Nick Kiddle (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ksej) wrote,@ 2005-08-31 09:11:00 |
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| Entry tags: | gender |
Answers and more questions
Jay Sennett and I seem to be having a blog discussion, which is a Very Good Thing for three reasons. Firstly, I've always wanted to have one. Secondly, Jay keeps paying me squirm-inducing compliments, not least in the eloquent care with which he addresses what I say. And, most importantly, this discussion is making me examine what terms and labels mean to me and why I'm so adamant that I'm not a transman.
Jay rightly points out how dangerous it is to set up an arbitrary line and declare that no-one is a proper transman until he crosses that line. In some places, the law won't recognise a transman's identity until he's carved his body up into some semblance of a male body, which I find barbaric both in the theoretical implication - that your body defines what you are - and in the practical consequence - men are forced to take all the risks of infection and so on associated with surgery for something that might not even benefit them, depending how they see their body. Setting up hormones as the gold standard of transition seems to avoid that problem, but testosterone is dangerous to some people and unavailable to others.
So it's all very well for me to say that a transman is someone who has begun transition, but that only leads to the next question: what does it mean to transition? If it isn't surgery and it isn't hormones, what is it?
My very tentative answer is that transition means to begin living in role. Which sounds very satisfying for about three seconds, but then the next question comes up: what constitutes living in role?
What indeed? The anecdotes about butch dykes who get called "sir" more often than some transmen but still identify very firmly as female muddy the waters, but they're murky enough depths even without that. A name change is usually a clear marker for transition, but what about those who were blessed with androgynous names from birth? My legal name identifies me very clearly as female, but the name I go by in daily use, a recognised diminutive, has fooled more than a few people into calling me "sir", at least on the phone. If I changed my legal name, all the institutions I do business with would also call me "sir", but a change of name is a hassle. Is it fair to demand it of someone who passes just fine without?
The importance of a name change is mostly symbolic. It's a way of saying to the world, "That identity my parents bestowed upon me when I was born? Completely wrong; here's what I really am." Transition begins when you tell the world that, all appearances to the contrary, you are a man. A transman is a transman when he says he is.
I like that definition because it doesn't dictate to anyone else how they should experience their gender, but it leave me free to say with complete confidence that I am not a transman. And yet one tantalising question remains: could I, one day, become one?
To that one, I don't have an answer. Last week, while venting about a certain person's obsession with rigid gender categories, I described myself as not identifying as female. Recollections of a time when I tagged myself "Hetero bio female" in a desperate attempt to repudiate the suspicions I was starting to have about myself are still fresh in my mind, but now the description of myself as not-female is painlessly true. I might stay in genderfluid territory for the rest of my life, or I might realise, some day in the future, that I'm comfortable with the term "transman". I don't know, and right now I don't really need to know.
All this musing intersects somewhere with my ideas about what courage is. I see courage as doing something that's difficult, and while that's not a bad definition of courage I tend to run with it in quite the wrong direction. If I look back on a decision and see that it was the easiest of all possible options at that point, I reject the idea that it took courage all the same. The alternative to remaining true to my identity while being pregnant is to turn my back on my identity or end the pregnancy. I don't think I could live with either possibility - certainly I've no great desire to try - so I'm only doing what I have to do. No courage here, move along now.
And of course, transitioning would be an act of great courage. However I intellectualise it, there's an idea in my mind of some dragon that needs to be slain, some giant hurdle that you can't possibly fail to notice you've jumped, before you can consider yourself a man. That's why I cling to the things, like changing my legal name or cutting my hair, that stand out clearly. Everything I've done so far to advance my male identity can be undone in an instant if I decide that's what I want. I've not risked enough; I've not done anything difficult; I'm not brave.
But that's not true. I've changed myself in slow, incremental ways, by pitching my voice low so often that it now comes out husky with no effort on my part, and by playing around with my male identity for so long that it's started to feel natural. Even if I wanted to put myself back into the pink box, I wouldn't fit properly. I could tell the world that I'm a hetero bio female, and I could convince the ones who didn't look closely - as indeed I do now when I sleep with straight men - but if nothing else, I would know I wasn't being myself. It's a comforting fiction to pretend the genie can go back into the bottle whenever I like, but fiction is what it is.
And my lack of courage is probably another fiction. I proclaim on my blog that I'm male-souled. I've blogged in detail about my gender identity and blithely given the URL to family members so they can read as much of my life as they choose. I describe myself as a boy in the "real world", although few people take that seriously and I don't bother to enlighten them. It's true that I could show more courage - cutting my hair so that I pass, for instance - but it's also a fact that I could show less. I do what I have to do to be true to myself, and perhaps it's time I learned to accept the label of brave, at least.
