, during that time, in what sense were they a man? (And again, symmetrically for trans-women.)

 

Thanks in advance for your patience!

Although I am Agender, I do consider myself transgender. And for me, learning i was Agender was a lot like learning I was asexual.

 

Clearly I was always asexual. I only thought I was straight because I was assigned straight at birth (ASAB). I was also socialised as a straight person. When it became clear that I was horribly bad at being a straight person I was taken to the doctors to find out what was wrong with me and that began four years of trying to be “fixed.” That didn’t work for me, I remained “broken.” I was still ASAB, but I started calling myself a “nothing” until decades later when I stumbled across the word “asexual.” 

 

Finding the word asexual and claiming that word for myself ISN’T what made me an asexual. Neither does assigning me straight at birth make it so, even if I am socialised that way, even if I receive four years of therapy. I was always asexual, and I had finally found a word to describe what it was that I was feeling on the inside. And moreover, I discovered there were other people that were just like me. 

 

Im using my asexual experience in place of my transgender experience here, but they are interchangeable. I hope this helps. For I don’t think a word has the power to change, fundamentally, who we are. 

[chridd]

On 7/15/2018 at 10:09 PM, Alllan53 said:

Let us assume that there was someone who somehow had this magical knowledge of how people will identify in the future (which raises its own set of issues, but I'll get to that later). The idea of "X being always Y gender", combined with misgendering being a bad thing, implies that this Magical Knower would be morally obliged to refer to you as a male, in direct contradiction of your own self-identity.

I don't think that would actually be true, since people can have various reasons for preferring particular pronouns, and not everyone cares about misgendering (some people mainly experience physical dysphoria).  In particular, if someone is closeted, they might be closeted for good reason, and using the correct pronouns might out them and put them in danger.  It's also possible for someone's current conscious feelings not to match up with their actual gender, e.g. being in denial or having conflicting feelings about gender (say, a trans woman who's internalized shame about being feminine), and to prefer pronouns different from what their actual gender is because of that.

 

My answer to the main question of how "trans men were always men" (actually, always male—they were once boys) makes sense is that gender is a subconscious thing.  That is, a trans man has always thought of himself as male subconsciously, since a very young age and probably since birth; but he might consciously think of himself as female because that's what he's been told and that's what he's observed; realizing he's trans, then, would be a matter of both correctly interpreting what his subconscious is telling him (which might, for some people, require being aware that being trans is even a possibility), and accepting what his subconscious is telling him (which might be difficult if he's absorbed transphobic or sexist messages from society).  It's the subconscious gender, then, that doesn't change (except in genderfluid people).

 

On 7/26/2018 at 8:48 PM, To Each Their Own said:

Clearly I was always asexual. I only thought I was straight because I was assigned straight at birth (ASAB). I was also socialised as a straight person. When it became clear that I was horribly bad at being a straight person I was taken to the doctors to find out what was wrong with me and that began four years of trying to be “fixed.” That didn’t work for me, I remained “broken.” I was still ASAB, but I started calling myself a “nothing” until decades later when I stumbled across the word “asexual.”

I sort of kind of don't like this comparison maybe...?  At least as a first impression while reading it?  While I don't think this is the intent, it sort of feels like it could imply that people growing up in trans-positive environments (and therefore don't have any experience anywhere close to what you're describing) wouldn't be trans, but that's sort of an issue I have with the "assigned" terminology in general; it implies that society could have assigned the correct gender, or not have assigned a gender, and then the person wouldn't be trans, whereas at least for physically-dysphoric people that wouldn't work.  My body would still be wrong even if no one "assigned" me as male, even if society considered me female since my birth.

[To Each Their Own]

13 minutes ago, chridd said:

I sort of kind of don't like this comparison maybe...?  At least as a first impression while reading it?  While I don't think this is the intent, it sort of feels like it could imply that people growing up in trans-positive environments (and therefore don't have any experience anywhere close to what you're describing) wouldn't be trans, but that's sort of an issue I have with the "assigned" terminology in general; it implies that society could have assigned the correct gender, or not have assigned a gender, and then the person wouldn't be trans, whereas at least for physically-dysphoric people that wouldn't work.  My body would still be wrong even if no one "assigned" me as male, even if society considered me female since my birth.

Yes, my analogy does have glaring shortfalls. It was the best I could do assuming the OP was asexual.

 

I do appreciate what you are saying here and I do agree with you. Even if I were assigned Agender at birth that would not have relieved the horrendous, physical body dyphoria that I had growing up. Still would have spent decades self-harming because I could not accept my body. Probably would have still attempted suicide.  And most definitely would have still spent the $16K transitioning my body into something more alligned to my psyche!! 

 

The reason why we have the word “transgender” (or cisgender, for that matter) is because we, as a society, assign people as either male or female at birth (no other choice).  “Trans” is the Latin prefix meaning “the other side of,” whilst “cis” is the Latin prefix meaning “the same side of.”  If society no longer did that, we wouldn’t have the need for that word anymore.  (I’m only speaking in general terms because I know there is a movement to get X put on birth certificates in the case of people born with intersex genitalia.)

 

However, given everything I’ve said above, even if I were assigned agender at birth, I would STILL consider myself transgender.

