Originally published, in part, approximately 2007:
When I moved to New Jersey from Arkansas, I had to pay a price. That price was silence, since I needed to commit to learning a new discipline and gaining something approaching stable employment. I now teach computer programming rather than mathematics and I've gained tenure...but it cost me 5 years of activism.
Below the fold is a combination of the last two meatspace presentations I did before moving (I hope to integrate them gracefully). They were presented to social work professionals in Little Rock and mental health professionals in Fayetteville around 1999.
If you have been reading my words, you will recognize some of them in this essay. I stole a few lines from it when I prepared I am a human being, a performance piece I did as part of my application for tenure. Some of it became a poem first published at Cheers and Jeers, which itself later became part of my third performance piece, State of the Onion (links to those pieces no longer reach their targets). That poem is attached to the end...which may by then seem like some redundancy.
When I do presentations of this nature, there are some questions that are invariably asked. Number one on the hit parade (just slightly more popular than why someone would change from a man to a woman and be a lesbian) is, "Why does someone do what you did?"
It wasn’t too many years ago that I, too, was obsessed with the question of why I was the way I was. Was there some sort of genetic anomaly which resulted in people like me? Or perhaps it wasn’t genes that were the cause, but rather the environment in the uterus during gestation. Or maybe some psychic trauma in my very early years implanted in me the notion that I should have been a girl, even though the available evidence was that this was not the case.
If I had to pick a single step in my growth process as a human being, it would be the moment when it occurred to me that it didn’t matter why I was the way I was. What mattered was that I existed, that I was a human being and I was living my life the best way I knew how.
I can’t do any better for myself than to be who I am. In my view, it is also the case that I can’t do any better for other people than to be who I am, because to pretend to be other than who I am is to intentionally practice deceit, and intentional deceit is to me one of the worst of social offenses.
I am the one who loves
changing from nothing to one |
I've got a few links for those who would like to do some studying before entering a discussion of the topics listed above the fold:
Causes of transsexualism: current findings and hypotheses
Come Explore With Us The Diverse Nature of Gender
Explanations of why we (i.e. people, in general) are the way we are have been sought for centuries. I am reminded of a discussion I had three days after I came out.
October 2, 1992
I quote my source, which is me in this case. I was once told to document everything, and this is part of that effort.
Chuck told me that THEY had had a meeting...THEM consisting of him, my dean, the president of the university, the school attorney, and the head of personnel (it would have included the VP for academic affairs, but he was out of town). We immediate thought was: "Why didn't WE have a meeting?" Chuck told me he was to be the conduit for any communication between me and THEM.
He voiced the "concerns" of those at the meeting:
"How does 'he' know?"
Gee, Chuck. How do you know who you are? That seems to be one of the central questions of philosophy for the past couple of millennia.
"If 'he' wears a dress to class, he's out of here." President
Oh, how wonderfully enlightened! Well, Chuck, I don't currently have any dresses appropriate for the classroom and the weather, but I'll let you know when I do.
"Wouldn't immediate medical leave be in order?"
Well, Chuck, I don't have any medical needs as of yet. I'm not even on hormones right now. I'll let you know when I can use it. Besides, couldn't that be interpreted as abandoning my classes and give THEM an excuse to terminate my tenure?
"Why couldn't you just be gay?"
No answer...just a disbelieving stare.
There may be a reason that I am transsexual, a test of some sort. But if there were a test and I failed it, I would be no less transsexual. In the same way, if there really were a "gay gene" and some people didn't have it, but still exhibited same-sex preference, would they be less gay?
I'm not a big believer in the importance of "Why?" when it comes to individual characteristics and identity. If someone chooses to be gay or transgender, I don't think that is a moral failing. I don't think there is anything "icky" about being gay or transgender.
Voicing that has got me in trouble with some of the essentialists in the past.
I don't know why people are transgender or transsexual. Ultimately, nobody really knows. There is conjecture. But as is always the case, one should question the motives of those who make the conjectures. What do they have to gain by making them?
