A great thought Melissa! As time move forward we are less likely to revert to the polar bios that so many older generations relied on to feel right about themselves. To forget about the child's learned behaviors and try convince them to be one or the other pushes far to many to end their young lives.Originally Posted by Badtranny
It's pretty binary. As crossdressers, do you look entirely different from genetic women? Or do you strive to look just like one? That would be binary, my friends.
The problem is that we think that whatever is found between our legs determines your sex. The biggest sex organ that we have is found between our ears. Most of mankind operates on the K.I.S.S. principle when it comes to sex. Keep it simple stupid, will be around for a long time, or until people get educated on the subject, and there are good tests to determine what an individuals brain actually is.
I like myself, regardless of the packaging that I may come in! It's what is on the inside of the package that counts!
[QUOTE=Kaitlyn Michele;2762347]Expression, gender, genitals...i like thinking of it that way...it makes sense
The problem we all face is trying to explain that to the 999+/1000 people that literally have no ability to comprehend how any of us can actually exist...
they dont care, and they mostly have NO REASON to care..this is the gender binary world...we all live in it..
like it or not, and we are all marginalized by it...
It's like the old wilson pickett song..
When a male genitaled, fluid gender expessing, female gendered man loves a woman.......not very catchy..[/QUOT How could they ? Most of the population cant even do simple math or count , Once you REALY know what your dealing with it becomes fairly simple.
Yull Find Out !!! lol,,,,
.
1. Female
2. Intersexed
3. Male
How does that equal two (2)
I'm someone that is genderfluid/androgynous/genderqueer. I really don't have a desire to live life as a woman or a man, I like both roles and often blend them together. On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being feminine and 10 being masculine I sort of go from a 3-7 depending on the day. As for pronouns I don't have a preference either, if someone calls me she or he or something like ze I don't care usually.
There are lots of genderqueer/androgynous people on my campus, however, I'm one of the few that was born male, I've noticed that most not all genderqueer/genderfluid/androgynous people, at least where I live around are biologically female and call themselves gender queer and the small amount of people biologically male prefer the term androgynous. Not sure if its like that in most area's but that's how it is in mine.
I've been away from the computer most of the day. First with my therapist, and then representing the T on a LGBT panel speaking to a university class of future teachers on diversity in the classroom.
I realize that I may need to clarify things just a bit. Almost all crossdressers, and transsexuals fully embrace the binary gender world. We either were born within one and move to the other, or from time to time present ourselves as well as we can as the other side of the gender spectrum. Most people would speak of crossdressers as being gender fluid, able to present as either end of the gender spectrum. I'm wanting to get some feedback on those in the middle area.
What about a person with breasts and a fully-functioning penis? What about a person born female, who binds and presents as male but still goes by a female name? What about a person who declares them self male, yet wears heels and makeup, but nothing else that would classify as feminine as part of their normal attire? Those are the people who I'm running into more and more within the younger transgender community. How do we "old folks" (and I use that term with my tongue firmly in my cheek) feel about those who throw out the binary expression of gender, and create their own middle ground?
I disagree with people saying that crossdressers have fluid gender because they can present as male or female. Pretending to be a gender does not make you that gender. Your gender is internal and fixed. You can't be male one day and female the next. A male crossdresser can be male and present as male, or male and present as female.
People who are between genders means they identify as some ratio of male and female, not the fact that they can "switch back and forth."
what if they feel that they fit both genders ? i feel as a woman if i am dressed up and i want to act and be perceived as one, the limitation is my male body, but i do not feel this way
all the time, it comes and it goes and i am happy with feeling both as a man and as a woman, we are talking about gender , not sex. gender is much more dynamic than sex (as a physical thing is)
pretending is the only way how to become that gender without drastic physical changes, and pretending is a bit offending too
There's a spectrum, but this needs explaining.
There are many systems which encompass our criss-cross of gender and sexuality. If you don't know already, gender identity is "inside the head", meaning the skin you live in, and the way you are most comfortable inside it - While sexuality is a bunch of systems about what sort of "rocks your world" from roses to leather fetishes, and cross-dressing is another sort of fetish.