 

[Alllan53]

On 7/27/2018 at 1:48 PM, To Each Their Own said:

Im using my asexual experience in place of my transgender experience here, but they are interchangeable. I hope this helps. For I don’t think a word has the power to change, fundamentally, who we are. 

This makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that, now I have a brain-model to fit things into, I can begin to understand this stuff.

 

(Don't worry, having a brain-model doesn't mean the brain-model is static. Just easier to adjust one than come up with one out of the cloth!)

[ElasticPlanet]

On 7/16/2018 at 3:41 AM, Celyn said:

As a kid, I thought all girls hated their gender and wanted to be boys, so I had no hesitation in admitting "unfortunately, I'm a girl."

I'm a bit like that too, except I thought both possibilities sucked somewhat, and I happened to be given the one (male) that sucked even more than the other. It never even occurred to me that you were supposed to want your assigned gender until I was in my late 30s. That's why I identified as male despite not wanting to be male. Now that I see being a gender as wanting to be that gender, I can look back and say that I have never wanted to be male; I have always been agender. I only said I was male because I didn't know better.

 

On 7/16/2018 at 6:18 AM, Alllan53 said:

But that viewpoint is ultimately circular. If they were "always" Gender X, and socialisation into Gender Y failed because you can't socialise someone into a gender they are not, but gender is the social and cultural role you adopt and are adopted into, then you're positing that gender both exists independently of, and is the result of, social forces.

I don't think it's circular at all. When you say "gender is the social and cultural role you adopt and are adopted into", that's true, but some of us (me included) reluctantly adopt the wrong social role and try to learn to put up with it. We may then need to change it later in life when we finally understand what's gone wrong and what needs to be done about it. Some people know the gender they need to be, but it's not available to them because everyone around them is transphobic and/or transclueless. Some of us have to go on for decades without hope of there ever being a right answer, because we've never even been exposed to any of the ideas we need to make sense of any of it.

 

The desire to be, or not to be, any particular gender, does exist independently of social forces. And it is often a lifelong experience even if we aren't helped to put the right name to it when we are young.

[Karst]

This might be off topic, but I wonder...

If children were raised exactly the same way regardless of sex, what would their gender identities be like as adults?

(Considering the issue of "socialization" here.)

[RakshaTheCat]

7 hours ago, Ardoise said:

This might be off topic, but I wonder...

If children were raised exactly the same way regardless of sex, what would their gender identities be like as adults?

(Considering the issue of "socialization" here.)

Probably depends on a child, some might be more affected by it, some less. I was technically raised as a male, and my identity looks like:

"what the hell is gender identity? I go as male because I look like a male"

if I was biological female, my identity would look like:

"what the hell is gender identity? I go as female because I look like a female"

 

I really have hard time understanding gender identity... 😕

 

[SkyWorld]

For me, it's basically not knowing that I was actually a boy for a while. Just because I didn't know doesn't mean I wasn't. I used to identify as a girl because that's what I was assigned at birth. I used to identify as straight because I thought that was the default. Both of that is extremely inaccurate and I somewhat knew that, but (1) I didn't know what would be more accurate and (2) if I did, it took me a while to accept/figure it out.

 

Though, personally, whenever I refer to my past self before I socially transitioned, I find it easier to refer to my past self as a girl. It was how I presented myself at the time, it was how everyone knew me as, it truly feels like I'm talking about a completely different person, so I kind of refer to my past self as a different person. However, I don't really talk about my past and I'm not sure how I would feel if someone else were to refer to my past self as a girl.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

10 hours ago, Ardoise said:

This might be off topic, but I wonder...

If children were raised exactly the same way regardless of sex, what would their gender identities be like as adults?

(Considering the issue of "socialization" here.)

If they were cis probably exactly the same but not constrained by gender norms. If they were trans they'd presumably come out a lot sooner and with much less fear (because in this world gender wouldn't be the Big Deal that it currently is).

[chridd]

On 8/1/2018 at 7:01 PM, Anthracite_Impreza said:

On 8/1/2018 at 8:15 AM, Ardoise said:

This might be off topic, but I wonder...

If children were raised exactly the same way regardless of sex, what would their gender identities be like as adults?

(Considering the issue of "socialization" here.)

If they were cis probably exactly the same but not constrained by gender norms. If they were trans they'd presumably come out a lot sooner and with much less fear (because in this world gender wouldn't be the Big Deal that it currently is).

…or it might take more time to realize that they're trans, because gender doesn't come up as often.  And I don't know if gender would necessarily be not a "Big Deal"; it might be that any discussion of gender is considered taboo in that world, or that people would fear that the existence of trans people threatens they're culture's gender equality values, or something.

 

To answer Ardoise's question: I think gender is innate, so society having a different attitude about gender wouldn't affect how many people were actually trans, but it might have some effect on how likely people are to realize they're trans, come out, and transition.  I don't know in which way that would affect things, partly because all of this is speculation.  I think it at least partly depends on whether "raised exactly the same way" includes not acknowledging sex differences.  If people were still called "boys" and "girls", but those were seen as pure physical descriptors and there was no expectation regarding roles or interests or who you were supposed to be friends with, I think people would still get dysphoric about being called boys or girls; whereas if society didn't acknowledge sex differences, I think trans people would still exist and experience physical dysphoria, but they would have a much harder time understanding and articulating what it is they're feeling.   (Relevant blog post)