We are All a Little Bit Trans
I'm outing you. Yes, you. As transgender, meaning that you do not fit exactly into the gender norms associated with the gender you were assigned at birth. How do I know? Because nobody fits perfectly into gender norms. Gender norms are created from averages and majorities, but people are individuals: that's what makes us special and gives us strength: diversity.
The crazy thing is...there are certain contexts in which it is considered acceptable, even desirable to exhibit traits generally associated with the other gender. A man is encouraged to "get in touch with his feminine side" or a woman is encouraged to "man up" in order to deal with something difficult. It's sexy when a man cries (well, until it becomes pathetic) because it means he's sensitive. A woman who is strong and smart is compared with men.
Now, I know self-identified trans-people, though admittedly none of them well. When I met one for the first time, I didn't think much of it, because to me, my gender wasn't very important: I was never told that I had to do something only because I was female (except, of course, the medical stuff, and random times that girls and boys were separated, like for locker rooms, which seemed to me arbitrary and I went along with it because it didn't matter much) or that I couldn't do something because I was female. I must admit it baffled me how anyone could know they were "assigned the wrong gender at birth" - how, after all, could people know what it is like to be different from what they are, let alone identify that other experience as the "right" one? How would being assigned the "wrong gender" be different from being assigned "the wrong height"? Are there short people who believe they "should be tall" or vice versa, or do they just take it as a given and work with what they've got? Couple that with the fact that I (and apparently, most of the population) understood gender as a synonym for what the transgender community refers to as "sex": the gender assigned at birth according to the appearance of one's genitals, and this decision to "live as the other gender" was baffling but acceptable. I became a fan of transwoman Laverne Cox on "Orange is the New Black," but I understood her not as the same as the other women, but as something else, perhaps something in between. Note that her character and Boo, the butch lesbian portrayed by the awesome Lea DeLaria, basically have nothing in common, except being in the same gender-segregated prison.
I also vaguely paid attention to the tragic stories of transchildren denied access to the bathrooms of their identified genders and even being targets of bullying as a result of being forced to use the bathroom of their birth-assigned genders, or worse, being denied access to all the kids' bathrooms and offered the teachers' bathroom. I definitely sympathized. No child should be the target of bullying for any reason, especially not by the administration. However, I also sympathized with the cis-children who felt threatened by having trans-children of the opposite sex be allowed in their bathrooms. The concern on their side was twofold: one, if the purpose of separating the bathrooms was so that no child has to see another child's different genitalia, then allowing transchildren of the opposite sex (same identified gender) in the same bathroom would defeat the purpose (unless, of course, the child has already had reassignment surgery, but as I understand it, it's not standard practice to give a child surgery as soon as he or she identifies another gender, and in these cases, the child still retained his or her genitalia from birth). Like it or not, there would be a penis in the girls' room or a vagina in the boys' room. The second concern is that people lie when it suits them. Since the only test for transgenderism is to ask people what gender they identify as, it is perfectly possible for a cis-boy to "identify" as trans to get into the girls' bathroom (as, I believe, politician Mike Huckabee recently pointed out, and was called a "bigot" as a result...but he made a valid point). Which, regardless of whether or not you think the cis-boy or any transgirl poses a threat to the girls in the girls' bathroom, defeats the purpose of having separate bathrooms, doesn't it? You're basically opening the door for anyone to use either bathroom, whichever one they feel comfortable in. The problem is, just because a person is more comfortable in a bathroom with girls than with boys, doesn't mean that the others who use the bathroom they want to get into feel the same way about that person (meaning, they may feel more comfortable in a bathroom that excludes that person than includes them). And equal rights should really mean *equal rights* - not special rights for some, even if they are the minority (and not if they're the majority either). If the point of the segregated bathroom is so that kids don't have to be in a bathroom with other kids they don't feel comfortable going to the bathroom with, you're going to be out of luck no matter what you do. There are plenty of same-gender cis-kids who don't get along, who bully each other, who are generally nasty to each other, and that has absolutely nothing to do with gender. Growing up, I was bullied and made fun of by both boys and girls. Therefore, neither bathroom was "safe" from the bullies, though I can't remember a time I was bullied *in the bathroom* and can't imagine that I would have been more likely to be bullied in the boys' room than I was in the girls'. I do know that the boys' room would have been less useful to me because, as someone without a penis, I can't effectively use a urinal, and after puberty, having access to feminine product dispensers and receptacles (not available in the boys' rooms) was appreciated.
When I saw a picture of Caitlyn Jenner on the well-publicized cover of "Vanity Fair," my first thought was, "Wow, she looks amazing." My second thought was, "Wait, *that* is what she thinks a woman looks like?" I don't know about you, but I don't know any cis-women who look like Caitlyn Jenner. Not a single one. For that matter, I don't know any cis-women who naturally look like any magazine cover. That look takes a lot of makeup, hair, lighting, and of course airbrushing. In short, it's not real. So what *is* real about Caitlyn Jenner's female identity? What, exactly, does she think makes her a woman?
I started really identifying as a woman when I became a mother. A woman is defined, technically, as "the female of the human species," and the female is "the gender that contributes the egg towards reproduction." This, in my mind, qualified me as female: I'd proved I was female by participating in reproduction in the female capacity (which is really the only reason we're gendered in the first place). Before that, I was female by default, by birth assignment, but it didn't mean much to me. But now, I had something in common with other women: all cis-women (and trans-men) are built for childbearing and breast feeding. We've evolved to be different from men *specifically* for this purpose. And historically, men have used that as an excuse to treat us differently. Women were the property of men in many societies, including our own, not too long ago, and are still extremely restricted as compared to men in various societies today. And even in our modern-day United States, mostly-male lawmakers are continually trying to erode our rights: criminalizing certain behaviors during pregnancy because it "puts the baby at risk," limiting access to abortion, blaming us for getting raped, and generally making or keeping it legal for us to be discriminated against in various ways (e.g. unequal pay), some of which are even hazardous to our mental and physical health (e.g. lack of access to birth control). Now, I do understand that some women cannot or choose not to use their childbearing capacity, but this is part of being a woman too: the expectation that one can get pregnant and give birth, even if one doesn't want to, the protections we have to take to prevent it if we don't want it, or deal with it if it happens anyway, and the inevitable feelings of devastating loss if we find out our reproductive systems simply don't work. Not to mention the judgments against us should we choose not to be mothers: the unspoken reply to a woman saying she does not want children is inevitably, "What is wrong with you?" I'm guessing transwomen (if people know they're trans and don't assume they have working uteruses) don't have to deal with that.