Gender identity is based in something that is beginning to be called body mapping. Body mapping is a system, built-in, for the mind, setting it so that we can use our body, placing us in a way that makes us most comfortable *and* which is why people feel false limbs when they loose an arm or a leg in Afghanistan, for example. This system is most often towards the far end of matching the body itself, which is WHY people think there's a binary. Also, there are social gender roles which reinforce this common confusion by the outside world.
The truth is that there are plenty of people who have it wired in the middle or towards the far other side of what their body is physically. And, this is possible, since it's all in the mind and how it's wired.
Add to this the fact that there is, as part of sexuality, fetishistic cross-dressing, something that gives people pleasure. And, we all know serious pleasure is very comfortable.
And, then you get a whole lot more confusion from the outside world.
And, then on top of that, since they're different systems, people can have different degrees of both (like a fetishistic crossdresser having a little nontypical gender identity or a transgender person having a tiny amount of fetishistic crossdressing when they're young) , creating confusion within themselves. But, people eventually figure it out, if they face it.
Anyway, the fact that people can be intersex proves your LGBT friends right.
As for me, pulling off something like Andrej Pejic edging more on the femme would be quite handy versus making a dramatic full-on transition, so the thought has crossed my mind.
If you feel you are both, then that might be what you are. How you present doesn't change who you are internally. You are simply expressing one side of you at one time, and another side of you at another time.
So for example's sake, if you feel you are 50/50 man and woman... if you present as a man, that doesn't make the internal you a man, you are still 50/50. But when you are in guy-mode, you are probably more comfortable expressing your masculine side. In girl-mode, your feminine side.
EDIT: But I'm no rocket scientist... or err... gender scientist. This is of course how I see things. That doesn't mean I believe it as fact though... just what I believe with the evidence I've been presented, the experiences I've had and the experiences others have shared.
Last edited by Bree-asaurus; 02-23-2012 at 06:49 PM.
So, does that mean that individuals who are transsexual, who go through hormones and surgery, remain the gender of their birth, regardless of what they have gone through or identify as? I know a lot of people who would have a problem with that. Are you saying that a persons gender is determined at birth by genetics?
My understanding is that sex may be constant and fixed (though it can be made to appear different), but gender is not, it changes over time, based on our experiences and cultural context.
My gender at birth is female. My sex at birth is male. I didn't become female inside, I always was. I just hid from it and pretended to be a man until I couldn't pretend anymore.
Surgeries and hormones don't change your gender. They are ways to modify your body to fit your gender.
EDIT: In case you didn't know... I am transexual.
Last edited by Bree-asaurus; 02-23-2012 at 06:55 PM.
Coming to this conversation at the end of the work day is almost overwhelming. There are so many great insights, and I agree with most. The differences amongst our opinions seem to focus on vocabulary issues primarily, though I thought Liz did a nice job of clarifying lhe original intent at the end of her busy day. We can speak to genetic, physical, hormonal, mental, and even spiritual facets and come to different answers each time, depending on which facets are most important to each of us. When it comes down to it, these differences are less important than the transformation we're seeing in our young people. They are openly and manifestly coming down on the side of acceptance of all of these differences, including the continuous spectrum captured by some facets. When I was in college 30 years ago, it was difficult even for those who were openly homosexual to find a place, let alone conceive of a spectrum of possibilities. Now we're faced with the rainbow of possibilities. It gives me so much hope for this generation, that they are making life so morh easier for those of us who would have been condemned by our own generation.
Miriam
Last summer, I googled the term bi-gender. I had never heard it used in any discussions or books I have read regarding transexuality, and crossdressing. Even the therapist I was seeing at the time had not heard of it, and she was herself transexual. I thought I invented the term and it seemed to fit who I felt like. Come to find out, it's a relatively new term, but you can find it on wiki. And this discussion is a hot topic within the GLBT, and particularly T groups. I even found and spent some time on other forums dedicated to bi-genders....males and females that identify with both genders.
