In my Thing two weeks ago I spent some time specifically addressing the rising tide of ugliness and impending violence associated with the backlash to declarative gender theory.
The response has been... interesting. I'd invite your input, if you'd care to give it, as a welcome bit of thought diversity on the matter.
This article has motivated med to accelerate my readthrough of Monsters.
Also, much as I will feel some sheepish guilt at soiling the exurbs of this beautiful piece, the section on the ontology of "buggery" was drowned out in my mind for several read-throughs by a witticism I learned in maybe 6th grade:
"If you build a thousand bridges and suck one dick, you're not a bridge builder, you're a cocksucker."
"And it sure is convenient for the Epsteins and the Bankman-Frieds of the world, who we would never be able to chase down the street and lynch on a normal day, to have a nice visible group of people for us to turn our rage on instead."
and also this:
"The promotion of pedophilia is coming from the woke, postmodern, socially-destructive left, most of them also followers of the agenda of globalist technocracy. Some of them may also be LGBT- many probably just think they are because their identities are so insubstantial and polluted that they’d identify as anything that might give them more meaning or attention or the simulation of love. Most of them aren’t. Epstein sure wasn’t LGBT, nor were the vast majority of his known affiliates."
There are absolutely a few complete fucking idiots who live their entire lives online who've argued for "liberating" children into sexuality. They all mostly have anime characters as their twitter photo and rarely talk about anything that doesn't happen on a computer, and that's the connection. Live most of your life believing other people and especially children are just pixels and it's easy to come up with ideas about how to treat them as such.
On the other hand, it's worth mentioning that the new satanic panic about pedophiles hiding in your cereal box is currently limited to the US and a tiny bit in the UK. In both places, "our children" function in the mind the way that "our women" do in French and German culture or "our foreskins" did in medieval European culture as the sacred object all the jealous evil barbarians were trying to steal. When people are experiencing societal chaos and instability, it's bizarrely comforting to imagine you have something everyone else is trying to take from you and corrupt.
This is a very interesting subject for me. Several years back, I lost an amazing friend to suicide. She had declared a trans identity and we had tried to be supportive. Towards the end she drove us all away with angry demands that we pretend to believe in preposterous lies- things easily verifiable as false and also random and hardly worthy of a fight. Whether Margaret Thatcher personally invented soft serve, for example. She had a very difficult past and I wonder to this day if she would still be alive if she had gotten care instead of affirmation. And yet, to question that is to “hate transpeople”. I don’t know- perhaps I have some secret subconscious hate of transpeople. But I have to wonder what sort of “love” would not question what could have been done when a friend dies. I miss my friend, not as some avatar of trans identity but as a person. And if seeing the person beneath the demographic boxes is hate- give me friends who hate me like that.
As far as changing things in declarative gender, I suspect we will see sweeping changes soon. See, the movement has for the first time been linked to harm to male people, while the previous vandalism, bomb threats, and violence was directed at female people.
I know that at least some transition programs, such as the one at Stanford University in the 1970, had a mental health component. Participants were assigned to therapists and the therapists had to sign off before they would be scheduled for surgery. The major concern, I believe, was that the participants not have unrealistic expectations of what the reassignment surgery and hormone therapy would accomplish. One transwoman my ex and I knew at that time was very tall--6'+ and had a thin, muscular build. No matter what she did with hair and makeup and dress being accepted as a female was a problem. She looked like the ex-Marine that she was. We heard later that she died in suspicious circumstances that were ruled accidental but may have been suicide. She had taken tranquilizers and settled into a hot bath while her roommate was out, slipped underwater and drowned. Very sad, RIP Molly.
But unrealistic expectations are guarded against by all responsible plastic surgeons. And, I would expect, by other types of physicians. People have to understand and accept that a nicely shaped nose, losing 100 lbs. or even correction of scars or a birth anomaly are not going to magically remake their entire life. But human nature is such that, the more extreme the change, the more extreme the expectations.
