Am I wrong with my views on transgender? Prepared to get flamed.

[MACaddict5]

I'll start by explaining that I have the utmost sympathy for those who are transitioning and who have had to transition as I can't even begin to imagine how truly difficult that journey would be.

I have often wondered what brings a person to that point of feeling that changing their physical anatomy will give them peace and allow them to be their true self.

I can imagine that growing up and being pigeon holed into wearing blue, playing with trucks, wearing "boys clothes" etc but feeling like you are more drawn to the "girl things". Feeling like society expects you to be a certain person just because you have male or female genitalia and feeling as though you're living a lie as a result of that.

Would it not be true to say that the physical anatomy is not necessarily the problem, but that it's how society has certain expectations of people based on whether they are male or female. That people from a young age feel that pressure to conform to certain gender roles and so, when they no longer want to live this lie, they feel the need to transition. Why does being physically male or female have to dictate anything about our lives? It strikes me that the problem is societies expectations of people based on their sex, rather than that individuals anatomy being "wrong" that is the problem.

I have nothing but compassion and love for those dealing with these issues. I just wish their was a way that we could become a society where we accept everyone as individuals rather and I wonder if I society like that would result in less people feeling the need to have such drastic surgery which must be such a difficult process.

I have suffered with body dysmorphic disorder since I was about 13. Been in therapy for over 20 years for it (was in the priory at 19 for a year) and sometimes have to take medication when it gets bad (to the point where sometimes I'm standing in front of the mirror all day checking my face)

It sounds in a similar vein to me. Is there any research into this?

Vestal,,one of the things I have observed about the trans activists and the fetishists who hang out on Reddit is that it's not so much that they feel discomfort in the male role, more that the feminine role is very arousing and appealing to them. You can see that in transwomen who work Monday to Friday in masculine clothes then adopt highly sexualized feminine attire when out at the weekend. Their working clothes don't seem to bother them so much, they reserve their feminine persona for leisure time. It's very different from the transsexuals, who hate their sexed bodies above all things.

Vestal: Some are simply girls who don't want to be treated as subhuman fucktoilets.

What on earth do you mean?? Am sure that no woman, lesbian or straight, wants to be treated like that...

a psychological disorder in which a person becomes obsessed with imaginary defects in their appearance. I know very little about this but what triggered it? Thetart.

Prawn would you call them a transvestite then?

I believe it to be a serious mental illness and should be treated as such. I don't believe surgery is the answer what so ever.

We are constantly telling our young (and ourselves!) to accept their bodies and that others should accept them the way they are... yes, that's simplistic, but we really should. We all struggle with perceived ‘imperfections’ about ourselves. Vegansnake commented earlier that a friend feels like a man inside - perhaps she doesn't feel the way she ‘believes’ the stereotypical 'women' feels like but what's wrong with that? And I'm honestly not being patronising when I say that she really wouldn't know how it feels to be a man inside – how could she? An individual shouldn't feel they need to confirm to society's perceptions. Heterosexual, bisexual, gay, transgender - we're just creating new stereotypes in which to pigeonhole people. And we'll keep doing so until people genuinely accept people for what and who they REALLY are.

It's an interesting discussion about the difference between transgender and transsexual.
This would fit much better my idea of transsexual/transgender and the reality of it.
I'm still :(:( at the agenda some people have around this issue that, I'm sure, is making things much much harder for a lot of people (gay, lesbian, non binairy and transgender)

londonsburning I still don't know after all these years.

One of my therapists thought I was competing with my brother, He Was the good looking one, child model, earnt parents lots of money. I'm a plain Jane, not academically bright, introverted (or perhaps a defence mechanism) have a very low self esteem and no confidence. But it could have been a lot of things.

So well put Debcam. I'm in complete agreement.

I have a DD who, as a baby, really suited blues, reds etc and was very very rarely dressed in pink. She is now never out of pink, everything has to be pink. She perfectly fits that stereotype of what is expected of girls her age. When I was younger, I was always the "tom boy" and was called that on countless occasions. I now am in my 20s and love nothing more than putting on some makeup and a nice dress. I have another DD who I often dress in pink as she really suits it. I'd say it's her best colour. When she starts to show a preference for certain things/colours, I'll let her be my guide. And if I've learned anything from my own childhood, it's that things can change so much. I would have had a melt down if my mum even dared put me in a dress and I remember crying when I was given a doll as a present. I am now what many people would describe as being quite feminine (although I'd rather not define myself by these stereotypes). Things can change, people can change. We need to stop making people feel like they have to choose a category to put themselves into.

