Week 5--On Passing

I had not posted for last week so I decided to compare and contrast the two speakers who came to address us in class.

Their situations seem very different. Katie was born with an intersex condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, and considers herself a girl. Alexander was born as a girl, but later in life came to the conclusion that he felt more comfortable assuming a male gender. While the details vary, both of these individuals deal with the pressure of "passing." Alexander explained passing as meaning the ability to have society recognize you from the outside as the gender you have chosen.

This applies to Katie as well, for while she did not choose her gender (she mentioned always knowing she was a girl, and when her father told her, "Don't worry, you are still a girl," her automatic response was "Of course I am a girl!"), she still had internal struggles with being generally accepted as female. She said at one time in her life, there was nothing more that she wanted than to be able to go through puberty the way other girls did. She wanted to buy tampons with her mom, and have her dad be awkward about dating boys and talking about sex. If a stranger took a glance at Katie, he would know she was a girl. Perhaps because of the certainty people possess about Katie's gender, passing is more of a personal quest for her. If that same stranger were to look at Alexander at this point in his life, they might be unsure as to what Alexander's gender is. For Alex, passing depends on the opinions of society. He said he hopes to pass one day.

The conversations we had with both Katie and Alex reinforced the idea that people really are afraid of what they cannot fully understand.  

Questions for Alex:

When did you realize that you identified with the male gender? Did you just know at a young age or did you make this discovery over time?

Do you feel that in the process of transitioning people have treated you differently? Are there different societal opportunities offered to the binary than to those who are in the middle?

What’s in a name? How do you feel that your name has affected your transition? How do you think gendered languages impact identification and association?

How has puberty and development of sexual orientation impacted your gender identification? 

Response to Alex’s Questions:

When I first learned about transgendered people, I assumed that they would alter their bodies in order to fit their gender. Now I have learned more, I do not feel that it is necessary to alter physical characteristics. If a person wants to change their physical traits it should be an option available to them, but in any situation I feel that it is a person’s individual choice to make. Society definitely creates pressure to fit in the binary through means of the constructed norms. When I was reading the My Right Self website, I achieved a greater realization of the difficulties faced by a transgendered person. If facing societal constructs of gender is not challenging enough, they must also face restrictions imposed by insurance companies.

Passing is very important to a person’s self confidence. Although I feel that passing can be applied to more than being accepted by society as male or female, it could be applied in terms of being able to have your gender identification mentally match your body physically and also to have this accumulated identity be accepted by a community.  In this way I think that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is missing a step between love and belonging and esteem, there should be an individual level before it is applied to a societal level. If a person can not make peace within themselves, can they be comfortable with their role/identification in society?

            I was wondering if anyone else looked at the My Right Self site and felt awkward about the photographs. On the one hand I felt it was great that there is openness about gender identification and sexual orientation, but I felt some of the symbolism in the photos served to attract attention to the aspects of physical appearance that people mentioned, given the opportunity, they would change.

I think questions one and two are very much related.   There is such a pressure in our society to fit a social norm.  For gender to be something that is easily explainable.  People arevery often afraid of what they don't know or don't understand.  And for many people the idea of transgender is still very unknown and hard to understand.

ANything out of the norm or different is viewed as bad or scary.  I was reading my principal's speech from our graduation the other day and she had a quote from an Ani DiFranco song in it: “When I was four years old, they tried to test my IQ. They showed me a picture of 3 oranges and a pear and asked me which one was different and which one didn’t belong. They taught me that different was wrong.”  We as a society don't know how to deal with the different.  We don't understand how people can be outside the gender binary and if they consider themselves to be, we still ask them to identify with a gender.  I think people are just scared and don't want to take the time to try and understand.

 I believe trans people are pressured to assimilate simply because people do not think if the existence of a third or fourth gender, or of infinite genders. Our society as a whole has had trouble accepting that some people are born into abody that doesn’t match the gender they feel comfortable as. The notion of a mismatched biological sex and a psychological gender is much easier for peopleto accept than for someone to identify not as any particular gender at all. Someone who “blends” genders is what seems to confuse and upset people (I do believe this is quickly changing, especially with our generation).

As a more general answer, tranliness would be a new idea, and new ideas take time for society as a whole to accept. Perhaps in the future identifying as trans will be considered as “normal” as choosing male or female.

Some questions that I have in response to the readings...