That’s rough. I’m sorry to hear about your friend. I definitely think there is a component of unrealistic expectations going on. There was a strong sense of “gatekeeping is bad” and anything is possible going in the community I lived before moving regarding transition. And it’s just kind of a matter of faith for many. And I think it’s a hard thing to admit that maybe transition isn’t possible for some people at least at a price they can afford physically, mentally, and financially. And not all people will benefit equally from medical transition- the results of FTM surgeries have not shown any long term benefit for the transitioners mental health. It honestly irks me so badly that despite the differing outcomes FTM transition gets treated like MTF transition. The expectations are that the technology exists to switch male to female or female to male bodies and it doesn’t. Regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t it doesn’t. And somehow it became taboo to admit that the best technology just lets the rich and famous pass and those who are flying to Thailand to get budget surgeries are probably not going to become the pixie fairy girls so many of them use for avatars.
“such prominent and vitriolic figures only exist because they speak some degree of truth about these matters, even as they weave those truths into rather violent ideologies.” Yes! If you want to understand why extremists get supporters behind them, it is usually because the extremist is vocalizing something that’s true and been suppressed from the mainstream, that other people have felt invalidated for secretly believing. This feeling of alienation for having different beliefs can be so strong that they are willing to overlook all the other untrue things that extremist is saying.
And yes, there are people totally “activists” making careers by simply emotionally validating people and accruing followers online. Honestly the “American Dream” in people under 40 right now seems to get enough followers online so one can start a business out if it, understandably- because working conditions and labor rights seem to be getting so much worse under global capitalism.
BTW this is one of the most nuanced and respectful essays I’ve read about the gender debate recently and I like how you are tying it to critiques of global capitalism.
I watched Matt Walsh’s film What is a Woman and thought it was an important contribution to this issue. I didn’t see a ‘virulent moralistic’ approach - I just saw a desire to stop the ideologues from conducting life changing experiments on children. There are all different types of politics involved here and I think we need to respect everyone’s views and have a discussion. However in Canada, where I unfortunately live, any type of discussion about declared gendered could be prosecuted as hate speech. I am grateful to anyone who is standing up to protect children right now.
"There is no sense now that being “something like” transgender, non-binary, gay, lesbian, or anything else means you have a specific role, importance, or meaning to society. But then again, being a father or a mother, an elder or a grandparent, or an artist or a mystic doesn’t really mean anything to us anymore, either."
"Of course, that would require us to abandon ideology and return instead to a more relational way of being together and allowing in again a sense of the sacred."
I think this is the most important point in this essay.
The retreat to rigid ideology has, predictably, coincided with the retreat into heavily-policed, virtual communities. And we see authoritarian demands across the spectrum for the state, Company X, or University Y to enforce one ideology or another.
That's been accompanied by a decline in civic institutions in general and the commoditization of as much of human interaction as possible. All of the spheres were we would formerly need to interact with others and reach consensus are shrinking.
I really appreciate this piece and the dialogue associated with it. As a mother of two young boys in the US, my prayers for them and all young children is that however they see themselves and their roles in the world, they come to that on their own terms and not through societal pressures or anyone's agenda.
Hi Rhyd, thanks so much for this excellent piece. The part about being called into sacred roles by your community/elders really resonated...it’s so important in general, as you said. I used to think a community that assigns roles would feel stifling, but now all I want is a community that sees me and asks me to share gifts they recognize in me...
I am feeling stuck on a point of confusion and I would love your thoughts. I felt very brainwashed by what some call “trans ideology” when I lived among west coast leftist circles, and I now see it as extremely regressive, as some variation of “women are Barbie, men are ken, and if you’re not either one then you’re not cis-gendered and your body might be wrong” (not to mention, there is a ton of social pressure to find some “queer” identity, lest you be seen as basically republican/a morally bankrupt individual. The social pressure is massive; when I visit my friends in California they are taken aback that my partner and I still identify as he/him man and she/her woman, and it clearly makes them uncomfortable.)
So I feel confused when I try to imagine a more beautiful version of the transgender experience that doesn’t rely on regressive stereotypes (the very idea that a effeminate man or a masculine women aren’t a man or a woman does not feel
empowering to me). Yet of course, there are some general (biologically based) descriptions of men and women that are true, in so far as they are descriptive on average and not prescriptive for everyone. There’s a tension here I struggle to work through between hating the regressive stereotypes and yet feeling some real stereotypes around men and women...the idea that a “woman” is a performance of makeup, heels and being submissive, and that “woman” can be separated from wombs, menstrual blood and pregnancy feels so wrong and sexist to me, yet at the same time, I can feel into the truth that there are some real behavioral stereotypes, that on average women are more nurturing, emotional, socially perceptive, and less action-oriented than men. Or maybe that’s even too restrictive...yet when I travel to other cultures, it doesn’t feel weird that for example, the women are primarily in charge of feeding and nurturing their families.
