azurelunatic | Community, gender, Don[na|o] Vorrutyer, and me

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gender

Community, gender, Don[na|o] Vorrutyer, and me

So after literally months of debate, I left

theladiesloos, not because of anything said or done in there (I barely participated at all, and the activity level is of public record on the profile: see start date, see number of posts = light use) but because while I understand the need that others have for gendered private spaces on a regular basis, and have occasionally sought them out myself, it makes me profoundly uncomfortable to be a part of one implemented in that fashion. I am perfectly comfortable to participate in the GeekFeminism.org community discussions. I suspect that the thing that has me running so hard and so fast is the intersection of the enforced privacy, the standard for admission being self-defining as a woman, and a gatekeeper effect where an existing member must confirm that you are a woman.

I am OK with being a woman. It's what the genetic dice rolled up for me, and I'm OK with being me for the most part. I like lipstick, long hair, and skirts, in the performative department. My genital arrangement does not displease me. (My reproductive system does displease me; I have all but given up on the idea of a body birth.) (My brain chemistry also displeases me, but that's not this topic although doubtless it would be affected in some way.)

But, see, I'm not attached to it. Girl stuff and boy stuff were not emphasized as part of my childhood. I got to adolescence without too much of the "but girls don't...!" and "but boys don't...!" attached to me. My brain does tricks like "All right, since all the girls are leaving in the van to go get ice, and all the boys are staying at the park with the baguettes and hummus and their books, and I am at the park with a book, and that hummus does look tasty, I must be a boy!" This, in my long hair and lipstick and frilly skirt, with a body that is exceptionally hard to mistake for male. (It has been done, but it was by a 5-year-old, and I was in full Darth Vader getup at the time, with a very concealing shirt.)

I am often "one of the guys". I do not often have problems with being one of the guys. I tend to hang out with men who are "one of the girls" and women who are "one of the guys". (My hobbies, computers and slash fandom, are strongly skewed, however. Tech skews male. Slash skews female.)

A female-bodied friend once confessed to me that they had gone to a campus LBGTQ meeting, intending to have gone there for the B, and realized that, if all things in the world were as they liked them, they would have been born as a man. They (and I don't know which they prefer to be called, so I'm using 'they') mentioned a mental exercise for cisgendered people to put themselves through.

Imagine that one day you woke up and you were the opposite sex. Not a Metamorphosis-like change, but as if it had always been this way. You have a closet full of clothes that suit your biological sex. Your orientation has also remained consistent relative to your body -- if you are straight you are still straight, if you are gay you are still gay, if you are bisexual you are still of course bisexual. Everyone treats you according to the sex of your body.

How would you react? To what lengths would you go to regain the body you currently have?

My answer surprised them. "I think I'd be mostly okay with it," I said thoughtfully. Evidently this is not the usual response. My one point of conflict at the thought was predictable: at the time I was courting a man who was a true Kinsey 0, and the thought of such a fundamental incompatibility with him was unbearable. But absent that, I did not think that I would have any motivation to attempt to again live as a woman. Not if that would mean making a fuss and going out of my way any more than I already do. I might still maintain long hair. I would probably go in for kilts. I would still lose tubes of Burt's Bees lip balm to the washer on a semi-regular basis, and they might even be tinted. Learning the societal expectations for a man would probably be just as painful as my unlamented adolescence. I wouldn't know how I'd actually cope unless I were actually thrust into that existence, unless there are psychologists out there who have tests that can accurately assess these things, and I don't think that modern psychology is quite up to the task.

At the end of the day, it's still a thought experiment, and in no way equivalent to the special hell that is having been born and living in a body that is the wrong sex.

But the older I get, the more and more I start to identify with Donna Vorrutyer. I don't know if she was deliberately written this way, but when I think of her decision to make the transition, I hear a frustrated oath with overtones of triumph. "All right, I'll play by your fucking rules, boys!"

I am not Donna Vorrutyer, nor Dono. There is nothing that I desire and need so much as Donna needed to inherit her late brother's post, that I am legally barred from on account of being female. Betan medicine does not yet exist. These are the factors that separate me from her: legally encoded gender discrimination, a time-sensitive goal, the need to work within the existing law to reach the goal, and the availability of a tested/straightforward/complete technological solution within that span of time.

Donna's solution is not a viable one for most scenarios of sex/gender based legal discrimination. As a long-term solution, it is always more ethical to enact change to the law. Two men who want to get married should not have to have one of them turn into a woman in order to do it, even if it's just a legal fiction and no one actually goes through a transition. That's just fucking stupid. Transition should be for people who actually want it, not for people who are trying to jump through legal hoops.

Right now, the state of medicine is such that only people who are fundamentally not OK with their body as it is will (or should) consent to go through gender reassignment surgery. I believe that as it gets better, easier, and cheaper, more people will have it done, and for perhaps different reasons than people today are going through it. I believe that one day, it will be good enough and affordable enough that people who do not actually dislike the sex their body got at birth will have it as an option, and that they will do it for what would now be considered frivolous reasons.