I have begun to question if there even is such a thing as binary genders. This is just a theory, but perhaps everyone has a sliding scale, female on one end, male on the other. And if given total permission, and complete honesty, everyone would admit that the slide is neither all the way to the left or right. 90% of people would be mostly to the left or right, and the rest of us somewhere in between. I think it is also possible to move along that sliding scale depending on our activities, moods, and how we dress. Some days I'm more to the left, some to the right, some right in the middle.
I am speaking about mental gender identity only and not physical or sexual. It is social pressures that have confined us into binary genders, and this fluidity will become more widely accepted in just a few more years. GLEE introduced a transgender character just last week. Fashions can’t be far behind.
I just couldn't wear my big girl panties today.
Saw this post this morning checking my rss feeds but don't really have the chance to jump in until evening.
This is something that's been on my mind a bit lately. What I'd like to do is, as much as practical, "shrink the gap" between Josie and everyone else I need to be at different times or circumstances. Ultimately, the goal is to just be authentically myself all the time.
That being said though, I don't think I'd be comfortable expressing myself as somewhere between genders. I guess I like the "gender binary" and, at times, I'd just rather be Josie.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -- Mark Twain
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Josie's Flickr Photostream
Dual Spirits (My Blog)
oooo very interesting thread, there are lots of great ideas here.
I believe that may be helpful to break down the gender concept, and in this case work with three aspects:
• gender identity: internal, not binary, and possibly fluid.
• gender presentation: external, not binary and possibly fluid.
• gender role/social gender: external, binary and fixed.
in an ideal situation, one would present itself reacting to its gender identity needs/desires, and would be embraced as a citizen whichever may be its appearance and attitudes, even if they defy the usual categorization (which, by definition, will always be late and need constant revision).
I think what the OP notes is within the third aspect: breaching and expanding the social construction of gender. leaving behind the binary categories assigned by society is getting more and more frequent, given that individuals today have more freedom than ever to choose how to present themselves. not that this is the case for everyone; reasons and limitations apply. what we may note it's how much it seems to be emerging over the last years, and not surprisingly. here I'll quote the abstract for Z. Bauman's Postmodernity and its discontents, where he deals not only with this new character of society but also the backlash that the excessive freedom brings:
When Freud wrote his classic Civilization and its Discontents, he was concerned with repression. Modern civilization depends upon the constraint of impulse, the limiting of self expression.Today, in the time of modernity, Bauman argues, Freud's analysis no longer holds good, if it ever did. The regulation of desire turns from an irritating necessity into an assault against individual freedom. In the postmodern era, the liberty of the individual is the overriding value, the criterion in terms of which all social rules and regulations are assessed. Postmodernity is governed by the 'will to happiness': the result, however, is a sacrificing of security. The most prominent anxieties in our society today, Bauman shows, derive from the removal of security. The world is experienced as overwhelmingly uncertain, uncontrollable and frightening. The very pursuit of individual happiness corrupts and undermines those systems of authority needed for a stable life.
lastly, to answer the question, I'm one who thinks that the it's beautiful to see the boundaries falling. I have deep admiration for those who feel free to present in whatever way they feel like, and I can only wait for the moment when society will be drowning in categories and finally find out that the only thing to be done is forgetting all of them -- well, ok, leave them to the historians.
(If I were younger, I would love to adopt a visual kei style, like Miyavi <3)
[SIZE="1"]It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. — Virginia Woolf[/SIZE]
There's a range of attributes among each gender that, if we kept in mind strictly stereotypical attributes, we could say that both men and women exhibit male and female traits. For example, if a person believes that logic and reasoning is a male attribute, then they will say that a female who possesses these qualities has male traits and is therefore gender fluid, or she is somewhere along the scale between male and female.