I recently learned that, according to the trans community, "sex" and "gender" aren't the same thing, although they're commonly used as synonyms by everyone else. Amusingly, I put my fiction into a bot online that guessed, from the way you write, whether you were male or female. I tested borderline male for various writing samples and strongly male for others. Virtually nothing I wrote tested as female. Not so amusingly, an all-ladies gym I was a member of for nearly half a decade basically kicked me out. Note, they could not discriminate against me explicitly because I am a cis-woman (I think another branch of the chain got in trouble for not admitting transwomen, and subsequently officially allowed them but made it clear the gym wasn't designed for them and that they weren't particularly welcome), but I was pulled aside by the owner and told that I was making the other women uncomfortable with my "style of conversation" and that I needed to be "gentler, more soft-spoken." As I understood it, I needed to be more of a *lady*. And I thought giving birth was enough proof that I was female (I actually worked out at that gym throughout my second pregnancy, including the day before I gave birth, and the owner was nice enough to allow me "medical time off" after birth to recover, during which she did not charge me my membership fee). I didn't know how to be a *lady*. This wasn't a simple matter of following a dress code, which I would have no problem with as long as it was explicitly stated (not sure why it's so big a deal for people to follow gendered dress codes, even if they are unfair: clothes are just clothes, so if they're sufficient for one person I don't see how they wouldn't be sufficient for anyone else, modulo sizing and physical disabilities of course), but was about who I was as a person. It wasn't trivial for me to "alter my style of conversation" or to "be more softspoken." The only solution I could think of was just not to open my mouth at all, but that presented the issue of being seen as standoffish for not verbally acknowledging the other women, especially if they talked to me first.
Finally I understood. Or at least, I thought I did. This gym was supposed to be a "safe space" for women who felt threatened by the presence of men. I get feeling threatened by the presence of men, given rape culture, but that's also a rather heteronormal view. If the women are merely worried about being gawked at, then gay men should be okay to come to the gym, because they're not interested in women. And what of lesbian women? Now here I am, thinking all along that being a woman was simple, it was just a matter of having a vagina and a uterus - a working one at that! - and yet apparently that's not sufficient.
So what, exactly, *is* sufficient for being a woman, and why does it matter? I tried to talk to trans people, to ask them what their definition of gender was, and *not a single one could tell me*. "It's personal," they said. "It's my identity," they said. But when you tell *me* what you are, what are you expecting me to do with that information? Presumably you mean to tell me something about yourself when you say you're a woman, something relevant to the way I interact with you. And it isn't what I thought being a woman meant (being built, inside and out, for the female part of sexual reproduction).
When a transwoman says she's a woman, is she merely looking for permission to wear dresses and not get judged for it? Personally I think there shouldn't be double standards for men and women, unless it's specifically because of an explicit difference between men and women. I don't see any difference between men and women that ought to justify men not being allowed to wear dresses. In fact, I've enjoyed many a drag show: I think at least some men look more fantastic in "women's" wear than most women do.
But here we are, I'm not "female" enough to hang out with the women in the gym, and I write like a man. So does that make me a man? And if so, by whose definition?
Further research reveals that gender is not a simple binary, but as one writer put it, "a three-dimensional space." So what's the point of "matching" a region of that space with each of the binary sexes? Is the idea that, because most women appear or behave a certain way, that it is the behavior or appearance that makes them women? And if some of that is adaptation to social expectations, does that mean a person can be "made" into a woman by society, trained to act and dress the way a woman "ought" to? In which case, one might not need to be "born" a woman to be one...and anyone could qualify, with the proper training. (Perhaps the reason I was having so much trouble "fitting in" with the other women is because my parents and teachers never trained me to behave like a proper lady.)
Yet the trans-community seems to suggest that not only are trans-women women, they are "born that way." And trans-men are not. But yet, they will not give a standard definition for what a "woman" or a "man" is, in their minds. So, the only definition I can come up with is, "a woman/man is someone who says she's a woman/man" or perhaps, "a woman/man is someone who believes she is a woman/man."
But given that statements and beliefs vary from person to person, we now run into the issue that being a "woman" no longer means anything. Without knowing people's personal definitions of gender, one cannot know what their gender identity means to them. And without that, the fact that someone is "a man" or "a woman" becomes useless knowledge (except, I suppose, for instructing us on which pronoun to use, but that seems rather inconsequential).
So, why share your gender identity at all?
What I understand from reading the testimonials of transgender individuals is that identifying as another gender allows them to be free to express themselves however they want, because the way they want to express themselves is more in line with what is expected of the gender they identify.
I can understand this, and I briefly considered identifying, myself, as something other than female, given the difficulty I've had with appearing and acting female. Heck, I once (in college, so I thought I was still young and pretty) showed up at a party in heels and a dress and got asked if I were cross-dressed. Obviously I'm not doing this "female gender" thing very well. I can "dress up" in makeup and fancy dresses, but I feel like it's a costume (perhaps because the only time I ever got to do that as a child was when I was on stage performing) and I have to be careful with the particular costume: if I choose the wrong clothes or do the makeup wrong (and I'm really not good at the makeup), it's not flattering. And I have to admit, given that all those female hormones make me pretty sick from time to time, the idea of altering my hormone balance might have its benefits...but I'm already doing that in a way that's acceptable for women (an IUD, which under some health plans would not be covered, because it's contraception, and some people believe female contraception is immoral because it promotes promiscuous behavior among women: same people that think it's great for men to have condoms and Viagra).
