Feminist perspectives on transgendered people

That's a fair point, LRD - I don't know the answer. You could well be right that a hypothetical society might be possible where gender wasn't an important part of identity, though my hunch is that the biological business of hormones and urges and reproduction might militate against this. But I guess my own approach is more pragmatic, in that as a psychotherapist I have to work with the society we live in.

Milly - I hope you didn't mean your last response to come across as rude. But in any case it seems that I can't explain what I mean in terms that make sense to you, so we'll just have to accept that our perspectives don't seem to meet and leave it at that.

I think the problem here is that some people believe feelings are more important than physical reality. Which is definitely a postmodernist point of view.

Oh, ok. I'm sorry, I probably need to back out then. Ignore.

LRD, now I'm further confused.

I thought Manatee was saying core gender identity meant understanding that you had a vulva - i.e. awareness of your own genitals.

I thought she was saying gender role to mean pink and blue stuff.

No, sorry, I don't understand what you are talking about and I don't know why you are still referring to biological sex as gender. I don't see what continuously doing that adds to the debate, because it isn't part of either transactivism or feminism.

Perhaps another poster who does understand could summarise your main points.

This has moved on hugely since I've been out, but manatee may I ask something?

You mention children developing a 'core gender identity' at a certain age. My automatic reaction would be that this is exactly what you'd expect to happen in a society that recognizes gender as an important category. But I'm not conviced that, if we could experiment by placing children in a new society where gender wasn't an issue and instead we categorized children as 'pinks' and 'blues', we wouldn't talk about children developing a 'pink identity' at age two?

What I'm getting at is, it seems to me observing if and when children develop a sense of gender identity in human societies which (AFAIK) universally recognize the concept gender, is not really indicative of anything except that children develop identity in response to what they're told is important for identity. It doesn't seem to me to speak to the objective reality of gender as a concept at all.

Milly, I'm sorry that my posts don't seem clear to you.

As I said before, I suggested the idea that gender is a physical reality (sex), that this is reflected in individual embodied experience at a young age (what I called core gender identity) and then overlaid gradually with socially-constructed behaviours and expectations (gender role identity). That's the 'aware of own body' stuff, which I suggested starts to develop prior to (even if it's not, by the time we're adults, easily separable from) the 'pink for girls and blue for boys' type nonsense.

My proposal was that the gender role identity stuff that gets overlaid on the 'aware of own body' can be multiple, conflicting and complex for both men and women. Or in other words, someone could be aware of themselves as female-bodied but have a real love/hate relationship with the roles and norms and expectations that come with that.

This seemed, to me, a more nuanced way of looking at physical (observable) and experiential gender than the statement 'Male and female aren't identities, they are biological realities', which seemed to me to imply that 'male' and 'female' must necessarily be either an identity or a biological reality. My intention was simply to expand on the idea that it might be both, and to suggest some ways that this might be the case.

My personal experience of course doesn't prove anything, but I've gone through periods of feeling very male-identified and simultaneously very conflicted about that, whether on feminist grounds or simple 'this is nonsense, stop it' grounds. I've also gone through periods of feeling very invested in my identity as a woman (including a stint in an all-lesbian commune) but really resenting some of the stuff that seemed to come with being female-bodied. Sometimes I've felt both at the same time, which was a real headfuck. I've never questioned the fact that I'm physically female, but my gender identity has at times felt a lot more conflicted and complicated.

Though I don't expect you to agree with me, I hope I have now clarified what I meant.

Indeed, but it seems like surgery etc is treating symptoms rather than causes. I expect this is the right approach, I hope so.

Wholly: I agree that the media's probably not representative, for example this interesting post by Max Zachs, one of the guys on My Transsexual Summer, sheds some light on the direction the show was edited. maxwellzachs.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-my-transsexual-summer-isnt-as-good.html He says "What I don?t see is anything that is going to make people think or feel any differently about what gender is or how it limits us all in one way or another. ... I wanted it to show the complexity of our gender identities so that people could start to see that it doesn?t have to be one or the other, that it isn?t one or the other."

I don't think many trans people do feel like that though. Many consider their male bodies to be female. They don't all dislike their own bodies.

But imagine. Imagine you are trapped in a body that you are utterly utterly convinced is the wrong one with a total unshakeable conviction. What would create that? Trans isn't anything anyone would wish for.

