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

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

would transition?

Nice to see the PZB love on this thread, Poppy is an old friend.

"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."

I agree. People who are skeptical about transgender folks always like to say "sex is biological, it's based on whether you have a penis/vagina" and "you can't just pick a gender at random"... but "biology" isn't just the physical aspects of your genitals and body shape that people can see, it also includes the workings of your brain and your internal sense of what your gender could be. Since people *can't* just be raised to take on whatever gender identity society wants them to have (although many anti-essentialist gender theorists have assumed they can), this suggests that elements of the way we perceive our gender are innate, and are just as "biological" as our bodies.

For most of us, our "internal" gender and external sex traits match up, for a minority of people they don't. IIRC, some transgender theorists have suggested that being trans could be thought of as a kind of intersex condition -- your internal sense of self is aligned one way, your physical shape/hormones another.

"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?"
In my knowledge (I'm far from an expert), the definition of "transgender" is a person who has some desire to change the sex they were assigned at birth, whether they've taken steps toward that or not. It's a more inclusive category. A "transsexual" has changed their physical sex in some way -- the most commonly accepted place to draw the line would probs be whether they've started taking hormones. The hormone therapy creates the biggest biological change, & for some trans people, it's the only medical intervention they need. If you're looking for a way to refer to such people that avoids all these complications, you can just call them "trans men" and "trans women."

I'd highly recommend Julie Serrano's "Whipping Girl" for anyone who wants to learn more about the subject. It delves into the author's personal experiences as well as gender theory stuff, it's clear and accessible, and it debunks a lot of assumptions/misconceptions.

idk i think the relationship b/w sex/gender/sexuality etc. is far too messy to just "schematise" and the way ppl try to seems part of some project of pathologisation of trans ppl as part of a project of othering to preserve normativity yadda yadda yadda

I'm not writing cogently ATM, so I will stop trying to discuss my previous question. But I will ask, How in the fuck is it that federal law - which still denies the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and has still can't pass ENDA after 14 years - accepts that a transsexual as their new post-reassignment sex?? It seems far more difficult to accept that a person can change their sex than that two people of the same sex (of the very clear, biological, since-birth variety) can get married, yet a FTM trans person's marriage to a woman only becomes federally sanctioned once she undergoes the change to being M.

Did the religious right forget to discriminate in this one area? Have there been Defense of Gender Norms bills?

pathologising/medicalising is a way of making queers like car-crash victims and therefore acceptable as a medical condition

xpost-

I was talking about this issue just the other day with a lawyer friend of mine whose thesis was on the legal status of transsexuals- she was saying that there is no clearcut federal policy about their status, and so what you have is a state-specific, deeply conflicted and inconsistent nest of rulings about things like changing the sex listed on ID cards, access/use of gendered bathrooms, the ability to marry, etc. The law is a grey area here, and so small town judges can tip things one way or the other (for or against granting the newly transitioned person the capacity to legally assert their new identity as a change of legally recognized "sex") and it suddenly ripples out onto everybody in that area of jurisdiction. I wonder if, in the next few generations, something is going to come before the Supreme Court and/or surface nationally in a major way to direct people's attention towards this. But I don't know.