I am still very early in this whole process, and there is still a lot of self doubt, so I am reading a lot of literature on “Am I trans” and dysphoria.
One concept that people often like to propose in these ressources is the button that makes you the opposite gender, and, crucially, also makes everyone else believe that you have been that way forever.
I don’t really like this, because my time as a boy/man is part of who I am. I would not be me without it, and despite all of the problems I had and have due to my gender, it is still part of who I am. I fought through all of this and worked to find out who I want to be by myself. I wouldn’t wanna be cis, and I also don’t want to cease being the me born out of this struggle.
(I’m not trans myself so I have an outside perspective)
I remember watching a video that basically said that gender essentialism (“born trans”) is something you tell conservatives to accept you. The radical stance on the other side is “gender isn’t something you are but something you do” if that makes sense. So in your case, you did a lot of male and now you want to do female. There is nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to say that your former life was a lie nor that it defines what you are.
This isn’t against people who say they felt it since they were little. So they did the other gender without showing.
I hope that makes sense. It’s my outside perspective and I’m willing to learn. I can look up the video if you ask me to.
Edit: I took the time to rewatch the video and it is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4r0CoXsGmk
This isn’t “radical”, it’s literally just an attempt to uphold the status quo by reinforcing gender norms as fixed things.
What is a gay femboy doing? Is he doing the female gender? In all ways in every aspect of his life he is behaving withing feminine norms, and having sex with men. All aspects of his behaviour, of his everyday life, are indistinguishable to others as the same actions that a transwoman might perform.
Is he doing female gender? No he’s not. He’s just being outside of typical social norms.
Gender is not defined by behaviour.
A woman can be a bodybuilder, that dresses masc, that behaves masc, and still be a woman. She’s not “being a man”.
The premise of gender being defined by behaviour is just a conservative attempt to reinforce social norms that they wish to uphold because they’re trying to preserve patriarchy and various other social pillars they view as essential to preserving the existing hierarchies of power.
Gender is not something you do. Gender is something you simply are, and it is incongruence with what you actually are and what you’re socially perceived as that produces feelings of discomfort. Which is precisely why acceptance is absolutely crucial to positive feelings, and why suicide and depression rates in trans teens pre-op and pre-hormones that have a fully accepting social and familial network (basically their whole lives) drop to essentially near cis levels. The social factor is extremely significant.
I rewatched the video and linked it in my first comment. Got watch it and let me say that this is not denying gender dysphoria. It is real and should be treated as such.
For me this viewpoint of “gender as a doing not a being” helps me to accept trans and non binary people. In the past, it helped me to think of trans people as “born in the wrong body” with a brain of their identified gender. But when I encountered more and more trans people, I felt like “would all of them pass the brain test?” and “is non-binary really a gender identity or a political statement?” If gender is a doing not a being, removes the burden of prove from trans people.
This doesn’t mean that there is no truth in the “born that way” narrative. The guy who made the video says that it still resonates with him. You are free to disagree with me and I guess “more radical” is the wrong word. These are different viewpoints that can simultaneously be true.
When I first read the mention of differing brain scans the first thing I immediately thought was, “I probably wouldn’t have those scans so I’m not genderqueer” or something along those lines. It’s an absolutely disheartening feeling.
I think that’s only if you assume that the binary definition of “gender actions” is correct, which it isn’t. It’s actually doing the opposite in any other case, I feel, because it calls into question the idea that binary gender ever existed in the first place.
All of your examples involve an implicit “doing” of actively thinking of oneself as a specific gender. That’s a pretty big thing that doesn’t require a simplistic “born this way” narrative that also invalidates swathes of trans people to exist.
Have you heard of this theory of gender as behavior before this? The only context i’ve seen it brought up in is in trying to undo patriarchal norms by purposely changing one’s behavior. It’s not something a conservative would want to admit or argue.
Yes it is. You’re just only applying your thought through the western lens.
Conservative liberals in several middle east and asia countries are the complete and total opposite. It is a virtue to them to change your behaviour to be in congruence with social norms if your internal view of yourself is not in line with your external presentation. Adapting and fitting into society by changing oneself is the conservative position. They rather view any deviant-from-norm expression as radical and something to oppose, such as anyone trying to be outside of strict gender norms like a feminine man or a masculine woman. Changing oneself to adapt to the collective and fit in is conservative to them because it preserves the social norms, it preserves the power hierarchies, and it does the opposite of challenge the existing systems. Rather than undoing patriarchal norms they see it as simply getting the trans person to fit into the existing binary and blend in.