These procedures are going to continue getting better. As they get better, more people will choose to transition. (People who are fundamentally attached to their current gender will never transition unless the technology gets good enough that they can do it quickly, easily, cheaply, and have no chance in the slightest of getting "stuck" in the wrong gender.) As more people choose to transition, there will be a larger sample size to isolate the factors that make people require a permanent and full transition from other factors, and there will be more actual science and less halfassed guessing behind stuff on gender.

If Betan-standard medicine existed, and there were a reason for me to have done it, I might well be one of those people that Dono offhandedly mentioned, those who have made the switch more than once.

It's all academic now. That sort of technology will likely not exist in my lifetime, and I'm unlikely to encounter anything that will prod me out of my gender inertia, particularly since the current political climate makes me skew female out of sheer stubbornness.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Interesting post. I was just thinking about it yesterday or the day before myself. I think I used to be more attached to my gender than I am now, but I decided I'd still rather be (remain) female because of types of relationships it lets me have with other females. It might be just as fulfilling to be "one of the guys," but I can't know.

Hmm.

I do like the female-bonding with like-minded females, but I *might* wind up bi-male-bonding with the same crowd if I were male.

However, I suspect I would probably be an arrogant ass if I were male.

I have to wonder. I have my own share of arrogance, but if I were male... I don't know if it would be stronger (because natural arrogance + privilege) or if it would mellow out (because privilege would make it less needed). I don't think I can ever know, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

I resemble your remarks. I am also in the 'I wouldn't mind' camp to wake-up-male with a side order of 'the society I live in make it drastically easier to be male than female; that sounds like a good reason to me.' I suspect that when it's easier to transition, and when being identified as trans doesn't put you a rung lower than male or female on the ladder of societal privelege--I suspect that when that happens, a lot of male privelege will evaporate. And good riddance.

Good riddance indeed.

Cramps. Never having these might be reason enough to not go back, even if a male body would feel strange. :7

Hm. I think my reaction to that question is "I don't know: I don't know what it's like to be a man & thus how I'd feel about it". I am happy with being female; I *think* that all other things being equal, if I woke up male, I'd probably be inclined to change back again were that straightforwardly possible. (I certainly have political identity stuffs around being female.) But that is an interesting question!

My feelings around gender-specific space are more complicated, & it is late :)

These things are rarely simple.

this is fascinating; thank you.

i have thought more and learned more about gender since I got into fandom than at any point previously. It's been very eye opening.

What you wrote about yourself resonated strongly with me -- except one difference is I have had two kids of my own. But I took your thought experiment and it's amazing to note that I too, would not work too hard at getting back to my original state. I have no idea what this means.

Have you read the Sandman comics? Remember the Endless named Desire? That whole concept blew me away.

I have nothing definitive to add here, but thank you so much for the discussion.

I count my blessings that I can consider gender along the lines of an interesting concept to consider, and not a hellish daily slog of any sort.

I have not read them, but a lot of people favor them, so it's on my list of things to take a look at, someday.

yes; I definitely have some privilege too around my gender and my race and class.

*ponders*

thanks again.

Oh God I'd be horrified if I woke up and I were a lesbian. I don't know why. I just...that's not ME.

No.

No no no no no no. I would be so not okay with it.

Also, the thought of not being able to be married to Jim is giving me hives. Metaphorically anyway. Not that we actually get to be married, but I like this relationship and not having it would bother me.

(Although I think I'd like women not being afraid of me. But then I don't get the reaction that a guy who is actually average height gets because I am five foot four and am sometimes taken for a woman at a distance, particularly if all you see of me is long hair, a leather jacket and jeans, so when someone does act like I might be a rapist I'm always so very confused.)

Edited 2009-09-04 00:43 (UTC)

I could just not see you as a woman. It would not work. You're one of the people who ... no. not a girl.

(The best friend is another one. Very much not a girl.)

Yeah, no, for all that I have a lot of "traditionally feminine" interests, I am so not a girl.

Everyone treats you according to the sex of your body.

You mean, everyone misgenders you it and it hurts like fuck and when you tell them, no, you're really *that* and you'd rather wear those clothes and have that name, they tell you that you can't or laugh at you or fire you from your job or beat you up or kill you. Don't you? Or is this some sort of thought experiment for cis people to ponder their gender identity? Think you could manage that without pretending for two seconds that you all are transgendered, except leaving out all the worst parts?

I am so deeply unsatisfied by how Donna/Dono was written. It looks like Bujold decided to try to write a trans character, and then did absolutely no research. To sum it up: there was no gender-related angst on his/her part. Either Donna should be gritting her teeth and bearing it - for the District, for Barrayar - or Dono should be relieved to finally be in a body that feels right (and the scads of male privilege are nice, too). I find it bizarre that anyone can *identify with Donna*, Donna/Dono seems so poorly written. (I also think Donna/Dono is a really unhelpful legal precedent for Barrayar, and it's going to bite the Progressives at some point, but that's all fictional - different from Bujold screwing up her one sort-of-trans character and a lot of fans not seeing what's wrong with it.)

