The gender of trans

This is quite an uncomfortable post to write, because it runs somewhat against my natural inclinations, but at the same time I feel that if I ignore the issues that I'm going to cover, then it will ultimately be to the detriment of open and honest debate, and will not help matters.

Trans folks often complain about being "third-gendered" - when the term is "transwoman" as opposed to "trans woman", then the implication is that "transwoman" is a separate gender from "woman" - whereas in "trans woman", "trans" qualifies (in much the same way as "old woman", "blonde woman", "tall woman" etc), as a prefix it defines. I have always been opposed to the othering, the "third-gendering", that people do, and always welcomed a person as their presented gender without questioning its truth.

However, I found some difficult challenges to this mindset when I read Raven Kaldera's piece Feminist On Testosterone: The View From An Intersexual FTM (found via Trinity's post Interesting!).

A lot of the problems come from the passage entitled, "What did testosterone do to you? Did it make you want to attack and rape women?"

Raven Kaldera writes:

I wish I could say, "It gave me a deep voice, facial and body hair and a receding hairline, muscles, redistributed my body fat, thickened my neck, increased my blood pressure, and cured my depression, and that was all." But I can't. First of all, it's not true; the boy-juice did affect my mind, my emotions, my behavior. It started affecting them within twelve hours of my first shot, and I notice the fluctuation at the end of each two-week shot period, and if I miss a few days or a week.

...

I also learned something chilling about my new sexuality - it was far, far more programmable than it used to be. Before T, my sexual interests were fairly static and increased slowly, one new thing at a time. If I didn't like something, I just didn't like it. After T, I discovered that if I could think about something heretofore not sexually interesting during approximately six masturbation-to-orgasm sessions, that item would become a turn-on in and of itself....no matter what it was. I could literally program myself in a Pavlovian manner to be aroused by whatever I wanted. I found this out by accident, after I inadvertently added a few new dishes to my arousal buffet without meaning to. When I realized this, I sort of sat in shock for a while, and then I said to myself, "Boy, you're going to have to be very, very careful from now on."

So in one fell swoop I learned the reasons for all those guys compulsively collecting porn on the Internet. It's not that women don't do it - I've met some who do - it's just that it seems almost par for the course with testosterone, a constant issue that doesn't go away, that you just learn to live with like you learn to live with daily sexual thoughts.

I just can't connect any of this to my own experience of masculinity, and I don't know that anyone I know could report anything similar. Admittedly, RK writes, "I think most female researchers wouldn't get that concept because they probably don't have it very often (if at all), and most male researchers wouldn't get it because it's too familiar, the air they breathe and the water they swim in." There's a lot of weight to the argument that what we find "normal" we often find invisible, but equally I feel like I should be able to see it if it's there once it's pointed out; after all, I have probably done more "examining" than many men to try to work out where my sexuality comes from!

But I go back to that opening part about noticing the changes, and I remember something from a trans woman of my acquaintance who complained of permanently feeling like a teenager due to the hormones that she takes, and then I look at this passage:

It wasn't psychological; it was just that as each bit of T was slowly absorbed into my bloodstream, it affected the spinal ganglia attached to my dick, and made it get hard. It was terribly random, and had no connection to what I was doing at the time - taking out the garbage, riding the bus. Having fairly constant context-irrelevant sexual stimuli going on all the time is not something that women can generally understand or relate to, and I had to find ways to cope with it.

Now, that's something I can relate to - from my memories of being a male teenager! Indeed, it's a subject that was covered in sex education lessons around age 14-15 when I was at school, because it's so common for teenage boys to get erections from little or no stimulation. And the reason is probably very similar: a huge surge of testosterone to encourage our bodies to develop into adult male bodies. How many more of the differences that I found could also be explained by comparing a teenager with an adult?

