The pink and blue highlighters in your brain
Why would so many people sacrifice money, effort, and social respectability, even risking their lives, defying rules that society has laid down for members of their sex…so they can follow rules that society has laid down for members of the other sex? I mean, if you’re going to get yourself in trouble with the Gender Police, why not be straightforward in your rebellion?
People who answer this question use clinical terms like “gender identity,” or clichés like “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Kosse Phillip Feral, an FTM transsexual, told a filmmaker: “The way I explained it to [his children] was I’ve always felt like a boy on the inside and the outside didn’t match the inside… They’re just little kids so they can relate to I’ve always felt like a boy or I’ve always felt like a girl.”
Statements like this are obviously directed to an audience that includes non-trans people, and they imply that everyone in the audience, trans or not, adult or child, has a gender identity. I’m expected to read Feral’s remark and think: Ah, yes, I feel like I’m a man, and I’d be pretty damn distressed if, given that feeling, I had breasts and a vagina and people kept referring to me as a woman. Therefore, I can understand how someone who is in that situation is a human being deserving of sympathy and respect, not a pathological weirdo.
Here’s my problem, though: I agree with the “human being deserving of sympathy and respect” part, but everything that comes before it trips me up. I know what it feels like to have a penis. I know what it feels like to spend my childhood with other boys indoctrinating me into Appropriate Masculine Behavior. I know what it feels like to be told that it’s good for me to go into elementary education, because I’d be providing little kids with a “male role model” in the classroom, and then discover that without a spouse making substantially more than myself, I can’t make enough as a teacher to pay off my student loans and live in Boston. (Not that I’m, y’know, bitter.) I know what it feels like to think, well, a sundress would probably be a lot more comfortable than pants in this 90° weather, but I’ll never know, because if I go out dressed like that I would be risking my job security if not my physical safety.
But I don’t know what it feels like to be a man. Or, for that matter, a woman. At least, I think not. Do I have the emotion that Feral talks about, but label it with different words? Am I like one of those incredibly closeted people who call themselves “asexual” to avoid labelling themselves as “gay”? Or am I the pathological weirdo here—not because of my gender identity, but because my lack of gender identity? To sort out these questions, I have been on a quest to isolate this mysterious “gender identity” that so many people take for granted.
Mommy, this strange man is deconstructing me
So what is gender identity, in terms that an AI, an alien, or a cripple like myself can understand? It can’t be the desire to have a penis or vagina, since some trans people are content to keep the genitals they were born with. It can’t be the desire to conform to a male or female gender stereotype; as Colt Illicit points out, you can be an FTM trans and enjoy all sorts of non-“masculine” pastimes.
C.I. suggests that there is a spectrum of gender identity, similar to the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation, in which most people are somewhere in the middle. With all due respect, I think he’s fallen into a taxonomic trap: confusing gender identity with conformance to a gender role. If you look at how well people conform to the stereotypes of their gender, you’ll see a pretty wide distributions. But when people are asked what sex they are, they almost always choose one side or the other, not a point on a continuum. C.I. has “met many ftm men…who enjoy doing female drag,” but he calls them “ftm men”, not “80%-men-20%-women”.
We need to disentangle gender identity from gender role-conformance. How?
The curious incident of the girlfriend in the bio
Typically, a woman’s intimate, platonic friendships with her “girlfriends” are important parts of her emotional life. These friendships are radically different from anything that most men have experienced; when I read Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the women there, in the ways they manipulated one another, might as well have been aliens from one of those “sociological” science fiction novels.
I am led to wonder: do MTF transwomen have these kinds of relationships with other women, especially non-trans women? Do they not feel any need to form such relationships? Do all of their close friends know their medical history, changing the dynamics of the relationship? Even after reading a number of autobiographies (near the bottom of Lynn Conway’s “Successes” page, there are a few dozen links), I have no clue; the topic just doesn’t seem to come up.
This absence of information is, in itself, informative. I assume that the people who write these autobiographies value their non-trans female friends, and put a lot of effort into maintaining those friendships, but they must not consider the friendships relevant to their lives as trans people. By contrast, descriptions of the physical and emotional effects of hormones are standard components of this genre. And this is a demographic group that is willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for various medical procedures not covered by insurance, not to mention the thousands of hours they devote to learning how to “pass.” So why isn’t friendship with women part of the standard “MTF trans success” story? As they say in the Talmud, mai nafka mina, what’s the difference between them?