I'd like to wake up either cis gendered, or in a world where there is conceptual and linguistic space for me. And no, I wouldn't for a minute think about changing things back.

I'm acquainted with some ppl who are female and cis but who don't much identify as "women". I have a helluva time grokking this, bc I'm third gender and female-but-in-an-ideal-world-wouldn't-be - I don't grok being cis anyway. I don't understand to what extent cisgendered females, like you, are rejecting a lot of the associations of "woman" and to what extent you represent a kind of grey space between cis and trans. I do think there aren't enough words for different kinds of masculinity and femininity - I mean, female masculinity kinda starts and stops with "butch".

I (and I know I have cis privilege which is almost certainly affecting my reading) read Donna/Dono as, well, trans from the outside in instead of the inside out. I think she chose the change purely as a response to the legal situation, but he discovered that it fit him better than he'd dreamed. But now that you mention it, I realize we really never do see things from the inside of Donna's or Dono's head, so he could be having angst we don't see. It's essential to his plan that he not show it even if he were feeling it, otherwise he'd certainly never be accepted as a man in Barrayar's culture.

I'd be interested in your response, if you have one you'd like to share. (Which is to say, I'm trying to acknowledge my cis privilege and express that I neither ignore your opinion nor demand that you tell me what you're thinking.)

But in response to your first paragraph,

azurelunatic did specify that the thought experiment was aimed at cisgendered people.

trans from the outside in instead of the inside out

... what? You mean external circumstances changed his/her gender (rather than her/his gender remaining constant and the only thing changing being his body and others acknowleding his gender identity)?

I realize we really never do see things from the inside of Donna's or Dono's head, so he could be having angst we don't see.

That's a very forgiving interpretation of how Bujold writes Donna/Dono. I disagree with it. It really wouldn't have been difficult to indicate either dissatisfaction with being biologically female and/or seen as a woman, or dissatisfaction with hbeing biologically male. There's a wide range of trans experiences, that's for sure. But Donna/Dono's doesn't ring true - by all accounts Donna pursued multiple affairs happily and enthusiastically, and then Dono is presented as completely comfortable with a different body and a different gender (and male privilege doesn't really compensate trans women for all the other trouble they face) and immediately ready to begin a brand-new long-term relationship. But then, this is Bujold, and monogamous heterosexual for-the-rest-of-yr-life matrimony is a sign that yr life is working out well. I'd find Dono's relationship with whichever Koudelka it was more realistic if they'd been together before Donna/Dono's transition, actually. Also, Bujold seems to suggest that Donna/Dono's sexual orientation switched along with his/her sex change. Wtf? A trans man who is attracted to primarily men doesn't become attracted to primarily women when he starts getting read as a cis man. This could have been made to work if there was a passing reference to Donna not discriminating on account of anatomy, or something. But the way Bujold does it, it actually looks like Donna/Dono's orienation switches.

Basically, there were plenty of quick easy ways to make Donna/Dono a believable trans character - Bujold used none of them - imo Donna/Dono is a failure of a character bc s/he's just not realistic, even given the tremendous variety of ways in which people are transgendered and experience that, and transition, and so on.

It's essential to his plan that he not show it even if he were feeling it, otherwise he'd certainly never be accepted as a man in Barrayar's culture.

We rarely seen Dono when he's on public display. We first see him through Ivan's eyes - and Dono is completely gleeful, if I recall correctly. Not a moment of either relief (if Dono had never been entirely at ease as Donna), or of ruefulness (if Donna was putting the District before her own comfort).

I don't think the thought experiment is an effective way to help cis people get a clue about what it is to be trans. Apparently other trans people think it is, but we sure as hell aren't monolithic. Obviously. Personally, I'd get into dysphoria, how friggin expensive a transition is (even without surgery), what a pain in the ass it can be to buy clothes, bureaucratic tedium, physical danger (esp for trans women), high rate of suicide, low employment rate (esp for trans women), discrimination within both the feminist and gay rights movemeents, blah blah blah. (I took a moment to think of something positive, but mostly it is just a pain in the ass.)

Or look at it this way: I'm white, and I'm not going to understand racism or a different culture or whatever by imagining I have darker skin and differently-textured hair - that's just the most obvious part. The thought experiment asks "how would you react? what lengths would you go to?", but it doesn't suggest anything of the kind of lengths actual trans people actually have to go to.

I simply don't see any educational value to the thought experiment. Unless the point isn't actually to understand cis privilege and cissexism and actual trans experiences?

Re the last, I think the point of that particular thought experiment is to examine one's attachment to one's gender--maybe find out whether one is actually attached to it or just riding along. I agree, it doesn't map to what I'd imagine of an actual trans person's experience.

Re the rest, I have read it--thanks for taking the time to write!--and I'm sleepy and have no further response tonight. If I have more response in the morning I'll add it then.

