Sex: M is for misfit

[justben]

Gender’s been on my mind a bit for the last year or so. It’s always been a bit of an awkward topic for me, but lately I’ve been spending some think-time trying to analyze why. I think the narrative of how it’s surfaced is interesting in its own right, but I’ve tried to write that once or twice now, and it always seems to get bogged down and

Comments

[justben]

First, let me start by thanking you for coming over and replying to my post. I can only imagine how much time you must already spend discussing gender as a third-gender person, so I appreciate you taking the time to drop by a stranger’s blog and hash it through yet again.

I just finished typing this bit to akiko_kalla just above, but I should say it here too: I did a poor job in my post of clarifying my intentions. I’m sorry about that. I initially set out this morning intending to address gender, and I realized that my thoughts on gender are closely related to my thoughts on sex. This isn’t surprising: As you point out, they’re closely related for a lot of people. I’m trying to tease them apart in this post for a couple of reasons. First, this post would have been way too long if I tried to take them together. Second, I know people who do make strong, clear, and well-considered distinctions between their sex and gender identities. This latter point alone leads me to believe that it’s sometimes sensible to examine the two separately at first, and that it might be valuable for me to do so now, even if in the end I bring them back together to find that for me they’re not so different after all.

Now, with that said, I’m very curious about your description that it’s all gender. It makes more sense to me that way: As I suggest in my original post, I don’t have a sense of what sex identity really means. It’s a topic I have a lot of difficulty sympathizing with in those who identify specifically as transsexual but not as transgendered, and it’s an idea I feel like I want to gain some fluency with. From your established stance that it’s all gender, how do you perceive people who describe feelings of body/sex dysphoria specifically, aside from any gender presentations they choose to wear?

As I reread that last paragraph, I worry that it might come across as a challenge or a trap. I hope you don’t read it that way. I really value your perspective as someone who’s living a life outside the gender binary and who’s clearly considered these matters before. I’m struggling to find a better frame to ask my question so that it doesn’t sound so much like a challenge, but I’m afraid I haven’t found one yet. I hope you’ll accept my apology for that.