Transgender people: do you know/have you met any?

I never read PZB but I know of her and her cult following. I didn't know that either. interesting!

Jan Morris' memoir "Conundrum" is really interesting, if you want to read somebody talking about transitioning- she was a great writer anyway, and her life was amazing.

now that I think of it, I guess I've known/know four transgender people, not the two listed upthread. I kind of forgot about some folks.

It was kind of interesting but disconcerting to see that one friend who had been cool with being part of a larger "queer" art community in SF in the early 90s got very, er, straightlaced once her surgery was done. Once she was post-op, she just wanted to date a normal dude and be a wife and live in the suburbs and really wasn't into gay activism / lesbians / drag queens /performance art "weirdos" / marginality in general. I guess for me that was when the penny dropped that a deliberately "anti-" stance is something that some queers identity with for life, and for some people, it's a kind of temporary zone while they are on their way to something more gender-normative on the other side of surgery/drugs/transitioning in the case of transgender people, or more gender-normative on the other side of assimilation / focusing on yr career / getting on with life in general. Queerness doesn't seem all that at stake for some people.

I had a big argument with a str8 friend about transgender people once. She was saying (I'm summarizing here) "I feel when I see an obvious transgender person like they are forcing me to be in some kind of play that they are putting on, like I have to pretend to not notice that they are transgender- I feel sort of co-erced into being a prop for their identity". I was annoyed by this argument and just said "What makes you think that this person living their life in gender X or Y is somehow for or about YOU-as-spectator? It's not about you, it's about their autonomy." It was weird, because she was a smart, not-homophobic person, she was cool w gays and lesbians, but trannies, specifically, triggered this reaction.

I have never met one, but I'm sure in my travels I've probably passed some and didn't even know it, the medical technology is getting so significantly better that you cannot tell anymore.

Only ever met one, an RAF helicopter pilot, M2F. Quite disconcerting the first time I met her, looked like Grayson Perry dressed as a woman, even though she was wearing her flying suit. Can't imagine what it must have been like to come out to your fellow pilots and other personnel, the military's not renowned for it's touchy-feely side of things.

Those who worked with transgendered people, what were your/their jobs?

one worked with me at a coffee shop in college, the other did our phone service/system installation at my current office. I'm probably forgetting others, certainly in SF there's plenty

Link to an entry about her FTM transition on PZB's blog if anyone's interested http://docbrite.livejournal.com/766469.html

I met one a few years back when she came to my house to service my washing machine. Christina was her name, MTF. Cool person, huge hands.

I published PZB in the late '90s and haven't been in touch for years, so... whoa!

Yeah I know. She blogged about 12 months ago about how she isn't writing any more and please don't ask her to kind of thing, but the FTM transition thing was something I only recently learned...though all I could think was, well I guess that explains the detailed sex scenes in Exquisite Corpse :)

a series of bad choices punctuated by the lighting of cigarettes

this is rather fine, i'll be passing this line off as my own at the soonest opportunity

I've been in a few bands with a man->woman who dated women and always thought of her as a her, nothing else really. She's a really great person and in all my years of knowing her all of our friends have been supportive of her. Never asked if she had an operation or anything, never really thought it was my business.

Also years ago i lived w this girl who dated a guy who wore fake boobs and was pre-op and I dont know if he ever went thru it. They were crusty art kids but he was definitely into it as a lifestyle choice. I took my girlfriend at the time on some double dates with those two where everyone was cross-dressing, which was pretty fun!

uh PZB is now F2M?
wow.

LOVED HER BOOKS AS A TEEN!

yeah, she was #1 on my list back in the day, for sure

Known a few M2F through the comix scene. Always M2F for some reason.

Have met some. Don't currently know any well.

Used to be friends with someone who was living as a woman and once mentioned saving up for the op. Never did it; has grown a beard and is now introducing himself as his birth name, so I assume he's reconciled with manhood now. (Is it unusual for someone to get that far and change their mind? A friend of a friend seems to be a pretty similar story too.)

A friend of a friend of mine is F to M (rather visibly so) and I *think* his partner is, too, but he is literally so much "half of both" that I just can't tell.

xposts I loved PZB in HS too! (Caitlin Kiernan is trans, too, right?)

I know plenty of drag people, but afaik no transgendered ones.

PZB falls onto my list of people who's artistic output I don't partic. care for, but would love to go out for a drink with. She used to call herself a "non-operative transsexual" which I think is pretty cool.

