Anyway, today, I'm going to write about the topic of transsexualism. To do that I'm going to need to throw out some definitions which you may or may not agree on, but it's for the sake of coherence in my post. Here goes:
- Sex = your physical, physiological and genetic definition. You'd think this would be the easiest one, your binary of being male or female. Wrong. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia, some people have dysfunctional Y chromosomes so their testes never descend and are in the position of ovaries, so your phenotype may be misleading. See I'm already going on a separate rant- given how you're supposed to be either male or female (barring medical defects), we'll label this one as binary.
- Gender: this one is heaps complicated, but it's what I define as your "identification" of being male, female, neither, somewhere in between etc. The word identification drives some people up the wall, because they're like "just because you think you're a cat doesn't mean you're a cat! Identification is bullshit!" and there is some validity to that argument, I'll go into it later. The most important thing to remember though, is not to judge whether identification is "correct" or "incorrect", but whether they identify yes/no. Okay? Gender is a spectrum, non-binary, non-discrete.
- Gender expression: how you dress, act, behave etc in accordance to "gender roles". Whether you ACT like a male/female/neither/somewhere in between. In essence gender is what you think, gender expression is what you do. Again, a spectrum.
- Sexual orientation: whether you're attracted to male, female, neither, both, somewhere in between, w/e. It's what you want in a partner. Majority of people are heterosexual, meaning we're attracted to our direct opposites in terms of sex and gender- but of course that is not always the case.
- Transgender/transsexual: someone whose sex and gender don't match. Sometimes people use transsexual to imply that they want surgery or they have undergone surgery to correct the mismatch, but in my post I'm going to use the 2 interchangeably. Don't get your panties in a knot over it.
See there's so fucking much to talk about, and I think grouping LGBTQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) together is actually so hard because they're actually all talking about different things, and I guess their main similarity is that they're related to sex and that these people are minorities who are heavily stigmatized against. Anyway, I'm going to focus on the transsexual/ transgender part of it today.
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Firstly, being transsexual in itself isn't technically a problem. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, because woah your gender and sex doesn't match aren't you just in constant misery because of how wrong everything seems? That may well be the case for some people, but in theory, if the individual is actually okay with their state of their mismatch, and there are no negative social consequences, then there is actually no problem. The main problem is, right, that there are almost ALWAYS negative social consequences. Just because the person is ok with themselves doesn't mean everybody else is ok with them, and I think that's totally fucked up but that's really the way the world is. Then here's the thing: is it the fault of the individual or is this something that we, as a society need to work on improving? Just because they're in the minority doesn't mean THEY are the ones that need to change.
So that was point one on "is transsexualism even a problem". Point two being "is transsexualism a medical problem". There are many treatments for it, right, from surgery to hormone replacement to counselling, and it is logical to question "what are we treating if it's not a medical problem". Well, being transsexual itself doesn't make you sick, but getting depression, anxiety etc as a result of this will make you sick. Thus we are targeting the root of these other problems and trying to work from that angle. There is a medical term for it- it's called "gender dysphoria", revised over and over because people find "transsexual, transgender, gender identity disorder" too offensive- I guess calling it disorder is offensive but I don't see how calling it dysphoria is much better. Political correctness in a nutshell. Look in my opinion, it's not a medical problem. We just have a diagnosis for it because it makes paperwork and legal stuff easier, but I don't think it means you're sick.
Point three: how do we treat gender dysphoria? I guess I've sort of explained why we treat it even though it's not an illness. This is usually the bit where people get heaps uncomfortable. The main legit argument I hear is "just because you think you're something doesn't mean you are something." And you know what, on a literal level, that is true. Yet that still doesn't mean someone is wrong and it still doesn't mean they're sick. If they want their body to match their brain, then we should respect their autonomy and they can go for it. I have the same reasoning for elective plastic surgery which I explained years ago- yeah yeah I know they're not the same thing because apparently improving yourself for the sake of vanity is looked down upon, but to me, you should just do what you want to be happy (without harming others yada yada). Problem with surgery is that it's expensive, it carries risks (infection + other complications), it's largely irreversible and people are really uncomfortable with "destroying perfectly functioning body parts". The first 2 sucks, the third is a matter of opinion. "Perfectly functioning body parts". So what? These people don't want to use their sexual organs for those functions. Things that shouldn't be there aren't useful to anyone anyway. It's like fertile women who don't want kids, tall people who didn't become basketball players--- because they have priorities in their lives and they wanted something else.
Point 4: the mind vs the body. Naturally some people won't be convinced that being transsexual is not a disorder of the mind. People still believe that being homosexual is a disorder of the mind. "There is obviously something wrong with their brain, otherwise they would be like the rest of us". Though we often use majority to define normality, it doesn't mean the model fits with every example. "Why don't we treat their mind instead of treating their bodies?" Well that's hardly a novel way of looking at it, with the number of grotesque things people have done in history to make others conform. See I actually got caught up in this a while ago- I was trying to figure out why we didn't treat the mind, and why we allow this incongruity--- but if someone said they identified as a cat we'd say they were insane.
The answer is simpler than I imagined. We don't turn people who think they're cats into cats, because no one is born thinking they're a cat, and cats don't function too well when you place human responsibilities and expectations on them. We don't turn them into cats because their quality of life doesn't improve and they're not very useful to society. We treat the body over the mind because it is our minds that make us who we are. If your significant other lost a limb you may very well stay with them, because they remain the person you know and love. If your significant other suffered a brain injury and had a massive personality change, you would feel as if you had lost the whole person though their body was still there. I'm not sure I understand the concept of a spirit or a soul, but by some chemical miracle our brains have formed in such a way that we have thoughts and feelings and it's really our brains that define who we are. Our brains change naturally as it is, and I don't know if enforcing uniformity in our brains is the way to go. Like, I just finished reading Brave New World (really great book, btw) recently and I'm really not that keen on that particular thought.
Then there's the issue of how we can't realistically alter someone's brain with such specificity right now- the technology isn't quite there yet (in terms of safety and cost, at least). So there really isn't much of an argument for altering someone's gender to match their sex, and I personally believe altering the body is way easier than altering the mind.
Would someone choose to change their gender instead of their sex if given the choice though? Absolutely. If there was some magic pill that someone could take so they wouldn't be stigmatized, criticized, ostracized for being themselves, I'm sure the line would be huge. Oh wait, are we still on topic? So the thing about gender is- it doesn't actually change as you get older. People with gender dysphoria never "grow out of the phase". Asking someone to be a different gender is almost like asking "would you like to be someone else". And if you've ever learnt anything from children's TV shows it's that you never really want to be someone else, you'd really just want yourself to be better. I wish we could do some sort of social experiment, where people stopped being so obsessed and hateful about transsexualism, and then see if we still struggle with the idea of transsexuals being normal people.
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Oh man my rant is so fucking long it's atrocious. I wish I had someone to talk to about these things these days. I feel like people are always too busy for me. I want to talk about this, about genetic research, about the existence of God and bunch of other things which seem kind of irrelevant to me on a personal level. I think what I'm trying to say is that I miss intellectually stimulating discussions, and I feel like all my degree wants out of me is a robot that can remember some textbook really well.
Basically to sum up my opinions on the idea of transsexualism:
- It's not a mental illnesss
- We treat it because of illness associated with it, not because it's an illness in itself
- Perhaps societal change needed over individual change
- Alter the body not the mind otherwise we turn into a sci fi novel
- Aim to improve quality of life and stop being a little bitch if they are not harming anyone. Their bodies, their choice.
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