I don't believe in such a strict definition of gender, but I suppose those who do are the ones who say that gender outside of the transgender community is fluid (meaning that some women have stereotypical male traits, and vice versa). I believe that all humans have the capacity to experience all emotions and thinking patterns, to varying degrees based on cultural influence and personality traits, yet most of these people decidedly identify strictly in either the male or the female camp. We have female athletes for example who would never be caught dead in a dress or makeup, who might have squarish builds and who love competition and physical activity, and who are happily married mothers. We also have males who dislike sports, prefer intellectual pursuits or collecting antiques (for example), they may be the cooks in their marriages, they may have a smaller stature than the average male, and who are happily married fathers. Both these examples show just how wide a range there is in personality and physique that does not conform to the stereotype, yet still describes a type of female or a type of male whose gender identity is congruent with their birth sex. These people are not gender fluid in my opinion. They do identify as females or males.
Now. Where gender is fluid I believe is in the transgender community where many people do identify to some degree with the gender opposite than birth sex. TGs also run the gamut in terms of physical and personality traits, just like in the non TG community, but the difference is one of gender identification which is rather fluid for people who do wish to present (and sometimes behave) in the gender opposite than birth sex ... unless they are doing this for sexual or non-sexual fetish and they identify strictly and unvaryingly according to their birth sex.
Last edited by ReineD; 02-23-2012 at 10:15 PM.
Reine
A good question asked!
At first, I thought my comfort with both genders would place me somewhere in the realm of genderqueer but as I experience more and more of being trans, I find that this isn't the case. I find that there are times when I am comfortably male gendered and times when I am comfortably female gendered. I think this defines "middle path" or bi-gendered as Jayne describes below:
[QUOTE=Aloha Jayne;2762670]Last summer, I googled the term bi-gender. I had never heard it used in any discussions or books I have read regarding transexuality, and crossdressing. Even the therapist I was seeing at the time had not heard of it, and she was herself transexual. I thought I invented the term and it seemed to fit who I felt like. Come to find out, it's a relatively new term, but you can find it on wiki. And this discussion is a hot topic within the GLBT, and particularly T groups. I even found and spent some time on other forums dedicated to bi-genders....males and females that identify with both genders.[QUOTE]
Me too. I have questioned, however, whether this is due to a lifetime of indoctrination. Melissa suggested this in her postIs this comfort in my genetic sex internally driven or a result of "societal indoctrination" of which I got more than my fair share!Who knows? I'm just trying to be as happy as I can be with the cards I was dealt. For now, bi-gendered it is.
Now this is really true and is part of the reason why this stuff is so hard to understand. At times, when I am really content with myself, I think that we trans people are on the cutting edge of humanity. Imagine what this can all look like 100 years from now! Maybe the physical transformation will be easy or maybe not even necessary.
Hopefully we will see this in our lifetimes!
Gender Queer here. Look like a girl, enjoy looking like a girl, act and think very much like a boy. I'm a gg.
"I know the difference between myself and my reflection. I just can't help but to wonder, which of us do you love?" ~Evanescence~
I guess it was about time for another "Gender" thread.
Mostly I just don't care about these distinctions. The only meaningful distinction in this area is the distinction between how I want to live and what I think I can get away with (and what my internalized Voice Of Society will let me be comfortable with, though I've been telling it to shut up a lot lately.) Whether I'm "really" 57% female and 68.23% male is about as interesting to me as whether my soul is really cabbage-y or really tomato plant-y (with trellis? without? that's important to know!)
I do realize that the question of "what gender am I" is very important to a lot of people, just as who wins the Stupor Boll is. This thread is evidence for that. And I'm mostly inclined to live and let live, and, when the subject comes up, to go off to raid the appetizer tray again.
But our world is full of people who refuse to live and let live. Everbody has to fit neatly into one of a very small number of boxes (usually two), and anybody who doesn't gets squashed. It's bad enough for grown-ups -- you hear of people getting murdered for not fitting into a box, though not too many where I live. But most kids get relentlessly pounded into their assigned box, with brainwashing and "enhanced interrogation techniques," if necessary (sometimes even if not.) Or bullied and driven crazy when they still don't fit.
