I'm a transman with a very low tolerance for people within the community who feel that, in order to affirm their trans identity and represent it to the rest of the community, they must rely on binary stereotypes. I do enjoy a great many stereotypically masculine things, but I also do some very stereotypically feminine things, and those things are just as much a part of me as the others, and I am not ashamed of them. I'm trying the best I can to prove to those around me that these things we call masculine or feminine are just attributes that cannot be partitioned objectively. My "feminine" attributes are included in my own personal definition of masculinity. From a lifetime of experience, I feel that my essence is masculine, and anything that comes from it, regardless of how society may label it, is rooted in my internal sense of masculinity. I do not need to reaffirm my masculinity by using external definitions to shape my behavior, and I do not need to represent it to the rest of the world in stereotypical ways.
Another person may describe hir internal essence as feminine, a mixture of the two, neither of the two, etc. To me, it's the same sort of issue I have with arguing that they are still men's clothes when a woman is wearing them.
My head seems to be all over the place tonight, but I have to say this as well: I know what it is like to not feel masculine. There are times when situations arise to disconnect me from my internal masculinity, and this masculinity is NOT replaced by femininity. It is an emptiness. A feeling of nothingness. Femininity is not the absence of masculinity, and again, this is known from the inside, not the outside.
I've been ranting about gender a lot lately, and I'm glad. I was having a lot of doubts about feeling disconnected from some of my friends because of the way I view my own gender, but when I opened up, I found that there are many more friends of mine who actually share similar ideas about what role labels play in how a person is represented in the community.
Shifting gears just a tad...
I don't think that I believe that I should have been born male. (I'm still working on this one.) I don't generally believe in the phrase because things either happen or they don't. Oddly enough, that's one situation where the binary thing kind of works. Perhaps the only things that "should have" happened are the things that DO end up happening.
I was born in a female body. And perhaps there were things already in me at the time of my birth that would lead me to discover this trans identity of mine. I think this is the body that I was meant to have, and I think I was meant to make this decision to change it. If I want to use the same old terms, my body and mind didn't line up, but I see nothing wrong with that, just as I see nothing wrong with making the decision to align them. Believing that there is something inherently wrong with being a man born in a female body seems insulting to those who do not choose physical transition. For me, I knew it was wrong to stay. For me.
I'm going to have to develop this further. I have so much to say about this because of a few recent conversations that have really helped me get closer to a person who is remarkably like me, as I've been privileged enough to discover over the last several months.
I don't know if I need to say something else tonight. Today. I mean, it is almost six in the morning. If I do, maybe it should go in another post.
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"Believing that there is something inherently wrong with being a man born in a female body seems insulting to those who do not choose physical transition."
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of people who would challenge you on this because it requires a much more radical view of gender than possessed by the typical member of our society. I'd love to read more about how you came to this conclusion.
~B.
If any body can be inhabited by a person of any gender, then it is not necessarily a negative thing to be a man in a female body at any time. There are men who are perfectly comfortable with their female bodies, and they never plan on pursuing any physical options. It is the belief that you cannot be a man at all without that bodily modification that bothers me. Some men are born in male bodies and others female. Some are born in bodies that are a little of both. There is no right or wrong in this. It is simply what is. I don't want to cheapen the intensity of my or anyone else's experience, but take this example: You see a woman on TV with blonde hair, and you really like it. You weren't born with blonde hair, but you've always felt like it fit you better. Now, there's nothing wrong with being born blonde. Some people are born blonde, and some are not, and that is what is. You can choose to change that later on or not, and blonde is going to mean something different to the person who wants to bleach his hair than it is to the person who wants a few highlights.
ReplyDeleteInteresting approach. I don't disagree with you, by the way. I just noticed the large number of assumptions made in this post that seemed in need of a Devil's Advocate. ;-)
ReplyDelete~B.