Here’s the difference: the unwritten rules of how to be a girlfriend are specific to women, but getting recognized as a woman does not depend on following them. Suppose that Alice and Barbara are girlfriends, and Barbara, unbenownst to Alice, is a transwoman. If Barbara violates Alice’s expectations of how a girlfriend should act, Alice might consider her less of a friend, or wonder at her poor social skills, but Alice is not going to suddenly realize, or even suspect, anything about Barbara’s gender.
In my arrogant opinion
Here’s my theory: gender identity is the desire, as an end in itself, to pass: that is, to be recognized by other people, even toddlers, as unambiguously belonging to a certain gender, for most of your day-to-day life. (I say “as an end in itself” to exclude, say, a 19th-century woman who dresses as a man so she can join the army.)
I think this theory fits what I have been looking for in my quest. It reflects the fact that most people, trans or not, seem to know what their internal gender is. The theory doesn’t make identity depend on genitalia, since most people who see you will decide your gender without looking at your crotch. The theory doesn’t make identity depend on role conformance: you can break every standard of Proper Femininity you ever learned, but as long as you want people to recognize you as a woman, you clearly have a female gender identity. The theory marks me as a pathological weirdo, but hey, I’m weird for all sorts of reasons, no harm in adding one more.
(A corollary is that if we lived in a culture where a child could change his or her social gender without stigma, hardly anyone would seek sexual reassignment surgery. I realize that this corollary is both controversial and unprovable.)
I think this theory has some interesting political and sociological applications, but before I go on to those, I need a reality check. All of you readers who do feel like you have a “gender identity,” whether or not it matches your physical body: how well does the description in my words connect with what you feel in your guts?
commenting closed for this article
Seth, thank you for writing one of the few original pieces on this subject that I’ve been privileged to read in a while. What are your thoughts on Dr. Louis Gooren’s research? He has several decades of substantive data indicating the biological reality and origins of a condition he terms “transsexualism”.
I believe that we can draw distinctions not only between gender identity and gender role-conformance, but also between gender identity and sex identity (not sexual orientation ;) ). The difference in terminology between those who self-identify as “transGENDER” and those who ID as “transsexual” relates to this distinction. For example, an FTM man who is satisfied with his physical attributes but who seeks to “pass” as a man, may identify as transgender. This is because, while his gender identity is as a man, his sex identity may be less binary. (Different people use these terms differently, but this is one manner in which they are used.) In contrast, an FTM man who seeks to be viewed as a man AND possess physical attributes common to a male sex identity may choose to call himself “transsexual”.
While I appreciate the thoughtful intellectualism of your approach, I find your statements somewhat limited by your evident lack of personal experience with trans people. I’ve met many FTMs who believed from their infancy that they would grow penises. I myself actually believed that I would grow a penis until my early teens. This was not related to any desire to “pass”, but an innate sense of discomfort with the contrast between my sex identity and my physical reality. Gooren’s research documents one characteristic common to transsexuals, which he refers to as “kinesthetic sense”. This kinesthesiological sex identity is hardwired into children as young as three. As in the case of an amputee, the kinesthetic sense actually feels and registers organs that are not physically present. It seems implausible to suggest that desire to change one’s sex stems from purely cultural factors, in light of the growing body of evidence to document the biological origins of transsexualism. HOWEVER, there are clearly many cultural issues involved in gender identity.
Let us imagine a society in which gender identity is not linked to sex identity. I believe that there would be men who wanted to pass as men but physically transition to have some attributes related to a female sex identity. In fact, I know a man in California who did this. (Under the table, of course.) He wanted breasts and had always felt feminine, identifying as having a female sex identity. Yet this man identifies as a man and is quite content to work, B-cup breasts included, as a man in male clothing.
The unfortunate political risks of taking the position that transsexualism is caused by cultural factors are that transsexuals will be considered mentally ill or people who chose their conditions. This popular misconception actually creates barriers to access of medical services for transsexuals.
It is interesting that even some of the fiercest opponents of transsexual surgery, like Rabbi Bleich in his decades-outdated commentary on this issue, acknowledge that there is no “cure” for transsexuality. If cultural factors were the main cause of transsexualism, why does “reparative therapy” and overwhelming social conditioning fail to effect any change in identity? Why is this still diagnosed as a psychiatric “disorder” in the U.S., when even the APA lists a purely physical rather than psychiatric therapy as the only treatment with proven efficacy?