It turns out (see Az's comment below) that it's for deeply clueless trans people and/or cis people who are very strongly identified with their gender. It also turns out that I understand being cisgendered even less than I thought, bc it didn't occur to me that there would actually be people who might profit from a clue bat in those measurements.

If your response argues for Donna/Dono not being a heaping pile of fail, I'm not really interested. Donna/Dono isn't even valuable as a thought experiment, bc gender really doesn't work that way.

As my friend presented it to me, it was an exercise for cisgendered would-be allies to attempt to empathize with the situation that transgendered people were in. I don't know if, in its original context in that LBGTQ group, the day-to-day agony of facing a cissexist world came up, or, if it did, to what degree it came up. Though in its original context, many of the cisgendered people present would have been gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc., and might already have a fairly advanced understanding of living in a hostile society.

So trans people aren't invited to play?

I don't see how the thought experiment encourages empathy with trans people. Based on the responses I see to yr post, anyway.

It appears to be intended to put a strongly cisgendered person who does not understand trans issues in the slightest into contemplating the mindset of a person who has realized that they are in a body of the wrong sex, in a straightforward FtM or MtF situation.

It is very simplistic and does not even appear to be a 101-level sort of concept, and my friend did not relate what other materials, concepts, or exercises had been presented with it.

I did not intend this entry to be educational; I intended it as a documentation of my thought process and the history of that thought process. Then it sort of wandered and picked up the Donna|Dono thing that had also been rattling around in my mind and had gotten attached to it for some reason.

I am sorry to have added to your pain, and if I find myself in the position of attempting to explain the whole concept of transgender issues to a fundamentally clueless audience, I would not use this alone if I did use it at all, and would emphasize the dangers from other goddamn human beings and how this is not OK.

It makes sense as a pre-trans 101 or remedial sort of thing - the kind of ignorance that I would ignore, so I haven't thought about how I would lever someone out of that state.

I think it would have been a good idea to include some of this information in yr post - it might have prevented my seeing some of the cis navel-gazing here.

Donna/Dono rattles around in my mind primarily as a major example of one of the things which Bothers me about the Vorkosiverse - right up there with Bel being called "it" and everyone except Ivan and By (it seems) getting married at the end of ACC (geez, Bujold, some people just don't want to get married, stop making Ivan feel bad about it if he's one of those ppl - having Miles as a best friend and being part of that particular family is a big emotional investment all by itself). I just don't regard Donna/Dono as even a useful thought experiment about gender.

As much as I want an Ivan book (oh god, I want an Ivan book), I'm horrified that it'll be Ivan getting married to some Vor girl or other. Bleurgh.

I've never read the Hornblower books... is there a perpetual bachelor in those anywhere? Precedent, after all.

Yeah, what you said. Also, it's kinda emotionally abusive, how Ivan is always getting referred to as "that idiot". I want Ivan to get with someone who finally says, "Lord Vorkosigan, please don't call my lover that anymore. It makes me want to break your jaw," or something.

Hornblower, not Harrington? In the Hornblower books, the title character MAJOR SPOILERS

does find happiness partly in marrying a woman he's suited to. But it's not in an obnoxious way. His BFF doesn't marry, but his BFF also dies (heroically, of course).

Poor Ivan gets no love. Almost makes me want to write fanfic, though philomytha on LJ has that covered. (Love!)

I did mean Hornblower - Lois says that she's loosely basing the Miles books on Horatio Hornblower (though more as a series structure? I honestly can't say, not having read them, but a lot of space opera is based on Age of Sail stuff.) But the BFF character dying doesn't sound like a promising parallel for Ivan...

In Memory (my favorite of the lot) he's a lot, hmm, better? The ass Miles can trust with high explosives. He's the town clown, but in the military, so he's got work. Poor guy's third in line for the Imperium, and he'd much rather be nowhere near that shit, so he keeps his head down and is quietly competent and avoids doing anything that would get him notice or recognition. I've heard that Ivan is one of those "the author had a better idea" things, making him less of that-idiot-Ivan (which he isn't much in Memory, though I haven't read the ones after that more than twice.)

I admit to a lot of :headdesk: moments. Frex, the opposite of bisexual isn't monogamous, eh? And the focus on happy monogamy and babies. Harumph. It's not always all about babies. (Though when you've got dynastic obligations to fulfill, it's a little different. But, hey, Frederick the Great never had children. Then again, Ivan doesn't have any brothers, and I think most of his uncles were killed...)

Thanks for the fic tip : )

I think Bush and Ivan have only very approximately equivalent roles. So I'm not worried. though if you wanted to do something really crappy to Miles which didn't involve Aral dying or Cetaganda invading again or something ...

Ivan got into the Academy and he got through the Academy. I mean, he would have had an excellent preparation for it, but someone stupid, untalented, indifferent, and unoriginal couldn't have managed it. He only looks that way when compared to friggin Miles - and of course he's been comparing himself to Miles (and Gregor) his whole life. Not to mention *not* living up to his mother's expectations.

Frex, the opposite of bisexual isn't monogamous, eh?