I wish I could break
all the chains holding me
|
Transsexual people have an internal disagreement with their bodies. We often say things like, "My body doesn't fit me." We may also have disagreements with the roles thrust on those who have bodies like the ones we were born having. Little girls are taught that they will grow up to be like their mommies. Little boys are taught that they will grow up to be like their fathers, if they have one.
That old drunk passed out on the couch? No, thank you.
No, transfolk reject, often from a very early age...even before we know what chromosomes are, that chromosomes are destiny. In place of that, we learn that we have to hide how we feel in order to avoid becoming bully-fodder.
We humans seem to want either a scientific or religious answer to everything. Especially when it comes to anything involving sex or gender-related behavior, if there is no known scientific cause, then there must be something morally wrong.
Why is that? Scientific curiosity I can understand. But it certainly should be disentangled from moral essentialism.
Do people really think that if there is no known scientific cause to a phenomenon, then it must be the work of...or evidence of...dark forces?
People who desperately need science to explain everything sometimes point to the 1997 study by Zhou, Hofman, Gooren and Swaab: A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality. (also here: Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus in The Journal for Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.)
Abstract: Transsexuals have the strong feeling, often from childhood onwards, of having been born the wrong sex. The possible psychogenic or biological aetiology of transsexuality has been the subject of debate for many years. Here we show that the volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminals (BSTc), a brain area that is essential for sexual behaviour, is larger in men than in women. A female-sized BSTc was found in male-to-female transsexuals [n=7]. The size of the BSTc was not influenced by sex hormones in adulthood and was independent of sexual orientation. Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones.
The problem with this sort of determinant is that it requires the cutting open of the brain in order to measure the size of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. That sort of requires that the person operated on be dead.
Where the predisposition for transsexualism exists, psycho-social and other factors may subsequently play a role in the outcome, however, there is no evidence that nurturing and socialisation in contradiction to the phenotype can cause transsexualism, nor that nurture which is entirely consistent with the phenotype can prevent it (Diamond, 1996).
--LINK
All I can tell you is that I found some peace when I changed my hormone of choice. Testosterone was destroying me. I found more peace after I had surgery so that my body could stop fighting the hormone change.
Okay...so if we don't know what really causes transsexuality, how do people know they are transsexual? That's also not any easy question to answer.
In short, a person is transsexual if they have, or develop, a long-lasting identification as a member of the opposite sex.
Some people experience this from when they were very young. In others the condition approaches when they are older. But usually, 20-20 hindsight can discover clues from our distant memories.
For me personally, I can recall the time when I shoplifted a copy of an Esquire magazine (I think it was) and read the story of Christine Jorgensen over and over until the magazine fell apart. I feel guilty having done that because of the stealing, but having someone know about how I felt would have been humiliating. I already knew by then that Society™ disapproved.
But now old friends are acting strange,
they shake their heads,
they say I've changed.
Something's lost but something's gained
in living every day. |
Why don't FTMs just be butch lesbians? Why don't MTFs just be femmy gay men?
Trans people aren't just frustrated homosexuals. Cisgender gay people would no more welcome sex reassignment than they would welcome a frontal lobotomy. They're fine with their bodies, by and large, and just happen to be gay. Transpeople, regardless of their sexual orientation, are NOT fine with their bodies, or at least with the heaps and heaps of gender norms that are enforced upon them as a result of their bodies. Their gender identity (their internal sense of self) and/or gender expression (clothes, mannerisms, makeup or lack thereof, hairstyle, etc.) is significantly outside the norm, to a degree that doesn't really fall within even the norm for feminine gay men or masculine gay women.
[Also] not all FTMs are terribly masculine and not all MTFs are terribly feminine. That's another common misconception. Transpeople aren't all striving to be nice, normal, heterosexual, pretend-you're-not-Trans people with 2.3 children and a white picket fence. There are FTM drag queens and MTF butch lesbians, for the same reason that FTMs aren't butch lesbians and MTFs aren't femme gay men or drag queens - butch lesbians are women, and femme gay men and drag queens are men. It just goes to show all the more that gender really is infinite, and WAY more complicated than we have language for. But we're doing our damnedest.
