Oh, this will be a long one. Feel free to skip it.
2. Another is gender assignment, which is what you're labeled at birth based on cues like apparent genital configuration.
A.k.a. 'sex', right? Give or take, original or reproduction.
Not according to my way of thinking about this. I deliberately avoided talking about sex, because my own thoughts are not well formulated about this complex entity, but I think it's also made up of several parts, such as chromosomal sex, genital sex, perhaps hormonal sex, perhaps brain sex, who really knows at this point— but these things are also not strictly binary, although like gender most people fall into one of the two commonly-accepted categories.
Gender assignment is something that gets done to you on the basis of what people can tell or guess about your sex when you're born. It's still social. But people assume that gender assignment is sex, and that sex is wholly biological and not social at all.
4. Then there's gender identity, which has to do with one's internal experiences and (for some) choices about gender.
This is what I don't really get.
You're not alone. I really can't explain it. I know my internal identity has shifted over time— when I was a young child I tried to shave my face, but I cut myself, and my mother had to explain to me that I was a girl and was going to grow up to be a woman (haha, little did she know) and that was something different from Daddy, etc. And unlike many people who have more solid transgender identities, I accepted this completely. I had total trust in my parents at that point, I guess. I think I must have decided that being a girl didn't mean anything, because for a long time I thought and acted as if gender did not exist for me. And it wasn't really until I was an adult, having intimate relationships, that that position became untenable. I can't explain what it felt like for that to happen, because a lot of it has to do with dissociation, so my feelings were as unknown to me as they are unknowable to you.
I think that our internal identities are also complex. Not all people feel like they have them, and that's okay. I feel as if I have something internal which tells me that whatever I am, it's not a woman. I think this was not a choice that I made, although it certainly must be shaped in some measure by a lot of small choices I made. It must have a lot to do with the kinds of characteristics I see myself having or wanting and how I gender those. For instance, I would find it intolerable to play the role of a femme woman, but I find it liberating to play the role of an effeminate man. I know that my ideas about what makes a person a man are cobbled together out of characteristics I saw in my father and mother— in itself a complex proposition because I always felt very proud that my parents did not adhere to standard gender roles, and so many of the qualities I saw as desirable for my mother were traditionally coded as masculine qualities. I'm sure all of these things contribute to my sense that I feel more at ease being treated as male for reasons which are deep in my personality and not easily separated out from whatever you might talk about as "core identity" if such a thing exists.
Now, I want to address a problem with your question "Just so I'm clear, can you *identify* as female without *really being* female?" If we weren't talking about gender, the answer would have to be yes, absolutely. For instance, a person could perhaps identify as a rock, but because the definition of a rock has nothing to do with what a rock feels like, or how a rock chooses to be, an identity of rockness goes no way towards fulfilling the definition of rockness. On the other end of the scale, a white person raised by a white family may identify as "an Indian" (indeed, many do; they belong to the Pretendian tribe) and not really be Native American. I've been trying to formulate why, and I'm not having a lot of confidence doing it. The complex entities that we abbreviate "race" and "culture" are different from those we call "gender" and "sex." I don't think anyone fully understands how much each of the different aspects of "gender" contributes to its "realness," i.e. is gender assignment 40% of gender, gender role 10%, and gender identity 20%? Is this different for different people? In addition, "real" doesn't have a very clear or useful meaning when we're talking about gender. But to me it seems there is something more individual about gender than there is about race or culture. I'm not saying that gender is entirely individualistic, though. I think it just tends to be negotiated in different ways. I usually think of gender being negotiated between two people, whether strangers in a shop or lovers making love, while race and culture are more integrally part of an ongoing historical dialogue. (Admittedly this perception on my part is probably an effect of my perception of gender as more individual, not a cause.)
I still can't clearly tell you why I think this. But I think that gender requires trusting a person's identity, and their motivation for expressing an identity, whereas race almost demands that we question that, especially when a person's race privileges them in certain ways. I think, however, that a person cannot, or perhaps ought not, "identify" in a vacuum. It would amaze me to hear that someone identified as something they had never had any exposure to, for instance—how would they know? I like pangolins, but I can't imagine identifying as one—I've never seen one up close, let alone come to understand its worldview. If I was not creating some kind of successful male role in society for myself, my identity as male might still be very real, but it would not be socially relevant. So "real" I think is not a useful concept for us right now.
This also relates back to elane's feeling that she is not a "good example" of a transsexual and therefore shouldn't share her experience. I think that's hogwash, elane, and I hope you don't mind me saying so. Much of my angst around deciding whether or not I could transition had to do with the fact that on first inspection, I couldn't find any "real transsexuals" whose experiences matched mine. I assumed I couldn't "really" be trans, and so not only should I not transition, I shouldn't even identify as trans. I see it as vital, therefore, that trans people who don't fit the "standard narrative" share our stories, because we're just as much "really trans" as a "I knew at three years old and have never been anything different" "primary" transsexual person.
I think my usual assertion that everyone has a right to choose how they identify in gender terms is probably like those rights. I think it would be a terrifying thing to take away from someone and lodge that power of definition somewhere else (one writer, I can't remember who, calls it a 'powerful seizure' to deny it). But I don't know what it guarantees
I agree, Ex, and I'm having similar trouble articulating what privileges the right to self-define should confer. I would like to think that equal access to safe, identity-consistent public restrooms would be in there somewhere. Also the right not to be harassed, or face job or housing discrimination. I would think that deliberate use of the wrong name and pronouns, after a person's choices have been made known to one, would qualify as a kind of harassment.
not to invalidate other people's experiences, but i can see there being social pressure , whether cosncious or unconscious, for transgendered people to describe their experiences as arising from circumstances they can't help, because expressing it as a choice somehow makes it less valid in the estimations of the larger world.
I've definitely felt this, and unfortunately there are real consequences to that decreased validity, in terms of the fact that this is a time when we are pushing for legislation to be passed that will protect us. Still, I know two women who did identify as trans under the "I've always" model, and they later turned out, entirely unbeknownst to them until their adulthood, to have biological circumstances which IMO must have contributed to those feelings. So I think we cannot rule out biological influences. However, I hesitate to ascribe them to all "true transsexuals," because that validates some people's identities while invalidating others, and I can't see a good reason to countenance that. |