Language is tres problematic. I imagine they write "feeling" because there isn't a way to articulate it?

Manatee, I think the confusion arises because you keep writing gender when referring to sex.

"I don't think biological sciences got it wrong, as such, but i think like with most things in science, the reality is much more complicated and nuanced than that straightforward distinction."

Well science has managed to discover and understand hugely complicated realities like genetics and cellular sex.

On the other hand, trans activists argue that sex is a "feeling".

One of those understandings of sex is un-nuanced, but I don't think it's the biological sciences.

Quite Hully. When I've seen it articulated in the media, it has been all about being "girly". Which is absurd to me, as I don't see pretty dresses and sparkly shit as being in any way fundamental to being female, or a lack of interest to being male.

Very happy to believe that is not truly representative, but have no idea how you can know yourself to be "in the wrong body" without it being all about gender expectations and styling.

I got that!

Sorry Hully, that was not to you, Xpost.

Yes, as I said earlier, I want to hear something about chemicals and hormones. They cannot be ignored in all this.

Yes, I am aware of my own body. What has that got to do with the more nuanced understanding of gender that you were referring to?

The difficulty is none of us know what it is like to feel that we are in "the wrong body."

Mine isn't much use, and I don't have much use for it, but I can't imagine what it must be like to feel utterly convinced that I should have a penis and testicles. Or vice versa.

Where do those feelings come from? That seems to me to be the nub.

Re your question earlier, thunderbolts - sorry - I missed it due to skipping in and out during an unspeakably annoying day at work. I couldn't really speculate on the felt experience of other species - I can at least inquire about the experience of my own species, as we share a language (however imperfect) but I don't speak any animal languages so don't really have any way of enquiring what it might be like for, say, a cat or a horse.

I'm still getting this nagging feeling that we're talking at cross purposes about this idea I floated of a 'core gender identity'. I'm definitely NOT talking about some essentialist idea of the attributes that come with a biological gender, but more about the 'tacit knowledge' that people have about themselves. The kind of 'implicit identity' I'm trying to describe is usually unspoken and largely unconscious, and comes about inductively and experientially, through inhabiting the world in a physical body.

Stuff like the shape and extent of our bodies, physical urges like hunger, thirst, tiredness or sexual arousal, subtle hormonal changes throughout the month or year, mood swings, proprioception - all the implicit knowledge we have about ourselves as embodied humans. The idea I wanted to float was that this is part of how we experience ourselves, fundamental to what we can experience (senses, sensitivities, etc), rarely reflected-on, and that at least some of that experience is gendered. This becomes more marked at puberty, with adult male or female hormones, but some part at least becomes marked at a pretty early age with the idea 'male' or 'female'.

And that the idea 'male' or 'female' becomes connected to aspects of embodied experience before we grasp any of the gender role stuff that goes along with 'male' or 'female', eg that one colour is 'for boys' and another 'for girls', and all that bollocks. I'm trying to describe that point where small children become aware that their genitals aren't the same shape as their opposite-sex parent, but don't realise yet that this will increasingly come to mean they have to behave in pre-determined ways that differ for girls and boys, in order to fit in with the expectations of those around them.

Milly - I certainly have an embodied sense of myself as female: I have breasts, I get PMT, I menstruate etc etc. Of course your experience is your own, and I don't dispute it, but I'm puzzled by your statement that you have no core gender identity. I'm thinking maybe we were at cross purposes, as you said in a subsequent post that you choose to spend time in all-woman groups partly because you have 'things physically in common with other women that are important to me'. Surely those 'things physically in common with other women' are approaching what I'm trying to describe here, as an embodied sense of yourself as female?

Marmite I also personally would like to be (and have been) inclusive of transgender women. On an individual level, I would be supportive of any friend or family member who felt the need to undergo surgery to make them feel happier in themselves .

But I respect that not all women share my views on inclusion, and there are valid reasons for that (e.g. making groups accessible to women with PTSD, or to women who will not associate with men for religious or cultural reasons).

Also, I do believe that a sex change is impossible. There are things about ourselves that we cannot really change, however much we'd like to. And I think it is wrong that the law has decided that being a woman is merely about identifying with gender traits.