So what would it mean for a man to feel that he is on some level a woman? I suppose, given what you said above, he would not “actually really be a woman” (one who needs expensive surgeries and a lifetime of pills to change his body), but perhaps that he has more access to the feminine principle because of his female soul and thus has a different role to play than other men. And critically it would also likely not mean he could claim to have and need the same experiences as women, or access to all the same spaces. Maybe he would be able to speak on behalf of the feminine principle (yin, maybe?) as women are able to, as his being is more closely aligned to it than other men?
I know instead of a clear question I’ve rather offered some internal musings, but I hope you can get a sense of my confusion. I’m very curious what comes up for you.
Hi Sama! I really appreciate your questions to Rhyd here and am looking forward to his reply. And just wanted to say I've dm-ed you on the MN forum we're both on! xxx
Many years ago, I was married to a transwoman--pre transition. We divorced because the Stanford reassignment clinic required it. We eventually separated shortly before her surgery. While we were together, I pressed back against gender stereotypes: "Sorry dear, I can't help with hair and makeup, I don't set my hair and I don't wear makeup. And "ain't I a woman?" Years later we had a conversation about her life after transition. At one point she was working as an apprentice operating engineer (driving earth moving equipment) which she enjoyed. A work injury ended that career, but she spent the remaining working years as a technician on the equipment that creates circuit boards. The interesting thing is that she told me that before transition she would not have felt comfortable in these "male" jobs, but that after transition she felt free to do things that were "male" without her "female" identity being threatened. So, in her case the surgical reassignment seems to have been a success in terms of life satisfaction. Post transition, after a few months of sexual experimentation, she identified as lesbian and has been married to another woman since Vermont legalized same sex unions. Obviously, the rhetoric around what was then called transsexuality was quite different in1970 than now. There were fewer public examples, fewer physicians willing to participate in treatment, etc. My ex was incredibly lucky to have understanding parents who paid medical bills, an employer who permitted her to do the required year of dressing and identifying as female at work (thank the Retail Clerk's Union, which insisted that a union member could not be fired for a medical condition) and the availability of the Stanford program.
Oddly, one category of gender performance (as contrasted to gender identity) that seems to have dropped away is that of transvestite. In the 1970s this was understood as a person finding erotic pleasure in wearing the clothes of the other gender, sometimes in ways that did not challenge gender identity. For example, men who dressed in masculine clothing with silky underwear or stockings concealed. Many were in heterosexual relationships, sometimes with their habits concealed from their partners, sometimes not. So, transvestitism could range from the silk undies under the business suit to dressing in completely female garb including makeup and wigs and hoping to "pass" as RG (the slang of the time for Real Girl). When we first met my ex was only just discovering her transgender identity and initially presented me with readings about transvestites--and had an alternate female identity who "came out" when she dressed up. Complicated. And, much of this was illegal--at least any visible cross dressing. Many states and cities had statutes against disguises (passed to fight the KKK) which were turned against crossdressing persons of either sex or sexual orientation. Some police departments had arbitrary rules about how many articles of correct gender clothing would prevent arrest.
I've written about this previously, but I had "something like" gender dysphoria most of my adolescence. I wasn't fully convinced I was really a woman, but I was very convinced I wasn't "really" a man. And I'm sure had this all happened now, I'd have rushed into (or been rushed into) transition around the age of 13 or 14 with disastrous consequences.
So, I can only really speak of the path I found, which had a strange inverse mechanism. The more I let myself feel okay with the parts of me that I perceived as "feminine," the more comfortable I became being male-bodied. This is something I've noticed in my relationship with my husband, who really likes my masculine qualities and remarks often that I'm the most masculine man he's ever known.
What's funny in those moments is that he remarks most on my masculinity when I am feeling most "feminine," when I feel most that I am embodying these other aspects of me.
