Gender and the Binary

During the talk I had with Milla the other day, I started thinking about what gender would be like without the binary. And before I go on- let me make something clear. When I say "without the binary" I do NOT mean "without wermen and women", I mean "without the idea that everyone must be either a werman or a woman. Not both, not neither. One. Or. The. Other." (as well as the cissexist binary which says "and what you are is based on your genitalia" and "breaking gender roles makes it okay to mistreat you").

AVEN

AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, is a good resource. The wiki is wonderful and everything else is a pretty cool 101 resource. But the forum? Not so great. It made me uncomfortable for awhile, but I could never quite put my finger on what. Thankfully, Kaz did it for me. (emphasis added)

Because most minority groups, they have their spaces where everyone is going to be on their best behaviour and try to do educating of the clueless and then they have their spaces that are minority-and-clued-up-ally-only where people can let off steam and clueless privileged people who wander in can expect to get blasted. AVEN is trying to be *both* the great centre for education and visibility (in the name!) and the centre of the asexual community, and when you think about what that means it’s clear it can so very easily lead to shutting down of opinions that aren’t nice clean friendly we-all-love-sexuals-really and forcing all asexuals to be nice and polite.

AVEN is a Public Relations site designed to educate and spread visibility of asexuals to sexuals. It is not a support forum designed to create a safe space for asexuals to talk about their problems and experiences without fear of being silenced. Unfortunately, to the detriment of the entire community, it tries to be.

Then Why Does Misgendering Matter?

Also known as: "It must be so nice to be comfortable in either social role (even though you say you aren't)" and "I don't care about non-binaries enough to find out what things are like for you, so I'm going to make snippy digs about how I have it worse and therefore don't have to care about non-binaries".

This conversation happened on facebook in a conversation about passing: Person1: "I don't really identify as female. I identify with both sexes. It's kinda hard to explain." Person2: "okay, then why would passing as male as opposed to female be an issue?"

-men

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" - George Santayana

"Woman" derives from the combination of the words wif (lit. woman) and man (lit. human being). "Man" , on the other hand, used to be "wer"*. Going to werman in the same pattern that took wif to wimman, then getting dropped just to "man".

Why? Most likely because, over time, the assumption that wer was the default sex/gender, that you only had to specify gender when talking about the other gender. This has actually already happened in Esperanto, a language only 100 years old (based on language forums- I don't know Esperanto myself)- so clearly whatever caused it to happen isn't out of our systems yet. The distance between "man", a gender non-specified term for people, ended up being uneven- reflecting the same idea that "generic he" carries.

What the bible says- and doesn’t say- about Homosexuality

I'm not Christian, I don't belong to any religion, I'm not an atheist. I do like Jesus- he seemed like a great guy- but I haven't had the best experience with Christians have never been into religion and still can't get interested. But, it's a big deal to people. And I have to admit- I really appreciate and respect when people look into it this much.

http://www.soulforce.org/article/homosexuality-bible-gay-christian

We gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Christians take the Bible seriously, too. Personally, I've spent more than 50 years reading, studying, memorizing, preaching, and teaching from the sacred texts. I earned my master's and doctoral degrees at a conservative biblical seminary to better equip myself to "rightly divide the word of truth." I learned Hebrew and Greek to gain a better understanding of the original words of the biblical texts. I studied the lives and times of the biblical authors to help me know what they were saying in their day so I could better apply it to my own.

The entire thing is a good- though long- read. It covers the history of how human interpretation of scriptures has led to a great deal of bloodshed and pain throughout the years and still now, how many people don't actually know what the bible says and how humans can misinterpret it, the effect homophobia it has on, well, mostly on CLG(b) people- but it effects trans people as well, and then goes on to tackle the parts of the bible that are used to attack homosexuality. It even talks about the problems that translations have caused- including two words that no one is actually sure what a literal translation would be, but that someone decided to call "homosexual" in 1958.

Transgender Sexuality

So someone made the claim that "LGBT people are heterophobic". They weren't listening to logic anyways, so why use logic, I just pointed out that some trans people are straight- and not all of the LGBT is heterophobic. They argued that trans sexuality (not to be confused with transsexuality) is based on assigned-sex, so trans people can't be straight. Let's ignore everything wrong with this statement. Here's my argument on why trans sexuality should be based on gender (if the person prefers it) more often than assigned-sex. I'm not going to get into "real" sex or surgery or anything like that. It pretty much comes down to this, for me.

The public part of a person's relationship is rarely sexual.

From here

We make the same sort of assumptions about bodies based on sex, although I would argue that they are more insidious. Culturally it is given that people with female bodies are women and people with male bodies are men. (Remember that, culturally, intersexed people do not exist.) Even among people who accept that trans people are telling the truth and we are who we say we are, we are still described as "men in women’s bodies" or "women in men’s bodies." This language is very problematic, as it still assumes that a female body must belong to a woman and a male body must belong to a man. To see how silly this is, consider a "man in a woman’s body;" just which woman does his body belong to? It’s not a woman’s body; a man inhabits it, it belongs to a man, so it is a man’s body.