O.M.F.G. I hate that line. If someone besides Bujold had written it, it might have been ok. But BUjold did write it. And someone somewhere was talking about how much they LOVED that line - gah! And don't get me started on Bel ...

I think Ivan would have a much easier time of it on Beta Colony as far as relationships go. Barrayar wants everyone married. Beta Colony wants everyone categorized. (That would be a Special Hell for me, so much so that even with the way that Barrayar is a rampant sexist dystopia, I think I'd have a better time of it there between the two.)

Yeah. Barrayar seems to have very USian ideas about life-long live-together monogamy or nothing. I suspect Ivan is very successful at the kinds of relationships he does want, and which there's more space and acceptance for on Beta.

I belive in the dystopic Beta Colony ; ) You really can't drop off the grid - easier to do that on Barrayar, actually. Also, Beta is supposed to be the Good planet, and I kinda resist what Bujold wants us to think. I think if things were written differently, I'd strongly prefer Beta, but under the circumstances ... I kinda like the idea of Barrayar. ESp under the influence of certain fanfic. And in my headcanon, there's totally a bunch of queer experimental artists living in the bad part of Vorbarr Sultana ...

btw, does Cordelia sound kind of ...smug to you? On the latest reread of Shards, she just sounded so self-satisfied and superior toward all those silly Barrayarans.

well, it's like putting on a blindfold for an hour and imagining what it might be like to be blind -- which doesn't represent even 1% of the experience of an actual blind person, of course, but it is one small step towards understanding it even a little bit instead of not at all.

i'm totally with you on donna/dono. and i was so thrilled when i heard there's a T person -- but really, i shouldn't have expected as much as i did, because i've read enough bujold to know that she's not exactly progressive compared to what i consider such. baby steps, once again. at least a sorta-T person exists, i guess.

about switching sexual orientation when switching sex -- i know several Ts for whom that did happen after taking hormones for a while. i don't have a good feel for how common it is, nor do i know those people well enough to speculate on whether it might not have been a biological change, but one motivated by an intense need to be "normal".

I'm guessing that the original idea was to look at the concept without also attempting to wrap one's head around the idea of a different sexual orientation (though in the comments to one of these, Pau did mention that if the orientation hinged on same/different in a person's head, then that portion of the exercise would be effective for the intended purpose, but if it hinged on male/female, then it would introduce a new level of weird).

Apparently, it's a thought experiment which actually helps some ppl - not something I would have predicted.

baby steps, once again. at least a sorta-T person exists, i guess.

My policy is not to be grateful for that sort of thing, but to expect better. And Bujold - yeah, there's a lot I think she does wrong or gets wrong ... you know, I never would have thought I'd want to write fanfic to save a heterosexual cisgendered male character, but she gives Ivan no respect bc he doesn't fit into the heteronorm in terms of his relationships. It's like he *can't* be emotionally mature bc he isn't in a long-term monogamous relationship with someone of the opposite sex - but where would Miles be without Ivan to rely on? But in Bujold-verse, that doesn't count as love and commitment. And some ppl just aren't the marrying type. And just cuz Alys wants Ivan to get married doesn't mean he *should* (except perhaps for political/dynastic reasons).

I guess my question about those trans people is what is meant by "switching orientation". I've talked to a couple who were gay, but the body of a cisgendered person of their same gender induced serious dysphoria in them, until they transitioned. And I know how I relate to males, masculinity, men; females, femininity, women are all shifting. I'm definitely not saying that it's Wrong for a trans person to, in effect, switch orienation (go from being attracted for the most part to males or men to being attracted for the most part to females or women, is how I'm defining it). But I think there's a misconception that trans people *usually* switch orientation when they transition - or rather, that if a "girl becomes a boy" [sic], then he's going to stay gay or straight and what will change is the people he's attracted to - rather than a different label being used to describe the attractions he's always had bc he's finally moving through the world as a man.

If Dono does in fact have a different orientation than Donna, then Bujold didn't indicate that ... that I can recall, it's been awhile. I think, if Dono were written properly, it might make sense to portray him as someone whose orientation or expressed orientation shifted by a need to be normal. I assume being het is *really* important to some people, and maybe both Donna and Dono is like that. Donna might have found women/females sexually attractive all along but would have *never* had sex or a relationship with one bc it screwed with her self-image as a *heterosexual* woman. Or something. I find that more feasible than whatever reasoning is behind "Donna was a straight woman, so Dono is a straight man". And it also would allow the writer to comment on the immense pressures on Barrayar to be normal, how it effects even someone positively radical in certain ways.

Thanks for the extremely interesting post.

I am completely and totally female. If I woke up male, I would try as hard as possible to go back to being female. I love being female and totally identify with being female, from always having wanted and loving having borne babies to dressing and looking very girlie.

I'm very grateful that I've never had any gender identification issues. And wish that there was more gender/transgender equality in the world. And while I'm at it, that I could easily have an extremely successful scientific career while also being a great mother of more than one child.

But I wouldn't want to be male. At all. Ever. Not even if it got me the career.