And I think this is the answer to your question. For many people who identify as trans people, often their view of the opposite sex from their body is confused by stereotypes or a deeper struggle that we all experience to some degree. The trans woman who gets surgery to look like a magazine model or a porn star has a false or damaged view of what embodying femininity is. Of course, all women struggle with this view within modern society.
The key (and this is very useful for non-binary identified people too) is to explode open our ideas of what masculinity and femininity are, to expand them to match how many kinds of women and men there really are. There are millions and millions of paths for this, contrary to what we are sold. I think the more radical position for someone who identifies as non-binary would be to question their own inherited stereotypes about what the sexes actually mean, rather than merely staking out that position with a declaration.
Thank you for this, this was super clarifying and deeply resonated with me. I haven’t had the exact same process coming to terms with my own gender, but I so deeply feel that “strange inverse mechanism” in so much of my life…it just feels like a fundamental truth of reality that never totally makes sense when I approach it cognitively, that both parts of a duality contain each other (like the Tai Chi symbol).
Yes, exactly. If I could sit down with a self-declared non-binary person, I would ask them what they felt was expected of them if identified as male, or female. Basically, I think I would be asking "What are you afraid of?" As far as I am concerned, a major goal of 2nd wave feminism was to free women, and by extension men, from fearing gender expectations. You can be a woman and not have to know how to bake a cake, or have naturally curly hair, or walk like a lady, etc. You shouldn't have to pretend to be dumber or weaker or less interested in certain areas than the men. And conversely for men. The hippy movement had already broken some male roles expectations: protest against violence, wear bright colors and long hair. But 2nd wave feminism got turned into a race to join the male corporate world and enjoy unconstrained sex lives--adopting male gender expectations instead of challenging--a topic for another discussion. Now the 'woke' seem to have reified gender roles as a key element of identity.
I agree that our cultures lack sacred roles surrounding gender--however, we seem to have retained the opposite, the idea that certain gender expressions and sexual expressions are inherently profane. I would say "sin" but that isn't quite it, sin implies an action, not just a way of being. These feelings are not confined to religious people. I observe many who do not attend church or etc., who may never have received any religious instruction, but who nevertheless express the feeling that homosexuality, and whatever else falls under the LGBTQ-- banner, is somehow wrong, bad, unnatural, perverse, dangerous. It is interesting that the sexual taboos retain more effect than taboos against alcohol, gambling, dancing or other "sins" that were found in the teachings of whatever religion is in the background of the culture.
I'll join the chorus of praise here. Thank you for sharing your perspective on this; it's one of the most level-headed and interesting takes I've run across.
I was about to say ‘yes, but . . . ‘ and then you concluded with my points, about lack of anything we can call community in a meaningful sense. :)
In truth our lives are not our own. We are all the ongoing flux of many lives in our ‘self’ and cannot be understood apart from the broad perspective which knows us in context.
This is still true in the West, but our ‘community’ formation is more formation by deeply impersonal technology, to which we have become subservient. You might say, we are no longer formed by the real world, and are somewhat’out of it’
I'm physically and emotionally attracted to persons of either biological sex, somewhat equally -- and have no particular 'gender' identity, as that term is now being used. My many-years partner is a man, but may have been a woman, except perhaps due to chance. But I have no desire or need to have my pronoun change from 'he' to 'they' or 'them.'. I've always been -- at root and core -- an outside observer to all of the gender framings of popular culture.
I'm perfectly okay with being called 'he' and him. I wear men's clothing, for sake of convenience. But "she" or 'her' would not be a put down for me. And I'd have no problem with wearing a dress in spring or summer, if it didn't freak people out. I acknowledge my biological sex. It is what it is. But I'm not deeply attached to anything related to gender, which I regard as something other than biological sex, per se.
I suspect it would be better if we all welcomed one another as whatever
'gender' which shows up, while acknowledging biological sex as what it is: Biology.
Like the ancient Hermes of Greece,, I am also boundary marker: a herm. https://www.etymonline.com/word/herm But I'm not thinking I'm special because of it. I'm just not on either side of "the line" of demarcation -- a line I find rather strange to identify with, apart from biology.
In my Thing two weeks ago I spent some time specifically addressing the rising tide of ugliness and impending violence associated with the backlash to declarative gender theory.
https://guttermouth.substack.com/p/tiws-day-thing-112922
The response has been... interesting. I'd invite your input, if you'd care to give it, as a welcome bit of thought diversity on the matter.
