I read an article recently that discusses gender from the perspective of a cis person and puts forth something very interesting about how cis people experience gender vs. how trans people experience gender in which she quotes Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, which I’ll also quote here:
“Having only ever had a trans experience, it took me a long time to realize how differently I experience and process gender compared to the way most cissexuals do. For example, a few months after I had begun living full-time as a woman, a male friend of mine asked me if I had ever accidentally gone into a men’s restroom by mistake.
At first, the question struck me as bizarre. When I gave him a perplexed look, he tried to clarify himself. He said that he doesn’t ever think about what restroom he is entering, never really notices the little ‘man’ symbol on the door, but he always ends up in the right place anyway.…. I laughed and told him that there had never been a single instance in my life when I had walked into a public restroom- women’s or men’s- by habit; my entire life I have been excruciatingly aware of any gendered space that I enter.”
I clearly need to read this book, but the author in the article discusses their own personal identity and experience with gender in feeling “androgynous”. It was interesting that I saw my own experiences reflected within the author, though I do not identify as cis. For me, feeling “androgynous” or, a term I prefer, non-gendered, primarily put me at odds with the vast majority of society.
One of the most problematic aspects of the way media and medical institutions accept and validate trans* narratives is their assumption that all trans* people experience gender dysphoria or their trans*-ness in the exact same ways. What I once heard Juliet Jacques refer to as the “wrong body narrative”, the predominant understanding and valid trans* story is one where a person feels born in the wrong body, often from a very young age and “always knew” they were a different gender. My friend HobbitDragon has already written brilliantly about the problem with this assumption, but I’d like to approach it from a different lens.
Data is one of my favourite characters in Star Trek and definitely was someone I sympathised with growing up. His constant struggle to be “human” and to understand the nuances of human communication really resonated with me.
I can’t divorce my own experience of attempting to meet cissexist standards from attempting to meet ableist standards. As a child with disabilities raised with very ableist attitudes, I wanted more than anything to not have disabilities and did my best to “pass” as normal whenever I could. When I was much younger, it was probably much more obvious that I was on the spectrum and the signs and symptoms of Aspergers, according to my own mother, read like a textbook description of myself at a younger age.
Whether by virtue of never meeting the standards of how I should look or behave in order to be a proper “female” or by virtue of being on the spectrum, I didn’t fit in with my peers. In addition to being told that I looked like a man, I was also told I was “weird”, a “bitch”, and outside of the assumption that I was a lesbian (which took off as an insult when I was in middle school when my peers connected failed gender presentation with assumed sexuality) or a failed woman, people still didn’t like me for reasons I could never understand.
I constantly strove to achieve normality or “perfection”, an ever present overarching theme in my life. I never got to experience a state of non-gendered-ness, where I took my gender for granted, because I was constantly told how badly I performed it. But I not only failed to perform as a “woman”, I failed to perform as a proper “human” with all of my inability to read non-verbal communication, laughing at the wrong things, criticising my peers, taking things too literally and just in general being an alien on my own planet. Being a proper woman was part of being a proper human being, which I tried hard to be. I told no one about my disorders or issues and I tried desperately to behave in ways that I thought would lead me to popularity.
Seven of Nine is another character who’s experience mirrors Data’s, but hers is a bit more of an obvious “transition”. She’s reclaiming her humanity in ways that I think that some trans* people reclaim behaviours that they’ve been socially bullied for exhibiting.
With that in retrospect, my narrative is different to the dominant paradigm of trans* narratives. I didn’t experience a huge amount of gender dysphoria because I was trying so hard to be a proper girl and therefore a proper human that any feelings I felt of oddness in relation to gender were just part of the overall puzzle I felt of the oddness in relation to allistic (non-autistic) society. The assumption of me being a “normative girl” was never there for me to be at odds with. I was always a freak. A weirdo. An outcast. With my weird disconnect about being called a “girl” part of that. I strove to be a girl despite it, because all I wanted was to be accepted and normal. It didn’t matter to me if being a girl didn’t really fit, because in truth, I was never normal to begin with.
Like Serano, I did experience the world as somewhat highly gendered, but I also experienced a social world that I couldn’t connect with on a basic level. For me, my gendered experiences were small in comparison to my inability for people to “get” me, my inability to be understood, or to understand other people. And the feeling of being “under cover” about my disability, of taking hormones in order to be “normal” was a constant reminder that I was not “normal”. My body was never normal before gender even became an issue. In the face of having to see doctors every six months, take medications every day, fearing going completely blind, and the myriad of other health issues I dealt with, the abnormality I felt as a result of gender sort of got shifted to a lower priority, or it least just seemed to be one piece of an overarching puzzle that spelled out, “You are not normal”.
