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I think I am still working out the why's of it all, grant, and anyhow if I were to really talk about it in any depth I'd end up posting a mammoth book. At any rate, I'm currently doing a zine about all this, so if anyone wants a copy when I finish it they're welcome.
But in some kind of nutshell... I've known for a long time that normative ideas about what a woman is don't apply to me. I thought that this was okay, and for a while I had decided that gender was 'cultural' or 'social', not something which mattered to me in terms of a different embodiment or visilibility. So I figured that being a dyke, looking kind of like a tomboy most of the time, taking part in the odd drag king adventure and exploring 'masculinity' in ways which involved psychical identifications were pretty much the extent of id'ing as masculine. BDSM has been a big part of this. It's complicated, because actually sometimes I like wearing skirts and being femme, and visually I don't pass as a man at all unless I'm dragged up to the nines. But at the same time, all the femme gear I wear in that headspace makes me feel like a drag queen, ie it doesn't feel natural at all.
I've been playing with this stuff for a while, and at various stages (like about a year ago, and a couple of months ago) I get shocked by the realisation that actually, being in a far more masculine *body* would not only feel way more comfortable, but I've been fantasising about it for, oh, about four or five years? I don't know how I know that I'd feel more comfortable; I just do. And it's paying off: f'rinstance, at the moment I'm experimenting with strapping my tits down and having a pretty flat chest in public, at work, for going out, on the street. It feels good. It also feels sexy. And it feels right enough that maybe I would like to be flat-chested permanently. There are other issues, body image issues about feeling too round and curvy, which I had always discounted as being to do with feminist body image issues; not being able to 'let go' and 'love my body the way it is'. I am finding that actually I don't much care about how much I weigh, but I'd really like to have a body which doesn't immediately scream 'she'. And I'm doing something about it now.
quote:Originally posted by Ganesh v4.2:
One of the theories I've heard recently concerned the differing motivations for individuals choosing to undergo male-to-female and female-to-male transformation. Broadly speaking, it was postulated that the male-to-female's motivations are individual ones, firmly rooted in personal identity - whereas female-to-males were also motivated by a sense of their place within a specific subculture or social grouping (I guess they're talking about the Del Grace and Pat Califia stuff here).
I agree with Ria: agreeing that both kinds of motivations have influenced me is to simplify in the extreme. I am definitely influenced by the broader visibility of drag kinging and ftm's and general female-embodied masculine genderfuck culture. Sure. But it has as much to do with my personal feelings about my body and my gender identity as participation in a genderqueer community; and actually at the moment I'm really not very involved in that community, which makes me feel like my motivations are probably as strong and clear as they're gonna get. Lots of claims have been made in the US that the number of dykes who transition is evidence of an 'ftm fad' -- which I think the above delineation strays towards a little too much for my liking. Also, contestation about who is a 'proper' candidate for transitioning is rife, both in medical institutions and within trans communities. I think I've already made myself clear about how I feel about that in a previous thread: I think anyone's motivation for wanting to transition (and to whatever stage) should be regarded as valiud and healthy, and supported. And, like Ria, I look forward to the day when there is actually a properly visible subculture you can hear about on the news and see in the media, 'cause no matter what stories you've heard, transfolk are hard to find. Especially when you need their help.
Does this all make sense?
Persephone wrote:
"Is it totally outmoded to align sex with biology (and the terms man/woman) and gender with sociology (and the terms male/female), even keeping in mind that all words explode at some point?"
It it relevant? I mean, to me the division between sex and gender has gone far beyond two mutually-exclusive categories anyhow. Even thinking of sex and gender along a kind of continuum of masculinity or femininity is pretty unrepresentative, for me. Words do have an unwieldy habit of exploding, little bastards. |
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