feelings

[sunjoy]

I think I was way harsh on myself in my last post. My thinking is closely tracking what I'm reading in Serano's book, and my previous post was motivated by her chapter on the transexual dissonance between the sex one's brain expects one's body to be, and the actuality of one's body. (Serano theorizes a biological basis for subconscious sex, because

Comments

[sunjoy]

That sounds like a restrictive idea of gender that's based only in your experience (and those of parallel experience) and that invalidates that of others that don't fit it. It's akin (but different) to a bisexual person saying that sexual orientation is socially constructed, and that all difficulties with orientation stem from a conflict between social stigma a personal choice.

What's different in the case of gender is first that everything is so public. The public at-large genders people incessantly by deciding, in any given encounter, whether they see you as male or female (mostly based on secondary sex characteristics). These acts of gendering range from store clerks choosing to address you as sir or ma'am, to people deciding for you which bathroom you are entitled to use, to people accusing you of sexual aggression simply because you entered a space that they deem you are wrongly sexed-for.

For those of us whose physical sex aligns with our identified gender, these acts of public gendering are invisible, humorous or at worst mildly annoying (consider the example of a butch lesbian who is told accusingly by a woman that she's in the wrong bathroom. Said person can simply say that they are a woman-born woman, and most probably expect to hear an appology. A trans woman, on the other hand, can expect to be told (no matter how many years she's been living 24/7 as a woman, taking hormones, or what surgeries she's had done) that she's not welcome).

I think, since you are cis-gendered, you fail to see that it's the public at large that is obsessed with gender identity. Rather, you single out gender exceptions (transsexuals for example) and when their gender expression does not neatly fit into how the public expects them to be, you accuse *them* of obsessing with their gender identity.

Go back a few decades, and similar arguments were made when homosexuality was still pathologized (that gay people were obsessed with their orientation and egotitistical, when in fact they ought to just fit in like everyone else and settle down and get married).

Furthermore, transexualism (for some transsexuals at least), predominantly a deep personal conflict with their body and endocrine environment, rather than with their gender expression or social role (which are secondary problems). Before hormone therapy, a transexual doesn't really know what embodying the other sex feels like, and they certainly can't know that they will prefer to live in a differently-gendered social environment. What they do know is that their current body feels oppressively wrong to them. I really don't think you or I have any inkling what that might feel like, and so we just have to trust that other people in this respect have a radically different experience from us.

You really *have* to talk to transexual people (real ones, not ones whose experiences have been distorted in books and media) and take their experiences into account before deciding that they suffer from the superego, or that their lived experience is invalid.

And don't misunderstand me. I'm not invalidating your experience of having fluid or variant gender expression. Just be very careful before thinking that your experience is more real that that of someone who strongly identifies with binary gender.