--LINK
I imagine that is much of the reason transfolk struggle for acceptance: anyone could theoretically claim to be trans. That seems to scare people.
It is true that anyone of us could be trans. If you fear that, you are not trans. What makes someone transsexual is that the prospect of changing sex is not at all unpleasant or fear-ridden. In fact, that's what we desire...in the deepest, innermost places of truth inside us. It is not our fault that it doesn't get painted on us in some way that is more easily identifiable.
Don't get me wrong. There is a lot of fear involved with being transsexual. But that fear comes from the way we are treated in the human community.
I am fully aware that my being transsexual causes discomfort to other people. I live in a society which has had a cultural taboo against the blurring of gender, let alone the concept of someone changing hogans. In my opinion, that taboo is the base cause of sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia, but then being a lesbian, my opinion is not an unbiased one. The fact of the matter is that for centuries the prevailing thought among the people who shaped the culture in which I live has been that there are males and there are females and males should act a certain way and should do certain things that females shouldn’t and females should act a different way and do certain things that males shouldn’t. That is, males should be men and females should be women.
That places me in a difficult bind. First of all, I don’t believe that sex (male/female), even if it were that binary, which it evidently is not, must necessarily determine gender performance (man/woman: how one behaves and what one does). There is cultural evidence of societies in which sex was not given this power over our lives. There are isolated societies where this is still the situation, but our society has done its best to stamp this out. We have a historical tendency to look at other societies as being less advanced than ours, but the people who lived in those societies were not depraved barbarians any more than we are depraved because we spend countless hours staring at a television set or more barbaric than a society which practices ritual murder of murderers. They were human beings living the best way they knew how. And the people who lived in those societies had some choice over their gender destiny. So why can’t I?
It is perhaps even more alarming to most people that I don’t really believe in gender. I don’t mean that I don’t believe that it exists. I just don’t believe that it is necessary for it to exist. At this point in my life, I find myself much of the time watching people interact from the point of view of an outsider, sort of like an anthropologist wandering among a native people, observing the practice of some strange rite. For it does seem strange to me...or maybe it is would be more accurate to say that it has become strange to me. I’m not sure. It’s hard for me to remember.
We could quibble about definitions, but I’ll just use this one from WWWebster,
Main Entry: 1gen·der
Pronunciation: 'jen-d&601;r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English gendre, from Middle French genre, gendre, from Latin gener-, genus birth, race, kind, gender -- more at KIN
Date: 14th century
2 a : SEX b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
I can’t help myself. In my obsessive-compulsive days, I used to read the dictionary. So I just had to pursue the lead to “kin.”
Main Entry: 1kin
Pronunciation: 'kin
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English cynn; akin to Old High German chunni race, Latin genus birth, race, kind, Greek genos, Latin gignere to beget, Greek gignesthai to be born
Date: before 12th century
1 : a group of persons of common ancestry : CLAN
We are apparently supposed to be born with gender if the etymology of these words is any clue. We are supposed to be a kind. But the words give no indication that there are only two kinds or that everyone must be of one of those kinds and remain that kind from birth to the end of life. I know that we are taught to behave in sex-appropriately gendered ways from birth. I guess I just failed those lessons. But I am no less human for doing so.
Why would someone “reject” that teaching? Now there is a very good question. All evidence, including personal experience, would seem to indicate that life is not made easy for such people. Indeed, traditionally-gendered people and the society they have generated can make life very difficult for us gender-variant folks. So there would seem to be no survival advantage in it. Maybe we were and are just obstinate. But maybe it just didn’t make much sense to us. Maybe it still doesn’t.
From my point of view, a better question would be, “Why do some people want to tell other people how to live their lives?” And for the answer to that question, you would have to ask those who do that. I have enough to handle constructing my own reality. Why would I want to interfere with someone else’s reality? I would never dream of telling anyone that they have to cease living within the confines of sex-appropriate gender. It’s just that I don’t wish to live within those confines. And in my chosen reality, I don’t have to.
