Gender Identities

There are so many terms used by people who don’t fit the behavioural expectations of their ‘assigned birth sex’. I’m not sure if there is any other way of saying that without offending or excluding someone among the women born men, people with birth defects, people with trans history, Harry Benjamin syndrome, gender identity disorder, androgyne, genderfuck, gender queer, trans, trans-women, trans-men transsexual, cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens, drag queens, transgendered…. almost every term is contentious in who and what it describes.

In my own writing I often use the term trans and transgendered to encompass anyone who does not fit the behavioural expectations of their assigned birth sex. I don’t expect people to accept this as a personal identity label, but I find it a useful catchall term. I do tend to slant this towards people that have or had some kind of gender dysphoria and generally exclude sexuality from this mix.  I include those who identify as having a trans history but are now for all intents and purposes cisgendered on account of their trans histories.

I personally love the word transsexual. It is a relatively new term for how I describe myself. It feels like a word of power and has a hefty weight of history and social expectation behind it. I think many people find it a little scary. I like the reaction I get. It is almost always favourable. There is the initial brain stutter, the eyes dilate a little and then comes the ‘wow!!!’.  It is like I have won a prize. It gives me instant street cred.

Relating to myself it means a person who was born one sex, but desired the body and genetalia of another and has transitioned in some way. Other people use it in other ways e.g.a person who has had genital reassignment surgery, a person who identifies as a gender on the other side of the binary from their birth sex regardless of whether they have transitioned or  a person that has been formally diagnosed as having Gender Identity Disorder or Gender Dysphoria.

I tend to keep my actual gender identity separated out of this as I don’t always identity as a woman. I'm not sure why that is. I’m the woman that’s not. It is a little bit of a minor conundrum. I wish there was recognition of people being non-binary gendered. 

What I want is to be able to say that "I'm a person with a female type body and female genitalia, who dresses and is called female pronouns. While lean towards a female gender identity I am not entirely comfortable being considered entirely female identified and feel that I am a step to the side of that". You could say I am gender queer. 

I wish there was a way for me to dress that would identify me as 'not quite woman'. Maybe I would be more comfortable as an alien, had pointy ears and fangs, or living in a foreign country. 

This conundrum does not cause me any particular distress...pointy ears sounds rather brilliant though! (note to self, don't think of this when manic...)

Sexism in Science Fiction and Fantasy

I love Science fiction and fantasy. It has always been an escape for me. Now that I have become much more aware of inequality and sexism, compared to say when I was a boy in my teens, I am noticing more and more that fantasy and sci-fi novels seem to swing from incredibly sexist to more ideal worlds where there is no sexism.

Often in older sci-fi and fantasy the sexism is there because it reflects the society of the writer at the time of writing. I try to be tolerant of that. But even so I am finding sexism in fiction a total turn-off for what would otherwise be incredibly enjoyable reads.

I just read one of Alan Dean fosters Flinx novels, The Tar-Aiym Krang. It is funny the Commonwealth government featured in the book is described as a progressive, well-intentioned liberal democracy when the level of sexism is rather appalling. Admittedly it was published in the early 70’s and I guess I can forgive it for that reason. It still makes for awkward reading. There are five ‘key’ female characters in the book (next to several male characters who are all equally heroic) – One is a concubine from a race of women who essentially are gold digging prostitutes. She throws tantrums and gets her shapely behind spanked. One is ‘affectionately’ called Mother Mastiff and she is called that despite understandably not liking being called a dog. There is an evil merchant with too much plastic surgery (ewwwww evil!!!) and her inept niece who has a bit part. Admittedly the merchant has a muscle bound male sex slave of small brain but their relationship is described as rather more unflattering than the guy and his concubine. The last is a pilot. The pilots only defining feature is that she is in love with the guy who has the concubine. The piolet and the concubine therefore share a strong cat like enmity of each other. They end up having a fight involving a lot of scratching and hair pulling and they manage to almost completely rip each other’s clothing off!! Phoar!

I think historical sexism in sci-fi and fantasy has created a lot of baggage for geek culture today. Sexism is still alive and kicking despite the fact that sci-fi and fantasy has often been used to push the boundaries of sexual and racial inequality e.g. Star Trek. Perhaps most blatant is the immerse worlds of computer gaming, particularly social gaming. 

The anonymity of the internet creates a forum for sexism to flourish with no consequence. Girl gamers get harassed in many different ways and games are often designed with male dominated worlds and women with overly sexualised bodies (the same goes for comics). In many games you still can only play them as a male character. It is easy to see how young men who spend a lot of time gaming on-line, who have comparatively little ‘real life social contact’, who are being fed a diet of women as objects for male gratification and women as not having the same power as men, are getting the wrong idea. As a result there is an on-line gamer communities which are actively hostile towards women. 

I think there is still a place for sexism in science fiction and fantasy, particularly if it is used as social commentary. Sexism is about power imbalance. My question now is can you have gender roles without power imbalance? Would gender roles exist if there was no power imbalance? I’m not sure they would. 

One example which might fit the bill is Game of Thrones where the women and men have rather strong gender roles. While the males tend to inherit overt power it is the women who seem to be the movers and shakers behind the scenes. Many of the characters transgress their roles. We have a mix of strong warrior women like Briana and soft pretty men like Little finger. But even so the gender roles in the books are based on the premise that women are there to make babies while the men hold all the power. This is one of those medieval fantasy tropes.