So I'm less worried about whether people want to call themselves male, female, genderqueer, tree-froggy, or whatever. I'm more worried about people who want to insist that other people are necessarily male, female, etc. Because that's where the compulsion to force reality to fit some preconcieved schema starts. And "force" is really a euphemism for violence.
Last edited by Asche; 02-24-2012 at 06:26 AM.
I believe the binary thing is a fabricated continuation of days gone by. As far back as records take us, many things have changed and it should be no different for this issue. We brutally sacrificed human life for the 'Gods", we ate our own, we tarred and feathered, we dunk you in boiling oil; if you lived you were guilty and were hung, if you died, you were innocent, we burned at the cross for heiracy, we painted beautiful extra large women and saw beauty, the list goes on. Man created the binary system to satisfy man. It was 'a label created' for structure in society. If it comes out with a hat rack, it's boy, and this is what we expect of boys! For years we have read about other animals in the natural order that for whatever reason, do not conform to the identification created by man. Time will correct this and the blending has already begun. Natural occurence will repeat itself and we have learned to some degree not to mess with nature.
man and woman have made babies since day one...and it will always be that way, just like with every species
its not days gone by at all...its not something brutally imposed on us, its just the natural order...
yes things change, i think jilleanne your thoughtful analysis leaves out that the gender binary HELPS mankind by simplifying communication for the vast majority of people...
binary gender constructs matter.. and they are in general beneficial
it informs every single day to day communication..it makes our lives much easier...we are a species, we procreate...we identify people by gender..
i would venture that when you first see a person, gender is the first thing that your deepest brain understands about them..this idea is a key part of the scientific rationale of why FFS works so well...we are gendered IMMEDIATELY by others.
as a ts woman i have lived it.. and so if we have a mixed or wrong gender in our minds...its very distressing and for some it can be suffocating...this sucks for us, but 99+% of people really just don't care... and not knowing if you are a boy or a girl instinctively DISTRESSES THEM!!!
there seems to be no doubt that we all agree that inside our heads, gender is something that is not limited to man and woman.. but that concept does not resonate with anyone else...
So even though its fascinating, it just doesnt matter...and there will not be any blending (what does that really mean anyway? 50 genders of your drivers licence? )
Getting rid of the idea of gender binary in peoples day to day lives serves no purpose other than to make us feel better about ourselves...no doubt a good thing, but so would be feeding the world..
Not trying to be a party pooper...but go out and talk to all your friends about this and see what happens..
Finally have a chance to get back to this site. The joys have having little kids, and a busy life. Thanks for all the great comments, it appears that just as in gender identity and expression, there are a countless ways of thinking about this topic, and none of them is wrong.
Judith Butler, Riki Wilchens, and Kate Bornstein have done a great deal of work on this topic, and I would recommend their writings if you want to explore more. You have all given me things to think further about - Thanks!
In my limited experience, the people who most identify with the genderqueer movement are in fact young, mostly collage aged, cisgendered lesbians. Some are genuine F2M transsexuals who probably started out as butch woman and continue to hang out with their old buddies. Very few of the people I have met who call themselves genderqueer are GMs. I have met some CDers who claim to be "bigendered" what ever that means. As far as I can tell it's a word for CDers who don't like the term CDer. Other than the collage kids who for a few short years are beholden to no one almost all of us present as either male or female on a day to day basis. It's perfectly legitimate for a male to want to feel feminine for whatever reason. I feel pretty butch when I have to fix stuff or change light bulbs for my wife but it dosen't change the fact that I only have one gender, female. I think sissystephenie has a point, it's impossible to have a discussion about gender without including sex. The gendered differences between males and females may be societal constructs but they are based on our sex differences. Sure men and woman are capable of doing almost all of the same things, strength being the biggest limiting factor in woman and of course males can't give birth. Throw a group of modern humans into a primitive survival situation and see how long it takes for the majority of them to take on those traditional gender roles!
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