And then I thought...what are the implications of identifying as non-female? Which bathroom do I use? (Note: I generally use the women's bathroom/locker room, though I will ignore the gender on single-person bathrooms and use whichever one is free, and occasionally, when there is only a men's room around, or there's an impossible line for the women's room and no line for the men's room, I will check whether it is occupied and if it's not, use it.) What do I put down on surveys? What do I tell my children? If I don't even understand this "gender" thing, how can I explain it to them, and what message will I be sending them about their own identities? Do I really want them wasting time and energy trying to figure out what "gender" they are instead of just accepting the default and focusing on their actual accomplishments?
Moreover, if I identify as non-female, I am caving to the demands of a society that treats women and men differently for no good reason, expects them to act and dress differently, and basically makes distinctions between them that *don't actually exist*. Distinctions based upon stereotypes and common characteristics. Women like shoes. Men don't like to ask for directions. Women are subservient (or else they're "bitchy" or "bossy"). Men are commanding and tough (or else they're "sissies" and "emasculated").
And here's where my original statement comes in: for any set of characteristics you can come up with that are associated with men or women, except for the primary sexual characteristics, you will find some people of the opposite sex that have those characteristics too, and for that matter, people of the same sex with a wide range of amounts of those characteristics, depending both on individual personalities and the culture they were raised in. So why do we assume that those characteristics are particular to a given gender? Just because most Asian people are short, does that mean a tall Asian person is actually not Asian at all? What I see here is a conflation of "common characteristics" with "defining characteristics," and that's problematic.
In order to justify differential treatment between two sets of people, there needs to be a real, identified difference between them that warrants that differential treatment.
If the difference between men and women is that men want to be treated like men (allowed to wear men's clothing, given responsibilities, trusted to lead but mistrusted around children, etc.) and women want to be treated like women (allowed to wear dresses and makeup, expected to be nurturing with children, but demeaned, ignored, and generally marginalized) then I'm pretty sure most cis-women (including myself) don't qualify as women and many cis-men don't qualify as men. I certainly think that the ways in which women are treated in this society are largely abominable, and I wish we weren't treated that way. It kind of baffles me that anyone would voluntarily opt for that sort of treatment, but apparently it's usually preferable to the treatment they get as non-gender-conforming men (which is how they identify/appear before coming out as trans: and note, there are lots of documented cases in which a transwoman transitions back because (s)he did not realize how badly women were treated and decides that being an effeminate man is preferable).
The reason why self-identified transwomen vastly outnumber transmen seems likely because there is far more of a tolerance in our society for women embodying "male" traits (wearing men's clothing, entering male-dominated fields, etc.) than men embodying "female" ones. This, I believe, is mostly due to homophobia: men are afraid that if they are too feminine, they will be attacked: and this is a well-founded fear. I absolutely believe that life is much safer for them when people believe them to be women.
Until, of course, homophobic people find out their secret. Then, it is understandable that they feel deceived, and also afraid of what it means in terms of their own sexuality. The transwoman, who a straight man was attracted to because she appeared to be a beautiful woman, is now in his mind just another dude, and if he's attracted to a dude, that makes him gay. And that, of course, means he's an abomination and going to go to hell (or some similar sentiment). Or, even if he's not homophobic, since he's straight, the idea of the object of his desire having a penis - even if that penis has been molded into a vagina - is a huge turnoff. It's understandable (though not, by any means excusable) that these men would react with hatred and violence. It's no wonder that transpeople have it rough.
So here we see that, no matter what we do with transpeople, there is still a problem stemming from people's assumption that this "gender" thing indicates sex. (Also, gender is identified in relation to sex, using the same terminology, so it's not like the two even can be separated.)
But, let's do a thought experiment and pretend that everyone understands that sex and gender are separate things and that, when you say you're a "woman" or a "man," people understand that you're talking about gender, not sex (this is, if I understand correctly, what the trans community wants when they promote trans acceptance). If nobody knows what "gender" means - because it's different for each person, we can't possibly act based upon it, because it gives no information. It's equivalent to assigning everyone a "1" or a "2," basically at random, and then having separate bathrooms and locker rooms and educational opportunities and jobs and clothing for 1's and 2's - but as we know from the Civil Rights era, separate but equal is *not* equal. Can we justify unequal treatment, simply on the basis of being a 1 or a 2? Of course not.
Meanwhile, by identifying only people's gender, we are obscuring their sex. Laverne Cox recently said that a transwoman being called a "man" is "an act of violence." Basically, we are not allowed to acknowledge someone's sex or gender assigned at birth. We are to treat transgender people exactly like cisgendered people of the same identified gender.
But here's the problem. There *are* identifiable differences between the sexes that justify differential treatment. We separate the sexes for most sports, because simply being female puts people at a distinct disadvantage as compared with being male. We measure boys and girls differently on growth charts, because they grow at different rates (well, different average rates, but when assessing what is normal, average for the body type gives more accurate information than average of the general population). And there are noticeable differences in life expectancies and other medical conditions between male and female sexes. I recently filled out a form that asked about heart health risk. It asked about relatives that had "early heart attacks," defined as "before the age of 55 for a man and 65 for a woman." Now, it is possible that the hormone mix associated with being female is the cause of the difference, in which case a transsexual woman taking female hormones should be treated like a woman in the survey, but a transgender woman who has not undergone reassignment treatment would need to be treated like a man. It's also possible that having a female reproductive system or some other physical characteristic that isn't changed during reassignment is the source of the difference, in which case even a transsexual woman should be compared with men. Simply put, a transgender person isn't always equivalent to a person who was born as the gender they identify, especially in terms of science and medicine. And they may not be equivalent to someone of their gender assigned at birth either, but it's hard to know when to group them with which set of people, assuming you even know they're transgender. Furthermore, if you believe that transgender people are actually different from birth than cisgender people, then they ought to be treated separately, but since being transgender requires a search for identity, there are many people who simply adapt to their surroundings and do as their told, and may not realize they are transgender, or would be if raised differently so that living as their gender is less comfortable and living as another gender is more comfortable.