Anya also has similarities to non-human characters because of her transition from being a vengeance demon. The scene I most appreciated was after Buffy’s mother’s death, Anya couldn’t understand the nuances of how to handle grief, which I totally sympathised with.
The point of sharing this is to demonstrate the ways in which trans* narratives can be radically different under different intersections. I’m sure that race, class, sexuality, and other issues frame and morph the way people experience gender and their trans* journey. One of the many reasons the “wrong body narrative” is so problematic is not just because it postulates one most authentic trans* experience, but also because it seems to be forgetting that having a disability, being a person of colour, or having any experience where you are classed as “other” can reframe you entire experience of gender dypshoria.
And it seems as though that if this is the narrative other trans* people are judging themselves against than very likely, once again, those under different intersections that influence their experience may be feeling that their trans* journey is less legitimate or that they aren’t really trans*. It’s important for all sorts of narratives and journeys to get out so that we can have an accurate understanding of the diversity of trans* experiences.
I think it’s also important to keep sex dysphoria in the picture. The “wrong body narrative” is actually a family of narratives which includes a narrative about having an identification within gender that wants expression and recognition, but also a narrative about a deep mismatch between the body’s sexed characteristics and its expectations of those characteristics.
It’s important not to disappear transsexual experience because the wrong “gender” narrative has some key differences from the wrong “sex” narrative. In particular, one is about wanting to be seen differently hence treated differently, and one is about wanting body peace. It’s possible to have one kind of relief without the other since different things relieve them.
Of course those narratives can combine and intertwine just as sex/gender narratives intertwine for cis people (often so seamlessly as to be indistinguishable), and in particular each of them has a strong affinity to “acquire” the other, especially with how sex/gender are bundled together both in (cis) mainstream stories of sex/gender and in the trans* stories that receive recognition in that mainstream.
That makes a lot of sense. I suppose for my own experiences I’ve always had trouble reconciling my body dysphoria with all of the other negative messages I’ve been told about my body. I’ve had so many conflicting messages about the abnormality of the size of my body and how it grows that for me it’s just like… okay, do I feel negative about my body because I’m trans*? Or because I’ve been socially conditioned to hate my body in “female” terms? Or because I’m seeing it as a “disordered” body and therefore not good enough? It’s so hard to divorce those experiences!
I don’t mean to say the “wrong body narrative” or sex dysphoria is necessarily a “wrong” narrative. I definitely think though what you’re saying about keeping it in the picture is crucial because it is one of the modes of experience. I can’t help wondering how that experience is influenced by other intersections as well.
Yes.
I suspect the answer is “heavily”! My special interest for both gender and sex dysphoria narratives is how they intertwine with sexist oppression. For example, I wonder how many cissexual women could say that they feel completely comfortable with the position they’re assigned within “gender”? And I even wonder how many women would say that there is no difference between their body, in a sexed sense, and their mental/physiological “reflection” of that body. I’m thinking here about things like dysmorphia, but not just in the medical sense, more in the sense of the impact of sexist oppression on how all women come to form our “body maps”.
For that reason I’m very cautious of speaking about feelings of “naturalness” or “relaxedness” for non-trans* women’s relationships to their positions within gender and sex. I think concepts of cissexuality and even cisgenderness are important, because there is an experience that’s very different from the trans* experience of both those narratives. It’s just not a completely unproblematic one. I also think discourses of “genderqueerness” and “agenderness” need to be careful not to subsume women’s political rejection of sex/gender oppression within an “identity” framework.
I wrote about that actually in my blog titled “Breaking down the Cisystem”. I think that quite a few people don’t feel “cis” in that they fully ascribe to gender roles but yet I also don’t think it’s particularly useful to get rid of the “cisgender” as a concept because of privilege, despite how problematic that tends to be.
And the last point -SO- much like… I got into a debate with someone once who was all, “Well *I* don’t identify with the concept of women but I don’t HAVE to call myself ‘genderqueer’ because of it” and I was just like… at a certain point it’s hard to explain, “you don’t get it”. I mean I totally get and respect a political rejection of sex/gender but I think there’s a differentiation there when it’s an identity and one isn’t necessarily like “above” the other, if that makes sense?
