Thoughts on Gender Part 1

When I decided to study gender, I thought that looking at transsexual people would provide some insight into what we mean by gender. The reasoning for this is that such people are starting in one gender and then moving to the other gender. I gained access to a number of transsexual spaces and observed, in most cases being accepted as transsexual. The acceptance happened because I have allowed people to believe that I am in the same position as them.

The more I have observed, the more confused I have become. I plan to use this blog to capture much of my rambling thoughts. Consequently, there will be conflicts between different posts as I develop the ideas. At this stage, it occurs to me that transgender people have merely confused the whole gender issue. For reasons I will go into another day, gender is complex, including internal feelings, external perception, personal presentation and, of course, biology.

I was fortunate in having a good friend who was undergoing transition, providing me with a very intimate insight into the process of transition (the actual process of crossing the gender “divide”). I was fortunate to watch her from prior to transition through the social and medical aspects of her transition. I was also able to attend a number of the medical appointments she went to and was with her when she underwent sex reassignment surgery (SRS). The actual term for the genital surgery is hotly debated by transsexuals, but I use this as a factual term: Sex refers to the bodily definition of gender based upon genitals; reassignment because the genitals are being reconstructed to the gender they identify with and surgery is obvious. The dual meaning of the word sex is part of the rejection of this term, but the same people also reject the term transsexual as it also includes the same word. The problem is that there is confusion over sex referring to the act of sex as well as referring to the genital configuration.

As I became more involved in these groups, I was amazed to discover a massive range of people, covered by a more general term transgender. This covers not only transsexuals, but also transvestites, cross dressers and so on. In fact, it has been used to define anyone who does not wholly identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. Looking more deeply, I discovered that there were people who merely adopt female presentation, but in a generally exaggerated mode. I initially defined this as being people who part time adopt a female gender role, however, I rapidly discovered that this was not strictly correct. In fact, they do not tend to adopt a complete female gender role, but only certain elements. I will consider this in more detail later, however, it appeared that they used clothes, hair and make-up in an exaggerated manner to counter an inability to accurately adopt other elements of the female gender role, such as mannerisms. I had identified a group of people whose experience of moving to the female gender was entirely based on appearance. What was more surprising was that they adopted the appearance generally used by young women as seen in many popular magazines. This was at odds with their own bodily structure and also their age. They were not seeking to blend with women of their own age and social grouping, but were attempting to adopt the hyper sexualised images presented through the media.

This was not what I was looking for. These people generally did not adopt the other gender full time and this was a position unique to men: I did not find any women who adopted a male appearance part time in the same manner. So I decided to limit my observations to those who live in the other gender to their birth gender full time. But this proved difficult. I came across a number of people who decided that they would not undergo any medical transition, but would live in the other gender full time. In the case of a number of trans men, I discovered that they were unimpressed with the surgery available to them and consequently decided to avoid phallus construction, but did undergo processes such as mastectomy to create a more male chest. But I found a group, primarily trans women, who had made a conscious choice not to undertake hormone or surgical treatments.

I had found various groups:
• Those who seek to adopt a female gender appearance part time
• Those who seek to live their lives full time without any medical treatment
• Those who seek to live their lives wholly in the other gender, undergoing medical treatment.

It is this final group that I was most interested in. The idea was that by analysing the gender experience of these people both before and after transition, it would be possible to gain an insight into the differences by analysing the changes they had undergone.

Even then, it got more complicated. I had assumed that a trans woman was a person assigned male at birth who wished to be accepted by society as a woman, but I was wrong.

In fact, I found that a number of such people did not consider that they were wholly female, but a combination of both male and female and they wished to be acknowledged outside the gender binary. This was illustrated by an Australian case of "norrie mAy-Welby" (http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/03/11/australia-is-first-to-recognise-non-specified-gender/) where, following transition and SRS, Norrie decided zie was neither male nor female and sought to have this legally recognised. Zie is not the only person who expressed this view, although no other cases have been legally pursued that I could identify at this stage. A number of people expressed their view that they were 60/40 female/male or 80/20 female/male, but that they were not 100% female or male.

That latter point is one that I have always believed: we are not all entirely male or female, but I would have put it slightly differently by stating that we all display a range of stereotypical male and female gender role elements.

This left me rather confused. I had made an assumption that transsexual people would experience gender in a much more intense manner than most other people. The reasoning for this, was that the process of changing from one gender to the other is so complex and emotional that there would need to be an extreme issue to cause someone to undertake such a change. To discover that some people are undertaking this course of action because they simply do not feel wholly of their birth gender seemed somehow to contradict their expressed reasoning.

This made me consider further what people were actually doing.

My experience of the gay scene back in the 1980s & 1990s saw me mixing with a massive variety of different lesbians and gay men. What I was amazed at was a certain group who took everything to total extremes. There was a pretty universal understanding that these people were actually taking these extreme positions just to gain attention. By shocking people, they were achieving a personal aim. The people they set out to shock were often their own family, but also included the general public. I have seen the same techniques within the general population, but it was extreme within these the gay scene. I knew people who were unhappy if they had gone to all that trouble and people just ignored them.

I called upon this idea and questioned if this “shock” desire may be behind the behaviour of some transgender people. Is the actual aim of their behaviour to be the ultimate in shock to their family, or to the public at large? An interesting idea, adding yet another dimension to what is going on.