Re work, of the two M2F women I know, one works as admin in my job (non-govt health org in Australia), so meets all the people who come in to the org
The other is a gynaecologist

I was talking with a friend (straight, male, usually very progressive) about Amanda Lepore and somehow we got onto the topic of whether she was a woman or not. He didn't come right out and say she wasn't, but he asked "Well, did she get ovaries? What about a uterus?" I changed the subject b/c we have a history of arguing, but I think, you know, must be nice to feel entitled to decide another person's gender/sex. (Also, in response to the story of the extreme possessiveness and abusiveness of her the ex-boyfriend who funded much of her surgeries, he expressed some sympathy for him, seeing as he was funding her "art project." Looking back, an argument seems justified....)

"So, if a woman gets a radical hysterectomy, she's not a woman anymore?"

I wouldn't label someone reactionary for that (the first part) - it's hardly outrageous to believe sex/gender to be biological.

must be nice to feel entitled to decide another person's gender/sex

don't think many people really pass this test of absolute non-decision, but 'it must be nice' to

It's just surprising and disappointing when I realize that people who I expect to be enlightened about what I think of as fairly mundane ideas about gender make statements like those above. Maybe my expectations are ahead of reality, but I know certain people whose understanding of gender and sex I expect to be on par with their thoughts on race or homosexuality. E.g., I wouldn't expect any of my close friends to oppose miscegeny, either.

idk, it's not clear your friend 'opposed' whatever it is we're talking about. if your expectation is that everyone accepts that our 'gender/sex' is whatever we decide, and not by anyone else, then yeah, you're probably a little far ahead of reality.

i think you can be okay with people's right to choose their gender and still believe that sex is biologically determined. i do at least. if nothing is biologically determined that why would a transgender individual need to 'trans' their gender? they would just be what they always were

That's an interesting issue. The surgical part is most commonly called *sex* reassignment surgery, and governments consider the person's sex to have been changed. Is there some standard for saying whether a person has changed their sex v. their gender?

seems odd to seek hard-n-fast standards/legitimacy from governments when the whole gist of this argument is that things are fluid/mutable/not subject to determination by outsiders, etc

I know. I just wondered what the standards were (standards of govt., academic, the trans "community", etc.).

Basically, I am trying to figure out how to talk about these issues. Despite my indignation above, I'm not exactly an expert.

I always liked the way Butler broke it down

Ha. I searched the thread before I realized you probably meant Judith.

lol yeah. she writes a lot about the gender/sex division

she sure does

I swore off JB after I a year's worth of religious studies classes where she was the high priestess of the department. Her ideas are great and I learned a ton of fascinating stuff, but her (and other queer theorists') writing is just so convoluted and dense. Needlessly so, I would say. Regardless, can you point me toward some sort of digest of her breakdown that you refer to?

Was it de Beauvoir that said people are not born, but rather become women?

there is some truth to that

It was her, yes.

Xposts: For what it's worth, my introduction to Judith Butler was from this, which is not only from an article about transgendered individuals (specifically the one alluded upthread re: dr. john money etc.) but is also written in relatively accessible English. I don't think she talks about sex/gender distinctions, but it's a good summation of a lot of her ideas.

I have been putting off reading Butler bcz everyone I've ever talked to about it says it is written in the most inaccessible English :(

That's what I think. I brought this up in one class, and was met with little sympathy, only explanations that the ideas were so foreign that they defied plain language. Which on one hand is true in that terminology had to be invented and regular usage wouldn't always work, but really most of the time it read more as obfuscation, maybe to discourage debate by simpletons.

lolacademicelitism

That article I linked to is written in a less dense style, outside of that, though...

With Butler (and I guess this goes for a lot of people), once you wrap your head around her style/terminology, it makes a lot more sense and can be very rewarding.

That sort of deliberate inaccessibility in academic writing is annoying to me in general, but moreso in regard to queer theory b/c this is stuff that, were it more readable, could make a difference in ordinary people's thinking. I guess it's the sort of thing that gets filtered down from the ivory tower? But I haven't seen much of the result of the trickle-down effect.

xp

stevie i doubt ud actually have a problem w/ butler bc i know ur familiar w/ a lot of the kinds of arguments shes making and her terminology anyway. I think ppl are just put off by the once removed logic of postmodernist discourse or w/e tho.

"logic"

i thought this question was totally bizarre until i remembered that the U of M still does half of the gender reassignment surgeries in the country (iirc) so this prob isnt as common in other areas. Still, the idea of never having known or at least met a transgender person is just kinda shocking to me.

My friend Jimbo is becoming a woman. I haven't seen him in years but know him through Facebook now. Takes big balls to undergo reassignment when you're a lawyer in Galveston.

also the cars

wt