Does this read like I’m saying the wrong body narrative is always wrong? Because that’s not what I’m saying. I’ve had some feedback on this in that me weighing on on the wrong body narrative as a “FAAB genderqueer” (which honestly I feel is a bit delegitimising of my identity) if I’m not a “transsexual” or “non-transitioning” is wrong. From the standpoint of my identity, I have no idea if I qualify as “non-transitioning”. I have an intersex condition but unlike some intersex people I was not surgically altered at birth (and wonder if that makes me also an unlegitimate intersex person). But the hormones I’ve been told to take since 16 have altered my body now in ways that I find uncomfortable. I’m hoping to get top surgery, but I don’t want a “male chest reconstruction”. I don’t want to “live as a man” but I don’t want to “live as a woman” either. I’d say I’m “transitioning” to what I once was before I took HRT but… what I was was pre-pubescent and… yeah, not wanting to transition into that. So… I have no idea where I lie on this, whether I’m speaking out of turn or not. It’s interesting that this article prompted this discussion when these are the reasons why I feel sometimes my own trans*-ness is not legitimate, that I’m a poseur and a faker who’ not “really trans*”. My experiences don’t match the predominant narrative. Does that mean I have no right to weigh in? I know you’re not the Super Rad Trans Guru of ALL that can legitimise my identity but as someone who’s opinion I deeply respect, I would appreciate your feedback.
No, it read more as omitting that “wrong body narratives” are often about something other than gender identification, when they’re actually quite often about sex dysphoria. Which, I guess, to the extent that gender essences are a “wrong” idea, ends up suggesting that wrong-body is “wrong” too, but not in a direct way.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who thinks their own trans-ness is “legitimate”. If there’s a universal trans* experience, I suggest it’s “inauthenticity”, i.e. being situated as not having access to discourses of authenticity. (Discourses which, whether “right” or “wrong”, are certainly often useful tools for physical and psychological survival.)
So whether or not identity feels “legitimate”, my own approach has been to focus on situation. Identity can be or feel “legitimate” or not but situation is. Some situations, e.g. the transsexual woman’s situation, are materially marginal, the target of concrete oppression. That’s the case no matter the etiology (“coming to be that way”) of transsexual womanhood. So if I were you I think that’s the kind of analysis I’d use for your situation.
I think the things to avoid, in terms of “weighing in” are 1) flattening power dynamics between people in a “trans” social situation and people not in that situation, 2) “naturalising” all objection to the gender system into pure “identity” in such a way that it erases the political struggle of those who identify it as a political system, and 3) making it difficult for trans* women to speak, including by creating an environment which distorts our speech.
If I’m objecting to anything it’s a case of (3), i.e. unintentionally further distorting the already distorted dialogue on “wrong body” by missing out part of the story, making it harder for those who are part of that story to speak. But you’ve been responsive so that’s fine as far as I’m concerned.
I’m really not understanding how sharing my own piece and my own experience is making it harder for other people to speak.
To be honest, I’m really flummoxed about all of this. I know there’s no “right” way for me to address issues, but it feels like any time I write something about my own experience, the immediate response I get is that I’m not including other people’s experiences. Of course I’m not. Because I don’t have them. It’s so frustrating that I feel like not saying anything at all. Because I apparently can’t share anything about myself without being expected to represent the entire trans* spectrum.
I always invite other people to tell me their experiences. The point of this was just to provide mine and say, “hey! we need to have more stories than JUST the ‘wrong body narrative’ in the mainstream too!”. That’s literally all I wanted to do and I can’t even seem to manage that. And become I’m some nebulous existence between transitioning and not and non-binary and not, no one can tell if I have the right to say anything about this at all so I get broken down into a FAAB genderqueer and that’s that.
To be clear, I’m not upset/angry with you. In general right now I’m just getting all of those inadequacy and illegitimate feelings reeling up all over again and I’m pretty sure it’s having a huge cognitive impact on how I’m viewing the world.
*shrug* I just don’t know what to say/think anymore.
If I may drop a link, I find that “the child who simply knew” to be one example (among many) of why popular culture is so quick to embrace the “wrong body” narrative as though it were THE narrative of trans* people. You’ll have to scroll down a bit to find it:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/10/11/the-eunuch-the-rapist-the-whore-and-the-child-who-simply-knew/
Thanks. My objection isn’t so much with the narrative, just with the concept that it’s THE narrative and the RIGHT narrative.