1. In the Kessler/McKenna article, it says that in order to "make a male," it is more important to add a penis than to remove a vagina. This implies that the penis is a more gendered characteristic than the vagina. Why is this? Does it have to do with the fact that a penis is external while a vagina is more internal? How could the importance of the penis be deconstructed?

2. Kessler and McKenna state that transsexuals should "focus on creating decisive first impressions as male or female." I'm interested in whether you, Alex, still have trouble confidently presenting yourself as male? How does your membership to a women's institution complicate your ability to present your gender coherently? The authors recommend that transsexuals focus on embracing a sort of "naturalness' of their gender, but if gender is a social construction, what is this naturalness?

3. What would be the consequences of having a "androgeous society?" Do transsexuals even desire such an environment? It seems like such individuals depend as gender just as much as non-transsexuals, it's just in a different manner. For example, transsexuals seem to want their gender to be recognized- is this the case?

4. The Davis quotation in the Bornstein article describes humans' dependency on a society based on classification. If our inability to handle a state of ambiguity is fundamental to our species, is it worthwhile to work towards erasing gender divides? If humans psychological depend on such organizational systems, can they ever been banished?

5. Finally, I'm interested in Bornstein's comment that "hiding, and not proclaiming one's transsexual status, is an unworthy stance." Do you agree with this? If gender is not biologically based but socially constructed, than are they really hiding? How is the story that transsexuals tell a lie? Isn't everyone "passing" to some degree?

1.      In Judith Butler’s essay, she expresses some qualms about being able to appropriately represent a trans-subject, particularly in a linguistic sense: “I have been given fragments of the person, linguistic fragments of something called a person, and what might it mean to do justice to someone under these circumstances? Can we?” In the other essays, Kate Borstein and Susan Stryker both explicitly names themselves as a part of the trans community, and speak from a position of “our” oftentimes.  I wonder what you think about this – about the difficulty of ‘doing justice’ to someone who is embodied differently than oneself, whether legally, socially, or (like Eugenides in Middlesex) in a literary sense. Would you object to someone who was not trans writing from the point of view of a trans person? Representing the inner experience of a trans subject?

2.      What would be your ideal admissions policy at Bryn Mawr?

The reading forTuesday mentioned that beauty was the last institution holding women back. AtTuesday's class discussion, it seemed like most people agreed. After class, thetopic was stuck in my head and I do not think that beauty is a bad thing or itsthe "last institution" holding women back. First, I don't think itonly holds women back because men, too, have a certain image/appearance, providedby the media, to uphold; such as, having abs/being muscular. Plus, I do notthink putting on make-up is a bad thing. For some people, putting on make-upmay help them feel more confident when going outside and meeting new peoplebecause they know they look good/pretty; it acts like a confidence booster.Also, by making sure one looks good, it shows that person cares how people willview him/her and he/she wants to make a good first impression because in oursociety it seems like first impressions are important.

Questions for Alex:

1. When/How did youcome to the realization that you wanted to identify as a male?

2. While making the transition from female to male, what kind of emotional/physical struggles did you encounter? 

3. What made you decide on choosing Bryn Mawr?

4. Identifying as a male and going to an all women’s college, do you ever feel out of place?

As a response, but not really an answer, to Alex's second question:

I get the feeling that, as much as this course is designed to help us understand what we mean when we say "feminism," it is also about questioning the necessity of gender itself, not even just the gender binary. So there is no "tranliness": this may be part of the way to break out of the high emphasis we place on gender to distinguish people. Certainly, no one completely aligns with some definition of "femininity" or "masculinity" all the time. Perhaps the first step in eliminating the gender binary is to alter our perceptions of characteristics from "either masculine or feminine" to "human."

In "Gender Terror, Gender Rage," Kate Bornstein proclaims: "I agree that hiding, and not proclaiming one's transsexual status, is an unworthy stance, more heinous if one's invisible status is maintained with the purpose of gaining power" (239). I could not agree with such an accusation: don't some people have to—or at least feel like they have to—maintain secrecy for protection? Depending on the place, it may or may not be safe (i.e. one's life might come into harm) to express political or religious opinions, sexual preferences, heritage, etc. Just because some of us might want transgender people to be open and honest as part of the way to disrupt the gender binary does not give us to right to mandate their participation in our efforts, nor to condemn them if they do not wish to comply.