Sometime in the previous millennium, at the ripe old age of 15, my folks confronted me with the banal porn mags and VHS tapes (ancient recording media) they’d located along with my make-shift toys…let’s just say my hacker tenancies sprouted early. They were annoyed that I’d stolen soft-core Skinemax recordings from a local dirt-bag (partly on account of the theft, but mainly on account of said’s content’s objectification of women’s bodies), but relieved that I wasn’t gay. I cannot overstate how much this was a tectonic rift between generations. I was pissed they’d found my stash, and slightly annoyed that, if I we’re gay, they’d have had such difficulty coming to terms with it - those two qualms switched priorities as I got older. I brought this up with them a couple decades later and I think it was half actual generational gap and half not wanting me to have to deal with the difficulty of being gay in a SWM’s world.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
It’s made me think a bit and realize that I am pretty strongly cis. Or at least have been.
I remember when I was 19 realizing that I “smoke cigarettes like a girl” and that bothered me a lot at the time. Not anymore. I’ve not been a dumb insecure teen for a while now.
Before that, I’d cross dressed a few times and it was almost painful. But I think that had a lot to do with me being a shit crossdresser. When I do things, I like to do them well, and I couldn’t take ten steps in heels without falling over twice. Altogether, very uncomfortable experiences to me.
These days I leave that kind of stuff to people who actually want to do it and are also much better at it than I am.
And before anyone starts yelling at me, tgis has nothing to do with how I feel about trans people and crossdressers. My post history will show that this is not to disparage anyone.
I think for me the abstract question did help me start to question my gender identity. I still feel embarrassed about taking on the label of “trans” but not because I am embarrassed to be trans, rather because I have imposter syndrome - I feel like someone could look at me, look at my family, and say, “You aren’t trans, you are cis and hetero (not to mention white and professional-class)”. But the reality is that I rely entirely on external cues to determine my gender, I lack an internal sense of gender (some of the voices I hear are gendered, some aren’t).
So I think I was someone who was basically very weakly cisgender (or very weakly trans) and who didn’t have much reason to think about it because of all the reasons you say. If I just kept following the scripts set out for me by people who didn’t have any trouble gendering me based on my body, my gender was easy to take for granted. I thought that any feelings I had to the contrary were just pretentious - a reflection of my desire to be “weird” or to fit in better with certain activist communities.
As theorists and activists moved to insist that gender identity could only be determined by self-identification I initially balked at the idea. I think I wanted to hang onto the idea that we could use external evidence to determine our gender. I realize that in almost every circumstance that means oppression - one person applying a test to another person and saying their gender identity is wrong. In my case having no external tests I could apply would simply mean I wouldn’t have a gender most of the time. I wasn’t very open to that possibility.
These days I’m considerably more open to it. Next year my province will start allowing people to put X instead of M or F on driver’s licenses for their gender. I’m getting kind of excited about doing that. It feels more like me.
What you describe about how you feel about your gender is basically why I chose the label agender. I have friends who are trans. I was talking about how the thing inside his head that tells him he’s male, that thing doesn’t exist in my head. I have nothing telling me whether I am female or male.
Yeah, I didn’t want to call myself this for quite a while, like I said I thought it sounded like I was pretending at something. When I look back at some of the stranger things that have happened to me in my life regarding blurring gender boundaries (and other people blurring mine for me) I feel like I can convince myself, though. Plus three of the voices that I hear are very much gendered (two male, one female) and one is very much not, and those are obviously me.
You’ve been spying on me, haven’t you?
Or are you one of the voices in my head I haven’t met yet?
Just like to say that this is a fascinating thread.
I’d say my sexuality is “disaster”. My intimacy issues are that I can’t really comprehend what it would be like to be with someone sexually… always been a disaster when I tried, so I’ve pretty much given up, broke and frustrated. I kind of wish sex wasn’t so alien to me. It’s so hard to relate without a frame of reference.
