One of memes the ideology of transgender has foisted upon women and men born with transsexualism is the concept that the word “Transsexual” is bad because it has the root word “sex” in it.
What is the problem with the word sex?
Why do the words male and female seem almost taboo in the discourse regarding both transgender and transsexual?
Why are discussions regarding sex automatically considered “problematic”?
When I had my operation in the early 1970s we called the surgery a “sex-change operation”. Why do we need dozens of variations of terms that obscure what sex reassignment surgery does?
Isn’t the invention of all these euphemisms a ceding of agency to the forces of neo-puritanism represented by conservative politics in partnership with fundamentalist religions?
Somehow this does not seem very liberating.
When I hear something some one use a phrase like “gender confirmation surgery” a couple of things cross my mind. After I get beyond the “WTF?” phase, Tinkerbell, my slightly twisted guardian fairy, who bears a startling resemblance to Amanda Fucking Palmer, causes a snotty question to form, “Wouldn’t it have been a lot cheaper to get a visible tattoo saying, ‘I ♥ Dresses and High-Heels’?”
Gender Confirmation Surgery, the whole verbal construct causes a pounding post-modern headache.
But back to the point of this post.
The right wing fundamentalists who hate us do not hate us because the word sex is the root word of transsexual. Do you really think they like transgender any better?
No! To quote our former leader, the idiot from Midland, “They hate us for our freedom.”
If we give in that means the terrorists will win.
Oh wait, I got side tracked…
Actually there is a more sinister reason why “transsexual” and any discussion that involves “sex” rather than gender has been banished from what passes for discourse in the worlds of Transgender Inc. and the Transgender Borg Collective.
Think about it… It’s important along with the constantly shifting requirements for who is actually a woman. The ones that set impossible requirements for the post-SRS women, the ones that say having a vagina doesn’t make you a woman be cause you aren’t able to have children etc. At the same time all that genitally intact, transgender people have to do is claim “identity.”
How many time have you heard the argument, “My genitals do not matter. No one besides my partner and myself ever see them. They are my private business. You are just a “genital surgery essentialist.”
The whole argument about it not being about sex may well be valid for transgender people.
But when post-SRS women make that same claim I suspect something else is at work. Having bought the propaganda is one possible reason, but another is sexphobia. Sex is about more than the sex act and transsexuality isn’t really about gender.
If it were we could have lived as transgender and put that money into buying a house or a retirement program. That we didn’t and instead put so much effort and money as well as physical pain ( at least for some of us) suggest that maybe it was about something other than gender.
I can sort of understand when a transgender person tells me they aren’t aware of those parts of their body. Or even that those parts aren’t part of their love-making. I can understand because I was there once upon a time.
But a major reason for me getting surgery was to end the alienation from my body, the having to pretend I didn’t have male sex parts between my legs.
So for me transsexualism wasn’t so much about gender, which I view as a matter of femininity or masculinity as it was about being female bodied.
I knew transgender women who were far more into femininity than I was. I was kind of a tomboy, more fascinated with cameras and making art than I was with the fine points of fashion and make-up.
I know quite a few post-transsexual women who are that way, although many are more into being femme than I am.
In the past I have been rebuked for referring to my pussy by the c-word instead of the v-word, which seems rather strange since men have more names for their dicks than the Inuits have words for snow.
Over my life time I’ve had sex with more than my share of partners of all the different possible sexes. If Susie Bright started passing out Sexpert Awards I’d be a candidate even though now I am old and that sort of adventuresome level of lust has waned and I am more than happily monogamously partnered.
Still denying wanting the ability to have sex as a woman being even a partial motivation for SRS along with feeling at home in your body seems odd to me.
Even leaving the having sex part aside. Being whole when you touch yourself or pee. When you bathe. All that is about sex not gender.
Now I hinted at something earlier when I mentioned the impossible to obtain requirements transgender folks place on post-SRS women, the same something that is a subtext in the “genitalia surgery essentialist” slur.