This article has motivated med to accelerate my readthrough of Monsters.
Also, much as I will feel some sheepish guilt at soiling the exurbs of this beautiful piece, the section on the ontology of "buggery" was drowned out in my mind for several read-throughs by a witticism I learned in maybe 6th grade:
"If you build a thousand bridges and suck one dick, you're not a bridge builder, you're a cocksucker."
Jumped in with:
I think this is a good summation:
"And it sure is convenient for the Epsteins and the Bankman-Frieds of the world, who we would never be able to chase down the street and lynch on a normal day, to have a nice visible group of people for us to turn our rage on instead."
and also this:
"The promotion of pedophilia is coming from the woke, postmodern, socially-destructive left, most of them also followers of the agenda of globalist technocracy. Some of them may also be LGBT- many probably just think they are because their identities are so insubstantial and polluted that they’d identify as anything that might give them more meaning or attention or the simulation of love. Most of them aren’t. Epstein sure wasn’t LGBT, nor were the vast majority of his known affiliates."
There are absolutely a few complete fucking idiots who live their entire lives online who've argued for "liberating" children into sexuality. They all mostly have anime characters as their twitter photo and rarely talk about anything that doesn't happen on a computer, and that's the connection. Live most of your life believing other people and especially children are just pixels and it's easy to come up with ideas about how to treat them as such.
On the other hand, it's worth mentioning that the new satanic panic about pedophiles hiding in your cereal box is currently limited to the US and a tiny bit in the UK. In both places, "our children" function in the mind the way that "our women" do in French and German culture or "our foreskins" did in medieval European culture as the sacred object all the jealous evil barbarians were trying to steal. When people are experiencing societal chaos and instability, it's bizarrely comforting to imagine you have something everyone else is trying to take from you and corrupt.
Much appreciated.
Finally, a voice of reason.
This is a very interesting subject for me. Several years back, I lost an amazing friend to suicide. She had declared a trans identity and we had tried to be supportive. Towards the end she drove us all away with angry demands that we pretend to believe in preposterous lies- things easily verifiable as false and also random and hardly worthy of a fight. Whether Margaret Thatcher personally invented soft serve, for example. She had a very difficult past and I wonder to this day if she would still be alive if she had gotten care instead of affirmation. And yet, to question that is to “hate transpeople”. I don’t know- perhaps I have some secret subconscious hate of transpeople. But I have to wonder what sort of “love” would not question what could have been done when a friend dies. I miss my friend, not as some avatar of trans identity but as a person. And if seeing the person beneath the demographic boxes is hate- give me friends who hate me like that.
As far as changing things in declarative gender, I suspect we will see sweeping changes soon. See, the movement has for the first time been linked to harm to male people, while the previous vandalism, bomb threats, and violence was directed at female people.
I know that at least some transition programs, such as the one at Stanford University in the 1970, had a mental health component. Participants were assigned to therapists and the therapists had to sign off before they would be scheduled for surgery. The major concern, I believe, was that the participants not have unrealistic expectations of what the reassignment surgery and hormone therapy would accomplish. One transwoman my ex and I knew at that time was very tall--6'+ and had a thin, muscular build. No matter what she did with hair and makeup and dress being accepted as a female was a problem. She looked like the ex-Marine that she was. We heard later that she died in suspicious circumstances that were ruled accidental but may have been suicide. She had taken tranquilizers and settled into a hot bath while her roommate was out, slipped underwater and drowned. Very sad, RIP Molly.
But unrealistic expectations are guarded against by all responsible plastic surgeons. And, I would expect, by other types of physicians. People have to understand and accept that a nicely shaped nose, losing 100 lbs. or even correction of scars or a birth anomaly are not going to magically remake their entire life. But human nature is such that, the more extreme the change, the more extreme the expectations.
