There was a fascinating post by
liv a while back about sexuality and how feminism and the like slots in around it. It's something that I find really quite fascinating because it's really complicated and not simple, yet there's some interesting things I've managed to draw out from it. It's also really important to me because I really need to understand, in a practical way, what is likely to be part of my transition and what's just stereotyping.
It's also a bit of a hot potato as a topic, because I've tried to talk about it and been shut down by various people and it's starting to make me feel a bit paranoid and unloved. I'm also pretty angry about it and I feel that, in this at least, I've been deferring to other people's needs more than I should. If I don't vent, I'll start killing people, or screaming at them again, which would be worse, and I'm starting to repress stuff and feeling victimised.
One of the things that's really important to me (if to not a lot of other people) is the idea of sex and gender, and how they're separate. I think that central concept is really important in understanding sex and gender for many reasons, ranging from because I think it's a decent and true model of how our brains actually work to the fact that it's a sensible model that allows coexistence between trans people and the wider trans* community (if trans are all the people who just want to change sex, then trans* includes the people who don't but have gender-variant behaviour and would include cross dressers and androgynous people for example). It also explains why there is gender variance in trans people too, and why trans people may want to change sex yet stay the same in terms of gender presentation.
Anyway, I've talked about this a lot already and there's little reason for me to go into it again, except as a reminder. So, when I think about sexuality and what transitioning does for that, what I'm trying to do is find out what actually is to do with sex and what's to do with gender. In the gender and sex model, there are some things that are invariant across the sexes and some things that change. The things that are invariant are probably related to gender, but the things that change are probably related to sex. That's what I'm trying to work out.
What makes me really angry is the sense that people mix up their terms and start to mix gender and sex terms, usually because the two are strongly correlated (i.e. most men are masculine and most women are feminine). So I end up with the fact that women can show "male behaviour" used as a killer argument, along with an example of some gender trait that's invariant to back up the argument. Of course masculine gendered women will show behaviour we associate with men, if by men we mean masculine male people.
I get tired of it very quickly because I'm usually aware of this and I make allowances for other people. If I'm with a gender variant person and they're doing the whole "women and men are the same" thing citing gender traits, I just switch the definitions in my head and make allowances for that. I don't get angry and I keep being understanding.
The problems come when I try and ask people to do this for me and I make the same shortcuts. I think that, if I'm being nice to people, people should be being nice to me. So if I say that women and men are different and cite a sex reason, I'm being a bit intolerant in the same way, yes, but I assume the other person will pick up what I mean and deal with it. After all, half the time I have a problem is because the other person will usually refuse to discuss the terms of reference of what they mean, so I assume it's their problem and they'll deal with it, just like I deal with it for them.
Only it doesn't work that way. I make allowances for other people, but they don't make allowances for me. So I end up in situations where I keep getting shut down for intolerance which are usually entirely manufactured by the other person. As usual, if sex and gender are entirely interchangeable, then the only way for me to be happy is over the dead bodies of the gender variant and vice versa. Great. Lovely. We're back here again. It's a draining and horrible place to be and it makes me think the problem is with me when it isn't. I've been starting to think of myself as some kind of horrible bigot, but I don't think I am.
It bothers me a lot and, recently, I've even run into cases where a straight-forwards decleration of "the hormones do X" has now become so contentious that it's hard to have any serious conversation with people. It's weird because I'd have thought that a simple statement like "men have more testosterone than women" wouldn't be a cause for problems, but apparently it is. If I found that a change in hormones has an effect on me, and that effect is referenced in scientific literature and borne out by the experiences of other transpeople, it should follow that, because men and women have that same difference, there would be a difference between them too overall, in a statistical sense, that would be independent of gender. But even that's too contentious sometimes. I'm getting too old for that kind of doublethink nowadays and my patience is wearing thin.