Legal females are routinely permitted to get breast implants, liposuction, and estrogen therapy without significant psychological screening. Women whose birth sex was designated as male face extreme obstacles to get those same treatments, for reasons unrelated to medical risks or safety.
The world is not as neutral on gender identity as your statements suggest. I recall one rabbi who was consulted regarding sex reassignment/sex affirmation surgery. Stroking his beard thoughtfully, the rabbi replied that he “didn’t have a gender identity”, that “gender is a social construct”, and that “he didn’t identity as a man or a woman”. Perhaps he failed to see that his relationship with his body, his identity as a father and husband, his use of male names and pronouns for himself, his all male social circle, his use of bathrooms designated for men, and scores of other gender-specific activities involved his having affirmed the gender identity of a man. Gender is so neatly interwoven into the fabric of daily life that most people never even notice it unless it isn’t working for them.
I can understand you, Seth, identifying as not having a gender identity, but the reality is that you are living as a man, with all the specific benefits and misfortunes that entails. When you enter a synagogue and choose your seating section, you are making a public statement about your gender identity. This identity may not fit with your personal comfort or desires, but it is the one in which you pass. The level of distress you feel regarding that “passing” determines whether you consider medical intervention necessary or irrelevant.
Wearing a sundress as a matter of practicality doesn’t alter the fact that you (presumably?) enjoy your male anatomy and its functions.
For intersex people, who represent between 1-10% of the population depending on the sources, choosing a sex identity isn’t necessarily binary. Some people are male, some female, and others something else. It’s not quite as simple as you’ve described.
Given the extremely high rate of suicide attempts among people who live with the daily reminder of genitalia that simply doesn’t match with the kinesthetic sex identity of their brain wiring, I would urge you to continue your research before drawing your conclusions.
One more comment… I already am passing as a man in every area of my daily life and in all of my interactions, kayn ayin hara. I have changed my social gender. Yet I still feel the desire for sex reassignment surgery. I didn’t plan on feeling this way after I had facial hair and otherwise male physical attributes, but I do. I used to agree with your unprovable hypothesis that “if we lived in a culture where a child could change his or her social gender without stigma, hardly anyone would seek sexual reassignment surgery”. But as I meet more transsexual people and progress in my own transition, I realise that I was wrong. Some people are perfectly satisfied by a change in social gender, without the need for genitalia to match. But many people, most of whom refer to themselves as transsexuals, feel the need for sex affirmation surgery. I have close friends who are otherwise mentally healthy, who experience severe body dysphoria and suicidal ideation specifically related to the contrast between their SEX identity and their genitalia and/or chests. It’s about a lot more than GENDER identity for them and for me.
I would say that I have a neutral gender identity, if that makes any sense. While certainly my biological features and my social standing lead me to use the ladies’ room rather than the men’s room, and I don’t feel any dysphoria about my gendered social roles as they stand right now, I feel uncomfortable identifying as a woman. I don’t mind sitting on the women’s side of the mehitzah, but when it comes down to who I am, gender is activity not part of that list beyond, maybe, “not male”. I shudder with anything that conceptualizes me as an aspect of my gender because of this dissonance. I’m uncomfortable being a “bride’s attendant” at a wedding simply because I feel it is performing a gendered role that I’m not attuned to.
For instance, I have a group of friends who have “girlfriend” relationships with one another (personally I hate the term, but that’s a different conversation). They’ll have girl nights out and such things, and I avoid those events because the idea of them makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. I don’t see my gender as a defining characteristic of who I am and I don’t feel a special bond with people my gender. Most of my friends tend to be male; I’ve never had a special close “girlfriend” relationship with a female, nor am I interested. Some of this may have to do with my sexual orientation and seeing the appeal of a “girls night out” as having a context which makes more sense in a heterosexual framework than a queer one. Still, when people identify me as a “woman”, I feel strong dissonance between the term and who I am in a way I don’t with “geek” or “femme” or “student” or “white person”.
There are so many things I want to say about what’s already been posted that I felt I needed to break them into separate posts. Components, as it were. The first three are these:
* A fish in water
* male/female != masculine/feminine
* 5 components of gender
I might think of more later.
Note to self: get new comment system for this blog, or tweak existing comment system, so that it can handle HTML comments more gracefully….
I hear what you’re saying about not having a gender identity. The thing is, I’m not sure you can say that. A fish doesn’t feel like it’s in water. We don’t feel like we’re walking around in a cloud of nitrogen and oxygen. You don’t generally notice things like that until you’re out of them. It’s the lack of congruence that draws our attention to things.