Still an interesting topic to think about & discuss. thanks

My social life would be a good deal less complicated right now if I were a straight male. I think I would mostly be okay with it, except that the physicality of a different body would be weird. Quite often I don't feel like my body quite belongs to me anyway.

I don't feel terribly attached to being male. But that could well be my privilege speaking - I don't feel terribly attached to being white either, but it's perfectly likely I'd feel different if either of those situations changed.

I went through a period in my twenties when I wondered if I might be trans, because I felt zero loyalty to men-as-a-tribe and because it seemed to me that if I toted up my "stereotypically male" and "stereotypically female" interests/traits, the second list would be longer. I finally decided that if being trans carried as little social stigma as, say, left-handedness, or surgery could give me a working female reproductive system, then I woulda done it--but, well, neither condition is true.

I keep trying to wrap my head around why most other cissexual people do have an OMG NO reaction to the "what if you woke up as a member of the other sex" thought-experiment, and I think I keep failing. Maybe I have some extremely localized form of autism.

(By contrast, curiously enough, if I woke up in an identity that wasn't Jewish, I would hie myself over to get converted as quickly as possible. Go figure.)

This is branching off thoughts in http://azurelunatic.livejournal.com/6318133.html (locked).

Actually, one of the things that bothers me about sex-change surgery currently is that I believe it is basically impossible to get unless you can show that you have psychological issues such that your gender does not match your physical body. I think this is tangling two different issues together.

Some people have a gender mismatch and should be seen and treated as a gender other than the one people assumed they had when they were born.

But I wouldn't be surprised if some people have a body mismatch. Sure, many people likely have both. But there are issues of body image that aren't linked to gender. The brain seems to have a mental mapping of what your body is and if your body doesn't match that it can cause distress. Extreme cases show up when the body image does not include a limb and the person is in extreme psychological distress because of the presence of normal limbs. There seems to be some sort of inherent psychological distress caused by feeling like your body is wrong. Given that it can happen without gender issues, it seems possible one could have a body mismatch by feeling one has the wrong genitalia without feeling like one has the wrong gender. I would support being able to have whichever genitalia causes one the least psychological distress (to the extent that it is medically possible) regardless of which gender one has. I want to decouple sex and gender. Your body can be one thing and your gender another, and that might even be the better way for it to be for you.

However, given how our society pretty much defines gender by sexual organs, it's hard to really determine what the actual range of issues is or how often people might want to be one gender with the sexual characteristics usually assumed for a different sex.

I don't know how I'd feel about having always been male. I suspect I'd be curious about being female, but feel like being male was normal, given that I was pretty much raised with the view that being male was the normal default and being female was a bit weird. Too much of what I was exposed to was from the male perspective with women treated as these impossible to understand other creatures. Mainly, I'm not sure how I'd have handled relationships with women. It's hard to think of who I might possibly have wanted to get into a relationship with and how my life would have gone if I couldn't have relationships with men. I might have gotten depressed and assumed I was too socially awkward to ever find a relationship. Maybe I'd have stayed more solipsistic. Maybe I'd have been happy being by myself and decide that relationships weren't important to me. That actually is fairly plausible.

Hm.

You know, I would not mind having a penis. It is an interesting bit of equipment although inconvenient. I am fine with all the rest of the standard equipment except the ovaries and uterus; they can go.

I might have been treated for ADHD, if I'd been born male.

There seems to be some sort of inherent psychological distress caused by feeling like your body is wrong.

Honestly there have been times when I keep twitching my back muscles wondering where the hell my wings are. And the place where they *should* be itches at least part of nearly every day. I never stopped and thought about how much that *bugs* me until you mentioned this. Huh.

My answer surprised them. "I think I'd be mostly okay with it," I said thoughtfully.

That makes sense to me, even though I'm in a bit of a different place. I can't imagine not being biologically female, but at the same time, I find it hard to understand what identifying as female even means. Like you, I wasn't exposed to much "girls this, boys that" stuff as a kid (one could say I grew up oblivious), and I've never been able to see those fundamental differences so many people seem so convinced of. Social and cultural conditioning, yes. Innate differences? Not so much. And so, with no clear conviction about what "being female" or "being male" means, gender is often a difficult concept for me ...

Er. Sorry for rambling in your journal! Didn't mean to make it All About MEEEE!!1! :(

Rambling leads to interesting things. A lot of the stuff I'm thinking about came about as the result of rambling, either somewhat recently or back in the big gender-discussion lab that

boojum and I had back in '97 or so.

I can identify specific things as being historically or stereotypically masculine or feminine, often with hilarious results, such as the discussion that

sithjawa and I had where we determined that if the feminine role was to manage the things internal to the household, and the masculine role was to manage the things external to the household, therefore setting up and maintaining the LAN and the entertainment server was a clearly and purely feminine role, while work on the outside internet connectivity, including any VPNs, would be a masculine role, as would management of any servers located off-site.

therefore setting up and maintaining the LAN and the entertainment server was a clearly and purely feminine role, while work on the outside internet connectivity, including any VPNs, would be a masculine role, as would management of any servers located off-site

Hee! I like your way of thinking. :D

Somehow even though I did learn about gender stereotypes as a kid, I never actually felt (or was made to feel) they applied to me. Or that sane people would think they applied to real people. (Until I hit puberty, that is.) I'm still not sure if that's a good or a bad thing ...