It’s very important to get perspectives on this from more than just western culture. Viewing it through a single lens can and will blind us to what true liberation should look like. It becomes clearer that this isn’t clear cut when viewed from the international perspective rather than a national western one.
Why do you think Iran is cool with trans people at an official level and pays for transition and surgery? Certainly not because it’s un-conservative.
No, those countries are still buying into the binary, strict idea of “gender actions”, not to mention viewing the entire process as mandatory. My point is that they are wrong, not because gender is some sort off dualistic thing that you have to be fated to be or biologically predestined, but because it’s a simplistic and binary perspective on gender.
I think you’re confusing what we’re saying for the concept of transmedicalism. I am staunchly anti-transmedicalist, and also saying that it is something you “do” would probably be a bad way of describe what I think. I think gender is more of an affinity than a dualistic essence, and as someone who has felt that affinity far stronger than any sort of internal essence, that’s why I care about it a lot. I think most sense of internal essence can probably be explained as a affinity for one’s own internal identity.
I’m not calling you (or anyone here) a transmedicalist.
I’m just saying that gender isn’t what you do and that this perspective does come from the more conservative side of this topic rather than the more radical, because what you do is irrelevant to your material experience of gender.
The material experience of gender is actually quite simple because it is based almost entirely in how other people treat you socially. We treat men we meet different to women, we treat women we meet different to men, and we treat non-binary people differently to both.
The material experience of gender is fundamentally social and lies in whether others accept or deny a person’s gender. This is why mental health outcomes are so heavily tied to the experience of acceptance in a teen’s social groups rather than to their physical biological appearance, genital expression, etc.
The material experience of gender isn’t in what the trans person does, but in what other people do socially. The perspective that some have that gender is what you do is an error derived from social outcomes improving when someone conforms to gender expression that causes others to more readily accept their gender.
Oh that makes sense
Y’all were born men and women? I was born a baby! /s
Seriously though, it sounds about right to me. Thank you, I needed this.
Edit to clarify: I’m pretty confident that I’m trans at this point as weird as it still sounds to say it (not in the bad way like calling myself cis though in a not ironic egg way lol) My dysphoria didn’t start until early puberty and I’ve actually got new dysphoria after giving myself permission to be trans. Giving myself permission to try more out without worrying about if I’m really trans enough (very trans thing to do) is a good idea.
I think you hit the nail on the head here in pointing out that we definitely shouldn’t gatekeep being trans on dysphoria — getting euphoria from switching should be enough, and even cis people should get to experiment too!
“I actually got new dysphoria after giving myself permission to be trans”
Same, lol
Yeah I think thars pretty common haha
I’m happy to help! If you’re interested: I put the video into my first comment.
It does raise the question of where dysphoria would come from, but I think it’s possible to explain it in a non-invalidating way with this framework- I’m just tired rn
Maybe it is comparable with kids being conditioned to follow into their parents footsteps and at some point being like “I don’t want to a baker but a bus driver”. It’s not that driving busses or baking bread is a being but that doesn’t mean that people should be forced into it.
Anyway, I put the video I was referring to, into an edit of my first comment if you’re interested.
I dunno, I think dysphoria’s a lot stronger than that.
My theory is that primates ( among other animals, perhaps) have the instinctual tendency to imprint behaviors from their social group, which manifests as self-idendifying as a member of that group. Gender identity is a form of this instinct to self-identify, which primes people to imprint/identify with gendered subgroups within their group.
As “male” and “female” behavior groupings can serve the function of genetic propagation (e.g. “men and women fuck and have babies”) these identities appear to exist for most or all animals, and within every society. The complexity of human culture, and the indef-gtability of biological categorization, allow room for the development of genders beyond the two listed previously, giving rise to nonbinary gender identities. To put it another way, an individual may not have male-typical or female-typical imprinting tendencies, but something less common or even novel. Human culture can adapt to this, when recognized and acknowledged.
Most people, being cis, find this process as invisible as imprinting language. They have an internal imprint/identification tendency that readily aligns with the most common sexual categories (male and female), and this reinforces their senses of self-identity. Trans people must contend with the contradiction of being socially and sexually identified as one group while fundamentally primed to imprint, and therefore identify, with the other. Nonbinary people may find themselves trying to fit an existing social group that most closely matches their sense of self, or they may attempt to carve out their own categories, ideally with the endorsements of their social groups.