Transgender people want the whole focus to be on gender. They need to be linked with those of us who had SRS and to have us go along with the meme of it being all about gender as well.
Because transgender claims of womanhood are based upon “gender” while post-transsexual women have their womanhood written on their bodies.
Transgender women do not have a response to the “Oh Yeah… You’re just as much a woman as I am, let’s pull down our pants and see!”
When transsexuals let transgenders drive the discourse using the hegemonic tool of gender as signifier instead of sex as signifier then we become transgender people with inverted penises.
When post-transsexual women embrace the transgender label because “sex is dirty” they are working against their own self interests.
That isn’t really necessary because the proclaimed political goals do not require every one to be the same. Working together on the shared political goals only requires working towards political goals all parties involved in see as desirable goals.
06/19/2011 at 1:07 am
For some strange reason I was thinking about the terms “transsexual” and “transgender” earlier today, so your commentary brought this back to mind for me. Some confusion, I think, comes from people using gender and sex interchangeably, while others see the word sex to refer to sexual activity, and therefore, want to avoid it. My Michigan birth certificate, for example, uses the word gender to refer to male or female, whereas I’d prefer them to use sex, as the determination at birth is made on the basis of penis / no penis corresponding to boy / girl, respectively. If I assume, however, that sex refers to the physical body characteristics of male versus female, while gender refers to brain sexual identity, the conclusions I reach are as follows: Trans as a word prefix refers to being crossed, and therefore, transgender means to cross gender, but then says nothing about crossing sex (i.e. physical characteristics, such as having a penis/vagina), while transsexual means to cross sex, meaning to physical change one’s body. In the case of the transsexual, the persons gender (which I’m taking to mean brain sex or sexual identity) doesn’t change. In fact, most medical research I’ve read suggests that brain sex is fixed pre-natally and doesn’t change. Therefore, application of the term transgender to a transsexual doesn’t really fit, as the transsexual’s gender doesn’t change. Instead, they are distressed by having a body inconsistent with their brain, and therefore, take steps to alter their body’s physical sexual characteristics to bring them in line with their brain. The term transgender would imply that one is changing their gender (sexual identity) rather than their physical body. Of course, this all boils down to how one uses these terms. When one uses the term gender, are they wanting it to mean brain sexual identity, sexual role/behavior/appearance (attire), for physical sex? When one uses the word sex, do they mean one’s physical male/female characteristics or the act of having sex? Personally, I don’t wish to diagnose anyone else or claim to be superior to anyone else, because I’m not. I can only describe who I am and why I’ve done what I’ve done with my life. My brain is and always was wired as a female. This is who I always saw myself as, and as I began transitioning, I found my world finally right-side-up and where I fit in. Having a male body was very distressing to me, to the point of wanting to take my own life. I could not and cannot imagine being female and having a penis. When I obtained SRS (GRS or whatever one wants to call it) I absolutely didn’t miss my penis. Why would I? I see and saw myself as female, so I’m supposed to have a vagina, not a penis, so surgery was about making me whole/complete. I also once had cancer, and so I had the tumor removed. It’s the same to me. I had a defect, fixed it and moved on. So, I see myself no longer as transsexual and I see myself as having cancer. I’m honest with others in regards to the fact I had cancer and was a transsexual, but these are part of my past and not my present. Saying this, I would think, has nothing to do with how someone else should feel or is capable of feeling. What I found necessary to do does not imply that everyone has to do what I did. I’m not anyone’s doctor, priest or therapist. If someone finds themself on the same road as me, I will try to help them. If someone is on a different path, I’ll try to be sympathetic, but I can’t always say I understand or relate to their situation, because often I don’t. Do I think everyone should be able to work, have housing, pee in peace, etc., absolutely. I don’t have to understand or agree with everyone to conclude that everyone deserves to be treated with respect. Differences between various people and groups are real and are actually good, I think, and shouldn’t be glossed over or denied in some attempt to be superior or out of fear that if real differences are acknowledged, it will make one side or the other feel inferior. Sorry, but it’s late, and I’m rambling on a bit, so I’ll shut up now.