Wow. Just watched that Spring Break Anthem video for the first time. Not sure how to feel about it. It’s catchy as hell, and it’s hilariously subversive. I think I’ll just feel good about it until someone clearly explains how much of an asshole I am for taking that point of view.
Also, is Ed Norton hot or what?
That’s an interesting idea. Is it bad that I’d consider doing it for free if I could be hot? As it is, I’d be a really ugly woman. I’m not a particularly attractive man, but my face is configured a certain way that just wouldn’t work (according to my aesthetic) as a female. That, or I’d like to be more masculine, which takes me to another point that came up for me recently…
I was reading an interview with the budget-cooking/social activist Jack Munroe (of ‘a girl called Jack’ fame) and she described the experience of coming out as trans and transitioning, which was interesting. The thing was, she wasn’t transitioning to male but rather towards male - the point she wanted to get to was to the butch end of female. I’ve come across this notion before, but there was something about the way Jack put it that led to a sudden expansion to the ramifications of altering gender presentation.
It’s interesting because society has until more recently tried to fit trans gender into the existing binary model that is generally accepted, and is now only just beginning to accept that there are intermediate positions that might be where a person is aiming for, rather than being ‘incomplete’ or ‘partially transitioned’. Accept this and suddenly a whole bunch more behaviours become understandable as expressions of ‘trans-like’ gender identity. For instance, if a man feels like his penis is too small and he has surgery to improve this (according to his values) then this could be understood as a person modifying their body to express their felt gender to the degree that they want to. They feel like a 7 out of 10 male and want to be a 9 out of 10. Similarly with a woman who undergoes ‘feminizing’ cosmetic surgery. Some people clearly want to dial their existing gender identity up to 11 - they feel like their existing presentation doesn’t adequately express their gender. Obviously there are complications to this understanding - some cosmetic procedures are aesthetic without strong gender signalling, and others (like male hair removal) are often ambiguous, particularly in combination with other body-transforming decisions…
Anyway, yeah, thought I would share. I’m not trying to ‘claim’ trans for cis people; just pointing out that a lot of cis people and societies aren’t as cis as they think they are.
Unless you’re a fireman/woman.
There is definitely an issue with being stuck with your body. I’d really like to be able to have different bodies on different days, but that’s pure fantasy. I’m sure there are some trans women who really didn’t get how their beauty was going to be judged before they transitioned (a lot of men just don’t get this, though asking women helps). On the other hand, hormone changes really do change the way you look. I have a trans friend who looked very manly as a man and then ended up looking very feminine as a woman. It’s hard to predict.
I find this a very interesting lens through which to look at some behaviour.
There’s hope for us all then…
It isn’t quite right, though; I haven’t thought about it enough and I’m sure that someone who is better versed in queer theory could do better. For example, a person moving away from their born, cis, gender ideal towards a trans identity will suffer worse disapprobation than someone moving within their existing cis gender and particularly towards the platonic ideal of that gender - that is (in crude terms) a man who wants to be more male is going to have an easier ride than a man who wants to be more female. And despite the fact that women are more generally disparaged by society, I think a woman who wants to be more feminine would also meet with less disapproval than one who is moving towards a more masculine position.
That said, people have varying levels of tolerance towards shifts of any kind, and people who undergo plastic surgery - and particularly that which pertains to gender presentation, do receive a certain amount of disapprobation in any case. Think of the attitudes leveled at women who have cosmetic surgery, or men who are interested in bodybuilding. We are more accepting of these as a society, but not entirely so.
So while one could argue that shifts towards uber-male or female presentation are similar to trans presentation, I guess that the component of social acceptance still differs. In a sense, gender identity seems to comprise of the gender you feel yourself to be, that which society expects of you (currently still pretty much binary in nature), and that which you want or choose to present to society, and the difference between cis and trans could be in absence or presence of disconnection between social expectation and the other two components.
