"Sexual Mimicry & Mutation" OR "Trans Woman Lesbian = Mobius Strip"

Issues of gender are difficult enough as they are. Imagine trying to teach a child that their identity is based upon a construction of society that has no basis in fact, and is a product of power structures created and maintained by patriarchal privilege. Is the most direct way to go about this to present transsexual and transgendered people? It is a way that we can come to understand that there are challenges to the gender systems currently enforced by society, but it is not the most direct way. Are transgendered and transsexual people examples of how gender is socially constructed and enforced? Or are these people an example of how the gender types are solid, yet not merely dependant upon biology? Who knows.

Reading Serano’s “Skirt Chaser: Why the media depicts the trans revolution in lipstick & heels” really pissed me off. There was something in her tone that just ate at me, the fact that she kept interchanging the words and phrases “Female”, “Feminine”, “Femininity”, and “Female sexuality” really set a fire under me. You can’t just go saying that female and feminine are the same, you can’t because they aren’t. Here’s a chart:

Female = Biology
Femininity = Gendered views of attributes attributed to females
Feminine = Gendered, often stereotyped view of how women act but can also be applied to men who are effeminate.
Female Sexuality = A biological woman and all topics surrounding sexuality of that biological woman.

Maybe this is where I find where I’m bigoted. I see myself as being very open minded, but when it comes to transgendered/transsexual women and men, I just don’t see it. Femaleness is biology and a trans woman can’t change that even with surgery and hormone therapy, the appearance changes but not the physiology. Dressing up though, the gendered female’s garments, is something a trans woman can do something about, but as Serano writes, “Despite the reality that there are as many types of trans women as there are women in general, most people believe that trans women are all on a quest to make ourselves as pretty, pink, and passive as possible. While there are certainly some trans women who buy into mainstream dogma about beauty and femininity…” In other words, femininity does not equal the look, the clothes, the make-up. But then what is it that a trans woman wants? Can we say what it is to be a woman without sliding down the rabbit hole of gender?

Thinking about it again, no, I don’t think this is where I am bigoted. I haven’t a clear understanding of the issue issue. When Serano says, “In virtually all depictions of trans women, whether real or fictional, deceptive or pathetic, the underlying assumption is that the trans woman wants to achieve a stereotypically feminine appearance and gender role.” What then is a non-stereotypically feminine appearance? What is a non-stereotypical female? I don’t mean to be a smart ass, but what is it that trans women want? Why does there have to be an extrinsic counterpart to their intrinsic identifying as female? This is what I don’t get.

This stuff is very confusing.

I have a friend who is 75-years old. She believes that inside of us are these animalistic tendencies that are shades of our primitive selves. These are the parts of us responsible for fearing otherness, these are the parts of us that as civilized people we have to fight against lest we be taken back to our primitive thoughts. There is a part of me that wants to lash out and say, “All this transgendered transsexual stuff is bullshit.” There is a part of me that wants to say, “Janice Raymond is right. Trans women are merely transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists” and that that too is bullshit and self-glorifying by way of adding additional polysyllabic words to a persons idea of concerning their identity. But I know, I know that these are ugly things to say. I want to accept, but I can’t without understanding. And I can’t seem to understand how this work. If you’re born a man and identify as female, why is it then that the rest of us who identify with what our biology suggests have to question gender? I already question why little girls can play with dump trucks, but little boys can’t play with dolls. A man who identifies as female but doesn’t dress female and is simply, for lack of a better word “effeminate” I get. But when someone who is trans woman, or trans man for that matter has a problem with the trans women and trans men that dress opposite to their gendered biology, that I don’t get.

Ugh… my brain is a mobius strip.

One final note, it seems that this whole idea of trans women and trans men are (I know if someone who is transsexual/transgendered reads this they will hate me for saying this) simply copies of copies. I see this in that since gender is an artificial by-product of patriarchal society and that men who were raised as male who somewhere along the line identify as female are merely copying the feminine artifice. That’s a little convoluted. Lets try that again.

A man who was raised as a boy is taught the ideas of gendered societal norms of what it is to be male, but when this man realizes that he identifies more as female then decides to be trans woman, he then becomes a copy of the ideas of societal norms of what it is to be female. But on the other hand there are transgendered people that say that it is not the societal feminine ideal that they are pursuing. What is it then that they are? We need a third option outside of man and woman. Maybe that’s what it is to be transgendered, maybe that is the third and fourth options and maybe most people are just too hung up on the old fashioned ideas of bifurcated male and female. Hmmm…