(Untitled)

[fianasylph]

vive la difference vs. your spiked heels are digging into my gender theory

I guess I see the logic behind the notion that sex change operations are homophobic and incompatible with some feminist theory (if you were born into the wrong gender, then gender precepts are inherent in nature, not from society), but I'm not willing to drink the kool aid.

I

Comments

[symbot]

The "free choice" thing really screws up gender discussions. We, as a culture, need to strike a compromise between "Look at my free will!" and "Nature put me here." Transsexuals who say they're stuck in the wrong body are saying that their gender identification doesn't match their sexual embodiment, but they're not necessarily saying "Nature has forced me to identify this way"... for most of us, our natural dispositions and our personal decisions work in tandem, and we don't want to be forced to prioritize one over the other.

Transsexuals' gender identification might not be set in stone by nature, but when we choose our gender identities, we account for our intuitions and dispositions, and why should we have to fight those? Neither the "natural/deterministic/classical physics" element nor the "free will/existential/quantum" element should take priority, because we can't genuinely separate them.

Or, in the words of Lucas from Empire Records, "Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear."

[vigilantics]

Agreed. It's a sex change operation, not (necessarily) a gender change operation. A person could be totally gender neutral and still feel that they would be happier having boobs or no boobs, a vagina or a penis.

On the other hand, it seems to be true that many mtf trans people dress and behave more traditionally feminine than most women. Not so for the ftm trans people I know. Most of them seem to be happy existing in an androgynous middle ground.