Why should what I have just said or how I live my life be deemed not “acceptable?” Why should society have any interest in how one person chooses to live one life if that person does no harm to others? Or is the message given by that society to be that not being or living like everyone else IS harmful to others.
When I was a child, I was classified as “gifted.” What it meant to me at the time was that I and a few other kids in my grade got to go on field trips to museums and have other similar activities when the other kids were probably doing stuff that we thought was boring. We also had to learn the words in a book they gave us, so that we could expand our vocabulary. Sometimes I felt embarrassed around other kids because I was gifted and they were not. It set me apart. But it was supposed to be a good thing.
Gifted...special...extraordinary...exceptional...
Curious...peculiar...odd...strange...eccentric...
Weird...bizarre...queer...abnormal.
Why is “normal” the objective?
Why do humans place boundaries on what it means to be human? Why does our society stigmatize some behaviors, some beliefs, some desires as being prima facie evidence of having mental disease or disorder and then to prove its point place a system of barriers against and punishments for behaving THAT way or holding THAT belief or having THAT desire. Of course there is going to be dis-ease for someone who is punished for existing. Of course there is disorder in a person’s life if there are barriers erected to that person living that life.
Why are what the average person does, how the average person behaves while doing it, or what the average person believes suppose to be of any relevance to one individual? I’m not a sociologist, rather I'm just a mathematician, but it seems to me that if a society is driven by the desire to have its individual members to be above all else within the bounds of what is defined to be normality, then it will attempt to truncate its outliers, to either “cure” them or remove them from that society. In so doing, the boundaries of “normal” would be contracted, leading to another round of truncation, and so on and so on, a pattern repeated for generations as more and more people are deemed less than worthy of human respect.
We are at the dawn of a new millennium, with technology evolving so rapidly that it beggars belief to think that humans aren’t evolving as well. Humans are developing new abilities to process information at rates never before conceived. The ability to multi-task is a new talent that some people have and others seek to develop. It would seem likely that other, as yet not conceived of, talents/skills will become apparent in the not too distant future. Why aren’t we as a society encouraging the expansion of the boundaries of human normality than seeking the contraction of those boundaries? What are we afraid of?
In this society, psychologists and psychiatrists are in an unenviable position, I think, because society looks to them to define those limits on normality. It therefore becomes incumbent upon them, I believe, to explain carefully that being or living outside of those limits is not always a bad thing. Above all, I believe, it is necessary for them to fully describe the lives of those people who are labeled “not normal” in ways that do not unduly stigmatize that non-normality. That starts with the psychologists and psychiatrists themselves re-examining their own biases in this regard. It begins with them being ultra-sensitive to the need to relate to patients as people rather than as cases. It includes developing methods for parents to raise children who are not normal, rather than developing and promoting still more ways for parents to force their children to BE normal.
There is before us a broad horizon of possibility for the human condition. Rather than circling our wagons to protect and defend only one or two or even just a few acceptable ways of living, shouldn’t we begin the exploration of those other possibilities? Why isn’t it possible to expand the definition of woman and expand the definition of man, while simultaneously allowing for people to claim neither or both or even to develop whole new categories of gender? What does society have to lose? What does society have to fear?
Once again, I have to ask: Why is normality the objective?

Red Neon
On Gender
extraordinary – weird
unconventional – odd
exceptional – queer
peculiar – strange
gifted – outlandish
outstanding – bizarre
special – eccentric
curious – atypical
unusual – abnormal
Why is "normal"
the objective?
There is
a broad horizon
of possibility
for the human
condition.
Rather than circling
our wagons
to protect and defend
only one or two
or even just a few
acceptable ways
of living,
shouldn't we
begin the exploration
of those other
possibilities?
Why isn't it possible
to expand the definition
of woman
and expand the definition
of man,
while simultaneously allowing
people to claim neither
or both or even
to develop
whole new categories
of gender?
What does
society have
to lose?
What does
society have
to fear?
Once again, I ask:
Why is normality
the objective?
--Robyn Elaine Serven
--November 9, 2005
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