My dad is a transvestite he is man he used to got to work as a man and weekends he wants to feel more feminine. He's retired now so he is probably dressing a lot more now and he wears the wig, red nail varnish the works.

My dad wants to feel more feminine so he dresses according to how he wants to feel and look, he knows he's not a woman.

People can't change who they are they are who they are man or woman. They can change their physical appearance but they will never be able to change who they biologically are. You can have bits removed or added that's surgery making it happen, It doesn't automatically make you male or female. The person who is going through the surgery and changing who they are from male to female their feeling of what a woman is and behaves is their own interpretation.

Know one is ever going to tell a man or woman you are fine just the way you are inside and out. There's to much money involved to say that. People need to love themselves because once the surgeon has done what he/she has to do you can't return back.

Londons I agree. If I was to have all they surgery I think I need to make me look normal I'd need to win the lottery first.

What on earth do you mean?? Am sure that no woman, lesbian or straight, wants to be treated like that...

Exactly. Some women become feminists, some go into heavy denial about the state of the world, and some, well, some try to identify out of oppression.

I am not sure whether transidentity is preferable to denial - one can get out of denial, but after years of testosterone, there is no way back to a healthy body.

I think the problem lies in assuming that there is some kind of opposition between two things: the idea that socially constructed gender roles are problematic and the idea that some people need to change their anatomy in order to feel whole in some way. To oppose those things transforms anatomical change into some kind of complicity with the patriarchal order, when in fact it is usually anything but.

I'd agree that there's no opposition between those two ideas. You can believe yourself to be a woman born in a man's body (or vice versa) and also believe that there's nothing inherently male or female about patterns of behaviour. The two TS people I know bear that out - both MTF, both scientists, one a mountaineer and the other a rugby player. IDK how they think about it but I imagine it as being something like phantom limb syndrome, where it just feels like something is off. I do wonder how they could be sure enough that surgery would help that they would be willing to undergo it - how they could know that surgery was going to make them feel like a woman, and even what that feeling would be - but both of them seem pretty happy, so whatever it was it apparently worked.

I do have trouble to see how transgender can be construed as anything other than a challenge to the idea that gender is socially constructed, though. If you're content with your genitals, and you support the idea that boys can wear pink and girls can pay football - what's left to define you as a man or woman? A third thing? You were born a bloke and you want to keep your willy but you just sort of feel, inherently, that you are a woman? And I'm like WTF is that, because I'm a woman, and I don't feel like an anything, so how can you feel like me? But then I'll get told it's transphobic of me to privilege my opinion of what female is over that of a transgender woman, just because I'm xx.
And then for me is the point where it all goes seriously antifeminist. Because this is a putsch. The word "woman", the definition is being taken away from xx people and being given to whoever wants it. But we bloody well fought for our rights under the banner of "woman", and some of those rights (such as safe spaces) don't make any sense when whoever wants to can define themselves as being a woman.

toomuch - that's a really thoughtful post. I think it's probably quite different for different people, so I don't want to comment on individual experience, not having anything personal to share on this score!

I would perhaps suggest that, at a conceptual level, there might be a difference between the ideas of embodied experience as something surgically transferable between the sexes and the idea of gender as something biologically essential. I might want to experience the world in a certain embodied kind of way - and that might be to 'feel' that embodiment physically, or it could be something more social, like 'passing' - without that necessarily entailing any belief that gender is something essential that inheres in chromosomes or possession of certain genitals (in fact, it would seem to me to tend towards a negation of that biologism, though I'm sure this is different for different people).

Behind this is another assumption: that simply saying that gender is socially constructed does not undo the historicity of that construction. It's not a magic Wizard of Oz reveal that creates society anew, on a new foundation. It is not revolution itself. Practices, institutions, people, customs and traditions all have a kind of temporal continuity that means that, even as the idea of women as equal subjects gains ground, the actual achievement of that equality lags behind.

I don't see the alliance under the banner of "woman" in quite the same way as you do. I'd point to the vocal objections that black feminists have made to their elision within white feminist traditions, or working class women in middle class feminism, or gay women in heterosexually-dominated debates. Feminism has always been a kind of loose bag of different movements, and has always had to negotiate different voices and experiences within that - sadly, non-white, non-middle-class, non-hetero women have often had to fight for their corner. There's capitalist feminism and anti-capitalist feminism too. I don't believe there has never been a one single banner of "woman" in this fight. What we have is a range of experiences of gender-based oppression, that work slightly different for different identities. And I think trans women can contribute to enriching that debate, being some of the most gender-oppressed people of all right now.