This leads to my main point. Bodies belong to their owner or owners, not to society or anyone else. And bodies belong to people; people do not belong to bodies. Thus, a person’s body is theirs to modify and interpret. Even when given the example above, people tend to huff and say, "Well fine, it’s not a woman’s body, but it’s still a female body." To me, this is still problematic. What precisely about a man’s body is female? Certainly not his brain. (Culturally we also have a problem where we don’t consider your brain a part of your body or your biology.) It’s his body, and he’s male, so I’d argue that his body is male as well.

That usually leads to another huff and, "It’s biologically female, and you’re just going to get in trouble if you deny that." This is where things get particularly sticky. There are two problems with this statement. The first is that it is none of anyone’s business what someone’s biological makeup is, except their doctor’s; and thus the insistence of cis people to constantly point that out to trans people is, at best, annoying, and at worst, intrusive.

A lot of cis people have a tendency to forget that biology is a lot more complicated than "male" or "female." First of all, there are those pesky intersexed people again. There are more people than our society likes to admit who have ambiguous genitals or chromosomal anomalies that don’t fit in with our ideas of neat little male and female categories. (A cursory overview of intersex conditions is listed here.)

Secondly, you can’t describe someone’s entire health profile by deciding which sex box they go into. Bodies are more complicated than that. Even amongst cis people, there are biological overlaps. As a personal example, if I took women’s multivitamins, I’d be poisoned. Even though I have a "biologically female" body. How is that? Because we have different nutritional needs than other people based on other factors apart from sex (in my case, a genetic disorder is what causes this particular issue.) So because my nutritional needs are "biologically male," what does that make me?

The second problem with insisting another person’s body is "biologically this or that" is that, by clinging so desperately to the "your body is really female/male" line, you are still privileging the body over the person’s identity. My argument is that we, as human beings, can all interpret our bodies in a way that makes sense with our identities without killing our bodies or getting dread diseases.

We do this already to minor degrees. How often have you heard someone attach sentimental value to a scar? Or point to a birthmark and say, "It’s a heart" or "It’s a kitty face" or some other thing? It would be pretty rude to come down and say, "No, that’s just an abnormal pigmentation of the skin caused by injury or vascular irregularities. Stop being silly." Clearly, that’s what scars and birthmarks are, but the technical explanation of others is not as important as a person’s interpretation of their own body. These marks may have sentimental value, or it may simply be more pleasant to think of a weird mark as a flower or whatnot than as skin damage. It does not stop that person from seeking appropriate medical care if their marks start showing signs of cancer-like activity. So why should anyone else feel compelled to rain on that proverbial parade?

I argue the same principle applies to trans people. I can call my body male to my heart’s content. It doesn’t mean I am going to pretend that it’s no big deal if I get a lump in my breast. (And frankly it’s not your job to make sure that I check.) I don’t need you to tell me that my body is "really female" or "biologically female." I can take care of my body’s individual needs, such as checking my breasts for lumps, without needing to label my body in a way that I don’t wish to label it.

I fell into the trap of labeling my body as somehow essentially female for a long time, and it caused me a lot of mental anguish. The perceived incompatibility of my mind with my body was the source of a lot of discomfort for many years. But once I took a more subjective stance on my body (realizing that it is mine to interpret how I wish), and fixed the incongruity in my own mind, it relieved a major source of stress in my life.

A turning point in my life was researching sexual homology. (Specifically, looking at this web page.) Seeing the origins of particular genital tissues and the similarities between "male" and "female" sex organs made me realize that I could re-interpret my body to be something I am more comfortable with.

Before, I had a lot of sexual difficulties. I couldn’t really touch myself without feeling castrated and wrong. The things I was expecting to be there weren’t there. My genitals were alien and unpleasant to me. But that was a matter of interpretation. I was thinking of them as being somehow essentially female and therefore I was uncomfortable with them. After researching sexual homology, however, I changed the way I thought about my body. In essence I "re-mapped" my associations.

I started with the penis/clitoris. It hadn’t occurred to be before that the two were homologous organs. So the next time I touched my genitals, instead of thinking, "I don’t have a penis, I have some other weird thing instead," I thought, "Okay, so, I can think of this clitoris as a small penis, because they’re similar." And strangely enough, it worked. I was able to become more comfortable with my body based on my new interpretation.

Your first thought may be, "But it’s not really a penis." What difference does it make to you how I interpret my body? As I’ve said, I don’t ignore my health. I realize that my penis doesn’t work the same way as a normal cis man’s penis. But there are plenty of people, cis and trans, with "abnormal" organs and tissues, who take care of their body based on the way that their individual bodies work. Someone with a prosthetic limb may refer to their artificial arm as "my arm," despite the fact that it’s not flesh and blood, and still attend to the health needs unique to their situation. Interpretation need not be delusion, and in fact, I believe that it can be an incredibly positive action to take.

I realize that my particular solution to how I came to be comfortable with my body is not for everyone. However, I do think that because it was such a positive experience for me that it is worth sharing how I came about it.

The only problem I have with it is the lump thing- men need to check as well. Everyone with breast tissue needs to. TRANS MEN need to unless their surgeon scrapped it completely. Pap smears would be a better point.