I was sort of allowed to be selective about my gender stereotypes. I was in (US) public school, so I got exposed to pinkness and barbie dolls and Transformers and cooties and the like, and I picked up some of it but my parents did their best to attempt to minimize the damage.

I used to joke that I was my mother's eldest daughter, and my father's firstborn son.

The funny thing is, I think my parents were nearly as oblivious as I was. *g*

My parents were aware of it, and worked to fight for our rights as autonomous beings, and made an effort to give us creative toys rather than themed and gendered toys, like Constructs instead of My Little Ponies.

I am very very frustrated with my five-year-old daughter. It's the TV, actually, that's turning *her* into a girly-girl. (Between Tru Jackson and Skechers commercials, she's trying to be *fashionable*. Ugh.) Her favorite colors are pink and purple, even.

At least she still wants to learn martial arts. And she did ask me to cut her hair short last weekend. (It only reaches her shoulders now. Which reminds me, must get decent pictures of it this weekend and post them.)

I tried to be fashionable in the 6th grade. "A form of ugliness so unbearable", etc.

See, I can expect and deal with it as part of the whole adolescence package. But she's FIVE!

Of course, she's five going on fifteen in a lot of other ways, as well. She's already got the teenager's "I know everything" attitude (which would be less annoying if she *were* a teenager, because I could have a logical argument and explain why she's wrong on things instead of her not understanding half of what I'm saying when I try to prove why she's wrong... *sigh*)

Oh *boy*.

Yeah, kinda have that outlook myself -- I kinda remember being male, been told it's a "past-life recall" but could just be very vivid dreams. Was OK, being female is OK too (except when it gets messy every month or so), I'd just as soon have a wardrobe of bodies to wear! :)

It's interesting where "my body works fine but I don't like it" intersects with "my body does not work fine and I don't like it", and where it diverges.

I suspect the "my body does not work fine" crowd is more likely to accept "upload me to the internet" as an option.

Entirely possible.

As of right now, my body works (though I could do things to cause it to work better) and I don't *feel* particularly female OR male.

Never have been exactly attached to my cis-gender, if that's the term -- the female body I'm wearing -- but never wanted to be male enough to do anything about it.

Maybe I'm not as unusual ("weird") as I've always been told!

"cisgendered" is where one's biological sex and one's gender concept of oneself line up, particularly where it conforms the the societal norms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer may have some interesting concepts to investigate.

So since my concept is somewhat fluid, that would be the wrong term. Hmm. Eh, whatever -- don't know why we can't just let people be people and not worry about it anyhow :)

Random anecdata: in ninth grade, my English teacher had us each write an essay whose premise was waking up one day as a member of the opposite sex. Then she grouped us in single-sex groups and had us read the essays of the opposite sex (without names attached), before pulling us all together in a discussion group.

The girls' essays ranged all over the place, from blase through curious to freaked out. The boys' essays were uniformly extremely freaked out.

Clearly this is not a rigorous scientific study. I think it'd be a great basis for one, though.

That would be really interesting.

That is fascinating. It makes me want to not only run that experiment on a larger scale but do it with other forms of privilege. What about race changes? Sexual orientation changes?

If Betan tech allowed me to switch and switch back without permanent damage I'd be tempted to go be a tourist. I'd expect the tech would also add an interesting dimension to "do we want to have more kids" discussions if replicators haven't been perfected by then.

Indeed. "Who's carrying the kid this time?"

If switching and then switching back were easy, cheap, and safe then I think most of my friends would spend a brief stint in the opposite sex. I don't know of anyone who hasn't wanted to try out being the other sex, even if most of them don't want to be it permanently.

If it were incredibly cheap, easy, safe, and fast then I would be tempted to be male for a few days every month. Although there are probably simpler solutions...

Nah, you couldn't do that. Biology would find some way to get you back.

I'd love to try being a dude, but it's not something that's especially compelling. I don't feel strongly attached to be female, but I've never felt I was meant to be male, either. Then again, I'd really like to be able to make a male partner try being female, as I suspect most straight/bi women would. I'd guess more people would like their partner to be able to experience their role than vice versa.

No, there's too much variability from woman to woman. He might end up as one of those women who have really easy, basically painless periods. I'd rather be able to say, it sucks and you'll never really understand how it sucks, so just take my word for it that it does than risk him thinking he understands when he doesn't. After all, we're not talking about him having ~my~ body. My oh so lovely chronically ill body that tends to give me migraines to go with my menstrual cycle because a bloody annoying mess with cramps is not sufficient hardship.

Don't mind me. My body and I are not on good terms with each other. It's an old feud. I've tried to make peace in the past, and I recognize we'd both be better off if we learned to try to help each other, but years of mistreatment on both sides is hard to get past.