There's also the question of discrimination and rights. When deciding whether to enact Affirmative Action measures to counteract hidden biases, it is important first to determine what, if any biases, are present. This requires taking statistics. But if you're looking for sexism, and you measure differences between women and men, and you include the transwomen with the women and the transmen with the men, regardless of when they transitioned, you're going to have residual effects of living as the other gender complicating your results. (For example, if you're examining how well women do in STEM as compared with men, and you think that girls are taught differently than boys in school, causing boys to exceed them at mathematical skills, then a transwoman who transitioned as a child would have the same disadvantage as the cis-girls, but if she transitioned as an adult, she wouldn't.) However, if you include the transwomen with the men, and the transmen with the women, you're going to have residual effects of living as the "wrong" gender first in the mix: for example, a transman will probably have been affected by a misogynist system while he was still identified as a woman. So, perhaps we should exclude the transpeople entirely, but then we don't know how discrimination is affecting them specifically. Do we give them their own categories? Do we have to include when they transitioned, what they've done in terms of transition (simple identification, hormones, surgery), how well they "pass" as covariates? It's complicated. And they may not be comfortable sharing that information anyway, because it's "personal."
Now, statistically speaking, with transgender people making up approximately 0.3% of the population, it's not going to make a huge difference if they're included or not - for now. But the population of transgender people is rising, and the reason is, as I stated in the beginning: we are all a little transgender. Not one of us is the archetypal male or female, so it is up to each one of us to personally decide where to draw the line and stop identifying as cisgender.
As the line moves, and tolerance for transgender individuals increases, tolerance for cisgender individuals *decreases* as a result. Let us imagine a line that depicts the "feminine" on one end and the "masculine" on another (yes, this is a gross oversimplification, but dividing this multi-dimensional "gender" space into gender binaries is oversimplified to begin with, and that's what we're dealing with). Now, people exist all along the line, but with males concentrated towards the "masculine" end and females concentrated towards the "feminine" end, yet some males and some females located anywhere along the line. To decide whether we are male or female gender or something in between, we must personally choose the points of delineation between "male" and "other" and between "female" and "other" and then locate ourselves on the line, then categorize ourselves according to the place we have personally decided to put those points. And the closer to the ends those points are placed, the more people inevitably fall somewhere in the middle. And more importantly, the smaller the spaces become for the "undeniably male" and "undeniably female" people. Simply put, as more people become transgender, the cisgender population becomes more homogenous, and more people will identify differences in themselves and identify as transgender, until no cisgender people are left.
And when there are no cisgender people, gender becomes completely a societal construct, unrelated to sex, and still woefully inadequate to describe people, not to mention still useless unless people can actually agree on a definition for it.
But let us assume that we reach some sort of equilibrium where a bunch of people are still comfortable as cisgender, and the rest are transgender, making the idea of being transgender still meaningful.
What are we asking of transgender individuals? Not only are they expected to live as the their identified gender (which only makes sense in a gendered society, which I take exception to, but is a fact of life for now), but inevitably they will want to look and feel the part (let's ignore for the moment that many cisgender people have trouble with that, either because of lack of means or lack of training). Choosing a new name and a new wardrobe are the easy parts. Hormone therapy, surgery, and in children, treatment to delay puberty and prevent development of secondary sexual characteristics associated with the "wrong" gender: these are the recommended treatments, and are where things starts to get dicey. That treatment we feel is appropriate for transgender children, so they can live out their lives as their preferred gender? Necessarily renders them infertile. And as for transsexual adults, depending on what treatment they get, it may or may not prevent them from having biological children and caring for them in the usual manner. Trans-man Thomas Beatie, whose wife was infertile, was able to bear three children (with some difficulty involving an ectopic pregnancy and the necessity for artificial insemination, both of which were less likely if he hadn't transitioned), but having had his breasts removed, he could not breast feed them. Luckily his wife was able to lactate after hormone treatment, but what if she hadn't been, or what if he'd been married to a man? (Also, their marriage ended, but I'm not going to jump to conclusions about why that was. It could be lots of reasons unrelated to his gender identification.)
So...you can live as whomever you want, as long as you give up your right to pass on your genes to your children. Does this not seem oddly discriminatory to anyone, a little eugenics-esque?
So...I propose a different solution for transgender individuals, and that includes YOU. Be who you are. Don't buy into this notion of "gender," and most certainly don't tolerate differential treatment. As a role model for children, SHOW them that there is no personality trait or wardrobe choice that is unique to one sex or the other. Men, wear dresses. Women, wear tuxes. And teach children that "boys have penises and girls have vaginas" and eschew any notion that children are different in any other way (they really aren't, not until puberty). No "boys like trucks" or "girls like princesses" or inviting all the same-gender kids in the class to a birthday party, but not the different-gender ones. Don't buy different toys for your children or other people's children based upon gender. I can't imagine a child who accepts the given definition, and who is not treated differently because of his or her sex, will consider identifying as another gender. It would seem as inconceivable as identifying as another race or another height or another species (oh yes, I was "different" as a child...different from all the other children, and yes, for a while after reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" I identified as a Martian, but even as I did so, I understood that as a fantasy). And then nobody will have to give up their right to biologically reproduce or undergo drastic appearance-altering surgery and potentially-sickening hormone therapy just to be accepted for who they are. (Note: they may still opt for appearance-altering surgery or hormone therapy for medical or aesthetic reasons, but it won't change their identity.) And the more examples we have of other people of our sex who are like us, the less alienated we will feel when we are a little bit different. And even if we are different, that doesn't make us not what we are. It makes us special. It makes us *more* than what we are, not less.
And as for Caitlyn Jenner, I'm happy that she feels free with her new name and her new body. But society could have accepted her the way she was, as a man, especially given the privilege she started with. (Just look at Steven Tyler or Michael Jackson as an example.) And in fact, she fathered children before she transitioned, so she didn't have to give that up. And even after coming out as transgender, she insisted upon using male pronouns, until she made her debut as her new identity on the cover of "Vanity Fair." She is not a typical transwoman, and she's certainly not a typical woman. So let's not identify her as such. We can celebrate her for what she is...a former male Olympian from a family of "reality" show stars, who has the money and resources to do whatever will get the most attention.