Trans-lies

I like challenging some of the memes of the trans world. As a group we carry a lot of baggage to do with identification, the way we name ourselves, stuff inherited from past types of diagnosis and the historical gates we had the get through to receive treatment, societal expectations around perversion, sexuality and religion…

What I really want to do in this blog is show that there are other paths outside of the norm, that there are other equally as valid ways of carrying out your journey. I’ve been thinking about what the ‘idealised’ transsexual woman might look like in western white society using all the standard memes and tropes out there (caveat: based on my experience of white western culture). I started making it but I realised it was pretty offensive. It was offensive in that actually some of us might look exactly like it and that is perfectly ok. I think there is an element of arrogance on my part as if to say that I know better. All I really have is my own experiences and my interactions (and altercations) with other trans type people. 

So instead I thought I would make myself a little vulnerable and talk about some of the things I said before and during my transition. These are things I said because they were the party line of my community, because I wanted to protect myself because I was afraid that I was not trans enough or that I would lose people I love. I’m feel very embarrassed and sad and guilty about some of these things, but here goes:

I never get aroused by dressing as a woman.

There is this massive fear among many trans people of all stripes that they will be labelled as autogynophilic (translating to something like getting turned on by seeing yourself as a woman). There is a huge stigma attached to this. I think in the past you were not considered a ‘true’ transsexual, and therefore not receive treatment, if you were autogynophilic. We are understandably afraid of being labelled as 'simply' having a sexual perversion, so divorcing ourselves from sex is in many ways good PR. It is not generally considered a valid reason for transition.

I used to say on no uncertain terms that I did not have autogynophilia, but this is a lie. Helen Boyd in her book “My husband Betty” spoke very frankly about autogynophilia among trans people. I think it was that book that made me realise, or at least admit to myself, that I do get turned on by seeing myself as a woman.

While the thrill has diminished with time from those first teenaged forays, I still love myself. I love looking at my body. I love feeling the curves. I love that I feel ‘right’. It turns me on.  It is a kind of narcissism and if I was somehow cloned I would so do me. 

There is no denying that I suffered from gender dysphoria. There is also no doubt that my body now matches my internal sense of self. But I am still turned on by seeing myself with a female body. Perhaps this is just one expression of gender euphoria, the, in my case, lusty busty sister of gender dysphoria. Not all of us feel this, but I think more of us do than we like to admit.

I will still be the same person inside

I think this is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, that somehow we will remain unchanged within all our physical change. Usually this is something we say to partners, to try and reassure them that the person they love is still there. 

Unfortunately what we don't or choose not to consider is that transitioning is not just a physical change. It can be a total emergence of a very inexperienced young self who has a huge amount of growth to do in order to find their place in the world. We change. We change in ways we don’t even realise ourselves. Our interests can change. Some of us even change sexuality. Sometimes this makes us closer to our partners, but more often I think it takes us further away from the person they loved.

I’ve said it myself. I said it to my partner at the time. I said it to my family. But while I retain much of the self I was I now relate to the world in a very different way and it also relates differently to me. 

I think this last point is very important. We might not change but the way the world sees us does. It can be something as simple as men now expecting you to walk through a door or enter a lift first (I still struggle with this one and makes for some awkward interactions. Actually many trans women will tell you that gender is irrelevant in that they let everyone through doorways first but men are socialised to do this. I think women are not socialised to do this at all. Try this as a woman and things get weird. In the case of man on man I remember the higher status male will let another through first even though this was not a conscious thing). It can be much more overt.

I used to love to hunt, but my hunting was wrapped in my relationship with my dad. It was always with him that I went and it was part of our thing. It was part of my identity that I was someone who went out and killed wild things and had wild adventures in the bush and came back covered in blood and the stench of wild things. But it was never something I pursued strongly under my own steam. When I transitioned my dad stopped asking me hunting and I have never gone again.

As soon as I started wearing woman’s clothing I felt very ‘natural’

It definitely feels better to be able to dress as you want to dress. For me, while it felt right to wear women’s clothing, it took some time for it to feel ‘natural’. Most of my pants did not have pockets in them. My shape was not conducive of a lot of women’s clothing (which I think is true for most women too on account of the varied body shapes and more fitted clothing). Bra’s were uncomfortable. Lace trim was itchy. High heels sometimes painful. The clothing hugged and exposed more than male clothing did. I was not used to moving in it or needing to be careful crouching down to tie my shoelaces while wearing a skirt. I was understandably very self-conscious.

There was incredible feeling of freedom and relief being able to wear it and I would say that it felt so right and natural. But what I did not say was that for many of my early attempts at staying in them for long periods of time I felt gutted that by the end of it I could not wait to get out of those clothes and back into my male slouchy wear. It did not help either that the stuff I wanted to wear was from a very idealised female image and in many cased this type of clothing is the least comfortable to wear.  It made me doubt my trans-ness. I wanted it but I was not comfortable. I felt like I had failed.

I did not know the extent of it

This is perhaps my biggest lie I have ever told and for that I have the utmost regret. I still sometimes say it. I said it because it took some of the responsibility away from me. It allowed me to deny that I knew what I really wanted. I said it because I wanted to believe it and I hid from the truth. Even my thoughts skirted around it. But I knew that I wanted to look like a woman. I knew I wanted a female body. I knew that I wanted to wear women’s clothing all the time. I knew that I wanted to change my name and be referred to as she.  

What I was really saying and could not admit to  was “I don’t know how much of it I can live without”. As a result I prolonged the pain and perhaps made it worse for everyone.

Hindsight is a lovely thing. I should note that despite these desires I did not identify as a woman until well into my transition. Even now that label does not sit entirely comfortable. A topic for another time perhaps.

I think it is worth challenging the memes of the trans world. They are not always our friends. They increase the doubt and guilt many of us feel. They can be very invalidating when you don't fit, and I have seen some of them used as weapons by trans people against other trans people. They can be damaging to ourselves and the ones we love  As hard as it can be, owning our own feelings and desires is important. Sometimes we suck (sometimes we suck a lot!) and I think that is part of being human. But we can always try to be better moving forward. What else can you do?