dancing the tightrope of gender

[leilanimichelle]

i posted something in my own journal about this and i figure i would write about it here where people will actually comment on it and maybe i would feel less alone with it.

here is what i wrote...

sometimes i think my transgenderism is a curse...  actually most of the time i do.... but i dunno.  sometimes i can actually see it as a blessing.  i

Comments

[eriktrips]

i think the diseased/problematic one is society for deciding what's "acceptable" and what's not.

I think you are quite on target with that. other cultures at various times have had a completely different take on those among them who wouldn't have fit the western anatomy-based and essentialist binary, and it seems that when 'differently gendered' people are accepted and integrated (and at times even honored for having a special gift) that the whole idea of disorder and disease falls by the wayside.

to the OP: I don't know if you are planning on transitioning or if you feel your place is in the middle or outside the whole bipolar system, but one thing to keep in mind that might help is that your experience is a unique and rare one, and one that many people would find interesting and attractive. the hard part is finding those people. so much of how we view ourselves depends upon how society views us that it is impossible to abstract out the "condition" of transgendered from the culture (ours) in which it occurs, and our culture wants to call it a disorder and many transfolk even claim this for themselves as a way of making sense of their own biographies, but you can decide whether or not to take this model on as appropriate for yourself.

I don't know if you are much for reading, but I'd recommend Walter Williams' The Spirit and the Flesh for a survey of how differently gendered people were treated in various Native American communities. it helped me a lot to see what I imagined I recognized as myself in a completely different cultural context, to see how the phenomenon of other-gendered people has been treated by other systems of belief than our own.

I hope that you can find a way to make peace with who you are, whether that involves physical changes or not. I do know some transgendered people who don't consider themselves as either/or who have still taken hormones of the "opposite" sex in order to shape their bodies into something more like what they want. although it is impossible to choose what features you will get with hormone treatment, it is something to consider: whether moving in that direction would make you more comfortable in your body, and whether that would make it easier to mover through the world.