The crazy thing is...there are certain contexts in which it is considered acceptable, even desirable to exhibit traits generally associated with the other gender. A man is encouraged to "get in touch with his feminine side" or a woman is encouraged to "man up" in order to deal with something difficult. It's sexy when a man cries (well, until it becomes pathetic) because it means he's sensitive. A woman who is strong and smart is compared with men.
Now, I know self-identified trans-people, though admittedly none of them well. When I met one for the first time, I didn't think much of it, because to me, my gender wasn't very important: I was never told that I had to do something only because I was female (except, of course, the medical stuff, and random times that girls and boys were separated, like for locker rooms, which seemed to me arbitrary and I went along with it because it didn't matter much) or that I couldn't do something because I was female. I must admit it baffled me how anyone could know they were "assigned the wrong gender at birth" - how, after all, could people know what it is like to be different from what they are, let alone identify that other experience as the "right" one? How would being assigned the "wrong gender" be different from being assigned "the wrong height"? Are there short people who believe they "should be tall" or vice versa, or do they just take it as a given and work with what they've got? Couple that with the fact that I (and apparently, most of the population) understood gender as a synonym for what the transgender community refers to as "sex": the gender assigned at birth according to the appearance of one's genitals, and this decision to "live as the other gender" was baffling but acceptable. I became a fan of transwoman Laverne Cox on "Orange is the New Black," but I understood her not as the same as the other women, but as something else, perhaps something in between. Note that her character and Boo, the butch lesbian portrayed by the awesome Lea DeLaria, basically have nothing in common, except being in the same gender-segregated prison.
I also vaguely paid attention to the tragic stories of transchildren denied access to the bathrooms of their identified genders and even being targets of bullying as a result of being forced to use the bathroom of their birth-assigned genders, or worse, being denied access to all the kids' bathrooms and offered the teachers' bathroom. I definitely sympathized. No child should be the target of bullying for any reason, especially not by the administration. However, I also sympathized with the cis-children who felt threatened by having trans-children of the opposite sex be allowed in their bathrooms. The concern on their side was twofold: one, if the purpose of separating the bathrooms was so that no child has to see another child's different genitalia, then allowing transchildren of the opposite sex (same identified gender) in the same bathroom would defeat the purpose (unless, of course, the child has already had reassignment surgery, but as I understand it, it's not standard practice to give a child surgery as soon as he or she identifies another gender, and in these cases, the child still retained his or her genitalia from birth). Like it or not, there would be a penis in the girls' room or a vagina in the boys' room. The second concern is that people lie when it suits them. Since the only test for transgenderism is to ask people what gender they identify as, it is perfectly possible for a cis-boy to "identify" as trans to get into the girls' bathroom (as, I believe, politician Mike Huckabee recently pointed out, and was called a "bigot" as a result...but he made a valid point). Which, regardless of whether or not you think the cis-boy or any transgirl poses a threat to the girls in the girls' bathroom, defeats the purpose of having separate bathrooms, doesn't it? You're basically opening the door for anyone to use either bathroom, whichever one they feel comfortable in. The problem is, just because a person is more comfortable in a bathroom with girls than with boys, doesn't mean that the others who use the bathroom they want to get into feel the same way about that person (meaning, they may feel more comfortable in a bathroom that excludes that person than includes them). And equal rights should really mean *equal rights* - not special rights for some, even if they are the minority (and not if they're the majority either). If the point of the segregated bathroom is so that kids don't have to be in a bathroom with other kids they don't feel comfortable going to the bathroom with, you're going to be out of luck no matter what you do. There are plenty of same-gender cis-kids who don't get along, who bully each other, who are generally nasty to each other, and that has absolutely nothing to do with gender. Growing up, I was bullied and made fun of by both boys and girls. Therefore, neither bathroom was "safe" from the bullies, though I can't remember a time I was bullied *in the bathroom* and can't imagine that I would have been more likely to be bullied in the boys' room than I was in the girls'. I do know that the boys' room would have been less useful to me because, as someone without a penis, I can't effectively use a urinal, and after puberty, having access to feminine product dispensers and receptacles (not available in the boys' rooms) was appreciated.
When I saw a picture of Caitlyn Jenner on the well-publicized cover of "Vanity Fair," my first thought was, "Wow, she looks amazing." My second thought was, "Wait, *that* is what she thinks a woman looks like?" I don't know about you, but I don't know any cis-women who look like Caitlyn Jenner. Not a single one. For that matter, I don't know any cis-women who naturally look like any magazine cover. That look takes a lot of makeup, hair, lighting, and of course airbrushing. In short, it's not real. So what *is* real about Caitlyn Jenner's female identity? What, exactly, does she think makes her a woman?
I started really identifying as a woman when I became a mother. A woman is defined, technically, as "the female of the human species," and the female is "the gender that contributes the egg towards reproduction." This, in my mind, qualified me as female: I'd proved I was female by participating in reproduction in the female capacity (which is really the only reason we're gendered in the first place). Before that, I was female by default, by birth assignment, but it didn't mean much to me. But now, I had something in common with other women: all cis-women (and trans-men) are built for childbearing and breast feeding. We've evolved to be different from men *specifically* for this purpose. And historically, men have used that as an excuse to treat us differently. Women were the property of men in many societies, including our own, not too long ago, and are still extremely restricted as compared to men in various societies today. And even in our modern-day United States, mostly-male lawmakers are continually trying to erode our rights: criminalizing certain behaviors during pregnancy because it "puts the baby at risk," limiting access to abortion, blaming us for getting raped, and generally making or keeping it legal for us to be discriminated against in various ways (e.g. unequal pay), some of which are even hazardous to our mental and physical health (e.g. lack of access to birth control). Now, I do understand that some women cannot or choose not to use their childbearing capacity, but this is part of being a woman too: the expectation that one can get pregnant and give birth, even if one doesn't want to, the protections we have to take to prevent it if we don't want it, or deal with it if it happens anyway, and the inevitable feelings of devastating loss if we find out our reproductive systems simply don't work. Not to mention the judgments against us should we choose not to be mothers: the unspoken reply to a woman saying she does not want children is inevitably, "What is wrong with you?" I'm guessing transwomen (if people know they're trans and don't assume they have working uteruses) don't have to deal with that.