This is why I didn’t saying anything other than that it is an interesting lens. I’m going to try looking through that lens and see if I learn anything. I mean, people talk all the time about (especially) male behaviours that are there to prove masculinity. If we think of male/female gender as a spectrum, than those behaviours could be seen as being about shifting gender identity (albeit in socially normal way).
I can only imagine that there are people who have written about this in their master’s theses who would be looking at what we are saying and thinking we sound like morons trying to apply quantum mechanics to religion, but who knows.
I have two responses to this.
First, part of womanhood in our society is dealing with the fact that bodies are not expressions of an aesthetic – despite men judging them that way – and the sea of clothes in the women’s section may have only one or two pieces that work for you, regardless of how you want to present yourself. So, no fair only springing for a perfect fantasy body that can’t exist in reality.
… my second response is, “well, hormones and facial feminization surgery can do amazing things…”
Neither do I! But the reason why I didn’t adopt “agender” is that I think gender can be pretty much anything. It’s an amorphous category. So I prefer genderqueer as being arbitrary or in-flux gender rather than a denial of the possibility of gender.
Mind you, that as a child I loved to sketch out designs for new kinds of genitals, reproductive cells, and hormones as well. So my conception of even biological sex tends to be quite fluid.
I have definitely been there. I think that some cultures really waffle on whether sexuality is (not unlike gender) something which is performative, or an identity. Fulfilling certain roles equals “sexual activity”, and those roles and activities change over time. In some cultures, genital contact which isn’t for reproduction is not considered sex at all, which can free it of a lot of moral baggage.
From a personal development perspective, I think that sexual identity starts with the self. It seems more practical and accurate to say that you are sex, rather than that sex is a condition which is bestowed upon you by somebody else. It is who you are, rather than some achievement. This acknowledges people’s agency and participation more. “We are sex, and now we are sex together.” rather than “Might this person want to have sex with me?”. For instance, my marriage largely self-destructed as a consequence of me being the “orgasm dispenser” which my partner needed in order to feel whole. It reduced us to neither being real people. They had no respect for what I wanted or how I felt - yet they felt as if I was withholding part of their own personality which they needed to function. Us both knowing that we were complete people who could share our sexual experiences with each other would have alleviated that conflict and stress.
That said, I think that many (perhaps most) do have profound communication issues with regards to sexuality. It’s largely a cultural thing, so I would not automatically take it personally if you find it difficult to negotiate a shared experience.
Sure, I didn’t claim it was right-minded or ideologically correct to feel like that - rather I think it is very superficial. I also think that failing to live up to an aesthetic or superficial physical standard is a problem that can affect men too. But there you have it. I’m clearly not that fussed about becoming a woman.
Funnily enough I did draft a comment earlier about facial feminisation surgery, but I deleted it as it was long. Basically I already have a massive head and adding bone cement to it would probably to make it even bigger. It’s hard enough to buy hats.
Raspberry Reich time again! This is one of my favorite bits of Bruce LaBruce’s leftist porno (although the hardcore version is hard to find). I probably relate to Gudrun too much - apart from being so manipulative. Being either socially radical or sexually progressive are difficult enough on their own, but their intersection I think is even more so. Overcoming restrictive abstract social conditioning and offering direct help to people in everyday life I think are equally important.