This is a fascinating discussion. I had about the same reaction you did to the gender swap question, and I once had an astrologer friend examine my chart and ask me, "this is the first time you've been female, isn't it?" which explained way too much about my life.

I would have enjoyed being a father, I think. It's really too bad that one is assigned by one's sex to be either a father or a mother. I have never had any desire whatsoever to be a mother, but there's part of me that would have liked having kids in some other way.

I wound up being more of a father to the LF (son of a previous roommate) than a maternal type figure, particularly as he already had one.

Yeah, sometimes you end up doing things like that. I have done similar things, too, but I think I would have enjoyed being a permanent full-time father. Oh, well. Maybe next go round on the wheel [g].

My answer surprised them. "I think I'd be mostly okay with it," I said thoughtfully.

Probably not going to surprise you to learn that I would have the same reaction. My top sexual fantasies mostly involve a sex change (I'm a guy having sex with a girl, I'm a guy having sex with a guy, and I'm a girl OR a guy watching two guys have sex are the top three). But it's more than mere curiosity, it's hard to quantify.

Being married has probably actually done the most to convince me of my female-ness, I think. There's a certain feeling I get immediately following really intense penetrative sex that I can only define as the essence of femininity, I can't describe it really, and I don't know if other women feel the same way. I'm not sure if having sex with a woman caused the same feelings - it's been just a little too long ago to remember clearly.

But most of the time, when I'm at work, etc, I feel like I'm set at neutral in terms of gender. I'm aware that I don't look like I'm set at neutral in terms of gender, but whenever someone references my gender, it's always a surprise, in a very small and hidden way.

I feel like I'm approaching both masculinity and femininity from the outside, ultimately. And that's why I'd be mostly okay with a sex change - it wouldn't really make any difference to the way I see myself.

Your orientation has also remained consistent relative to your body -- if you are straight you are still straight, if you are gay you are still gay, if you are bisexual you are still of course bisexual.

I'm curious about one thing in this premise: is the root cause (biological, psychological, genetic, or whatever it may be) of gender attraction expressed as "attracted to same/other", or as "attracted to men/women"? (The outcome - phenotype, as it is - is described as "attracted to same/other", but that says nothing about the mechanisms involved - just as TTBOMK - Mendel's experiments on peas may be explained equally well by "yellow vs. green" and "yellow+smooth or green+wrinkly vs. yellow+wrinkly or green+smooth" feature pairs as with the more common explanation, "yellow vs. green" and "smooth vs. wrinkly".

Interesting tangent. Myself, I suspect it's "attracted to men/women".

To what lengths would you go to regain the body you currently have?

If the rest of my life were the same as it currently is? Great lengths. Because Chris is mostly straight. So unless the new male body were one of the 1 in 10,000 males that he thinks are hot? I'd want my boobs back.

Barring my relationship with Chris, or if he still wanted to fuck me? I'd be doing the Snoopy dance. Mind you, my attitude is very similar to yours. I like skirts, and doing my hair, and swishing is always fun. (I can give or take the makeup, and haven't actually used it in years, but I would pull it out for a special occasion if anybody else wanted to see me with it - though Chris thinks I'm prettier without it, which is why I don't bother.)

But I *hate* hormonal cycles and periods. HATE HATE HATE. If I were younger, I'd be sad about not carrying any more children, but my last two pregnancies were hell and convinced me that my body was too old for that any more. (Not that I want more children to raise, anyway. Just that pregnancy and babies feel good in my head.)

And I have good enough memories of some of my previous lives, and dreams where I've been male, that I remember what it feels like to have a penis. Hell, I remember sex as a male. I like it better, honestly. Though multiple orgasms are cool, I like the way the penis feels better than the vagina.

Though I'd probably be kind of a femme guy. I'd still keep my hair long, for instance. But then, I have a hair fetish...

I've always been envious of the quick-n-easy gender reassignment biotech in John Varley's Luna stories. (But then, it should surprise nobody who knows me that I am quite certain I'm one of those who'd swap gender, experimentally, in a heartbeat if it was complete, reliable, and reversible.)

Why, yes,

boojum did assign me Steel Beach as reading in my teens...

Imagine that one day you woke up and you were the opposite sex. Not a Metamorphosis-like change, but as if it had always been this way. You have a closet full of clothes that suit your biological sex. Your orientation has also remained consistent relative to your body -- if you are straight you are still straight, if you are gay you are still gay, if you are bisexual you are still of course bisexual. Everyone treats you according to the sex of your body.

How would you react? To what lengths would you go to regain the body you currently have?

My first reaction?

"...sweet!"

I probably wouldn't fight very hard to regain this form. At all.

Hm.

Edited 2009-09-07 01:31 (UTC)

Excellent post, and I sympathize with a LOT of the stuff you've written here.

Sorry I haven't got the brain for a longer response -- headed off to bed at the moment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Community, gender, Don[na|o] Vorrutyer, and me

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TANGENT

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Surprise! pauamma is going on a tangent!

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