I recently learned that, according to the trans community, "sex" and "gender" aren't the same thing, although they're commonly used as synonyms by everyone else. Amusingly, I put my fiction into a bot online that guessed, from the way you write, whether you were male or female. I tested borderline male for various writing samples and strongly male for others. Virtually nothing I wrote tested as female. Not so amusingly, an all-ladies gym I was a member of for nearly half a decade basically kicked me out. Note, they could not discriminate against me explicitly because I am a cis-woman (I think another branch of the chain got in trouble for not admitting transwomen, and subsequently officially allowed them but made it clear the gym wasn't designed for them and that they weren't particularly welcome), but I was pulled aside by the owner and told that I was making the other women uncomfortable with my "style of conversation" and that I needed to be "gentler, more soft-spoken." As I understood it, I needed to be more of a *lady*. And I thought giving birth was enough proof that I was female (I actually worked out at that gym throughout my second pregnancy, including the day before I gave birth, and the owner was nice enough to allow me "medical time off" after birth to recover, during which she did not charge me my membership fee). I didn't know how to be a *lady*. This wasn't a simple matter of following a dress code, which I would have no problem with as long as it was explicitly stated (not sure why it's so big a deal for people to follow gendered dress codes, even if they are unfair: clothes are just clothes, so if they're sufficient for one person I don't see how they wouldn't be sufficient for anyone else, modulo sizing and physical disabilities of course), but was about who I was as a person. It wasn't trivial for me to "alter my style of conversation" or to "be more softspoken." The only solution I could think of was just not to open my mouth at all, but that presented the issue of being seen as standoffish for not verbally acknowledging the other women, especially if they talked to me first.
Finally I understood. Or at least, I thought I did. This gym was supposed to be a "safe space" for women who felt threatened by the presence of men. I get feeling threatened by the presence of men, given rape culture, but that's also a rather heteronormal view. If the women are merely worried about being gawked at, then gay men should be okay to come to the gym, because they're not interested in women. And what of lesbian women? Now here I am, thinking all along that being a woman was simple, it was just a matter of having a vagina and a uterus - a working one at that! - and yet apparently that's not sufficient.
So what, exactly, *is* sufficient for being a woman, and why does it matter? I tried to talk to trans people, to ask them what their definition of gender was, and *not a single one could tell me*. "It's personal," they said. "It's my identity," they said. But when you tell *me* what you are, what are you expecting me to do with that information? Presumably you mean to tell me something about yourself when you say you're a woman, something relevant to the way I interact with you. And it isn't what I thought being a woman meant (being built, inside and out, for the female part of sexual reproduction).
When a transwoman says she's a woman, is she merely looking for permission to wear dresses and not get judged for it? Personally I think there shouldn't be double standards for men and women, unless it's specifically because of an explicit difference between men and women. I don't see any difference between men and women that ought to justify men not being allowed to wear dresses. In fact, I've enjoyed many a drag show: I think at least some men look more fantastic in "women's" wear than most women do.
But here we are, I'm not "female" enough to hang out with the women in the gym, and I write like a man. So does that make me a man? And if so, by whose definition?
Further research reveals that gender is not a simple binary, but as one writer put it, "a three-dimensional space." So what's the point of "matching" a region of that space with each of the binary sexes? Is the idea that, because most women appear or behave a certain way, that it is the behavior or appearance that makes them women? And if some of that is adaptation to social expectations, does that mean a person can be "made" into a woman by society, trained to act and dress the way a woman "ought" to? In which case, one might not need to be "born" a woman to be one...and anyone could qualify, with the proper training. (Perhaps the reason I was having so much trouble "fitting in" with the other women is because my parents and teachers never trained me to behave like a proper lady.)
Yet the trans-community seems to suggest that not only are trans-women women, they are "born that way." And trans-men are not. But yet, they will not give a standard definition for what a "woman" or a "man" is, in their minds. So, the only definition I can come up with is, "a woman/man is someone who says she's a woman/man" or perhaps, "a woman/man is someone who believes she is a woman/man."
But given that statements and beliefs vary from person to person, we now run into the issue that being a "woman" no longer means anything. Without knowing people's personal definitions of gender, one cannot know what their gender identity means to them. And without that, the fact that someone is "a man" or "a woman" becomes useless knowledge (except, I suppose, for instructing us on which pronoun to use, but that seems rather inconsequential).
So, why share your gender identity at all?
What I understand from reading the testimonials of transgender individuals is that identifying as another gender allows them to be free to express themselves however they want, because the way they want to express themselves is more in line with what is expected of the gender they identify.
I can understand this, and I briefly considered identifying, myself, as something other than female, given the difficulty I've had with appearing and acting female. Heck, I once (in college, so I thought I was still young and pretty) showed up at a party in heels and a dress and got asked if I were cross-dressed. Obviously I'm not doing this "female gender" thing very well. I can "dress up" in makeup and fancy dresses, but I feel like it's a costume (perhaps because the only time I ever got to do that as a child was when I was on stage performing) and I have to be careful with the particular costume: if I choose the wrong clothes or do the makeup wrong (and I'm really not good at the makeup), it's not flattering. And I have to admit, given that all those female hormones make me pretty sick from time to time, the idea of altering my hormone balance might have its benefits...but I'm already doing that in a way that's acceptable for women (an IUD, which under some health plans would not be covered, because it's contraception, and some people believe female contraception is immoral because it promotes promiscuous behavior among women: same people that think it's great for men to have condoms and Viagra).