The word "woman", the definition is being taken away from xx people and being given to whoever wants it.

Yes - I agree with this. And it's why I have such a big fucking problem with Bruce Jenner. Because he plays at being a woman. He put on a dress and grows his hair and says 'Call me Caitlin', but then he puts his male clothes back on and goes to play golf at his all-male club, and then he gets given an award for Woman of the fucking Year! It's insulting and it makes me very, very angry. He will never be a woman or know what it is to be a woman or grow up as a woman or have periods or be afraid of rape or unwanted pregnancy. He is playing at being a woman and all the right-on dickheads in the media are saluting him for it. And quite honestly it makes me think all this trans stuff is 99% bullshit.

"Stereotyping these days tends to be extreme."
That's my belief too. I was a child in the 1960's and 70's. I don't think, in all these years, I ever possessed any pink clothing. I look back at photos - red, navy, brown, cream, orange, grey; never pink. I walk into a shop selling girl's clothing these days, it's all pink, purple, fuschia. Pictures of unicorns and fairies. WTF? My son was born 1998, buying clothes for him was similarly stereotyped. Navy, khaki, pictures of footballs, skateboards and skulls.

And that's just clothes.

That constant drip drip drip from all sides, amplified by the ever-present bullying social media, feeding people's insecurities and fears.

People's bodies are not wrong (except for those very few with body dysmorphia). But the society that those bodies live in and with - it is seriously fucked up.

"Know one is ever going to tell a man or woman you are fine just the way you are inside and out. There's to much money involved to say that."
And I find that very scary Londonsburningahhhh. There is money to be made in persuading people that all their problems will magically disappear just as soon as they trans, buy these puberty blockers, buy these hormones, buy this surgery ... it's an onslaught to their senses.

Like you OP I didn't present as feminine as a child. I lived in jeans and sweat shirts and got my first pixie cut at 6. I played with lego and had a train set. I wanted to be a doctor. No one cared or said I should be a boy instead. I'm now a fairly feminine ciswoman.

25 years on and my DS started to worry at age 6 that he might be a girl. He likes girly things like dolls and cooking. He can also build just about anything out of lego.

I kept reassuring him in age appropriate terms that he was fine to like whatever he wanted to. He's 10 now and a few months back we had a conversation about puberty and he was perfectly happy talking about becoming a man.

He doesn't have any dysphoria. He was simply totally confused about what he's being told about gender. I told him he can like whatever he wants to and as long as he feels comfortable in his body that's all that matters. After all, his female friends who play football don't all think they're boys do they? He agreed not and quite insightfully said that it is still easier and acceptable for girls to like boyish things but there's still a problem when boys like stereotypical girly things.

He now hates stereotypes and is big on gender equality. He wants to be a chef now he knows cooking isn't 'just for girls' and he's pretty popular being the only boy in his cookery club.

He's also pretty insistent he likes girls, but I just say to him I don't care whether he likes girls, boys or aliens as long as he's happy.

I think we've broadened things too much and gender stereotyping is on the rise because of it. This is leading to kids becoming confused and parents trying to do their best are potentially making big decisions that could be harmful.

I have FtM friends, MtF friends, FtGN friends and LGB friends. I support each one on an individual basis and as long as they are happy I am happy. I won't question their decisions or how far they want to go with transitioning, they're doing what they need to be happy in themselves.

Talking about stereotyping, did everyone see I am Lily a short video about a 4 year old transgender child that was shown at a primary school? One of the mums started a thread about it. It was horrifying to see how stereotypes are used to claim the poor kid needs a sex change.

I don't see the alliance under the banner of "woman" in quite the same way as you do. I'd point to the vocal objections that black feminists have made to their elision within white feminist traditions, or working class women in middle class feminism, or gay women in heterosexually-dominated debates. Feminism has always been a kind of loose bag of different movements, and has always had to negotiate different voices and experiences within that - sadly, non-white, non-middle-class, non-hetero women have often had to fight for their corner. There's capitalist feminism and anti-capitalist feminism too. I don't believe there has never been a one single banner of "woman" in this fight. What we have is a range of experiences of gender-based oppression, that work slightly different for different identities. And I think trans women can contribute to enriching that debate, being some of the most gender-oppressed people of all right now.

Black women
Working class women
Lesbian women
Capitalist women
Anti-capitalist women
Transwomen

One of these things is not like the others

being some of the most gender-oppressed people of all right now

What does that even mean?