Parents experience this all the time. Praising a child for good behavior takes a great deal more conscious intent than reacting negatively to bad behavior. It is natural to take “normality” for granted. That’s what being normal means. It’s the abnormal (or un-normal, or a-normal) that forces us to take notice.
There are no real words to describe what it’s like to be a small child living with that sort of incongruency. No one who hasn’t experienced it can really get it. I know, in theory, what being deaf means. But I’ve never experienced it, and I can’t really understand it. Even were I, God forbid, to lose my hearing now, I would still never know what it’s like growing up without ever having known what hearing is like.
I understand that you think you have no sense of your own gender. And while I’m wary of putting my own interpretations on the feelings of others, I’d like to suggest that you’re referring more to the social construct version of gender than actual gender identity.
As a certified Barbie Factory Dropout, I know how many trannies strive for femininity, rather than femaleness. In many cases, this has to do with poor “passing” ability. After all, what is femininity, if not a costume that hides the real person? (Masculinity, too, but that’s probably something for someone else to talk about.) Makeup and designer clothes and plastic surgery and $100 haircuts are great for some people, because after they’ve done it, all people really see are the makeup and the designer clothes and the plastic surgery and the $100 haircuts.
Personally, I don’t have the energy for that sort of thing. I’m a woman; not a Barbie doll.
What does it mean when a 4 year old knows feels she’s female, despite her male body? That’s the next entry.
There’s a big difference between male and masculine. And there’s a big difference between female and feminine. I’m sure everyone here has seen masculine women who were clearly female. Or non-feminine women who were not only obviously female, but very sensually female. Take the character of Corky in the movie Bound. She was smoldering hot, and I’ve heard guys say the same thing. But feminine? Hardly.
Not only that, but masculine isn’t the same as macho. Nor is feminine the same as… whatever the equivalent is of macho. Sex kitten, maybe.
Pardon me while I slip into something a little more metaphysical, but I think there’s a spiritual difference between male and female that does not map directly to any of the social constructs of gender. Many MTFs strive for femininity because that’s what society seems to want from females. When a woman rejects that social construct, people see her as different. Different in that way isn’t something MTFs want for themselves generally. It’s not really what I want for myself, but it’s who I am. “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
I once met a woman online who grew up as a Hassidic boy in Williamsburg. When I met her, she was a very vocal and very butch biker dyke with a radio show. Clearly another Barbie Factory Dropout. Quality control just isn’t what it used to be.
My therapist let me have my magic letter for surgery 4.5 months after I started seeing her. It wasn’t until several months later that I mentioned to her that I thought I was gay. From her reaction, I’m not sure she would have been so quick to give me that letter had she known earlier. Being a lesbian doesn’t fit with the Barbie paradigm, you see.
A guy who wants to have breasts doesn’t have a female identity. He just wants that aspect of femininity. And, excuse me while I step over that line again and express an opinion of other people’s feelings, but I think that transgendered people who are okay with their bodies as they are are really more interested in the social construct than anything else. Maybe those with a horror of surgery in general, or HIV+ folks who can’t find a qualified surgeon who will agree to operate on them, are exceptions. Maybe they’ve made a virtue of a necessity.
FTMs who don’t have surgery… that’s a toughy. It’s so outside of my experience that I hesitate to comment. But, of course, I’m going to anyway. Some FTMs don’t have surgery because to all intents and purposes, it’s not available. The cost and the lack of an aesthetic and/or functional outcome counts as not available, I think. But a lot of FTMs continue to be a part of the lesbian community. I once went to GirlFest on the 4th of July in Santa Cruz. I got there early, and volunteered to help. They put me at the entrance with a little coffee can for donations. They told me that men were allowed in only if they were guests of women. And before the organizers had finished telling me this, two guys walked up, said hi, and went in. I was very confused, until I realized that the guys in question hadn’t started out that way. The way I figure it, a woman who transitions to male and stays a part of the lesbian community is saying “I’m still a woman”. And is really more interested in masculinity than maleness. It’s sort of like the butch thing, but taken to an extreme.
Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna wrote a book called Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. While I’m not really a fan of ethnomethodology (it smacks of absolute subjectivism and relativism to me), they had some amazing stuff in this book. Probably the most valuable thing was their division of “gender” into 5 distinct concepts. Rather than rewrite what I’ve written elsewhere, let me just give you a link: http://starways.net/beth/gender.html.
a) Sorry about the duplicate post. I hit refresh to see if anything had been added, and it reposted my previous comment.
b) There’s a URL at the end of my last post. Can that be hyperlinked?