And then I thought...what are the implications of identifying as non-female? Which bathroom do I use? (Note: I generally use the women's bathroom/locker room, though I will ignore the gender on single-person bathrooms and use whichever one is free, and occasionally, when there is only a men's room around, or there's an impossible line for the women's room and no line for the men's room, I will check whether it is occupied and if it's not, use it.) What do I put down on surveys? What do I tell my children? If I don't even understand this "gender" thing, how can I explain it to them, and what message will I be sending them about their own identities? Do I really want them wasting time and energy trying to figure out what "gender" they are instead of just accepting the default and focusing on their actual accomplishments?
Moreover, if I identify as non-female, I am caving to the demands of a society that treats women and men differently for no good reason, expects them to act and dress differently, and basically makes distinctions between them that *don't actually exist*. Distinctions based upon stereotypes and common characteristics. Women like shoes. Men don't like to ask for directions. Women are subservient (or else they're "bitchy" or "bossy"). Men are commanding and tough (or else they're "sissies" and "emasculated").
And here's where my original statement comes in: for any set of characteristics you can come up with that are associated with men or women, except for the primary sexual characteristics, you will find some people of the opposite sex that have those characteristics too, and for that matter, people of the same sex with a wide range of amounts of those characteristics, depending both on individual personalities and the culture they were raised in. So why do we assume that those characteristics are particular to a given gender? Just because most Asian people are short, does that mean a tall Asian person is actually not Asian at all? What I see here is a conflation of "common characteristics" with "defining characteristics," and that's problematic.
In order to justify differential treatment between two sets of people, there needs to be a real, identified difference between them that warrants that differential treatment.
If the difference between men and women is that men want to be treated like men (allowed to wear men's clothing, given responsibilities, trusted to lead but mistrusted around children, etc.) and women want to be treated like women (allowed to wear dresses and makeup, expected to be nurturing with children, but demeaned, ignored, and generally marginalized) then I'm pretty sure most cis-women (including myself) don't qualify as women and many cis-men don't qualify as men. I certainly think that the ways in which women are treated in this society are largely abominable, and I wish we weren't treated that way. It kind of baffles me that anyone would voluntarily opt for that sort of treatment, but apparently it's usually preferable to the treatment they get as non-gender-conforming men (which is how they identify/appear before coming out as trans: and note, there are lots of documented cases in which a transwoman transitions back because (s)he did not realize how badly women were treated and decides that being an effeminate man is preferable).
The reason why self-identified transwomen vastly outnumber transmen seems likely because there is far more of a tolerance in our society for women embodying "male" traits (wearing men's clothing, entering male-dominated fields, etc.) than men embodying "female" ones. This, I believe, is mostly due to homophobia: men are afraid that if they are too feminine, they will be attacked: and this is a well-founded fear. I absolutely believe that life is much safer for them when people believe them to be women.
Until, of course, homophobic people find out their secret. Then, it is understandable that they feel deceived, and also afraid of what it means in terms of their own sexuality. The transwoman, who a straight man was attracted to because she appeared to be a beautiful woman, is now in his mind just another dude, and if he's attracted to a dude, that makes him gay. And that, of course, means he's an abomination and going to go to hell (or some similar sentiment). Or, even if he's not homophobic, since he's straight, the idea of the object of his desire having a penis - even if that penis has been molded into a vagina - is a huge turnoff. It's understandable (though not, by any means excusable) that these men would react with hatred and violence. It's no wonder that transpeople have it rough.
So here we see that, no matter what we do with transpeople, there is still a problem stemming from people's assumption that this "gender" thing indicates sex. (Also, gender is identified in relation to sex, using the same terminology, so it's not like the two even can be separated.)
But, let's do a thought experiment and pretend that everyone understands that sex and gender are separate things and that, when you say you're a "woman" or a "man," people understand that you're talking about gender, not sex (this is, if I understand correctly, what the trans community wants when they promote trans acceptance). If nobody knows what "gender" means - because it's different for each person, we can't possibly act based upon it, because it gives no information. It's equivalent to assigning everyone a "1" or a "2," basically at random, and then having separate bathrooms and locker rooms and educational opportunities and jobs and clothing for 1's and 2's - but as we know from the Civil Rights era, separate but equal is *not* equal. Can we justify unequal treatment, simply on the basis of being a 1 or a 2? Of course not.
Meanwhile, by identifying only people's gender, we are obscuring their sex. Laverne Cox recently said that a transwoman being called a "man" is "an act of violence." Basically, we are not allowed to acknowledge someone's sex or gender assigned at birth. We are to treat transgender people exactly like cisgendered people of the same identified gender.
But here's the problem. There *are* identifiable differences between the sexes that justify differential treatment. We separate the sexes for most sports, because simply being female puts people at a distinct disadvantage as compared with being male. We measure boys and girls differently on growth charts, because they grow at different rates (well, different average rates, but when assessing what is normal, average for the body type gives more accurate information than average of the general population). And there are noticeable differences in life expectancies and other medical conditions between male and female sexes. I recently filled out a form that asked about heart health risk. It asked about relatives that had "early heart attacks," defined as "before the age of 55 for a man and 65 for a woman." Now, it is possible that the hormone mix associated with being female is the cause of the difference, in which case a transsexual woman taking female hormones should be treated like a woman in the survey, but a transgender woman who has not undergone reassignment treatment would need to be treated like a man. It's also possible that having a female reproductive system or some other physical characteristic that isn't changed during reassignment is the source of the difference, in which case even a transsexual woman should be compared with men. Simply put, a transgender person isn't always equivalent to a person who was born as the gender they identify, especially in terms of science and medicine. And they may not be equivalent to someone of their gender assigned at birth either, but it's hard to know when to group them with which set of people, assuming you even know they're transgender. Furthermore, if you believe that transgender people are actually different from birth than cisgender people, then they ought to be treated separately, but since being transgender requires a search for identity, there are many people who simply adapt to their surroundings and do as their told, and may not realize they are transgender, or would be if raised differently so that living as their gender is less comfortable and living as another gender is more comfortable.
