I'm posting this diary in response to a comment from a valued fellow kossack a while back. His comment touched me in a way that I couldn't answer without a fair bit of reflection and searching for words. In the end the only way I feel I can respond is by sharing an encounter I once had. It doesn't directly answer the comment, I just hope that this window into my genderqueer experience might enlighten our exploration of gender, sex and sexuality.
Here's the comment:
I still wonder why that disconnect with your body took place. It doesn't seem to me that that sort of thing should be able to happen if we weren't handed our gender roles like little pink or blue hats before we even take our first breaths.
Our broken society doesn't make enough little yellow hats and it makes far too many assumptions about how people should act and think based on superficial fluff like genitalia. You and I and every one of us were subjected to the indoctrination of gender role stereotypes from countless sources all our lives. And when the truth of who we are inside doesn't match what we appear to be on the outside then all the gender role garbage strapped to our genitalia can become too much of a burden.
I think about transitional surgery similarly to the way I think about oriental people getting their eyelids surgically altered to conform to some foreign and artificial concept of beauty. I cannot condemn the act itself because above all else I believe that your body is yours to do with what you want to-- but I see the need to surgically alter healthy flesh as a symptom of a deep, societal disease that forces us to conform to narrow, unnatural standards.
There are too many variables of physical sexual characteristics, too many sexual orientations and far too many roles attached to gender for anyone to fit neatly into just two categories labelled merely "male" or "female".
I'm also bothered by piercing and tattoos though. I see it all as mutilating healthy flesh. But I guess we all do what we must to feel better about this body of ours that the world sees and the world judges. We're all just trying to fit in, one way or another.
I shaved my face yesterday. In a way, that too is just an act of conformity. And yet, I suffer and conform and feel better about myself.
Not really analogous to the changes of reassignment surgery but I've hopefully pointed out that in some small way I see my own hypocrisy.
That said, I should perhaps add that I think that reassignment surgery is something that should be paid for by health insurance. I think of it as just another cost of living in an intolerant society.
I think what I want to say is that my personal experience as a trans* person has little to do with societal expectations about gender roles. My "problem" is not that I don't feel comfortable being who I am, or that I feel pressured to act in a way that follows convention associated with people who have a vagina (although that pressure is there). My problem is that my body feels like it is not mine. And years of psychotherapy have not changed that and never could.
To any given person who might ask themselves why a trans* person needs to have hormone therapy and surgery: imagine you wake up tomorrow morning and have a body of the opposite sex. Imagine going through your workday in that body, going on a date and having sex in that body. Imagine the slight personality changes that go along with estrogen and testosterone - or the physical differences in strength, body hair, fat distribution. Imagine spending your life in a wrong-sexed body. Regardless of how society treats you (although that is of enormous importance) the point is how you feel in your own skin.
So anyway, follow me beyond the fleur de Kos to read a bit about my encounter with a philosophy student I met at a queer-socialist meetup a few years back.
Geronimo was like a revelation to me. A radiant, feminine-androgynous beauty whom I found myself picturing in a flowing summer dress, he had creamy skin and delicate features. The long silky blond hair tucked under a beret betrayed no hint of what his gender might be. The first clue came when he opened his mouth to quote Simone de Beauvoir in a mellow, melodious baritone. “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”. Of course he didn't agree with her – nor do I.
He, who was born and welcomed into his family as a little boy, had indeed grown up to become a woman. But he will argue that the woman had always been inside him, alongside masculine aspects he embraces as well. I write of “him” and not “her” at his own request, just as I was a “she” to him – though in my heart I was a little boy who had been welcomed into my family as a daughter. I had grown up to become a (trans)man who bore three children and felt nothing so intensely as the rightness of motherhood. Pronouns to us represented a binary that didn't account for our experience of gender. So we chose to ignore them and their implications. We each knew the other's gender better than any pronoun could convey.
For us, both unsure of anything except our common rejection of the gender binary, the pronouns and names were a mere irritation. For us, the source of pain was the mismatch. Our actual physical bodies were incongruent with our minds and spirits. That mismatch often made physical intimacy impossible, and the outward expression of our felt genders was fraught with contradiction and fear. That mismatch made me hate my body (and myslef by extension) in a way no person should ever have to feel. It turns out he would rather have worn a dress that day, but fear made him leave it in the closet. The token of femininity he carried with him was a flowered silk scarf in his messenger bag – he kept it safe there, but also hidden.
The physical mismatch, the wrongness of our bodies, is something Geronimo and I talked about at length. Even though we understood each other perfectly, and there was no fear of rejection, this wrongness prevented any physical intimacy. We kissed more than once, but always had to stop. The reality of our bodies got in the way. The breasts that I would find beautiful on anyone but me, and the penis he prayed every day would disappear, added up to more dysphoria than a sexual encounter could survive. But we did go as far in our intimacy as truly understanding each other. That was further than either of us had ever gone before.