Rita
That’s rough. I’m sorry to hear about your friend. I definitely think there is a component of unrealistic expectations going on. There was a strong sense of “gatekeeping is bad” and anything is possible going in the community I lived before moving regarding transition. And it’s just kind of a matter of faith for many. And I think it’s a hard thing to admit that maybe transition isn’t possible for some people at least at a price they can afford physically, mentally, and financially. And not all people will benefit equally from medical transition- the results of FTM surgeries have not shown any long term benefit for the transitioners mental health. It honestly irks me so badly that despite the differing outcomes FTM transition gets treated like MTF transition. The expectations are that the technology exists to switch male to female or female to male bodies and it doesn’t. Regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t it doesn’t. And somehow it became taboo to admit that the best technology just lets the rich and famous pass and those who are flying to Thailand to get budget surgeries are probably not going to become the pixie fairy girls so many of them use for avatars.
“such prominent and vitriolic figures only exist because they speak some degree of truth about these matters, even as they weave those truths into rather violent ideologies.” Yes! If you want to understand why extremists get supporters behind them, it is usually because the extremist is vocalizing something that’s true and been suppressed from the mainstream, that other people have felt invalidated for secretly believing. This feeling of alienation for having different beliefs can be so strong that they are willing to overlook all the other untrue things that extremist is saying.
And yes, there are people totally “activists” making careers by simply emotionally validating people and accruing followers online. Honestly the “American Dream” in people under 40 right now seems to get enough followers online so one can start a business out if it, understandably- because working conditions and labor rights seem to be getting so much worse under global capitalism.
BTW this is one of the most nuanced and respectful essays I’ve read about the gender debate recently and I like how you are tying it to critiques of global capitalism.
I watched Matt Walsh’s film What is a Woman and thought it was an important contribution to this issue. I didn’t see a ‘virulent moralistic’ approach - I just saw a desire to stop the ideologues from conducting life changing experiments on children. There are all different types of politics involved here and I think we need to respect everyone’s views and have a discussion. However in Canada, where I unfortunately live, any type of discussion about declared gendered could be prosecuted as hate speech. I am grateful to anyone who is standing up to protect children right now.
"There is no sense now that being “something like” transgender, non-binary, gay, lesbian, or anything else means you have a specific role, importance, or meaning to society. But then again, being a father or a mother, an elder or a grandparent, or an artist or a mystic doesn’t really mean anything to us anymore, either."
This really hit home.
"Of course, that would require us to abandon ideology and return instead to a more relational way of being together and allowing in again a sense of the sacred."
I think this is the most important point in this essay.
The retreat to rigid ideology has, predictably, coincided with the retreat into heavily-policed, virtual communities. And we see authoritarian demands across the spectrum for the state, Company X, or University Y to enforce one ideology or another.
That's been accompanied by a decline in civic institutions in general and the commoditization of as much of human interaction as possible. All of the spheres were we would formerly need to interact with others and reach consensus are shrinking.
I really appreciate this piece and the dialogue associated with it. As a mother of two young boys in the US, my prayers for them and all young children is that however they see themselves and their roles in the world, they come to that on their own terms and not through societal pressures or anyone's agenda.
Hi Rhyd, thanks so much for this excellent piece. The part about being called into sacred roles by your community/elders really resonated...it’s so important in general, as you said. I used to think a community that assigns roles would feel stifling, but now all I want is a community that sees me and asks me to share gifts they recognize in me...
I am feeling stuck on a point of confusion and I would love your thoughts. I felt very brainwashed by what some call “trans ideology” when I lived among west coast leftist circles, and I now see it as extremely regressive, as some variation of “women are Barbie, men are ken, and if you’re not either one then you’re not cis-gendered and your body might be wrong” (not to mention, there is a ton of social pressure to find some “queer” identity, lest you be seen as basically republican/a morally bankrupt individual. The social pressure is massive; when I visit my friends in California they are taken aback that my partner and I still identify as he/him man and she/her woman, and it clearly makes them uncomfortable.)
So I feel confused when I try to imagine a more beautiful version of the transgender experience that doesn’t rely on regressive stereotypes (the very idea that a effeminate man or a masculine women aren’t a man or a woman does not feel
empowering to me). Yet of course, there are some general (biologically based) descriptions of men and women that are true, in so far as they are descriptive on average and not prescriptive for everyone. There’s a tension here I struggle to work through between hating the regressive stereotypes and yet feeling some real stereotypes around men and women...the idea that a “woman” is a performance of makeup, heels and being submissive, and that “woman” can be separated from wombs, menstrual blood and pregnancy feels so wrong and sexist to me, yet at the same time, I can feel into the truth that there are some real behavioral stereotypes, that on average women are more nurturing, emotional, socially perceptive, and less action-oriented than men. Or maybe that’s even too restrictive...yet when I travel to other cultures, it doesn’t feel weird that for example, the women are primarily in charge of feeding and nurturing their families.