There's also the question of discrimination and rights. When deciding whether to enact Affirmative Action measures to counteract hidden biases, it is important first to determine what, if any biases, are present. This requires taking statistics. But if you're looking for sexism, and you measure differences between women and men, and you include the transwomen with the women and the transmen with the men, regardless of when they transitioned, you're going to have residual effects of living as the other gender complicating your results. (For example, if you're examining how well women do in STEM as compared with men, and you think that girls are taught differently than boys in school, causing boys to exceed them at mathematical skills, then a transwoman who transitioned as a child would have the same disadvantage as the cis-girls, but if she transitioned as an adult, she wouldn't.) However, if you include the transwomen with the men, and the transmen with the women, you're going to have residual effects of living as the "wrong" gender first in the mix: for example, a transman will probably have been affected by a misogynist system while he was still identified as a woman. So, perhaps we should exclude the transpeople entirely, but then we don't know how discrimination is affecting them specifically. Do we give them their own categories? Do we have to include when they transitioned, what they've done in terms of transition (simple identification, hormones, surgery), how well they "pass" as covariates? It's complicated. And they may not be comfortable sharing that information anyway, because it's "personal."
Now, statistically speaking, with transgender people making up approximately 0.3% of the population, it's not going to make a huge difference if they're included or not - for now. But the population of transgender people is rising, and the reason is, as I stated in the beginning: we are all a little transgender. Not one of us is the archetypal male or female, so it is up to each one of us to personally decide where to draw the line and stop identifying as cisgender.
As the line moves, and tolerance for transgender individuals increases, tolerance for cisgender individuals *decreases* as a result. Let us imagine a line that depicts the "feminine" on one end and the "masculine" on another (yes, this is a gross oversimplification, but dividing this multi-dimensional "gender" space into gender binaries is oversimplified to begin with, and that's what we're dealing with). Now, people exist all along the line, but with males concentrated towards the "masculine" end and females concentrated towards the "feminine" end, yet some males and some females located anywhere along the line. To decide whether we are male or female gender or something in between, we must personally choose the points of delineation between "male" and "other" and between "female" and "other" and then locate ourselves on the line, then categorize ourselves according to the place we have personally decided to put those points. And the closer to the ends those points are placed, the more people inevitably fall somewhere in the middle. And more importantly, the smaller the spaces become for the "undeniably male" and "undeniably female" people. Simply put, as more people become transgender, the cisgender population becomes more homogenous, and more people will identify differences in themselves and identify as transgender, until no cisgender people are left.
And when there are no cisgender people, gender becomes completely a societal construct, unrelated to sex, and still woefully inadequate to describe people, not to mention still useless unless people can actually agree on a definition for it.
But let us assume that we reach some sort of equilibrium where a bunch of people are still comfortable as cisgender, and the rest are transgender, making the idea of being transgender still meaningful.
What are we asking of transgender individuals? Not only are they expected to live as the their identified gender (which only makes sense in a gendered society, which I take exception to, but is a fact of life for now), but inevitably they will want to look and feel the part (let's ignore for the moment that many cisgender people have trouble with that, either because of lack of means or lack of training). Choosing a new name and a new wardrobe are the easy parts. Hormone therapy, surgery, and in children, treatment to delay puberty and prevent development of secondary sexual characteristics associated with the "wrong" gender: these are the recommended treatments, and are where things starts to get dicey. That treatment we feel is appropriate for transgender children, so they can live out their lives as their preferred gender? Necessarily renders them infertile. And as for transsexual adults, depending on what treatment they get, it may or may not prevent them from having biological children and caring for them in the usual manner. Trans-man Thomas Beatie, whose wife was infertile, was able to bear three children (with some difficulty involving an ectopic pregnancy and the necessity for artificial insemination, both of which were less likely if he hadn't transitioned), but having had his breasts removed, he could not breast feed them. Luckily his wife was able to lactate after hormone treatment, but what if she hadn't been, or what if he'd been married to a man? (Also, their marriage ended, but I'm not going to jump to conclusions about why that was. It could be lots of reasons unrelated to his gender identification.)
So...you can live as whomever you want, as long as you give up your right to pass on your genes to your children. Does this not seem oddly discriminatory to anyone, a little eugenics-esque?
So...I propose a different solution for transgender individuals, and that includes YOU. Be who you are. Don't buy into this notion of "gender," and most certainly don't tolerate differential treatment. As a role model for children, SHOW them that there is no personality trait or wardrobe choice that is unique to one sex or the other. Men, wear dresses. Women, wear tuxes. And teach children that "boys have penises and girls have vaginas" and eschew any notion that children are different in any other way (they really aren't, not until puberty). No "boys like trucks" or "girls like princesses" or inviting all the same-gender kids in the class to a birthday party, but not the different-gender ones. Don't buy different toys for your children or other people's children based upon gender. I can't imagine a child who accepts the given definition, and who is not treated differently because of his or her sex, will consider identifying as another gender. It would seem as inconceivable as identifying as another race or another height or another species (oh yes, I was "different" as a child...different from all the other children, and yes, for a while after reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" I identified as a Martian, but even as I did so, I understood that as a fantasy). And then nobody will have to give up their right to biologically reproduce or undergo drastic appearance-altering surgery and potentially-sickening hormone therapy just to be accepted for who they are. (Note: they may still opt for appearance-altering surgery or hormone therapy for medical or aesthetic reasons, but it won't change their identity.) And the more examples we have of other people of our sex who are like us, the less alienated we will feel when we are a little bit different. And even if we are different, that doesn't make us not what we are. It makes us special. It makes us *more* than what we are, not less.
And as for Caitlyn Jenner, I'm happy that she feels free with her new name and her new body. But society could have accepted her the way she was, as a man, especially given the privilege she started with. (Just look at Steven Tyler or Michael Jackson as an example.) And in fact, she fathered children before she transitioned, so she didn't have to give that up. And even after coming out as transgender, she insisted upon using male pronouns, until she made her debut as her new identity on the cover of "Vanity Fair." She is not a typical transwoman, and she's certainly not a typical woman. So let's not identify her as such. We can celebrate her for what she is...a former male Olympian from a family of "reality" show stars, who has the money and resources to do whatever will get the most attention.