(FWIW, I think that Raspberry Reich is not a very good movie, but it can be both interesting and entertaining)
A spectrum like this needs to be (at least) two dimensional, IMO. This one may not be perfect, but it’s at least symmetrical:
Or you could go by symbols 
:
My main problem is that we can’t seem to be able to say what is on either end of the gender spectrum:
This doesn’t seem to work at all, since you can strongly identify with one gender and strongly reject many gendered cultural aspects. A female soldier is no less of a woman, for example. The same would apply to men who look after children – it is more common for one gender, but it doesn’t move you along the spectrum in either direction. I always chafed at the idea of “expressing your female side” for the same reason; not because I don’t like to be associated with women, but I hate the “men are ignorant cavemen, women are delicate and sensitive” insinuation. Pretty much everything but elements like “sperm/egg production” look like overlapping bell curves:
On the other hand, hormones do affect gendered characteristics to some extent. Surgical and chemical castration has physiological and psychological effects – eunuchs don’t go bald but lose body hair and have hot flushes similar to the ones women have at menopause. Their sex drive decreases. They grow taller and have higher pitched voices. They have lower bone density, lose muscle mass and gain fat. Some experience breast enlargement. In one study, there was a significant reduction in obsessive compulsive behaviour (P < 0.01) and 22% changed sexual orientation. Supplemental testosterone and oestrogen both had a positive effect on sex drive (P < 0.001). There isn’t really any reliable evidence elsewhere that it increases lifespan. Italian castrata singers often lived slightly longer than the average man, but some were actually women and since those selected for the process had a good singing voice, they may have been healthier than average boys. The effects are different depending on the age of castration, as there are different characteristics that are activated at different points of development; it seems that people follow a more female development pattern in the absence of male gonads.
There is pretty strong anecdotal evidence for the correlation between high testosterone doses and aggressive behaviour, although it’s difficult to test. More modest doses that match a normal level don’t seem to have a measureable effect. Hier and Crowley (1982) showed that androgen deficient (hypogonadal) men exhibited a marked deficit in visuospatial ability compared with matched controls and hypogonadal men who acquired the condition post-pubertally. Girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), where the female fetus is exposed to very high levels of testosterone, are reported to show more male-typical behaviours such as increases in rough-and-tumble play and aggression, and more male-typical toy preferences. Another study used amniotic fluid that had been collected during pregnancy to demonstrate that the lower the level of fetal testosterone in the womb, the higher a child’s ability to empathise as measured by eye contact, quality of peer relationships, and other factors 6 to 8 years later. However, the influence of testosterone on behaviour is complicated and highly affected by social and individual factors. In turn, those factors also affect testosterone levels.
All of my previous comments on this thread were made before I found out that I was autistic, but there’s an interesting correlation between autism and gender identities. Simon Baron Cohen hypothesised that autism was an example of the “extreme male brain,” but this doesn’t seem to mean “macho” at all. We tend to be more detail oriented and analytical, but less empathetic. As far as personality, clothing and other elements are concerned, both men and women tend to be more androgynous and gender dysphoria seems to be much more common. In fact, a Dutch study of 115 boys and 89 girls identified those with suspected ASD, and found it to be 7.8%. That’s not a large sampling size, but the link has been commented on by others. Another study of people with ASD found them to be 7.59% times more likely to “express gender variance.”
There are questions about whether this is some kind of “overthinking”, exposure to more androgens in the womb (which might explain the higher incidence for women, but not men) or a social issue – if you’re not as influenced by society in general, the gendered aspects won’t affect you as much as they would for neurotypicals. Or maybe it’s just that autistic people are used to thinking of themselves as different, and are more likely to resist binary gender models. As with BPD, this has led to some professionals claiming that those on the spectrum are gender dysphoric because of their autism, and that they shouldn’t be taken as seriously. Unfortunately, apparently they can also feel less welcome in trans groups that want to make a strong statement that being transgender isn’t a mental illness. Lydia Brown uses the term “gendervague” to describe their experience of both:
Someone who is gendervague cannot separate their gender identity from their neurodivergence – being autistic doesn’t cause my gender identity, but it is inextricably related to how I understand and experience gender. Autistic people’s brains are fundamentally different from those of anyone who is assumed to be “normal” or “healthy.” For many (but certainly not all) autistic people, we can’t make heads or tails of either the widespread assumption that everyone fits neatly into categories of men and women or the nonsensical characteristics expected or assumed of womanhood and manhood.
Sabrina Whitenight has a similar experience:
I understand gender as it applies to others. The gender spectrum makes sense to me and I fully support those who are trans or nonbinary as well as those who are comfortable with the gender they were assigned. However, when it comes to my own gender, I struggle to conceptualise it. I know that when people refer to me as a woman it feels strange. I know that I’ve never felt like femininity fit me. I know that in my own head I don’t think of myself as a woman. But I also know that man doesn’t really fit either. I know that pronouns don’t really matter to me. I’m ok being referred to as he, she, or they. I know that I likely won’t ever actually change my body. But I don’t know what I am.