I feel like a bunch of very wise fish have been telling me, “see, ‘water’ is the thing that helps you move by providing a surface to push against when you wiggle your tail”, and I’m thinking, “but when I wiggle my tail, I don’t move.” I see all these other fish nodding their heads and saying, “ah, yes, that explains what water is”, but I still don’t understand what water is. Maybe I’m not in water. Or not a fish. ¶ Kessler and McKenna’s “Gender Identity” is precisely the thing I’m trying to grok here. The other four kinds make perfect sense to me.
Out of skeptical curiosity I typed my name into a search engine, and lo and behold, look what appeared!
I find it quite interesting there’s all this discussion.
I did what I did to suit myself, not to get anyone else into a frenzy of analysis and deconstruction. Funny how the personal act of changing one’s body has to get everyone into an uproar.
I have been able to separate the social “being seen as a man” aspect from the “I am physically male” aspect. I already pass full time as a man in all areas of my life. Yet I cannot fully enjoy my physical body because it is different from how my brain “knows” it should be constructed. My sex life, while excellent, could be far more excellent if I actually had the penis for which I have phantom nerve sensations. I don’t enjoy my chest, though I am comforted by the rock-hard muscle part above the nipples. I realise that I do view my body as male. At present, I am biologically male in the sense that I am hormonally male. On blood tests, I read as a normal, healthy male. I no longer test in female ranges for any biochemical levels. A friend recently remarked that he found the emphasis on surgery as the demarcation between male and “pre-transition” within the “ftm” community to be problematic. What is more striking, all-encompassing a change than altering the body from being hormonally and chemically female to being hormonally and chemically male? My personal experiences and reviews of medical literature have shown me that I have a male brain sex. That means I was never fully “biologically female.” Dr. Louis Gooren and other experts have significant evidence to point to this reality. I’m not saying that everyone who identifies as “trans” has a brain sex consistent with his/her/hir gender identity, but that this is one of the characteristics of transsexualism. I agree that gender, in terms of social roles and definitions of gender role conformance, is learned. However, I would not use this fact to draw the conclusion that trans people wouldn’t exist if gender was fluid and not socially imposed. Sex identity, as in the biology an individual identifies as that which they were “meant to have” on an intrinsic and kinesthetic level, is NOT socially constructed or learned. I knew that I was meant to have something phallic between my legs and a body configuration that was more like that of the boys around me well before I was old enough to identify with any gender at all. My “sex identity” was formed before I even started school. It was only after I was enrolled in the full time gender indoctrination known as school that I began to be taught that I was a girl and that girls were supposed to behave in a particular manner that was different from boys. I contend that transsexualism is a biological condition which has nothing to do with gender roles, social constructs, or externally imposed ideas. I am passing full time as a man, yet I still want a penis, so that I- alone on a desert island or in my private bedroom life- can experience physical completeness and comfort.
Another important point is that many FTM men did NOT come from the lesbian community. I have met many FTMs whose prior identifications and experiences were as straight women, as women who were attracted to gay men, or as asexual beings.
I also know FTM men who had relationships with women in which they were viewed as men within the relationships. These men, prior to identifying as trans men, were still male-identified enough that they had no involvement with lesbian communities.
that’s quite an assumption, particulalrly as it is based on a LACK of information, as you have admitted. Exemplo gratio: I am a testes-having person (thus far), these days awash in estrogen, apparently, of my own making, and having some real trouble concentrating today; and my young female roomate is having her period and can’t think real straight either. Do I feel comfortable sharing? I do not. Do I feel a need for this, which is you have to admit somewhat more intimate than a testes-having person is real accustumed to? Yes, and a little desperately too.
/”I am led to wonder: do MTF transwomen have these kinds of relationships with other women, especially non-trans women? Do they not feel any need to form such relationships? >Do all of their close friends know their medical history, changing the dynamics of the relationship?< Even after reading a number of autobiographies (near the bottom of Lynn Conway’s “Successes” page, there are a few dozen links), I have no clue; the topic just doesn’t seem to come up." /
I wonder why. Born with testes and made to try and fit accordingly; could it be that some are not socialized (and I was raised exclusively by and around females, still: ‘he’s a boy’ IE: how could he understand such a thing) in any way fit to deal with such a need should it arise? Much less say writing a book about it.
I’d say yes, the dynamics of the situation have everything to do with it.