I started with jerking off. I'd never had any shame about masturbation (luckily), but before T it had been something I did once in a while in order to make myself feel good. Now it was something I did two, three, or four times a day to relieve an itch, so to speak. I had to learn to treat it like urinating; when you need to relieve yourself, you don't wait around and hope it'll go away; you go off and deal with it as quickly and efficiently as possible, and go back to what you were doing. I had to learn that having a hard-on was not an excuse for having sex, because there were just too darn many of them. I had to learn ways to think through them and ignore them if jerking off wasn't appropriate; I learned that violent physical activity can relieve them.

I think a lot of this does reflect teenage experiences, except that teenagers don't always have the maturity to figure out all of the coping mechanisms that RK did. I think this is also a good point to mention that women also need to recognise that an erection is not always an excuse to have sex (that is, just because a penis-bearer has an erection, that doesn't actually mean he wants sex).

The passage about programmable sexuality that I quoted above, and said didn't bear any resemblance to my experience, needs revisiting because as adult men we are told that to delay orgasm and thus maintain erection long enough to please our partners, we should think unsexy or boring thoughts. I don't know how effective this is in general, but I think that a lot of advice given even by good "sexperts" seems to suggest that for most men the "programmable" thesis doesn't hold true. Does it hold true for teenagers, though? And if it does, what does that mean for the Religious Right's assertion that gay folks are made, not born?

I don't have a lot to go on to answer that question, but I am going to come down on the side that it is not true for teenagers. My reasoning is that many teenagers experiment sexually with different sexual concepts and they find what works for them, rather than finding themselves programmed in any particular way. I will accept that the world is more complex than a simpe "yes or no" answer on this question, and that undoubtedly some influence of the "programming" nature may well take place during our formative years, but I am not willing to accept that it is anywhere as clear-cut as RK's self-analysis seems. As I remarked above, my own self-analysis also seems to be that it is not true for me in the development of my kinkiness.

So in one fell swoop I learned the reasons for all those guys compulsively collecting porn on the Internet. It's not that women don't do it - I've met some who do - it's just that it seems almost par for the course with testosterone, a constant issue that doesn't go away, that you just learn to live with like you learn to live with daily sexual thoughts.

With this, my immediate thought was "all those guys?" While I would accept a statement that the majority of men probably have some internet porn stashed away somewhere (I am not willing to make such a statement myself, however, without some evidence!) I think that the men who are compulsively seeking out internet porn are probably relatively few in number - but we have to ask ourselves what is "compulsive" here? We also have to ask ourselves whether there is, in fact, any correlation between testosterone levels and porn usage. I am disinclined to believe that there is, because in general testosterone levels fall gradually as age increases, and yet I would hazard that many of those who collect porn compulsively are middle-aged or even older.

I can't help but come back from RK's piece and think that his experience of maleness, at least as much as that is involved in testosterone, doesn't sound a great deal like mine, or like what I understand of other men's. This brings me backto the disturbing question, "What if this means that the anti-trans folks have a point? Does this mean that trans folks actually are a different sex/gender from the rest of us?" I looked again at what I know from first-hand accounts by trans women and I looked at RK's piece, and I looked at the rather sketchier data/anecdotes I have of othe trans men, and I had to think hard about this.

I struggled with this thought, and I didn't want to accept it. But having cheered when others criticised online radical feminists for ignoring the reality of trans issues, I could not in good conscience do the same myself. This was a question I needed to understand and answer.

But then I remembered that a trans person is not doing any of this for fun. They're treating a medical condition that has left them with a mashed-up brain and body that don't match - or some such thing, anyway. Plenty of people take pretty powerful medication that affects them in all sorts of ways, for all manner of medical conditions; RK's testosterone, my trans woman friend's hormone treatments that render her permanently teenage-brained, etc - thes eare just the same sort of thing.

I want to be absolutely clear here that I am not likening transsexuality to a disease or illness in any way, nor to a disability. But the difference between a trans woman and a cis woman is only the same degree (but not the same type) as the difference between a woman with a medical condition or disability that requires ongoing treatment, and a woman who does not need such treatment. Likewise a trans man to a cis man.

So it still isn't justifiable to third-gender trans folks on the grounds of their different experience of gender.