This makes a lot of sense to me; I don’t feel very comfortable in some female settings, but I feel the same about many male ones too. I basically tolerate being referred to as male, although I hate terms like dude and bro (I don’t get offended at people who call me that, I just recoil inside. I’d much rather be misgendered). It just seems very vague to me, in the same way that a lot of social patterns of behaviour do. Sabrina Whitenight also comments that her alexithymia means that it’s difficult to have a strong sense of identity or be clear on how you’re feeling at any point. It’s interesting though, the number of autistic people I’ve met online who don’t identify strongly with their assigned gender is significant – way over 50% from an admittedly fairly small sample size. It’s not that I asked them, it’s just that many seem to have a divergent enough idea of gender to comment on it.
I think I will now identify my gender as Tzeentch.
Though I think genderfluid deserves an animated gif.
Actually, I don’t like your two dimensions because I don’t see agender and genderfluid as opposed. If male/female is direction, agender vs. “hypergender” would be amplitude and genderfluid vs. “genderfixed” would be error bars along the spectrum. This would still encompass a lot of ideas on a single spectrum, but would obviously leave some people out (people who identify strongly as not male and not female would be grouped in with people who don’t feel they have any gender identity at all; people who feel a broad continuity of identities would be grouped in with people who feel distinctly male sometimes and distinctly female other times).
Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl has a description of the experiences of having hormone replacement that are validated across many people. The one that jumped out at me the most is that apparently testosterone makes you feel warmer. I’ve never heard that from a study about men/women, but we are all familiar with the debate about where the thermostat should be.
Yeah, the “because of” thing seems like someone trying really hard to put a box around gender and separate it from cognition, as if that makes any sense. Like one is prior to the other. I’m pretty sure (a phrase meaning perfectly certain) that sex hormones start affecting our development before cognition comes into the picture.
I’d been looking for a good word to talk about gender, and gendervague is it.
I note a very high proportion of people who don’t seem to get gender in a “normal” way when we talk about it on these boards, which is obviously a result of self-selection (both for the boards and for the topics).
This all seems so obvious once the idea has been presented. Most people seem to want to divide all but a few very obvious edge cases into two neat buckets: male and female. Obvious people who aren’t neurotypical find it much harder than people who are to see themselves as part of any neat two-bucket system (other than, possibly, neurotypical vs. not-neurotypical buckets). If you don’t feel like you fit in with people you aren’t going to feel like you fit in with people of type A or people of type B.
It does raise an interesting question about the relationship between gender and cognition. Some (most?) people really do experience a strong sense of being male or female.
Let’s say that part of human experience is something we could call masculinity and femininity. If we drew a graph we’d find that people who are biologically male skew masculine and people who are biologically female skew feminine, but I think we both agree it probably looks more like your weight/height chart than like the gamete production chart.
But then we have the interaction between masc-fem experience and society. Ultimately masc-fem is going to be far more simply than culture (since individuals in their entirety are simpler than culture), and it will be expressed from a sort of culturally determined menu of options. These menu options run really deep in our experience. People with autism are less likely to flinch or say “ow” when given a needle. For a long time doctors thought they were less sensitive to pain, but when people tried measuring physiological indicators of pain they found people with autism had stronger reactions. They just didn’t have the same behaviours to express pain. For any neurotypicals who are still reading, when you realize that flinching away from a needle is a cultural rather than a reflexive response, it gives you a sense of how deep this goes.
So my little girl wants Barbie toothpaste and a Barbie toothbrush because Barbie is a cultural mode of expressing femininity. I’m supportive because I want her to have a chance to explore femininity in a self-directed way.