So what would it mean for a man to feel that he is on some level a woman? I suppose, given what you said above, he would not “actually really be a woman” (one who needs expensive surgeries and a lifetime of pills to change his body), but perhaps that he has more access to the feminine principle because of his female soul and thus has a different role to play than other men. And critically it would also likely not mean he could claim to have and need the same experiences as women, or access to all the same spaces. Maybe he would be able to speak on behalf of the feminine principle (yin, maybe?) as women are able to, as his being is more closely aligned to it than other men?
I know instead of a clear question I’ve rather offered some internal musings, but I hope you can get a sense of my confusion. I’m very curious what comes up for you.
Hi Sama! I really appreciate your questions to Rhyd here and am looking forward to his reply. And just wanted to say I've dm-ed you on the MN forum we're both on! xxx
I've replied. :)
Many years ago, I was married to a transwoman--pre transition. We divorced because the Stanford reassignment clinic required it. We eventually separated shortly before her surgery. While we were together, I pressed back against gender stereotypes: "Sorry dear, I can't help with hair and makeup, I don't set my hair and I don't wear makeup. And "ain't I a woman?" Years later we had a conversation about her life after transition. At one point she was working as an apprentice operating engineer (driving earth moving equipment) which she enjoyed. A work injury ended that career, but she spent the remaining working years as a technician on the equipment that creates circuit boards. The interesting thing is that she told me that before transition she would not have felt comfortable in these "male" jobs, but that after transition she felt free to do things that were "male" without her "female" identity being threatened. So, in her case the surgical reassignment seems to have been a success in terms of life satisfaction. Post transition, after a few months of sexual experimentation, she identified as lesbian and has been married to another woman since Vermont legalized same sex unions. Obviously, the rhetoric around what was then called transsexuality was quite different in1970 than now. There were fewer public examples, fewer physicians willing to participate in treatment, etc. My ex was incredibly lucky to have understanding parents who paid medical bills, an employer who permitted her to do the required year of dressing and identifying as female at work (thank the Retail Clerk's Union, which insisted that a union member could not be fired for a medical condition) and the availability of the Stanford program.
Oddly, one category of gender performance (as contrasted to gender identity) that seems to have dropped away is that of transvestite. In the 1970s this was understood as a person finding erotic pleasure in wearing the clothes of the other gender, sometimes in ways that did not challenge gender identity. For example, men who dressed in masculine clothing with silky underwear or stockings concealed. Many were in heterosexual relationships, sometimes with their habits concealed from their partners, sometimes not. So, transvestitism could range from the silk undies under the business suit to dressing in completely female garb including makeup and wigs and hoping to "pass" as RG (the slang of the time for Real Girl). When we first met my ex was only just discovering her transgender identity and initially presented me with readings about transvestites--and had an alternate female identity who "came out" when she dressed up. Complicated. And, much of this was illegal--at least any visible cross dressing. Many states and cities had statutes against disguises (passed to fight the KKK) which were turned against crossdressing persons of either sex or sexual orientation. Some police departments had arbitrary rules about how many articles of correct gender clothing would prevent arrest.
Rita
I've written about this previously, but I had "something like" gender dysphoria most of my adolescence. I wasn't fully convinced I was really a woman, but I was very convinced I wasn't "really" a man. And I'm sure had this all happened now, I'd have rushed into (or been rushed into) transition around the age of 13 or 14 with disastrous consequences.
So, I can only really speak of the path I found, which had a strange inverse mechanism. The more I let myself feel okay with the parts of me that I perceived as "feminine," the more comfortable I became being male-bodied. This is something I've noticed in my relationship with my husband, who really likes my masculine qualities and remarks often that I'm the most masculine man he's ever known.
What's funny in those moments is that he remarks most on my masculinity when I am feeling most "feminine," when I feel most that I am embodying these other aspects of me.