06/19/2011 at 1:51 pm
Your guardian fairy rocks! So do you. I wish this kind of clarity would be read far and wide. TS-Si posted a link. I will too, even though my blog doesn’t have that much readership.
06/19/2011 at 7:20 pm
http://ben-girl-notesfromthetside.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-change-sex-not-gender.html This is another well written essay on the same subject.
Suzan when you leave out the left wing politics you make a whole lot of sense and good solid arguments on this subject.
06/19/2011 at 9:32 pm
Well much of what you call left wing politics is simply covering economics issues and the right wing, a group that does not act in the best interests of ordinary working people. Much of my material is sourced from places like the New York Times and The Guardian UK.
But hey I’m an old hippie dyke with working class Union family roots.
06/19/2011 at 11:58 pm
Suzan:
> When I hear something some one use a phrase like “gender
> confirmation surgery” a couple of things cross my mind. After I
> get beyond the “WTF?” phase, Tinkerbell, my slightly twisted
> guardian fairy, who bears a startling resemblance to Amanda
> Fucking Palmer, causes a snotty question to form, “Wouldn’t it
> have been a lot cheaper to get a visible tattoo saying, ‘I ♥
> Dresses and High-Heels’?”
Love that!
The self-appoointed Trans Media Watch in the UK seek to advise the media that “sex-change” is a hate term. It cannot be long before they try the same with sex-reassignment.
> So for me transsexualism wasn’t so much about gender, which I
> view as a matter of femininity or masculinity as it was about
> being female bodied.
I suspect this is very much the core of the difference between urgent, early transitioners and others. The Dutch gender team has now published that the single difference between the children to persist and transition, and those who change their minds, is the demand for the body of the other sex.
For me, with clear recall of infancy, I know that my conscious need to grow up to be a woman started with knowing I must not have the attributes of a man’s body – be big, hairy, gruff, etc.. I remember the realisation, before I was 3. My identity with women followed straight on from that, in the weeks before I asked my mother to ask doctors if they had things they could do about that, which I figured they might. When I saw women did not have between their legs what was between mine, and what had always felt alien, it became dangerously urgent to be rid of it. My terror of puberty, and seeking of hormones, was about the body. At 11, out of the blue, my brain fed me imagination of sex as a woman, and suddenly I wanted more, and only that, very much. So it was very much about sex, in every sense, for me, and I hugely resent such needs being erased. But I have no problems with, and will always support different needs related to gender.
Unfortunately the idea of suppressing “transsexual” because it has that three-letter word in the middle, panders to not only prudes, but also to those bigots who think sex is only for heterosexuals, and maybe only married heterosexuals. And thus it panders to those who would deny sex-reassignment surgery too. Making puberty only available to those over 16, and SRS only available to those over 18, or 21, or only those with significant money, is no different to those who demand the unmarried be celibate, or unmarried mothers give up their child, or a higher age of consent for gay men, or celibacy for homosexuals, and follows from imposing the use of “transgender”.
> I knew transgender women who were far more into femininity than
> I was. I was kind of a tomboy, more fascinated with cameras
> and making art than I was with the fine points of fashion and
> make-up.
>
> I know quite a few post-transsexual women who are that way,
> although many are more into being femme than I am.
I’m similar. It might run in families though, since my mother was like that, whilst still feminine (and beautiful), and all the women in my family seem to be so. Also not men-mad; and that is not only known to run in families, but actually to be genetic. Women come in many varieties.
06/20/2011 at 1:40 am
This whole thing about sex is a distraction. It is about erasure of an entire group in society to benefit some puritans, who in secret engage in sexual activities that most of us can not even imagine. The transgenders are liars and hypocrites.
As for those who get uncomfortable with the word sex itself. All I can say to that is clitoris, vagina, breasts, penis, testicles, ovaries, sexual intercourse, oral sex and anything else that anyone cares to add, that will offend a puritan.
People need to get it into there heads that gender is a social construct and sex is between your legs. To get a penis rearranged into a vagina is changing sex, not gender.