You switch to an autistic little girl and she could be just as “feminine” but not see the connection between her internal experience and Barbie toothpaste (like the pain example, maybe she’s actually more “feminine”). When neurotypical people (who aren’t academically studying gender) talk about gender, they get the experience of having gender confused with the cultural menu to express gender (the same way people do with mental illness). Austistic people are less likely to make this “mistake”.
But without cultural modes of expression, it’s just this formless feeling inside of you (alexthymia, but instead of the “lex” party being limited to words, it becomes a metaphor for more general expression). I think people with autism end up suffering through a lot of difficult internal feelings because expressing them isn’t an option - whether because they are so unattuned to cultural modes that they actually don’t even know how, or whether because they have learned through experience that when they express themselves it doesn’t make things better and so they’ve shut down expressing in ways that do make sense to them.
Because of that you could have people actually feeling the same sensations that other people understand as gender dysphoria but not have a way of understanding that other than “I feel bad all the time” (if they can even put their finger on that).
I guess I’m constructing something that runs counter to the Simon Baron Cohen observation of “extreme male brain”. I don’t really mean to dismiss that there is a link between gender and autism, because I wouldn’t have any way of knowing that right now. For all I know that something that is masculinity/femininity and that something that is autism are highly related (or are even exactly the same thing).
Itself not a clean separation.
I should point out that gender and the social construct of gender are two totally different things. I don’t really understand the social constructs of masculinity and femininity, and what I do understand about these constructs seems silly to me. I think some people try too hard to emphasize whatever gender they are. However, I don’t feel anything like gender dysphoria.
The fact that we even discuss gender here shows that we’re more enlightened and introspective than most.
Alexithymia literally means the inability to put words to feelings.
In my case, it is mostly alexithymia. I know I feel something, but I’m not sure what it is or how it got there. I find it hard to control my emotions because I can’t even identify them, even when they are very strong. Not being attuned to cultural modes is also a factor, because sometimes I want to say something but am not sure how to say it. Of course, if I’m melting down I’m not going to question whether or not I am being socially appropriate, so that is purely alexithymia.
The “extreme male brain” thing is inaccurate, and many autistic people find it offensive. I stop short at saying it’s offensive, but definitely don’t think it’s accurate.
I think the cultural modes thing is at least as much for the person who is doing the expressing as it is for the people who the feeling is being expressed to. If cultural modes of expression were evolved over time to give the most accurate feedback to others, then you’d think the go-to mode of expression for anger would be saying, “I feel angry right now.”
So when my daughter gets that Barbie toothbrush, I think she is practicing to know what it is to be herself by utilizing a cultural mode that is set out for her to do so but that ultimately will probably not be part of who she is (serious adult Barbie collectors being few).
That’s what I meant when I said that if you don’t clue into cultural modes of expression you’ll probably end up having trouble knowing what your emotions are - that’s how people learn what emotions are. So I don’t think people are trying too hard to prove they are their gender (well, some of 'em) but instead they are doing things that make them feel like they are their gender. For a lot of people the action and the feeling aren’t separated by such a space - they regard that as the natural way to act when feeling that feeling (whether that feeling is “I’m a man” or “I’m sad”).
I think there is something to it insofar as I think it is very poorly expressed. If we’re talking about internal sense of gender, societal construct of gender, internal sense of masculinity and femininity and societal menu of options regarding expression of masculinity and femininity as four different things (and that’s just to simplify the issue), it would be, at the very least, unclear what “male” means.
In another discussion this was raised with BPD being presented as a opposite the “extreme female brain.” To me, if I think of these two statements as meaning, together:
- There is an axis of internal experience along which autism and the underlying organization that tends to give rise to BPD-like-behaviour fall on opposite ends
- The average location of men on this spectrum is closer to autism and further from BPD-like-behaviour than the average location of women is
Then I find that an interesting hypothesis as a person who has BPD and who dated a person with autism for 8 years. So basically I think there is something interesting about it, but my suspicion is that it is about as accurate as saying that tall people have “extreme male bodies” because men are taller.