And I think this is the answer to your question. For many people who identify as trans people, often their view of the opposite sex from their body is confused by stereotypes or a deeper struggle that we all experience to some degree. The trans woman who gets surgery to look like a magazine model or a porn star has a false or damaged view of what embodying femininity is. Of course, all women struggle with this view within modern society.
The key (and this is very useful for non-binary identified people too) is to explode open our ideas of what masculinity and femininity are, to expand them to match how many kinds of women and men there really are. There are millions and millions of paths for this, contrary to what we are sold. I think the more radical position for someone who identifies as non-binary would be to question their own inherited stereotypes about what the sexes actually mean, rather than merely staking out that position with a declaration.
Solid answer, Rhyd! 👍🏻
Thank you for this, this was super clarifying and deeply resonated with me. I haven’t had the exact same process coming to terms with my own gender, but I so deeply feel that “strange inverse mechanism” in so much of my life…it just feels like a fundamental truth of reality that never totally makes sense when I approach it cognitively, that both parts of a duality contain each other (like the Tai Chi symbol).
Yes, exactly. If I could sit down with a self-declared non-binary person, I would ask them what they felt was expected of them if identified as male, or female. Basically, I think I would be asking "What are you afraid of?" As far as I am concerned, a major goal of 2nd wave feminism was to free women, and by extension men, from fearing gender expectations. You can be a woman and not have to know how to bake a cake, or have naturally curly hair, or walk like a lady, etc. You shouldn't have to pretend to be dumber or weaker or less interested in certain areas than the men. And conversely for men. The hippy movement had already broken some male roles expectations: protest against violence, wear bright colors and long hair. But 2nd wave feminism got turned into a race to join the male corporate world and enjoy unconstrained sex lives--adopting male gender expectations instead of challenging--a topic for another discussion. Now the 'woke' seem to have reified gender roles as a key element of identity.
I agree that our cultures lack sacred roles surrounding gender--however, we seem to have retained the opposite, the idea that certain gender expressions and sexual expressions are inherently profane. I would say "sin" but that isn't quite it, sin implies an action, not just a way of being. These feelings are not confined to religious people. I observe many who do not attend church or etc., who may never have received any religious instruction, but who nevertheless express the feeling that homosexuality, and whatever else falls under the LGBTQ-- banner, is somehow wrong, bad, unnatural, perverse, dangerous. It is interesting that the sexual taboos retain more effect than taboos against alcohol, gambling, dancing or other "sins" that were found in the teachings of whatever religion is in the background of the culture.
I'll join the chorus of praise here. Thank you for sharing your perspective on this; it's one of the most level-headed and interesting takes I've run across.
Really interesting Rhyd and helpful
I was about to say ‘yes, but . . . ‘ and then you concluded with my points, about lack of anything we can call community in a meaningful sense. :)
In truth our lives are not our own. We are all the ongoing flux of many lives in our ‘self’ and cannot be understood apart from the broad perspective which knows us in context.
This is still true in the West, but our ‘community’ formation is more formation by deeply impersonal technology, to which we have become subservient. You might say, we are no longer formed by the real world, and are somewhat’out of it’
Thank you
I'm physically and emotionally attracted to persons of either biological sex, somewhat equally -- and have no particular 'gender' identity, as that term is now being used. My many-years partner is a man, but may have been a woman, except perhaps due to chance. But I have no desire or need to have my pronoun change from 'he' to 'they' or 'them.'. I've always been -- at root and core -- an outside observer to all of the gender framings of popular culture.
I'm perfectly okay with being called 'he' and him. I wear men's clothing, for sake of convenience. But "she" or 'her' would not be a put down for me. And I'd have no problem with wearing a dress in spring or summer, if it didn't freak people out. I acknowledge my biological sex. It is what it is. But I'm not deeply attached to anything related to gender, which I regard as something other than biological sex, per se.
I suspect it would be better if we all welcomed one another as whatever
'gender' which shows up, while acknowledging biological sex as what it is: Biology.
Like the ancient Hermes of Greece,, I am also boundary marker: a herm. https://www.etymonline.com/word/herm But I'm not thinking I'm special because of it. I'm just not on either side of "the line" of demarcation -- a line I find rather strange to identify with, apart from biology.
https://theheronhouse.substack.com/p/shes-not-there