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

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.

As to the biology of it, my understanding is that current research seems to show that there are 3 different ways which set somebody's gender:

* DNA
* Developmental hormones in the womb
* Brain structures

Most people are lucky enough to have all three line up, but some people don't, hence (for example) people who completely look like, have all the bodily structures of, and identify, without ever suspecting otherwise, as women, but who actually have male DNA (and only discover this when they go for fertility tests)--from the womb on, they got all the female hormones for some reason, and so turned out female. Before DNA testing, none of these people would ever have suspected that they were born male, in some sense.

And plenty of people have a brain structure that better matches the opposite gender to their own bodily form, and these people often end up changing their bodies to suit their minds.

xp Jesse: Gender reassignment surgery has been around for sixty-odd years; plenty of time to get laws passed.

Christine, that's why I'm surprised there hasn't been some legislation denying trans people's rights. I'm surprised that DOMA doesn't have provisions in it defining "man" and "woman" in its definition of the marriage of one of each, for example. It seems like a major oversight.

yeah, this is the weird risk if there was a sudden, nation-wide attention grabbing Supreme Court case- it might lead to some really lame decision being handed down across the entire country- or, a more lefty/liberatory ruling might trigger a backlash of amendments and fire up the family values crowd. The weird lack of a position puts trans folk at risk, but it also might be better than a DOMA style initiative- at least in some states, if you transition, your new sex can be your stated sex on ID, and, apparently (going by what my friend told me) the same is the case with marriages in some states- trans people who pass just slip under the radar.

When I worked at the Times, Donna Cartwright sometimes came and did overtime shifts in my department, so I got to know her a little. Well enough to say hi in the cafeteria and so forth. Other than that, I worked at another newspaper where a reporter (big burly guy in his mid-50s) announced he was going to have a sex change, but I wasn't there while it happened. The management was surprisingly supportive, given that it was a fairly conservative paper in a fairly conservative city.